Pause+Pray

Reflect An invitation to a Mardi Gras party at the Sisters’ Motherhouse—how could I turn it down? Picturing sedate older nuns listening to jazz, I was delighted by their three-piece band, New Orleans decorations, and a parade of costumed Sisters ...

Reflect “A stranger,” Irish poet William Butler Yeats is supposed to have said, “is a friend I haven’t met yet.” As Catholics, ours is not a circle-the-wagons religion. Our faith calls us to open our hearts and arms to those foreign ...

Reflect  After Mass, I trailed my husband in his electric wheel chair to the parking lot, where I would be hard-pressed to lift the chair into the trunk. I called to a parishioner yards ahead. “I’d love to help,” he replied hurrying ...

Reflect In the indigenous Lakota tradition, the Mitakuye Oyasin prayer offers thanks for “all my relations”: our deep interconnectedness to other people, animals, and all of the living world.  In our Christian faith, St. Francis of prayed in a similar ...

Reflect  “Don’t change!” I plead to the traffic light at the end of the exit ramp. No use. I brake to a stop beside a homeless veteran on the grass holding a sign. Embarrassed to turn my eyes away, I ...

Reflect The Israelites sojourned for forty years in the desert, learning to be a community and learning to trust entirely in God to sustain them. Manna was the symbol of this faith: food enough to last a day or two, but ...