We can talk about motherhood. We can talk about the Gospel. But both stand beyond talking, beyond words. They’re a dying in living, a dying to live.

Our task is not to judge the branches of the vine.

There is much more to life and discipleship than death, yet death determines the final meaning of both.

Intimacy and the honest pleasures of the flesh will not fade away.

Whatever else sin is, it is always a forgetting that we are loved by God. And the more we sin, the more we forget.

Louise Glück’s poem, “Wild Iris,” begins with a description of death, the sort of death something made of earth and growing there might recount if it could speak.

The early Christian record is not what we should expect from the human weakness to exploit the truth to serve one’s own ends.

While God the Father did not will the death of the Son, we can still ask why the Father permitted it. The answer lies in the act of our creation.

At the beginning of his Passion, Jesus bears witness to the truth as he allows himself to be proclaimed the messiah.

Christ goes to his death insisting that his life has meaning. When and how he will die can be left to speculation but not so why he dies.