This weekend while straightening up my porch, I noticed my front door wreath was crooked. When I removed the wreath to rehang it, I didn’t realize there was a small bird nest built deep inside the wreath. When I repositioned the wreath, three tiny eggs fell to the ground and broke.
I had no idea the eggs...
I’m not usually a big fan of birds. I’ve had a few too many incidents in my life of birds leaving “a deposit” on my head for me to have any great fondness for things flying directly overhead. But this weekend I had a couple of “bird encounters” that surprised me.
On Saturday I armed myself...
A couple years ago, a Franciscan friar in my community, Fr. Carl, built and mounted a number of bird houses on the property of our St. Anthony Shrine. The birdhouses are nicely constructed of cedar and are the exact type suited for bluebirds. Because there were no bluebirds around the shrine property, we...
It’s been about six week since my grandfather died, and little by little, I’ve been finding some peace.
The night I received the phone call from my mom, though, I felt a sense of panic that I wasn’t used to. It wasn’t grief initially, but fear. I was gripped with near-terror over...
In his apostolic letter “Door of Faith,” Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI cites Vatican II’s frequently quoted teaching: “The Church . . . clasping sinner to its bosom, at once holy and always in need of purification, follows constantly the path of penance and renewal” (Dogmatic Constitution on the...
It’s not surprising that Franciscan scholars and others who have spent a great deal of time studying and emulating the life of this saint dismiss what they refer to as the saint of the garden birdbaths, something of a fairy-tale figure in distinctive brown robe, usually surrounded by birds and woodland...
