Latest Reflections
Stories of faith, memory, Scripture, and the quiet ways grace meets us in ordinary life.
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What We Lost When Small-Town Grocery Stores Disappeared
The Bell on the Door There used to be a bell. Not a notification ping. Not a barcode scanner chirp. A bell—hung loosely above a wooden door that opened with resistance, like it knew something sacred was about to happen. You stepped in, and before your eyes adjusted to the dimness between flour sacks and…
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When Nothing Is Left to Hold: Breaking the Silence Around Miscarriage and Infant Loss
The Silence No One Prepares You For (written especially for my brother and sister-in-law, but also for all who have experienced miscarriage and infant loss) There are losses that the world knows how to acknowledge. And then there are losses it does not. Miscarriage and infant loss often fall into that second category—not because they…
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Blessed Are Those Who Have Not Seen
A Reflection on John 20:19-31 and St. Thomas Didymus The Door Was Locked The Gospel tells us the doors were locked. Fear has a way of doing that—closing things, narrowing space, reducing the world to what feels manageable. In John 20:19-31, the disciples are not gathered in triumph. They are gathered in uncertainty, behind barriers,…
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What Old Photos Still Can’t Tell Us (Even in Color)
There is something almost unsettling about seeing an old photograph in color for the first time. A face you have only known in black and white suddenly seems closer. Skin tones emerge. Jackets and work shirts acquire texture and warmth. Eyes that once looked fixed in another century seem to belong to people who might…
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Lead Me by the Hand: On The Road to Emmaus
The road to Emmaus is not a triumphant road. It is a retreat. In Luke 24:13–35, two disciples are not heading toward mission, or clarity, or even hope. They are walking away—from Jerusalem, from the Cross, from everything they thought they understood. They had believed. And now they are disoriented. “We had hoped…” That line…
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Christ Has a Garden: Eden, Mary Magdalene, and the Song That Calls Us by Name
There are songs that entertain, and there are songs that uncover something older than memory—something planted deep in the soil of the human heart. Christ Has a Garden by the Hillbilly Thomists belongs to the latter kind. It feels less like a composition and more like a recovery, like stumbling upon a path that was…
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Holy Saturday and the Abasement of Hell
There is a silence that follows Good Friday—a silence not of peace, but of waiting. The work of Salvation is finished, and yet something remains undone. Christ has died, but the world has not yet seen what His death will accomplish. It is into this silence that Sister Mary Ada’s poem “Limbo” speaks with remarkable…
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The Wounded Healer and the Mystery of the Cross
Good Friday has a way of stripping away our illusions. It confronts us not with sentiment, but with reality: suffering, sin, mortality, and the terrible cost of redemption. Few modern poets enter that reality with the theological depth and severity of T. S. Eliot. In East Coker IV, the fourth movement of Four Quartets, Eliot…
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Old Pots, Clear Vision: Seeing Jesus As He Really Is
“Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is.” — 1 John 3:2 The Old Pots of Fulton Sheen Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen once gave a homily in which…
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