1. We need more Myrrhbearers. If you’ve never heard of them, my first article at will introduce you to the ones we need today—and the myrrhbearers we’re called to become.

2. Do You Know God or Know Of God? ’s latest primer/rant/manifesto on prayer is a great back-to-basics if you’re feeling lost lately in the spiritual department.

3. Check out this stunning painting from local artist Laura Kruchen that will accompany a prayer I was honored to write for a local summit of prayer, conversation, and advocacy. Thoughts, Prayers, & Action: The Catholic Call to End Gun Violence, will be held in Blaine, MN, on Sat. Aug. 8th. It’s free to attend, but get your tickets here (or donate to support).

4. “Bless our hearts, when my husband and I had been married all of three months, we signed up to become a team couple with our local Engaged Encounter program…” What love teaches us about God, far beyond marriage.

5. I never use AI in my writing, speaking, or preaching. Never (as evidenced by my recent rant against AI homilies). This striking essay from U.S. Catholic by a 17 year-old author speaks volumes on the real ethical and spiritual dangers of using AI for spiritual matters. I couldn’t agree more. What do you think?

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Even though it meant driving four hours solo with three kids, with three different nap schedules. Even though I was still nursing and getting scant sleep. Even though on paper the prospect had all the makings of A Very Bad Idea.

I needed fresh air and new horizons and any break. The lake promised precisely that.

I can’t remember why I decided to read A Wrinkle In Time that summer day. I do remember that I was in an e-book chapter of life, reading backlit while the baby breastfed through endless wee hours. I must have wanted an easy read, one I devoured countless times as a child. Or maybe I was intrigued by the extras in the 50th anniversary edition, the only option “available now!” through the local library app. Either way, the click of a finger that afternoon changed my life.

Because what I learned for the first time, from the afterword by Madeleine’s granddaughter, was that Madeleine had written her life-changing, best-selling book while she was home with her three children for the summer. More than that, their family was in the middle of a ten-week road trip (heaven help them!) when she got the burst of inspiration that became her masterpiece.

“During that summer, the family went on a ten-week cross-country camping trip, and it was on this trip that the idea for A Wrinkle in Time began to germinate. Driving through the landscape of the Painted Desert, so different from the New England and north Florida of her childhood, the names Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which popped into my grandmother’s head, and she told her three children—twelve, ten, and seven—that she would have to write a book about them. When the trip was over, my grandfather restarted his acting career—playing the father in a production of The Diary of Anne Frank—and my grandmother stayed behind in Connecticut so her children could start school while their father got settled. The first draft of A Wrinkle in Time poured from my grandmother’s fingers, written in the three months she was alone with her children.”
(Charlotte Jones Voiklis)1

In the midst of chaos, creation sparked to life. The Spirit hovering over the churning abyss. The same story for every genesis. Let there be light, let there be love, let there be life devoted to faith, family, and the fever pitch of writing your way through all of it. Suddenly everything shimmered and shifted and something new became possible. Suddenly the boys in my arms—sweaty, squirmy, sweet, and sun-baked—were no longer barriers to the writing life but doorways by which I could enter.

I looked up from that story and saw my whole life differently. I could do this. I could create.

I never forgot those words, read in a breathless thrill one rare afternoon. For the rest of the week, while the baby gulped at my breast, while his older brothers raced and chased on the muddy lakeshore, I kept thinking: I could do this. A creative life was possible as a parent.

As the Quakers say about calling, as way opens. A clear way opened for me that day.

Since that sunny afternoon years ago, I have pressed this truth into the palm of every parent-writer I found. You know Madeleine L’Engle started A Wrinkle In Time when she was home with her kids? I have shouted this over the din of playdates, bouncing a baby on my hip while brokering peace accords with brawling siblings at my knees. I have whispered this across coffee shop tables with others who dared to dream but wondered how to make it work in the midst of messy lives. I knew Madeleine’s story might not speak to everyone with the ground-shifting revelation that it spoke to me. But the knowledge of any way forward felt too powerful and precious not to share.

You can write, right here.

Madeleine’s books have companioned me for my whole life. I adored A Wrinkle In Time. Meg, Calvin, Charles Wallace; weird, wondrous, wild. Mysterious adults, courageous children, holy anger, palpable evil. Theology, cosmology, physics, fantasy (though I could name none of that as a child who simply loved a good story). I came to crave Madeleine’s insight into complicated relationships and family dynamics. As I aged into adolescence I read every one of the Austin family series, secretly taking notes from Vicki’s first forays into dating. Much later, my sister told me she thought Two-Part Invention was the best book on marriage, so Madeleine’s Crosswick journals became companions through adulthood, always one buried somewhere in the tower on my nightstand. I fell upon Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art as I became a writer, working to braid these two together, at times adrift on a lonely sea. While I waded through marriage and motherhood, she taught me neither was an impediment to a writing career but rather the fertile soil for a creative life, professional and personal, all of it devotional.

But nothing mattered more to my writing than one simple sentence I read one summer afternoon while the baby napped. Suddenly a light broke through the dark forest and fell upon a path that I could follow. It was a kairos moment in chronos time. The divine breaking into the daily. The ephemeral transcending the everyday. A wrinkle in time, an acceptable time.

She showed me a way forward.

We need elders and peers on any vocational journey. We need wise experts and fellow novices. Mentors who mark the road ahead, whacking their way through the brush, making a way possible for those who will follow. And companions who walk alongside us, chatting as we go, cheering us when we falter.

Madeleine became both for me. A grandmother and a friend.

I know she’s a complicated character all her own. I’ve read the post-mortem profiles.2 But I also know that my childhood love became my grown-up light. I know that a lifetime spent reading her words mattered as much as one searing lightning flash that came once and never again. Such is the mystery of creation, on the page or in the soul.

What I wish most for you, what I pray you find, too, are the folks who show a way forward. What I would love to know is a sliver of the story of someone who cleared a path for you. A teacher, a relative, an author, a mentor, a pastor, a poet, a friend. Anyone who helped make possible—even from afar, even across the years—what once looked like an impossible dream.

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“I was always tired. So was Hugh. During the decade between thirty and forty, most couples are raising small children, and we were no exception. Hugh was struggling to support his growing family in the strange world outside the theatre. And there was I, absolutely stuck in bucology, with the washing machine freezing at least once a week, the kitchen never above 55* when the wind blew from the northwest, not able to write until after my little ones were in bed, by which time I was so tired that I often quite literally fell asleep with my head on the typewriter.

The various pressures of twentieth-century living have made it almost impossible for the young mother with pre-school aged children to have any solitude. During the long drag of years before our youngest child went to school, my love for my family and my need to write were in acute conflict. The problem was really that I put two things first. My husband and children came first. So did my writing. Bump.”

(Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet: The Crosswicks Journal)

The Lord will give you bread in adversity
and water in affliction.
No longer will your Teacher hide himself,
but with your own eyes you shall see your Teacher.
And your ears shall hear a word behind you:
“This is the way; walk in it,”
when you would turn to the right or the left.”
(Isaiah 30:20-21)

“We knew the promise had never been safety,
or that bad things would not happen if we were good and virtuous.
The promise is only that God is in it with us, no matter what it is.”
(Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time)

For God says:
“In an acceptable time I heard you,
and on the day of salvation I helped you.”
Behold, now is a very acceptable time;
behold, now is the day of salvation.
(2 Corinthians 6:2)

“Science, literature, art, theology:
it is all the same ridiculous, glorious, mysterious language.”
(Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time)

More on Madeleine

I once wound up talking about her for half of a podcast I did with .

And turns out I’ve written about her all over the place:

On her poetry & the risk of birth.

On violence & the Christ Child.

The Möbius strip of time.

p.s. if there are any L’Engle lovers who know why I started this essay with the sentence I did, let me know and my heart will thrill!

1. Local folks: Join me in Saint Paul, MN, on July 19th for an evening of storytelling with and . We’ll read from our latest books, answer your questions, laugh a lot (also probably cry). Tickets are only $10, and I already can’t wait. Details here: Sustenance—An Evening of Storytelling around Suffering & the Surprising Endurance of Joy.

2. A Wonder Is What It Is. No better way to describe this short series of actor Nick Offerman reading Wendell Berry’s poetry. Listen on YouTube or search it up from WNYC wherever you listen to podcasts. 10/10.

3. Took the crew to Toy Story 5 this week. Consensus was: good, but not as great as its predecessors. Which reminded me of this mind-blowing creation story and literary analysis of Toy Story 3. I watched this entire thing TWICE during one writing retreat: Mistakes Made & Lessons Learned.

4. Finished Whistler this week (Amazon or Bookshop). Loved it, but Bel Canto and Tom Lake are holding firm as my favorite Ann Patchett novels. Did you read it?

5. Kids have been baking non-stop this summer. When I shared a snapshot of our chaotic kitchen, many parents noticed this cookbook on our counter & said it was their kids’ favorite, too: The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs from America’s Test Kitchen (Amazon or Bookshop). But the real winner has been this simple microwave pancake recipe. Perfect for one & easy enough for our 6 & 8-year-olds (they cook it on a buttered plate). If you have a favorite kid-friendly recipe, will you send our way?

We have two groves in our yard: one at the edge of the driveway, one framing the front door. The farther bushes bloom first, then the fragrant door posts, standing like sentinels at entrances.

Every May from my window I watch fuzzy bumblebees and flitting yellow swallowtail butterflies dart between the flowers, flora and fauna waking up again, well-rested after a long winter’s nap. Lilacs can bloom white, pink, purple, blue, violet, even magenta, but only briefly. Now they are shriveled and gone.

Lilac season is short and sweet, pungent and syrupy. Each time I step out the door in late May, the blossoms pack a punch. Fragrant, even in memory, for their fleeting nature. When my oldest ones were young, we spent hours beneath the lilacs, playing in the shade of the bushes. Sidewalk chalk, hopscotch, nursery rhymes. I did not know how fast those days would pass. How short and sweet, how tender and cliched.

In lilac season I stop the car by the end of the driveway where the grove grows, grab a fistful of blossoms, rip them off the branches, cut the edges to make them even, stick them in a mason jar, and set them on the table to enjoy. I try to carry the outside inside. I want to keep it all, longer than nature allows. It never works. They cannot last.

In North America, lilacs are blooming an average of one day earlier every three years. Once I wrote a poem about cold lilacs, but this year the air and ground were already warming whenever I slipped out in pajamas to press my face into their dewy blooms. Too much heat, too strong and soon the blast of sun. Too warm, too wary of what this means for us.

Phenology—the science of seasons, the chronicling of nature’s calendar—tells us that spring is starting 2.5 days earlier every decade. I shift uneasily when I read these words, when I consider what they mean for us, our children, our children’s children, our children’s children’s children. Consider the lilies, how they grow. Consider the lilacs.

Lilacs are an indicator plant. They are sensitive to temperatures, not seasonally changing light. Farmers and gardeners tell time by lilacs: “When lilac leaves are the size of a mouse’s ear, sow peas, lettuce and other cool-weather crops. When lilac is in full bloom, plant beans. Once lilac flowers have faded, plant squash and cucumbers.” When the lilac season shifts, the season shifts for all.

Lilacs, like us, are the frogs in the slowly boiling pot. They cannot last like this. They were not made for unrelenting heat. Notice how the flowers grow.

Every September and every spring, I take photos of the kids by the back door, next to the lilacs. First day of school, last day of school. Their faces change, their hair grows, their chins sharpen, they lengthen before my eyes. We try to pin down the butterfly of time, but she flits away.

Could we stand lilacs year-round? I want to say yes, want to beg for more, beauty all at once. But it will not be given. What it is, is for now. Lilacs symbolize first love, innocence, freshness, and possibility. To sing of lilacs ought to be a love song, not a lament. An elegy for the elusive, not a eulogy for a passing earth.

The children are stepping each day into adulthood, some closer than others to the long years of adulthood where we spend most of our time (if we are lucky, fortunate, blessed). I don’t believe in luck; fortune feels as outdated as the fates; blessings in Scripture are almost always for the many, not a privileged few. But I do believe in the God who made the lilacs, who made my children, who made a world of indescribable beauty and asked us to love it, too.

Up north it is lilac season now. Startled, I stumbled upon purple, blue, violet, white, and pink running up and down Minnesota’s north shore. An encore, a second helping, a resurrection—but only in my mind’s eye. Most lilacs don’t rebloom. When they do, it’s a warning sign. After drought or heatwave, the plants go dormant, then wake up when cooler temperatures return, confused and convinced spring has come again. I wince when I see too-late lilacs on our bushes. I shuddered at last September’s blooms. I want to lull them back to sleep.

Now that our blossoms are gone, the leafy branches make a perfect shelter for birds’ nests. We’ve had robins and grackles in years past, but this spring, none. Last year’s nests are lined with plastic, long clear strands plucked from roadside litter. Now I wonder and worry about the birds. Consider the ravens. Count the sparrows. Have we made their home uninhabitable, too?

Sometimes I catch myself when I pick the lilacs. Why is my instinct to take, rather than give? Ripping the lilacs from the branches rather than leaving all the rare beauty for the neighborhood to enjoy? Whatever good is given, it is given for all. I take some and leave most. But I wonder what is enough, why I long to grasp and clutch.

Every day I let the children spring off into the beautiful bruised world. Climbing onto the bus or buckling up in the backseat or pulling down the driveway at the wheel. The lilacs were not made to stay. The young are meant to leave. But for two short, too sweet weeks in the spring—if the storms don’t pummel, if the sun doesn’t scorch, if the earth doesn’t groan—the scent of hope makes me wonder if we might yet make the world a softer place where all can live. The children, the birds, the lilacs, the bees. I pray we can.

Cold lilacs poem.

On lilacs and phenology.

Scripture: Matthew 6:26-34. Luke 12:22-28.

An ode to the birds that once nested among the lilacs: The Brood Patch of God.

If you’re wondering where I’ve been for the past two weeks, I have something big to share very soon—but not quite yet! Trust me, it’s great news & worth the wait. Till then:

1. What’s the point of prayer? As the title of U.S. Catholic’s podcast says, I’m glad you asked. A fascinating conversation with their editors about a question I’ve been asking my whole life.

2. “What is the holy beat of the Sacred Heart if not the same joyful, painful throb that parents feel the moment a child is placed in their arms, knowing they will forever have their whole heart walking around outside their body?” My latest for OSV News.

3. If you love Mary Oliver, these poetry cards are a delightful way to bring her words into your everyday. Currently sitting on our bathroom counter, a perch of highest honor.

4. Be still, my heart: a children’s book about Madeleine L’Engle? Even my littlest sits in rapt attention to this one—a praise song for our biggest questions. A Book, Too, Can Be a Star: The Story of Madeleine L’Engle and the Making of A Wrinkle in Time.

5. Finally, this suggestion is so niche (as my 14-year-old would say), but if you like ASMR (as my 12-year-old does), then you might enjoy this creative Van Gogh healing or this priest getting ready for Mass and blessing holy water. Please don’t ask me to explain it; the brain simply finds it strangely satisfying.

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1. Could not have loved The Correspondent more. As beautiful as countless friends told me it would be. (Amazon or Bookshop or wait for 6 months at your local library like I did, 100% worth it!)

2. These tiny vases have brought me an inverse & inordinate amount of joy this spring. Perfect for dandelions picked by small boys or whatever wildflower you adore.

   

3. Two new-to-me Instagram accounts I’m loving: little.people.learn from an early childhood educator and golsa.golchini, an Italian painter. Thought-provoking / Visually stunning.

4. “Living with kids is an ever-flowing stream. Even when we pause to take stock of where we are and how far we’ve come, the river keeps rushing. Time only moves in one direction. Especially in springtime, when another school year ends and graduations bring goodbyes, we often find ourselves longing at the lasts.” What if we looked to how Jesus handled his own “lasts”? My latest column at OSV News.

5. I forget to share my past books, but this week I got to order a bunch of copies—since they are still selling away!—to take with me to Maryland when I speak there next weekend: Everyday Sacrament: The Messy Grace of Parenting (on how God meets us in the ordinary labor and love of family life) and Grieving Together: A Couple’s Journey Through Miscarriage (because fathers deserve to be supported in grief, too). I hear from readers every week about these two, and it warms my heart that they’re still doing good in the world, many years later.

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It’s officially summer for our family (as of 2:10 pm this afternoon). How are you feeling about this turning of seasons?

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1. Gobbled down a remarkable book in two days: She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons: A Life in Novels by Kathleen Hill. For anyone who loves books and marks chapters of their lives by these companions (Bookshop or Amazon).

2. Two spring poems I loved lately. “Shall we do without hope?” by Wendell Berry. “Listen,” by Barbara Crooker.

3. When Timothy Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics, received the Laetare Medal from Notre Dame, his words called all of us to become mystics. “There is no us and them. There is no less of God in any of us.” Watch here.

4. Easter is in the rearview, but this conversation on America Magazine’s Jesuitical podcast was fantastic: watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get podcasts.

5. “For 10 days, people admired the vastness of the universe. The frailty and interdependence of the human species…It turned all of us into children at camp, lying supine and looking up at the stars, thinking very big thoughts.” Another Giant Leap Reminds Us How Small We Are (gift article from NYT).

p.s. Local rec: the Guthrie Theater’s production of Little Women is SO GOOD. I got to treat my mom for Mother’s Day, and we loved it from start to finish.

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I look out on the sea of women, young and old. A six-day-old sleeping in her mother’s arms, a table full of friends in their 80s. Every face burning with questions and passion and longing and faith.

Already that Saturday we have laughed and cried, spilling out over break time, harrowing stories of suffering and loss, babies buried and cancer coming back. For the millionth time I marvel at the magic of a room full of women, how much we hold and how we hold each other.

“What if,” I lean forward, “the real miracle of Pentecost was not that tongues of fire appeared out of nowhere, but that the Spirit fanned into flame the fire that already burned inside every single person in that room?”

“What if,” I lean back, “we could see each other’s flames all the time? What if, when you walked out of this church today, you could see the burning faith of every woman here today? What if we tried to live like that every single day?”

Suddenly I can see them for a split second—dancing, glowing, gleaming tongues of fire atop every head. Just a flash, and then it’s gone.

Maybe they think I’m crazy. (Maybe I am.)

But in that burst of a burning moment, Pentecost glows possible, palpable, powerful.

The retreat ends. We close in prayer, pack up the room, hug goodbye. I walk back to the car, buckle up, drive out of the parking lot. But all the way home, the words dance round my thoughts, leaping like tongues of fire.

There is no way of telling people they are all walking around shining like the sun.

“Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time.”

(Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander)

//

He stands before thousands in the packed cathedral, looking down from the looming stone balcony of the sculpted ambo far above us. Without any preparation, without a single glitch, he leans forward and begins to read the words he’d been handed moments before, his deep voice echoing into the cavern of the church, booming like the man he already is.

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1. Want to come to Maryland this summer? On June 13th I’ll be speaking at the Shrine of St. Anthony for their 2026 Festival. Learn more here and watch an interview between me and the monks and staff of the Shrine. This is a beloved site of pilgrimage, so I hope to see some of you there: free & open to the public.

2. “For years my own work has been animated by Henri’s light. Long ago I taped his words on my office wall: ‘My deepest vocation is to be a witness to the glimpses of God I have been allowed to catch.’ This invitation to seek God through suffering and joy has sunk into my bones as I have been humbled to learn what Henri teaches: that both the cup of suffering and the cup of blessing can bring joy.” An excerpt from my forward to the 30th anniversary edition of Henri Nouwen’s Can You Drink The Cup? at Focolare Media: What Is God Asking?

3. Kate Bowler’s interview with poet Malcolm Guite was so good that I listened twice: What If Prayer Isn’t What You Think It Is?

4. Quantifying Care from Glass is a remarkable art project that honors the unseen/unpaid labor of caregivers.

5. Shoutout to my spouse for bringing this into my day: for fans of Project Hail Mary + orchestral music.

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Book Giveaway

My wise and witty friend has published a beautiful book: Love like a Mother: How the Sacred Work of Motherhood Reveals the Maternal Heart of God. Brazos Press is generously giving away a copy to one lucky winner here!

Simply leave a comment below by midnight CT on Sunday, May 24: which woman in your life has taught you about God’s love?

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And suddenly the smallest socks showed up in the laundry again, stuck to toddler sweatpants or clinging to soccer jerseys. Every time I’d marvel at the tiny sizes. How a whole human person—every organ, every bone, every muscle, the mystery of a mind—could fit into a onesie I held in my hand.

In the tortuous fog of sleep deprivation and the constant churn of children’s needs, I had to make myself mark the marvel. Not to lose the fleeting wonder of an entire astonishing existence unfurling before me, once cradled in my body, now nestled at my breast. It was never “another baby.” It was always a mind-blowing mixture of heaven and earth, an odds-defying creation that could have ceased at ten thousand precious points en route to my arms.

When you have many children, the world does not understand why. In fact, I could alter that sentence countless ways and it would still hold true. When you have any children. When you have one child, not the traditional two. When you have two kids of one gender and don’t “try for” the other, as if parenting were a set of accessories, collect them all. When you raise more than two children in a society built for the four-pack of mother, father, daughter, son.

When you proceed to crack open your heart, mind, faith, body, future, plans, finances, health, status, work, everything, and decide to make space for a child, the world (whatever that phrase means, the strange conglomeration of all-of-us or the imaginative powers-that-be who sternly pass judgement) will never understand. To have a child makes no strict sense beyond the biological compulsion to keep going, the instinctual survival mechanism that drives every species.

But what to make of the mysteries of the human heart? What is love? What are dreams? What is the creative act, born on paper or canvas or marble or the hospital bed where you push and push and cry and bleed, or where you allow the soft skin of your own flesh be sliced in two by a surgeon’s scalpel, to let-there-be-light in the dark once again?

Logic need not apply. Love sways to its own rhythms, the same strange dance that turns a bar floor kiss into a wedding day waltz into a quotidian shuffle of work-home-kids-repeat. Who could say why any of us do the things we do, make the choices we make, lead the lives we half-create, half-receive?

Researchers tell us facts and figures do not sway us. We mammals are motivated solely by the strange swirl of belief and hope that brews in the grey folds within our brains. Every time I got pregnant again, I wondered how to explain it to skeptics. The irresistible desire to take part in the most complex creation in human existence? The mysterious multiplication of love? The growing realization that whatever The World lauded—money, success, power, privilege, comfort, ease—turned into gnawing emptiness for everyone I saw pursuing such shining ends at the expense of ordinary service, sacrifice, beauty, joy?

We love our kids. I’d simply shrug. It’s such a joy to have another.

The season ended. Quietly and without fanfare as seasons do, slipping softly and slowly into another. Children age, and parents age, and bodies age. There would be no more. We knew it, we grieved it, we celebrated it.

But the tiny socks bouncing around in the dryer—I will always miss them. How silly; more work. How small; so fleeting. How backwards the impulse; longing to keep them close and cuddled when the point is to help them grow and watch them leave. But every time we pulled the diapers and the onesies and the baby blankets from the bins tucked on the closet shelf, I smiled. I loved the small season, despite its deep pains and bodily messes and scant sleep and harried pace.

The marvel was never lost.

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Post-script: To be crystal clear, I am not pregnant. I will not be pregnant again. Cancer took away that possibility. Any time I write something poetic about pregnancy, birth, or babies, someone inevitably misunderstands (clearly my fault, not yours!) and thinks I’m announcing. Instead, as I worked on a column this week about firsts and lasts in parenting, these words tumbled out unexpectedly—which is also the whole point of this essay.

Anything to spend time with my kid.

Fast-forward a few hours, I’m hooked and it’s way past my bedtime. The next night, I’m yelling downstairs as he’s demolishing a midnight snack in the kitchen, YOU NEVER TOLD ME [SPOILER #1] WAS GOING TO HAPPEN! He comes around the corner, grinning like a Cheshire cat. The following night, I’m bursting through the back door to holler at him and his brother who are up to something adolescent in the backyard, [SPOILER #2]?! I CANNOT HANDLE THIS! He laughs at me through the darkness. “I told you so.”

By the third night, I had lost hours of sleep (and truth be told, skipped through not a few sciency sections because it’s been many moons since my brain last tangled with physics) but the book was finished and I was better for it. I understood why everyone had been swept up in the story, I didn’t want it to end, I wanted to read it again from the beginning, I wished I could start it for the first time.

That weekend we ditched the rest of the gang and slipped away to the theater to take in the movie. We were enthralled. We didn’t want it to end, we wanted to watch it again from the beginning, we wished we could see it for the first time. His grins in the dark, the laughter we shared, the way he rolled his eyes whenever I startled at every jump-scare we knew was coming—the whole night was a core memory made.

But as it often does, a single line leapt off the screen and scrambled my brain in the best way (as happens with Scripture in lectio divina, as happens with poetry turned over and over in the brain and on the tongue). I hadn’t noticed the line in the book (as with Scripture or poetry long-loved, it brought that puzzling moment of was this always there?!) but yes it was, and there it was.

I promise no spoilers when I tell you that the moment in question comes when the human (Ryland Grace) is outside the spaceship and the alien (Rocky) is asking what’s going on, in his quirky way:

Rocky: What is Grace doing, question?

Ryland Grace: I’m having a moment.

A man is beholding the beauty of the cosmos. He’s taking in a sight that human eyes have never seen. He’s standing on the precipice of risk, great promise or utter disaster.

Grace is having a moment.

As often happens with lectio or literature, that single line wormed into my brain and set up shop. For weeks now I’ve carried it with me, a mantra of sorts, a pseudo-psalm to ponder in response to all that’s happening in our rocky world, which is decidedly un-graceful, which tempts me daily to despair, which likely makes us all want to give up on the whole human project at one point or another, were it not also shot through with glory from above.

And in one particular corner, I keep asking myself: is Grace having a moment?

Depending on what you read, you may or may not have heard that many, MANY folks entered the Catholic Church on Easter Vigil this year. I don’t just mean they slipped in the doors, grabbed a candle (the best worship has props!), and settled into their pew for the longest, loveliest liturgy of the year. “Entered the Church” is the turn of phrase we church-folk use to say “became Catholic” (because it can mean someone converted from another faith or had already been baptized as a Christian and has now made the choice to become Catholic). Insider baseball, I know, I know. But depending on where you locate yourself within circles of church or state, we’re supposed to be skeptical or celebrating the sky-rocketing numbers of new Catholics. (Learn more from religious media or secular media; hear from those urging caution and those shouting praises; read a conservative Christian or a liberal Catholic.)

Nothing the internet loves more than a hot take, so no wonder there are a thousand analyses of this current Catholic (craze? crisis?) phenomenon. All I can offer in response is a single line from a phenom film, a moment I can’t stop thinking about from a movie I won’t soon forget.

What is Grace doing, question?

I’m having a moment.

With friends across ideological and theological spectrums, I have watched people cheer or cringe, raise hands to heaven or roll eyes in response to what’s happening. A revival is upon us. Or the theobros are winning. Disillusioned post-moderns are drawn by ancient ritual: clearly this is conservatism’s triumph. Or Pope Leo’s brand-new bandwagon has everyone excited: now is the progressive turn-around.

Honestly? I simply wonder if Grace is having a moment.

When I tell you that despair is my daily temptation, I mean that I don’t know how anyone can read the news without deciding we are collectively on the fast track to hell in a handbasket. Having brushed too close with death, having buried too many beloveds, I lose my loving mind at the maddening reality of how humans heap extra suffering on each other every day by way of cruelty, greed, violence, hatred, or fear. Life would be hard enough if we only had to deal with the suffering and death we can’t control, so when people make more of it? I truly TRULY cannot. But every morning I open my eyes, and a new day is dawning, so I shrug and say once again to the Creator of the cosmos: ok, let’s do it. You haven’t given up yet, so I guess I can’t either.

Because grace is at the heart of my life’s work. It’s the subtitle of my first book. It’s the silly handle of my Instagram profile (that every expert tells me I must change to my own name, if I really want a brand and a platform and influence, though I’d rather have grace). It’s the thru-line of everything I try to create on this spinning rock. Grace is the sacred, stupefying lens that changes what we see. Grace is the wild wind that shows up and blows the whole room around. Grace makes all the best parts of existence possible: love, peace, forgiveness, imagination.

So my God, I am sticking with grace like the stubborn fool I am. Care to join? If we can’t take a break from the rhetoric and rabble once in a blue moon, and sit back under warm sunlight from 93 million miles away, and collectively shrug that we might not know exactly what’s going on EVER, but we can always gather together in awe—if we can’t chalk it up to grace once in a while (or most of the time), then what are we doing here on this improbable planet?

Grace might look like a Hail Mary pass, flung up in desperation as the clock runs out. It might sound impossible as a virgin birth or a dead man raised. But logic alone is the boring bland bran of our diet: sure, we need it; useful for filling us up and moving things along. But we cannot survive long without the savory and sweet of wonder and awe, the delicious delight of the surprising and inexplicable, all the goodness that makes life worth gobbling down with the holy hunger that drives us.

Maybe all the new Catholics will drift away over time. Maybe next year the numbers will drop and the tongues will wag once again. Or maybe in ten years there will be ten times more. Exactly zero of us can predict the future with crystal-clear certainty.

So I am going to side with Grace. I am going to remind myself that despair, fear, snark, and cynicism are junk food, and every time I choose the abundant feast of joy and love instead, I never regret it. I will remember to turn off the pundits (even the smart ones I like) and turn to prayer.

And once a day—or deep dark night—I will take one small step outside, one giant leap for humankind, to stare up at the vast holy expanse of bright stars and dark matter and holy unknown, to let myself take a long drink of the sweet, slow breath of hope in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

Grace is always having a moment, and all of us get to join in, whenever we choose to remember.

1. I adored this essay: In praise of unruly children in church. Speaking of church, this was a fascinating ecumenical conversation at Common Good Magazine: What Is the (Local) Church For?

2. “Family life is hard. In case no one has affirmed that for you lately, let me be the one…But the Gospels surrounding Easter offer refreshing, realistic and surprisingly relevant stories for the struggles we face as families.” My latest column at OSV News.

3. Recently I started following and have been impressed by his clear-eyed wisdom: “A seven-year Catholic who tells the pope to watch his theology, while defending an administration that posted an AI image of the president as Jesus Christ and refused to apologize, is not in communion with the tradition he claims to be writing about. He is in communion with power. And that, as Augustine himself understood deeply, is a very different thing.”

4. Thanks to their podcast, I’ve gotten to know the folks at Goodfaith whose work on sharing Catholic social teaching is some of the best I’ve seen. They’re inviting feedback for a new initiative designed to support people’s daily faith lives, so please chime in here on their quick survey!

5. Loved this podcast with Sisters Erin McDonald and Colleen Gibson from Beyond the Habit: Something Bigger at Work.

Bonus from brilliant friends

A little bird told me that might be cooking up something new soon. Check out what some of our writers have been up to lately:

’s new book launches next week—just in time for Mother’s Day—and it’s a stunner: Love like a Mother: How the Sacred Work of Motherhood Reveals the Maternal Heart of God (Amazon or Bookshop).

’s latest book is out next week, too: Small Steps: Blessings to Lift Your Soul on the Pilgrimage of Life (Amazon or Bookshop).

is offering an hour-long online retreat tomorrow (4/28) on Looking at Light. Don’t we need to learn how to find the light now more than ever?

This post contains affiliate links.

2. Local folks: I’m leading a women’s retreat at Holy Name of Jesus on Saturday, May 2nd. The theme is Women of the Resurrection, and I’m thrilled to dive into their stories (Mary Magdalene! The Myrrhbearers! Mary the Mother of God! The women of Pentecost!) and how they speak to our lives today. We’d love to have you join us, especially to keep living Easter together. Register here.

3. So touched by this shoutout from my friend . Check out the other great books she highlights as well.

4. Deep thanks to every podcast/radio/TV host who’s welcomed me to speak about Living Easter over the past few weeks—and to Ave’s amazing publicist Erin who made the magic happen. Give one of these a listen if you need a little inspiration or laughter in this Easter season:

   In Goodfaith: Practicing Resurrection

   More McGrady with Katie: Living Easter

   Living LIT: Practicing the Resurrection for 50 Days

   Busted Halo on SiriusXM: How to Live into the Easter Season

   Iowa Catholic Radio: How to Live Easter Every Day & Rediscover True Joy

   CatholicTV’s This Is The Day on Living Easter

5. If you need an extra Easter infusion: I am going to live like there is hope.

One sunny Saturday on a soccer sideline, I saw my dead brother. He had been gone for thirty years. But there he was. Baggy sweatpants hanging off his hips, bony fingers pointing down the field. I knew him in an instant. The way he threw his head back and laughed to the sky when a player scored on his own goal. The way spit edged the corners of his mouth as he shouted to his team. The way he simply was.

Thank God for sunglasses. I sat staring, jaw dropped, ignoring the team I came to watch, my own son (his nephew) tearing up and down the next field with the rest of the rugby scrum of four-year-olds chasing the soccer ball like hungry wolves in a pack. Like no good mother, I turned to focus on another field. Because here before my eyes was the dead one raised.

I knew it was not him. Of course I did. But from the first call of his voice, my neck snapped up, taut rubber band of impossible hope, still seeking the familiar, foolish though it be. Same soft brown hair, same lanky limbs, same winning smile. It shouldn’t be him, it couldn’t be him, it was some kid’s dad, not this mom’s brother. Mind over matter, I kept trying to force myself to look away, to behold the real life before my eyes, not some imagined temptation over there. But was it temptation? Was it wrong? What if God’s strangest gifts show up when we least expect?

Two years earlier, in the grim lights of a hospital room, a tall, slim, gentle doctor leaned against the wall and laid out my options. My blood pressure remained dangerously high, despite days of powerful drugs plying my system. The baby was in distress and moving less. To stay pregnant was the hope. But it was no longer the goal. To keep him and me alive, we had to act fast.

I nodded, woozy behind the wall of magnesium sulfate, the IV drip into my veins that turned me drunk and disoriented, unable to see myself straight in the mirror when I heaved my pregnant belly out of bed and made the slow stumbling walk to the bathroom every few hours, assisted on each arm by nurses, serious and attentive. I knew things were bad, but up to this point I had refused to admit how bad they were. Confined to bed, I kept cracking jokes about Lady Sybil dying on Downton from the same, but no one found my dark humor fetching.

Until this blue-scrubbed doctor poked his soft brown-haired head around the door, and in a gentle voice I would recognize in an instant anywhere, said, “Laura?” And my whole soul turned, and my whole body calmed, and for the next fifteen minutes I nodded quietly and clearly to every hard word he spoke, taking seriously for the first time what was happening. Because the doctor looked exactly like my big brother, and I did not want him to leave, not again, not after my whole heart had longed for this moment for years upon years upon years.

I knew it was not him. I could not read the name on his badge, my vision too blurred by blood pressure off the charts. But I knew it did not say Jay. Dulled as my thoughts were by drugs and dizziness, I still knew I lived in a world where dead people stayed dead. But logic sprouts wings and soars away when love pushes down roots. I had never seen a face that looked so much like his, never heard a voice with the same timbre, or watched hands that moved with his same gestures. I kept nodding. I listened to everything he said. I wanted him to stay.

I do not know what to claim about resurrection. Except that it feels impossible to believe, yet it happens every day. We do not recognize it, as they did not recognize him. But every blessed day, in a world where bodies break and relationships fail and evil tendrils choke out good, there are also bodies that heal, forgiveness that rebirths, and tender green shoots that push through hard concrete to grow. Ours is a world of miracles, though mostly we miss it. Ours is a clouded vision, yet our bright eyes still search for stars.

We moderns have a major stumbling block to our reading of ancient texts, and it is our own ego. How could his friends have been so stupid? We wonder. How did they not recognize him? We’ve been reading the whole story for two thousand years, taking his rising as a fait accompli, so we struggle to understand how they could mistake him for a gardener, a stranger on the shore, a scholar on the road, a ghost. Good God, our audacity. The Risen One has shown up to us ten thousand times, playing in unlikely places and faces grimy on the street corners, holding up signs that say GOD BLESS and we drive by without turning.

We humans misunderstand most of what matters, save the bright shining moments of clear, certain truth—I love you, I forgive you, I can help you. Then we foist our own anxieties back on his grieving friends, as if it were their fault that puffy eyes and tear-streaked faces couldn’t make him out in the dim garden or the dark seashore. They were trying their best, in the worst of times. We are, too. What a wonder how much he loves us, that he couldn’t stay away, that he changed death by death so that we might live always together. He was no magician, no charlatan, no wand-waver who erased all suffering, pain, evil, oppression, and death from the planet while he walked among us. He turned the whole world inside out by love, here and after, now and forever. A mightier work and a greater gift. But harder to glimpse. Slippery to grasp.

I have never seen my brother after the bright July day when his greying body turned cold in the downstairs bedroom where we all gathered to pray. I have glimpsed his grin a thousand times in my brothers’ smiles, heard his laughter burst forth from my sister, watched my parents hold their heads just-so in the sun in moments that shimmered with him. I have watched his friends become men, husbands, fathers, making their ways in a world where he never got to grow old. He has stayed dead and gone. For now. Of course.

And yet. My mind must reckon with both fact and faith. My brother is dead, and I spoke with him once on the maternity ward of the hospital. My brother is dead, and I watched him coach soccer one warm spring morning. I have staked my life on a story that happened two thousand years ago and six thousand miles away, women finding an empty tomb filled with everything impossible. What I believe and love will never add up on paper.

Twice this morning, I have been startled by a sound. I am the only one in the quiet house. Twice I have gotten up from my writing desk (a leaving I am always loathe to take) to find out what it was. The first time I was startled, annoyed. The second time, I was curious, cautious. Not the usual house noises, the creak of the furnace or the cracks of the wood. It sounds like a plastic bag being pulled through the air and then landing on the floor. The sound makes no sense. It has interrupted and intrigued me. I do not believe it is my brother, I do not believe it is a ghost, I do not believe it is God. But I do believe that the world does not make sense in the strict, sensible logic that our pattern-seeking, chaos-fearing brains desire. Reality is much stranger. Prayer can change things. Miracles do happen. What looks like the end is not always the end.

If I did get to glimpse my dead brother once or twice (which even now, my skeptic’s mind protests, flipping back through files of memories, searching for evidence to distrust and disprove my own grieving heart) perhaps it was for this. To let the world startle me out of sluggishness. To learn to lean not only on logic’s pillar, but to rest on love’s pillow. To keep working on the clay of faith I have been given, a formless lump at the beginning, a cup I have been shaping and reshaping on the spinning potter’s wheel for years, yanking it off and rethrowing the whole creation more times than I can count. To trust that whatever happened in the holy past might still be happening now in the holy here. To believe what I cannot see. And what I can.

I still do not know what made that sound today. I believe I never will.

1. Last chance to join! Our mini-retreat on The Practice of Easter Joy starts at 12:00 pm ET today, from the Church in the 21st Century Center at Boston College. If you can’t join live, sign up to receive the recording later & listen on your own time. We’ll explore the Easter season, share ideas for ways to celebrate through 50 days (even in an impossibly hard world), and pray together in a week when prayer is deeply needed. Register here.

2. You can read an excerpt of Living Easter thanks to my friend who featured the book on her Substack this weekend.

3. More ways to listen & learn about Easter from two recent podcasts: Feast after the Fast from Ave Explores with Katie McGrady. Living Easter and Singing Praise Every Day from the Kolbecast.

4. This piece on pilgrimage by offers profound insights into the spiritual life from a pilgrim whose feet are dirty from the road. Thanks to for sharing it first.

5. A remarkable essay (and exegesis of Paul’s theology of the Body of Christ) from Plough by Alice Hutton Sharp: My Daughter Exists: What parenting a child with severe disabilities has taught me about dependence.

P.S. I know I’ve shared this poem before, but it came across my desk again and I’ve read it every day since. On the ones who cleaned up the Last Supper: By Their Works by Bob Hicok.

I’m so touched by how my unexpected essays this week have resonated with so many of you. Today I’m swamped with book promotion work (and that delightful virtual retreat!) but I hope to respond to each of you who reached out. I hope there will more soon, too…

Grief goes to the moon. I have watched the video so many times I’ve lost count. The astronauts floating in their capsule, speaking with mission control back on Earth across a quarter-million miles, announcing the naming of a new crater on the moon’s surface. The care—oh God, the care—of spelling out her name, that’s Carroll, C-a-r-r-o-l-l. Because names matter and details matter. Because two children, whose father is currently farther from Earth than humans have ever gone before, are now hearing their mother’s name spelled and spoken for the whole world to hear.

Her name was Carroll. She was loved. She is missed. She will be forever remembered.

Even absence has a name. A crater is a catastrophe’s lingering memory, a scar carved into the body’s surface. No more fitting memorial for a mother gone, a spouse mourned, a friend and sister and daughter dead and buried. The whole world weeps, with a weeping husband, with weeping children, with weeping friends. We have all known the hollow ache, the forgottenness of mourning, the desolation where nothing grows. We weep because we are one.

Grief is the dark side of the moon. No one can see its depths. The craters are forever shadowed, the hollows cannot be filled. Like the glowing orb above us, we learn to turn through our days and nights keeping the darkest side far away from sight. We wax and wane, grit and bear, smile and brush away concern—no, I’m fine, thanks.

Mary Magdalene was not fine. Mary Magdalene unspooled in grief in the garden, weeping from soul depths, full body heaves of hope broken, battered, beaten and left for dead. The men run away, same as they raced to the tomb, side players in Scripture’s scene because John turns his full attention to the weeping one, unafraid to wait and witness, to hold vigil with the wailing while everyone else would cover their ears and scurry away, brow-furrowed. Grief is not supposed to look like this. Women are not supposed to unravel like this. Decorum buttons up the shirt to the top, straightens the tie, and heads back out to work the morning after the funeral. Who needs bereavement leave?

But Mary doesn’t leave. Because she doesn’t leave, she alone sees. She alone receives. She alone speaks to the God who has gone to the dark side of death, the unseen cold face of the grave, the harrowed hell, the underworld only imagined in myth and song, poetry and story whispered with shivers round the fire in ancient nights. But now the Resurrected-and-Returned speaks her name. Because names matter. Because love spells out each syllable. Because the soul leaps when one who knows us from the inside out calls to us again—the child lost in the crowd crying for mother, the lover at the airport leaping for the embrace at arrivals, the family whooping at graduation for their only beloved one. When you hear your name, you turn.

The tomb was an empty crater. Nothing that came after could erase the shattered impact. The whole world was not enough to bear the weight of his pain. But like a war memorial, absence speaks. An unmovable stone was shoved away, and the stone was death. The earth upheaved, and more graves were opened, and others once-dead, now-living were walking around the city, but we barely scratch the surface of those stories (what a mind-boggling wonder, to sideline with a shrug more miracles than could even be numbered?). Meanwhile, inside a cold cave, the fabric of existence has been turned inside out, folded neatly, and set to the side. Later his friends will find the sign and realize in a heart-leaping flash that this is proof he has not been stolen, one more affront and humiliation to add to the list. No, he himself folded his own burial cloths, an act never before done in human history (for even Lazarus needed help to be untied). The carpenter from Galilee has gone to the far side of the moon. For a terrible, tortuous stretch of time we lost contact with him—out of sight, beyond words, only the faint hope of ancient promises and wild prophecies to bear us up through the agony of absence.

But then like sunrise on the moon, a sight once imagined and now glimpsed, the dead man rises. The gone God returns. Yesterday the astronauts gasped at a view never before seen by human eyes. NASA responded amaze, amaze, amaze, echoing an alien’s iconic lines from a prayer-named book, because doesn’t the whole mission feel like an epic Hail Mary? Moonjoy! Everyone rejoiced, a cosmic Alleluia, a praise song to the Creator who set the great lights in the dome of the sky and saw how good it was. Even the poet who wrote the Paradiso ran out of words. He sent his last spinning to “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

Carroll’s crater is on the “near-side, far-side boundary” of the moon. What more fitting way to describe how we live with long grief, always edging on the near-side, far-side of ordinary life? Carroll’s crater can be seen by her children from earth, perhaps one day from space if one of them follows in their father’s floating footsteps. Every day she will watch over them from above. Every night she will turn while they sleep. God alone has watched over that crater since time immemorial, the God who neither slumber nor sleeps but gave us a glowing face in the night sky to shine over always and let us know we are never alone. Even when the moon shrinks and disappears, even when the astronauts lose contact, even when the stone was rolled in front of the tomb, the story never ends in darkness. Light always returns.

For a brief flash of time, between leaving the garden and rejoining the group, Mary Magdalene alone held the weight of the world and the hope of the church in her hands. Like an astronaut to the apostles, setting out with a mission no one had carried before. If Mary is Our Lady of Sorrows, then Mary Magdalene is our Sister. Seven demons cast out from her body and soul by the One who became her teacher and friend, the One who called her by name. She stayed with him to the bitter, brutal end. Little wonder he came to her first, entrusting this woman, this friend, this Apostle to the Apostles with the earthquaking, life-shaking good news that resurrection is real and every expectation has come undone. She cannot run fast enough to tell. She cannot care less if no one believes at first. Every cell of her body, every corner of her soul has been changed. A moonrise. An earthset. She knows the truth will set her free. Even doubt’s dark side will circle round to delight.

Above the earth, beyond the moon, four astronauts embrace. They hold the weightless hope of the world in their hands. It’s a bright spot on the moon, and we would like to call it Carroll.

A Magdalene of sorrows. A Mary of light. The moonjoy of resurrection.

Carroll Wiseman (yes, that’s truly their family’s last name) died from breast cancer in 2020 at the age of 46. She was a NICU nurse. Her daughters are Katie and Ellie. Carroll is an Irish name meaning “fierce in battle.” I didn’t know any of that before I wrote this. I am quite certain everyone who loves Carroll could use our prayers.

For more from above: Moonjoy. Amaze amaze amaze. Matthew 27:51-53 for the story of the other graves opened when Jesus died. If you want to read more on Mary Magdalene & Jesus at the tomb, I have a whole essay on them in here. The final word goes to Dante.

Easter Monday morning, somber grey and biting cold. Already the tombs are filling back up. We have a hellbent leader full of fury and foul language, ready to bomb at the push of a button. My friends’ parents are dying. Depression steals the light from the eyes of too many people I love. Cancer has come back to one of the kindest women I know, and her empty pew at Easter was a wound in the side of our church.

Yet the women’s wondering words are ringing like a maddening echo in my ears: “I have seen the Lord!” I have, too. Never on my time, never at my demand, never when I planned. But every time I wept at the ashes of what looked like death, stubborn shoots of life were already pushing through the holy darkness.

Once I wrote that the most infuriating part of grief is that the dead stay dead. Mourning would be hard enough if you had to wade through the terrible raw days at the start, the murky months and the tender years. But the audacity of decades without them near? I shake my fist at the sky for a set-up like this. We’d never have made the rules of the game this hard, if we’d had the chance.

But the cosmic rub of space and time stops my foolish flailing, thinking any of our animal brains would be better at inventing the ways and means of creation. Only a God-mind could dream up resurrection—not simply a return, but a rebirth. Eternal life but with wounds in our hands: everything we suffered not dismissed or denied but transformed and transmuted, gold shining through all the breaks.

The dead won’t stay dead. For now the silence and stillness weigh heavy as forever, but despair is the lie. As a child I loved to push two magnets together to see what happened. Opposite poles will attract with a satisfying click, but like poles push apart with stubborn insistence. Eternity will work like this, I believe on the days I believe. The dead will not stay dead but flip around to new life, all of us firmly held together by the core that is God.

Whatever evil the powerful wreak this week, whatever death befalls God’s beloveds, the end is not the end, not yet. Two thousand years ago a woman stayed weeping at an empty tomb that made no damn sense, and she turned at a stranger’s voice and then turned again to find that it was divine: the Once-Dead-Made-New. She wanted to latch onto him and never let go, opposite magnet poles never to be pried apart. But he told her gently in the garden: not-yet. We still live in the in-between, a time of repelling and disconnection, yet tinged with the promise of transfiguration. What changed for him will one day change for us (we wonder, hope, and pray). Our bodies will rise, our souls will rise, our selves will find themselves at home in Life Abundant.

Above the grey clouds, radiant sun is always shining. Every time I ascend through the miracle of modern flight, I’m stupefied by this silly fact: on the darkest days here-below, there has always been sunlight above. Truth does not depend on what I can perceive.

In Catholic school we sang a sing-song tune that has never left the grey folds of my brain:

“I believe in the sun, even when it isn’t shining. I believe in love, even when there’s no one there. And I believe in God. Yes, I believe in God. Even when God is silent.”

I read too early and too fast, so the teachers gave me a missal and hymnal to keep me quiet in the pews. So I reread the note at the bottom of the dog-eared page a hundred times, that the words were written on a wall by a Jew in a concentration camp during World War II. For decades now I have checked my own existential despair against these simple words. If someone staring into the pit of hell could still believe in sun and love and God, could I keep my head up, too? Even through the worst that life flung my way?

Easter Monday is the anniversary of our engagement and the anniversary of my cancer diagnosis. The best yes I have ever given and the worst no I have ever received. We used to celebrate with ice cream with our kids every year, just like we did decades ago when he first asked and I cried yes. Now the memories muddle in my mind: the horror flood of news, the hard facts spelled out on a screen, the sad voice of a nurse over the phone who knows what everything means and must translate the terrible. I remember driving to his parents’ house to share the news that Monday evening, windows rolled down in sweet spring air, my new gold ring glinting in the sunlight as it set. Everything felt possible, everything was joy. Twenty years later on that same day, every opposite roared up in protest. Too much to hold together; two days pushed together, repelling like magnets.

This year, for the first time since I heard the news three years ago, my body has risen up in revolt against what it went through, finally feeling safe enough to rage that none of it was fair, that I have endured far too much, that the lingering threat of any return of that killer on my horizon is too precarious a place to try and build a life even in survival. I have let my scarred and wounded body weep and rest as it wanted, as it needed, through the holiest days of the year. We cannot control what happens to us. But we can help what we believe, tender as a spring shoot in the cold wind.

This morning in the grainy gloom before dawn, I woke to the gentle hoot of the barred owl. Who, who, who cooks for you? I never hear the words in the calls like the guidebooks say you should; birdsong always sounds like a mysterious language all its own. But this morning I heard it for the first time, clear and strong. Who, who, who cooks for you?

John’s story of Jesus cooking breakfast on the beach sprang to mind, as quick and unbidden as birdsong. I laughed to myself even in my drowsy dreams: I guess I do know who cooks for me, and for you too. Even and especially for the friend who said he never even knew him, denial bitter on the lips and churning in the gut, the poison guilt in grief. Over fish and bread (from where, no matter; answers always less interesting than questions) Jesus does not say “No worries” or “I understand” or even “I forgive you.” He only asks the simplest question: Do you love me?

Everything starts again on the other side of death. On the lakeshore, the offer of eternal life is extended without crossness or condemnation. Do you love me? He keeps asking, and Peter keeps answering, misunderstanding as he and we always do. Jesus is offering him the opposite pole of the magnet, ready to click back together in friendship and love that will never be pulled apart again.

Feed my lambs, tend my sheep, feed my sheep. Lots of work left to be done, but if you remember that the sun is always shining, even beyond the blanket of clouds, if you cling to love even when it looks gone, if you listen to God even in what echoes like silence, you will find strange presence you never expected. Chew on this over fried fish and warm bread on the beach at dawn. Chew on this for a lifetime.

Who, who, who cooks for you?

We have seen the Lord.

I believe in the sun, even when it isn’t shining.

The dead will not stay dead.

yes i said yes i will Yes

The last line is from Molly Bloom’s closing soliloquy in Ulysses by James Joyce.

The Scripture is John 20:11-18, 21:1-19.

The rest is mine. I sat down to write an Instagram post, but one paragraph spilled into this. May your Easter Monday bring some small surprising joy or glimmer of light.

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Free Easter retreat! Want to join me and the Church in the 21st Century Center at Boston College? We’re offering a mini-retreat next Wed., April 8th, on Zoom. You can sign up here to join us live at 12:00 pm ET or get the recording later. Our virtual gatherings are a joy to lead. I love that I get to offer them to you for free!

Honored & humbled by this latest interview about my work in the Catholic Spirit by Christina Cappechi. So many podcasts lately. Cafeteria Christian with my friend was such a joy: if you can talk Easter with skeptics, it matters most. You can also hear me on Cath-Lit Live and Radio Maria’s Meet the Author. Big thanks to Amazing Catechists and Catholic Mom for recent reviews and the mention on the Abiding Together Podcast. Found a Canadian distributor and another European distributor for you, too! Grab Living Easter here if you need.

Good words for Holy Week

Pope Leo spoke straight to the powers that be on Palm Sunday. “Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood” (Is 1:15).” Read his whole homily.

Question for you

What’s your favorite part of Holy Week? I’ll share mine in comments.

Leave a comment

I’d scribble a burst of phrases, news stories, scattered memories, strange words that hardly seemed true when I spelled them out. Then the phone would ring or the Signal chat would buzz or the urgent email would interrupt. I’d leave the writing unfinished and get back to work. Groceries, rides, vigils, supplies, protests, fundraisers, prayers—a thousand needs pulled for my attention, pressing more urgently than the artist’s need to create.

It was a personal, private loss in the midst of enormous collective grief; of course I kept it quiet. But the disorientation was dizzying all the same. When we cannot do what we normally do, whenever we become unmoored from what once held us fast, we find ourselves flailing, farther and farther from shore.

What has our life become, overshadowed by threat or tragedy? How did this happen? Will things settle down again—or are we hurtling toward a breaking point? Who will we become on the other side?

The year is only a quarter gone, but already we have metamorphosed. The past months in Minnesota have crammed together such jarring contrasts I can barely catch my breath when I try to take it all in. Terror, injustice, violence, death; generosity, compassion, solidarity, love.

I have witnessed, heard, spoken, and done things I never thought possible. I have been changed, we are still changing, and I want us to flee across the bridge to safety, to the other side—but I can’t. We can’t. Not yet.

It takes time.

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