Faith in Focus

When I returned to the United States from Nigeria in 2000, I was assigned to work in a downtown parish of New Orleans, where Harry Tompson was the only Jesuit and pastor. Harry, who had cancer of the prostate, was not afraid of many things, if anything. He used to say, “It’s not death I

One night a few months ago, my 8-year-old son was very sick in bed. He lay there moaning and crying because of terrible pain in his ears. While my wife was on the phone attempting to get hold of a doctor, I did what I could to comfort him. We tried the usual things, but nothing worked. The choices s

For almost five years now (since I was a young 74), I have entertained a friend who entered my life unexpectedly: daily physical pain. I am a diabetic, which is not painful in itself, but I eventually developed a condition known as neuropathy. In my case it causes continual pain in the bottom of my

Years ago – before I had children – I spent several hours one evening on a friend’s deck in the Adirondacks sitting perfectly still, watching night come. My purpose was to be the one person on earth that day to witness the exact moment when night definitively arrived at one place, when darknes

I hurriedly vest for Mass, fingers fumbling over the unfamiliar cincture. I pick up the books of hymns and prayers and scurry out of the sacristy, moving through the ancient stone church and the outer chapel. Pausing to genuflect before the Blessed Sacrament at a side altar to Our Lady, I shiver eve

Iraq receives all the headlines these days. But the truth is there is a war being waged in the homeland, a battleground in nursing homes across the country. In the past five months my mother has been in three of them as her health and self-reliance deteriorate. The latest is a 13-floor monolith wher

My pager went off at 5 p.m., just after my husband and I had come home from work. I called the long-term care facility where I was the director of nurses. The receptionist told me to call immediately the emergency room of one of our local hospitals. When I asked for the nurse who had left the messag

Though she first introduced me to intercontinental travel, Auntie Lee does not venture very far anymore. Mostly she is pushed in her wheelchair from bed to dining room, from recreation – movies, sing-alongs, the Rosary – to her usual post across from the nursing station at Abbott Terrace, a long-ter