Living Monstrance

One of the joys - yes, joys - for me is to do the yard work around my parents’ house. I’m no landscaping expert, but there’s a good feeling to doing gardening, trimming, mowing, and digging in the warmer months. Maybe it’s being outdoors in nature, maybe it’s the satisfaction of building or [...]

[Read more →]

A priest friend of mine invited me the other day to go kayaking on the Charles River in Boston. “Sure,” I said. Even though I pretty much have lived in Boston all my life, I have never kayaked down the Charles. It was a new trip through familiar territory. So, we [...]

[Read more →]

Pope John Paul II’s autobiography is called Witness to Hope. What does that phrase mean, “witness to hope”?
Some friends of mine evangelize out in public. They have some big signs, even a speaker and a mike, and they set up in a spot in downtown Boston or Cambridge and hand out “tracts” and [...]

[Read more →]

Recently I saw some video tributes to Pope John Paul II on uTube. The thought that I had was, how is it, that this one little man, the leader of the smallest and weakest country in the whole world, is so huge? I mean, everyone in the world knew him and he had [...]

[Read more →]

I used to date a wonderful woman who I loved. At Christmas we would get each other gifts, and so one year she was surprised when I put one giant box wrapped in Christmas paper under her parents’ Christmas tree. That’s it: nothing else but a giant box. The days before Christmas, [...]

[Read more →]

Last spring I was doing small projects at my parents’ house. I had put in a new window well around one of the basement windows, and when I started to look at that whole side of the house, I thought, I might as well re-do the whole trim around the perimeter. It was [...]

[Read more →]

The Lord blessed me with a wonderful girlfriend. She loved me, and we shared much together.
One night, she went out with a friend downtown Boston. Well, after a few drinks, as the night got late, some things happened and her friend took off and left her. Alone. Drunk. Without a [...]

[Read more →]

The group photo from the consecration at St. Clement Eucharistic Shrine on August 14, the memorial of St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Vigil of the Assumption.

[Read more →]

After I left the Franciscan community in January, I was down. Things just didn’t work out, and I was back at my parents’ house. There was ringing in my head again the song of failure. See, I wanted to be living in the “action”, with the Lord in the tabernacle, in the [...]

[Read more →]

When I first turned back to the Lord, a certain priest I had sought help from had done much for me, and so one Christmas I planned to get him a gift.  I didn’t want to get money - that’s cheesy, I thought.  I’ll get him something meaningful.
So I asked some of his confreres about [...]

[Read more →]