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’m glad to hear from our friends Tara and Rick that you are doing well and staying safe and healthy in the midst of this global pandemic. This year has been quite different than I ever could have imagined, but then again, most years (most days, even!) ebb and flow in an unanticipated rhythm. I am grateful that my family is safe and healthy. We have even experienced great blessings...  Read More

Dear Peregrinus: Hello, dear old friend. It is nearly a year since I have written to you last, and my, what profound wonders and sorrows have come to be in that short amount of time. The extraordinary and hard-won recovery of our mutual friend, Rick Ganz; the birth of my precious Gesumina, delivered to us strong and healthy and fresh from God ...  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