Dawn Farm in Ann Arbor, Michigan is a place where addicts and alcoholics recover the lives they lost to drugs and alcohol. Recover is an innocent-sounding verb for the grueling, gut-wrenching metamorphosis that takes place in the human body and spirit as it separates from the chemical demons that possess it. But close to 75 percent of the people who undergo treatment at Dawn Farm really do reclaim their lost lives and achieve long-term recovery.
This teacher's reaction to an unexpected gift from an unloved child paid off in a miraculous way.
June 22 is the Feast of one of our greatest saints: Thomas More. St. Thomas More (1478-1535) was one of the most gifted men of his day. He entered Oxford at about age 15, was a brilliant scholar, writer, and lawyer (thereby showing that lawyers can get to heaven) was fluent in Greek, Latin and French, was schooled in mathematics and was an accomplished musician.
I began the spiritual journey in a fervour of prayer, asking God to give me the companions I needed for the road. The voice in my heart was gentle but firm, Name your needs. Ah, but that was easy! There were three whose company represented my constant longing. Wisdom! Compassion! Holiness! I cried.
My own young daughter, Kemper, was in agony from lupus, a disease ravaging her body, and I worried about leaving her to visit Washington's poor. But I had promised to share my time with a small child in one of the poorest housing projects of our nation's capital, so I had to keep my word. This visit was part of the ongoing Catholic ministry of Exodus Youth Services, Inc. (Exodus) that my husband and I had founded in 1985.
When I first met them, at the St. Ignatius Institute at the University of San Francisco, I hadnt gone to Mass regularly for years. I enrolled in their program knowing but not caring that it was Catholic. I just wanted to live in San Francisco and read great books. I didnt have even a passing interest in the faith. The St. Ignatius Institute changed that.
Young man, inquired Mother Teresa, do you say the rosary often? No, not really, he admitted. She took his hand, while her eyes probed his. Then she smiled. Well, you will now. And she dropped her rosary into his palm.
On the evening of October 16, 1978, when Pericle Cardinal Fellici announced that the Church had a Polish pope, an astonished world expected that it might take some time for the newly-elected successor of St. Peter to learn his job. For Karol Cardinal Wojtyla of Kraków had had none of the preparation usually considered necessary for the papacy.
The short life of Blaise Pascal (1623-62) was one of intense intellectual brilliance, physical anguish, and mystical vision. The son of a French bureaucrat, Pascal exhibited extraordinary mathematical and scientific abilities at an early age.
On December 21, 1968, a spacecraft appropriately named after the pagan god Apollo left the earth on its three-day trip to the moon. Thirty some years ago we had, for the first time, a compelling image of the only home that all we humans can call our own. This image urges us to reflect on the brotherhood, mutual love, and respect that our common dwelling place mandates. The inhospitable blackness of the surrounding void is not an alternative, either literally or figuratively.