Winters in Rome can be grim. It is often rainy and gray. The outside is cold and damp; the rain falls at angles that defy the use of umbrellas. In buildings filled with rooms that have very high ceilings and marble floors, buildings from get a single poof of heat at 7 a.m. and the next at 9 p.m., th

The world, the flesh and the devil were the original “axis of evil.” Of the three, “the flesh” often gets the hardest rap. “Sins of the flesh” entail sins of our senses. “Extracting the last ounce of flesh” refers to dominating power. The “flesh

The Sufi poet Rumi tells the tale of a holy man who sees a snake crawl into a sleeping man’s mouth. Shouting, the holy man wakes the sleeper and forces him to eat rotten apples. He then makes the astonished man run for hours, whipping him as the man cries out in exhaustion. Finally the former

I don’t want to be humbled; you don’t either, I suspect. Yet there are people who say it was the best thing that ever happened to them. Members of Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, say that they began to move toward sanity and wholeness only after they had been deeply humbled. Likewise,

A number of years ago, I belonged to a parish that brought Communion to a local hospital each Sunday. One Sunday, as I approached one of the rooms and looked in, all I could see were white sheets covering a mound of pillows. Coming around the bed, I discovered a small, emaciated woman in a fetal pos

I open the gray metal box. Where others keep grandma’s opal from Australia or silver certificates, I keep one hand-written letter. In my father’s unique penmanship, the long “y” of sorry reaches down and captures a memory: My dear daughter, ...what happened long ago.... It i