We are pleased to present below all posts archived in 'June 2003'. If you still can't find what you are looking for, try using the search box.
Something important, I believe, can be learned from our reaction to capital punishment.
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An icon is a holy picture, an image showing something of the divine. Perhaps the best icon to depict adulthood is a picture of a mother or a father carrying a tired or a sleeping child. Few images capture as beautifully and as deeply what an adult is meant to do – carry the young.
"And they were asleep out of sorrow." St. Luke uses those words to tell us why the disciples fell asleep during Jesus' agony in the garden. They fell asleep, he says, not because the hour was late and they were tired from the supper and the wine.
Shortly after he entered the Trappists, Thomas Merton wrote the story of his conversion and journey to a monastery in a book, Seven Story Mountain. It became a best seller that, among other things, caught the romantic imagination of his generation. For years afterwards, Trappist monasteries were flooded with applications, not all for the right reasons of course, but a large number of men did become good monks because of a romantic ideal that Merton's story triggered.
Why does God stay hidden? Why doesn't God reveal himself so concretely and physically that no one could doubt his existence?