Finding Hope Between the Brambles

How to seek the good, the true, and the beautiful among their opposites

Much as I love writing essays here, I equally love the chance to share others’ holy labor. Nothing lifts me up like the wild and wonderful work that people are bringing into the world, despite every reason to give up.

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The evil, the wrong, and the terrible

I know it’s hard to keep thinking/acting/praying about all the recent mass shootings. But if we don’t change how we think/act/pray, nothing will change.

Here are a few poems that have helped me in the past two weeks:

Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild by Kathy Fish

What to Write after Another School Shooting by Kate J. Baer

We Would Never Sleep by David Hernandez

A few prayers that have helped, too:

This litany from Aleteia

Prayers for a violent world from W. David Taylor

Lament Songs from The Porter’s Gate

I wrote my latest column for Catholic News Service on why gun violence is a pro-life issue:

When my Uncle Jim was murdered, I wondered if this is what it would take for every American to care about gun violence: to lose someone they loved.

Now that another classroom of innocent children has been gunned down in the latest school shooting, I ask the same questions. How long, O Lord? Until every last one of us is grieving?

If you need motivation for momentum, here’s a short guide to keep going.

The final word goes to S. Josephine Barrett, C.S.F.N., with this powerful piece on 4 things you can do to protect your mental health in the midst of all we’re facing. 

The good, the true, and the beautiful

Claire Swinarski at The Catholic Feminist told me to read Sarah Clarkson’s book This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks Into Our Darkness. A lush memoir about struggling with doubt and despair in mental illness but also discovering the holy power of grace and beauty. Highly recommend. (Thanks for the nudge, Claire.)

I’m also reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. For someone with a heightened sense of mortality I found it fascinating to read how this realization reordered Burkeman’s productivity obsession. 

Creative God: Awaken Your God-Given Imagination by Anna Bonnema is a devotional about creativity and imagination (so you know it sparked mine!). I get sent a lot of prayer books, but this is a gem I’m actually going to use this summer.

Little Prayers for Ordinary Days is a lovely collection for children from Tish Harrison Warren, Flo Paris Oakes, and Katy Bowser Hutson. I met Flo last month in Nashville and got to see a sneak peek, and the illustrations are as charming as the prayers.

Finally, this is niche humor but we need any laugh we can find right now: someone set the famous Dirty Dancing scene to The Muppet Show theme, and it’s perfect.

Peace,

Laura

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