Faith in Focus

Last Sunday evening I had one of the more remarkable telephone conversations of my life. At first I simply heard a man’s cultured voice, with a smooth and soft foreign accent, very politely say, “Father Gelson?” “Yes.” “Father, do you remember a scouting trip to D

I prayed over a dead man today. His name was Jocelyn, and he had only one leg. His other leg had been amputated “not too long ago due to complications from sugar,” said the man in the adjacent bed. That man’s legs had both been amputated at the knees. I guessed Jocelyn had been in

There is a chip in the paint on my bunk bed where Keith hanged himself. Like everything else in prison, penitentiary paint is cheap. Even a suicide’s shoestring rope is enough to nick it. That scratch is all that is left of Keith now. In the year or so that we shared a cell, Keith and I never

Among my New York City circle of friends, I am considered to be the best read. This is not because I am the most educated or gifted with the highest I.Q. It is because I have the longest commute. When one lives in the outer borroughs, as our less enlightened, Manhattan-centric brethren call them, on

This particular Sunday was not different from any other summer Sunday at Nuestra Señora del Rosario parish in Mexicalicapital of the state of Baja California in Mexico. It was scorching hot, with people milling about, finding shelter in a bit of shade in the patio fronting the church, and ladies se

My cousin telephoned to say Aunt Bib is dead. The funeral is two days hence. No need to wait; at 94 she has outlived all her peers. The pastor will officiate. Of course, I reply. Will you sing, she asks? Of course. And you’ll come back to the house afterward? Of course. It will be good to have

I can’t remember exactly how old I was, but from what I have learned, that’s not unusual. I must have been 10 or 11, in the fourth or fifth grade at a small parochial school. I was an altar boy, and it was while serving at 6:30 Mass before school one morning that I first met him. He was

Raised Catholic, I went to church on Sundays and served as an altar boy. I was spiritual, but I sought an intensity of experience I did not find in the Catholic tradition. Communion was my main problem. If this wafer truly were the body and blood of God’s Son (so I reasoned), I would receive i

Money is a subject that has always held endless difficulty and fascination for me. At 20 I entered a convent, embracing a sacred vow of poverty and refusing to have anything to do with owning money. At 38, I left that order and had to face financial reality again. I worked in the service of the chur

I had been dreaming for some time of a winter wonderland, wrapping myself up in a warm blanket, reading a good book and admiring the snow outside the window, so I accepted the invitation of Brother Wolfgang to visit his abbey in Admont, Austria: the Benedictinerstift Admont. The impressive, fortress