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

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