“Ash Wednesday made no assumptions. It offered no promise that anything would get better. It spoke directly to the condition I recognized most readily.”
“Mr. Wycliff, the bishop says that the Catholic schools are for all Catholic children,” the priest said. “Your children will be welcome in our school.”
"When a ninety-year-old Catholic mother dies, a man who’s been at the parish for fewer than six years puts on a robe, says a few words, and then we go home. And every time I think, you have no idea who you had here."
'Rather than frantic productivity for maximum impact, I am focusing on small contributions, done as well as I can and with as much care as I can give.'
"My brain is no longer a hive buzzing with new ideas for novels. My body tells me that seventy isn’t the new fifty or sixty. The immutable truth is that I’m old."
Contrary to what is typically asked of him, the just man does not need imagination but attention. Poetry, too, requires a kind of pure, focused attention.
We are locked up in our own little worlds, trying not to get hurt too much or screw things up, and we have our backs to the fireworks going on all around us.
“It was important that I forgive her and all my former torturers because they were repositories of my childhood, living rosaries of shared, idiosyncratic memories.”
When living in fear, speaking our truth can be one of the hardest things in the world to do. And yet God still calls for our realest selves, and replies with love.
