26 Feb

Who or what in my life is closest to me, so close that I cannot imagine ever being free of that person, trait, possession, position or experience? That question is at play in the first reading from Genesis on this Second Sunday of Lent, the account of Abraham and Isaac in the land of Moriah. Isaac was the only son of Abraham, born to his wife Sarah in her old age. God is asking Abraham to give up his son, his only son. Abraham is ready to say yes to God, not because Isaac is unimportant to him, but because his commitment to God is so great. If God is offering a test, Abraham has passed it and received his son back. Abraham had experienced existential and spiritual freedom....

19 Feb

The Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beats; and the Angels waited on him. This experience of Jesus, related on this opening Sunday of Lent, has often intrigued me. Yes, he was the Son of God. However, he was also a human being....

17 Feb

I've been looking back over my past posts for igNation and have realized that this is the third consecutive Ash Wednesday I've written about. I was tempted to ask the blogmeister if he could find someone else to write for this year's start of Lent. Then I thought that I shouldn't give up so easily. Perhaps, unbeknownst to him, he is being used by God to get me to dig deeper into what I am being offered by my honest entry into this season....

16 Feb

For Shrove Tuesday 2015, Greg Kennedy, SJ, offers us this poem on the day before the start of Lent....

01 Feb

I saw an interesting sight in my neighbourhood on December 26, the Feast of Saint Stephen. The household across the street had their discarded Christmas tree on the sidewalk, ready for pick-up by the city. It caused me to wonder when most people think that Christmas ends. Some people are pragmatic about taking down decorations and assume Christmas ends on the day before we head back to work or school. Fair enough!...

22 Jan

Sunday is the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. David Savoie, a Grde 12 student at St. Paul's High School in Winnipeg offers a reflection on St. Paul....

15 Jan

During my doctoral studies at UBC, one of my fellow graduate students did a most unconventional dissertation. He spent a year by himself on a small, windswept, rain-soaked island miles off the coast of southern Chile. His dissertation, entitled A Year in Wilderness Solitude attempted to answer the question, What are the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual effects of living for an extended period in deep wilderness solitude? The dissertation was eventually published by New World Library in 2009 as Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes: A Year Alone in the Patagonia Wilderness....

31 Dec

We celebrate several things on January 1: the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God, New Year's Day, and World Day of Peace. Pope Paul VI established a day for peace in 1968. He asked that, "every year, this commemoration be repeated as a hope and a promise, at the beginning of the calendar which measures and outlines the path of human life in time, that peace with its just and beneficent equilibrium may dominate the development of events to come."...

29 Dec

This December poem was written by Grace Colella while she was working with the Yonge Street Mission in Toronto....

25 Dec

I helped a friend of mine cut a Christmas tree the other day. It was a balsam fir, a lovely, fragrant, symmetrical tree. Native to North America, in Canada, balsam fir ranges from Newfoundland to Alberta. When I was young, I loved going off into the woods to cut balsam fir Christmas trees with several of my buddies. We would make a day of it. Set a fire, beans and bacon, homemade bread, and some fresh coffee or tea - sweetened of course with Carnations condensed milk....

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