Posts with the category “rick-ganz”

A dear and fifty-year friend of mine died in March, on the 14th day, on the birthday of Albert Einstein (1879-1955). The latter wrote wisely such words as: “Imagination is the highest form of research.” And “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” And “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent … read them more fairy tales."  Read More

There was a boy, a native of Alexandria, Egypt, who lost his eyesight at the age of 4. History would come to know him as Didymus the Blind (313-398 CE). But for a man who could not see, he was among the greatest Christian biblical scholars and theologians of his time. He worked in the 4th century, which very few Christian centuries since then can match for the intensity and depth and range of original Christian thinking...  Read More

During the years of my formal schooling and up into my 30s, I did not understand why I could not get access to Poetry; why it would not open to me. My parents taught all of us Ganz children to read, and to read all the time, barring access to the TV that we might grow in affection for books. They taught us well, doing that teaching in the most compelling way by themselves reading all the time. Yet, I could not figure out why Poetry was a locked box to me, the key to which was never placed into my hands. What was such a key?...  Read More

Even as a little boy I noticed the music of a person’s voice working in his or her language. I was captivated by the different ways that, especially adults, sounded English. (It never occurred to me that there were other languages.) Notice that I did not say the way an adult pronounced his or her words. Pronunciation has to do with the correct way of forming in one’s mouth the vowels and consonants...  Read More

A StoryThe word “discipline” has always conjured up for me images of what a person of a rebellious will requires: “That boy needs discipline!” And when we hear a person say that another person “lacks discipline”, we hear a distinct harshness in the voice of the one offering this assessment. The use of the word in this way never, in my experience, heralds the arrival of redemption, of a joyful find...  Read More

During my late 20s, I studied at Regis College (Jesuit) at the University of Toronto, for my Master of Divinity degree. In the fall Term of my second year, I begged Fr. Michael McMahon Sheenan, CSB to break a few rules (for a holy cause of course) and to let me into his Seminar. He made it happen, even though I had not been formally admitted as a student at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies (PIMS)...  Read More

We assume that people who are “gifted” enjoy having those gifts. Maybe. Sometimes. We who have less glory in us imagine that those who have more must be happier, more joyful, and with an easier life. The truth is that they are happier if, and only if, they have good friends (who have defeated the seduction of envy), and they will be joyful if they abide in God – a contemplative in action - through the Holy Spirit given us. Joy has no other source.  Read More

A “wise” person is not defined by how much, or by what kind of, knowledge he or she has amassed, but by how much his or her existence is transparent to, or “magnifies”, the Spirit of Wisdom – the Holy Spirit – who dwells unimpeded within him or her.  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: I have begun to write this letter to you on Monday, the day after Pentecost, when liturgically speaking we have re-entered Ordinary Time, in its 10th Week. Much has happened in our lives, in our nation, and internationally since Ash Wednesday on March 2nd. For example, the Russo-Ukrainian War, which began in 2014 suffered a major expansion on Thursday, 24 February 2022...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: Happy Eastertide to you, old friend. Be sure to write to me about any insights you gained during Holy Week this year, because I gain so much from the depths I discover inside of your insights. It is one thing for me to receive from you an insight; it is quite another for me to understand what it means and, eventually, to be able to make that insight my own...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: As I begin to write to you, the Sun, having made most of its transit today through a cloudy sky, is now propelling itself (though it seems to fall) toward the west, dropping behind a stand of hundred-year-old Douglas firs, which are rooted over there some fifty yards beyond my windows. For all the glorious light that the Sun gave today to the world, I wonder if it ever finds itself preoccupied with the shadows that its effulgence...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: I got to thinking how we, in the Catholic liturgical calendar, have as of last Sunday, January 9th, entered “Ordinary Time”. And the feast day that marks its commencement is that of the Baptism, by John, of Jesus in the Jordan River... Surely for Jesus Himself, and certainly for John the Baptist, there was nothing ordinary about that day...   Read More

Dear Peregrinus: Blessing to you in this month of November, the last of the four months to have thirty days – “Thirty days has September, April, June, and November”. In Anglo-Saxon (i.e., “Old English”), this month was called Blōtmōnaþ, the month when the Anglo-Saxons sacrificed cattle to their gods. The root “blōt- “means “blood sacrifice”...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: Thank you for being in touch with both Tara and Mary, who think the world of you, and who love writing to you each summer. Your gentle way with both, having just the right touch with each, proves to me (as if I needed more proof) that you are good with people. Your “way” with them is your greatest, and most enduring, work of Art. It was also Jesus’ greatest work of Art...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: I am writing to you from the western edge of the continent, on the Oregon coast, in a hideaway graciously offered me to inhabit for a week by John and Denise, in this week before my 67th birthday. Writing is why I am here, and for long walks in the afternoon through the ocean-saturated air. It is interesting to me the way that we stumble about in Time...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: I greet you warmly and acknowledge how it is likely true that you and I will be remembering our mothers this weekend. I still find it fascinating that I call my mother “mom” and never by her first name, Doris. She was not a “role”, such that I would want to keep her locked inside it; she was far more than a role. She was a presence. That is different. I am convinced that even in Heaven, when I meet her again, I will greet her the way that I always did: “Hey, mom!”, and not with “Hello, Doris.” ...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: Blessings to you during this Holy Week. I continue to pray, not only for myself but for everyone, that we may comprehend how we, in our stubborn desire to return to normal, continue to reject the profound disruption of our “normal” way of being with one another as Americans, and as human beings. I recall how the newly called People of God, set free from their enslavement in Egypt, soon wanted to go back to Egypt and slavery rather than to learn how, in the Wilderness with God, to be free, “to become a people all His own.” ...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: It seemed a perfect day to be writing to you, because, well, any day is closer to “a perfect day” when you are in it. And today is the feast day of a brother and sister – who were twins! – who both became Saints (i.e., what the Church means by a genuinely successful human being – being a human being in the way God “does” human being - Jesus) ...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: I am writing to you from one day beyond a day in Portland when we received the most rain ever recorded on that day. Perhaps with a certain mordant reflectivity, I recalled yesterday as the rain poured down from the sky these lines from Genesis: When the Lord saw how great the wickedness of human beings was on earth, and how every desire that their heart conceived was always nothing but evil, the Lord regretted making human beings on the earth, and his heart was grieved...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: We have this very day started to emerge from a national calamity, a political one. What I mean is our breaking the hold of (if we wish it) an intense perturbation, a toxic peevishness not in the realm of ideas or arguments (so few ideas; rarely a well-constructed argument!) but in the realm of the emotions. We live in an intemperate Age ...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: I have just gotten in from raking and sweeping leaves on this autumn morning. We are already a third of the way through October (!), and local universities have already finished with Midterm Exams. October! The tenth month with a name meaning “eight”. Such a beautiful month when Nature shows us what it means to let go (do not cling!), to trust growth – loss and gain! I need October to be slow, so that I, slow to learn what it teaches, have time to attend to its lessons ...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: How quickly we have been vaulted into September, but how hard to grasp that this is true, because there are no school buses out in traffic. At this time of year, the roads would normally be clogged, in part because of the thousands of newly licensed teens driving themselves, and their younger siblings, to school. I can still feel in my hands, at 66-years old, that buzzing in the steering wheel of the “kids’ car”, of our green, four-wheel drive International Scout, when I drove to Gonzaga Prep for the first time in September of 1968. I can still feel the thrill of it...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: I greet you from the Ides of June and expressing the hope that this letter will hunt you down and find you doing well (you are always doing good). If you are not well, then you must tell me, so that I know how to aim my prayers for you. How I wish that I knew how to pray as encouragingly as St. Paul could ...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: I am happy to be writing to you on the anniversary of the second of the two days in May of 1373 CE when Julian of Norwich had an extended, profound experience of God, the sixteenth “shewing” to complete the fifteen “shewings” given her on the previous day. I know of no greater Theologian than Julian, and, interestingly, the publication of her Shewings is the first book by a woman ever published in English...  Read More

Raphael (1483-1520)[1], The Transfiguration (16th century)[2]in the Dulwich Picture Gallery If you want what visible realitycan give, you are an employee.[3]If you want the unseen world,you are not living with your truth.[4] Both wishes are foolish,[5]but you’ll be forgiven for forgetting[6]that what you really want[7] islove’s confusing joy.[8] FIRST POINT – It is my experience that God makes sen...  Read More

Jacopo Tintoretto (d. 1594)[1], The Temptation of Christ (1578-1581)in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Sala Superior[2] Midway in the journey of our lifeI came to myself in a dark wood,for the straight way was lost.Ah, how hard it is to tellthe nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh -the very thought of it renews my fear!It is so bitter death is hardly more so.But to set forth the good I fou...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: You asked me recently to explain why I esteemed the movie Frozen. What caught my attention was how Princess Elsa, born with a magnificent power, a gift for beauty, was compelled by her own parents to hide it, to cover it, and who ordered her to keep news of it from the one person who loved her most steadfastly – her sister Princess Anna ...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: I am writing to you at our return to what our liturgical calendar calls “Ordinary Time". I have learned over the course of a long life how un-ordinary the ordinary actually is, because God, whose world this is, has not the slightest part of ordinary in Him. I mean God’s “ordinary” in specific and unsettling contrast to the “ordinary” that we humans prefer. The Wisdom Books of the Bible regularly ponder what kind of world we have when God seems set on being free to do what He wants ...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: Thank you for your call on Thanksgiving day, and now happy Advent. Your words always fly, like a dart in the hand of an “archer”, quickly and smoothly towards the place within me where insight happens. You are amazing to me in this way. Wise. Sometimes intimidating. Playful. My trusted Friend ...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus, Happy November to you. I wish you peace and insight on this Sunday, when at Mass the Readings we hear are ones that I love. My pondering and study of them occupied me all morning.As I studied the verses surrounding those few verses selected for today’s First Reading, I was particularly affected, rendered thoughtful, by these lines ...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: I am writing to you from inside a wondrous autumn afternoon, which the Pacific Northwest offers us each year, a gift of too few such days with respect to our desire for many of them. I look up today and behold that which Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ called “a sweet and scar-less sky” ...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: I salute you, old friend, on what has become September, the name of which month means seventh even though it is the ninth month of the year. Thank you for your gracious reception, and reply to both Tara and Mary, who wrote to you in July and August respectively. They think highly of you ...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: Happy 11th day of Christmastide to you (January 4th), and may divine blessings be upon the Adventure (almost completely hidden from us) that will be the year 2019.Tomorrow evening is “Twelfth Night”, which is the conclusion of the “twelve days” of Christmas...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: Thank you for writing recently and letting me know what you have been learning from the great René Noel Girard (1923-2015) concerning his important thoughts about “atonement.” You wrote to me in October, and now, suddenly, it is November with Pacific Standard Time returning early Sunday morning ...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: We have begun a daily reading St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (written in Ephesus in 54 or 55 CE) – sections of which constitute the first Reading each day at our Masses starting yesterday, Monday, and continuing through to Wednesday of next week (not including Sunday). What caught my attention this time, as I refreshed my knowledge about who the Galatians were, is that they were likely a colony of Celts ...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: One nice result of my being away this summer for the sake of some hard work on capacity-building is that you – thank you! – graciously received Letters from two people I trust, Tara and Mary, whose souls are good, and who demonstrate a willingness to accept the challenge of genuine depth. I mean by “depth” that location within each of us where God is unceasingly active and powerful “underneath” the cacophonous foolishness that we all, and more often than we should, allow to gain our attention, and to hold it ...  Read More

Seeing the “far side” of the Moon as it transits the sunlit Earth[1] Dear Peregrinus (Tenth Sunday of Ordinary Time):I have been thinking about syzygy.[2] You? No, it was not a New York Times crossword puzzle that compelled my interest in this noun (I don’t do crossword puzzles), but the poetic loveliness of the names given the full Moons of the year by different tribes[3] of the First Nations[4] ...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: My goodness it has been some weeks since last we communicated - it was before Lent began on February 14th. My time was taken up with writing the Lenten Meditations each week, which I hope that you read. They are some of my best work. We both have been fully deployed, which is our practice of kenosis ...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: Happy new year to you, old friend, by which I do not mean from January 1st onwards, but rather according to what our Christian tradition instructs. Our new year, each year, begins with the first Sunday of Advent. Consequently our “new year” happened on 3 December 2017, when we heard read from Mark's Gospel these words: "Be watchful! Be Alert! ...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: Thank you for writing back to me, and for that quotation you sent from Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina;(written 1875-1877): Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be. Though it has been years since I read that novel from that great-souled author, I can remember now what I felt like then. It is not ...  Read More