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