In a remarkable book, The Inner Voice of Love, written while he was in a deep emotional depression, Henri Nouwen shares these words: The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to try to understand

The religious congregation to which I belong, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, has had a long relationship with the indigenous peoples of North America. Admittedly, it hasn’t always been without its shortcomings on our side, but it has been a sustained one, constant through more than 150 years. I write this out of the

Some years ago I went on a weekend retreat given by a woman who made no secret about the fact that not being able to have children constituted a deep wound in her life. So she offered retreats on the pain of being unable to have children. Being a celibate and not having my own

We quite naturally tend to think of the word “Christ” as Jesus’s second name. We think of the name “Jesus Christ” in the same way that we think of names like Susan Parker or Jack Smith. But that’s an unhealthy confusion. Jesus didn’t have a second name. The word “Christ” is a title which, while

It’s no secret that today we’re witnessing a massive decline in church attendance and, seemingly, a parallel loss of interest in religion. The former mindset within which we worried, sometimes obsessively, about sin, church-going, and heaven and hell no longer holds sway for millions of people. As one parent, worried about the religious state of

According to the 7th-century bishop and theologian Isaac the Syrian, a person who is genuinely humble gives off a certain scent that other people will sense and that even animals will pick up, so that wild animals, including snakes, will fall under its spell and never harm him or her. A humble person, he believes,

Jesus says that if we follow him the cross will find us. That message is chronically misunderstood. Maybe we would understand it better if Jesus had worded it this way: the more sensitive you become, the more pain will seep into your life. We catch the connection then. Sensitive people suffer more deeply, just as

We live in a culture that idealises youth and marginalises the old. And, as the psychologist James Hillman says, the old don’t let go easily either of the throne or the drive that took them there. I know; I’m ageing. For most of my life, I’ve been able to think of myself as young. Because I was