31 Dec

New Year's resolutions are the worst way to begin the New Year. Resolutions often breed failure and if they do not then they add on one's shoulders the burden of keeping these resolutions. Whare resolutions so necessary or appropriate to the New Year? Why does resolution tend to accompany new starts? Is there even such a thing as a new start? Is it the same old all over again? It seems to me that resolutions put one on a vicious cycle of failure. The reason I want a new start in the first place is because I had originally resolved to turn over a new leaf. What is the etymology of the word resolve?...

30 Dec

Saint Robert Southwell, was an English Roman Catholic priest of the Jesuit Order. He was also a poet and clandestine missionary in post-Reformation England. After being arrested and tortured, Southwell was tried and convicted of high treason for his links to the Holy See. On 21 February 1595, Southwell was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. In 1970, he was canonised by Pope Paul VI as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales....

29 Dec

All holidays bring family and friends together, and Christmas does so in a particularly strong way. The tradition of exchanging of gifts has much to do with it, but there is something additionally community-oriented about Christmas because it is about the birth of a child. The arrival of a baby into the world has brought people together at all times and in all cultures; how much more so does the birth of the Christ who is born as a brother to all....

26 Dec

I wouldn't describe myself as a spiritual person. I find the whole concept of believing in something that can't be physically sensed very hard. Everything about praying is difficult to me, and thinking about God in my life does not come easily. Therefore, it might come as a surprise that I signed myself up to go through St. Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises....

25 Dec

I was sitting with a group of people in the peaceful, prayerful atmosphere of the Loyola House chapel listening to Father Eric leading us in a personal reflection as part of an evening service of reconciliation. He was suggesting that sometimes there is buried in our memories an experience, perhaps even going back to early childhood, where we have been hurt or have hurt someone in a way that leaves us in need of healing or forgiveness. As I thought about this, to my surprise the memory of a little brown coat came to me and I had to struggle to hold back the tears....

25 Dec

I was sitting with a group of people in the peaceful, prayerful atmosphere of the Loyola House chapel listening to Father Eric leading us in a personal reflection as part of an evening service of reconciliation. He was suggesting that sometimes there is buried in our memories an experience, perhaps even going back to early childhood, where we have been hurt or have hurt someone in a way that leaves us in need of healing or forgiveness. As I thought about this, to my surprise the memory of a little brown coat came to me and I had to struggle to hold back the tears....

24 Dec

Christmas is a time of promises - promises to be kept and promises fulfilled. . Throughout the season of Advent, the readings have been about God's promise down the ages to the Jewish people to send them a messiah who would be their king and saviour. Mary is called blessed because she believed that "the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled....

23 Dec

As part of the "Our Culture" section, , igNation will post poetry written by Jesuits and our collaborators. Poems from Gerard Manley Hopkins and St. Robert Southwell will appear as well as contemporary poems. Today's poem, by Greg Kennedy, SJ, looks at the birth of Christ "in an age of climate change."...

22 Dec

Christmas will soon be here. Every Christmas morning we hear the same Gospel story, the first 18 verses of the Gospel of John. Not fit for Hallmark Christmas cards, the words of John are strange to our ears. No mention of the baby Jesus, the poor stable, shepherds in the fields or stars in the skies. Mary and Joseph and the angel Gabriel are nowhere to be found. A Hallmark nightmare....

19 Dec

We all have our rituals for Christmas: Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life, A Charlie Brown Christmas, or How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Since hearing it read as a child on the Max Ferguson Show on CBC Radio, my annual ritual is reading or listening to Dylan Thomas reading his story, A Child's Christmas in Wales. "One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six."...

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