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Privileged Communication within the Communion of Saints
When I was a child, as part of our family prayer, we used to pray for a happy death. In my young mind, I had a certain conception of what
https://ronrolheiser.com/privileged-communication-within-the-communion-of-saints/
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Twenty Years In Exile
November 15th marked an anniversary of sorts for me, twenty years of writing this column. I began it in 1982, as a bi-weekly piece, while I was doing doctoral studies
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Turning our Eyes Toward Heaven
It’s not easy to be centred, rooted, secure in who we are, able to give the world our best. More commonly, we find ourselves adrift, unsure of ourselves, with most of
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The Anthropological Function of Gossip
In his novel, OSCAR AND LUCINDA, Peter Carey, offers this colourful image of gossip. In a small town there are rumours about the priest and a particular young woman. Here’s
https://ronrolheiser.com/the-anthropological-function-of-gossip/
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The Dream of Fewness
Inside a little book entitled, THE THOMAS MERTON POEMS, J.S. Porter writes this piece: There’s too much of everything books, stars, flowers. How can one flower be precious in a
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Living in a Moral Diaspora
In an autobiographical novel entitled, My First Loves, Ivan Klima, a Czech writer, talks about a pain he endured as a young man. Growing up without religious training and living
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The Eucharist as Touch
A few years ago Brenda Peterson wrote book of essays entitled, Nature and Other Mothers. Her first entry is wonderfully named, In Praise of Skin. In it, she tells how
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Polishing our Stones
There are times when we can only live by hope, when what confronts us is so overwhelming, so huge, so utterly beyond our strength, that it’s simply hopeless, or a
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Kathleen Norris – An Augustine for our Time
We need saints today and we need a variety of them. They don’t all look the same, as we commonly suppose. Some saints do have the gaunt, ascetical look, that
https://ronrolheiser.com/kathleen-norris-an-augustine-for-our-time/
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Amazing Grace
It was William Auden, I think, who wrote that when grace enters a room everyone begins to dance. Would this were so! More often the opposite happens, grace enters a