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

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, It is Mary Edmonds who writes to you today. It has been a whole year since our last correspondence. Our dear friend Fr. Ganz has kept me up to date as to how life is treating you. It seems as if we have both, and all, seen and experienced many joys as well as sorrows in these past 12 months. As a fellow pilgrim, you understand...  Read More