I’ve been taking to riding the bike around the city to get around these days. It saves money, gets me exercise, and helps reduce all the consumption that we all do in this world. It’s also fun – and dangerous. Bike lanes are a new thing, and everyone is just getting used to them. Every…
Just recently, I saw on the news that a house in Cambridge completely collapsed. I mean, it just entirely collapsed. The news article mentioned that a person who used to regularly walk by it said that it had looked for a long time that if you just sneezed on it, it would fall down. And…
I make videos sometimes to make available to share something I’ve come to discover about the Gospel as I live it. I sometimes look at the videos and laugh as I can’t help noticing that it looks amateur: scruffy with a 5 o’clock shadow, my used clothes on, a view of my small bedroom or…
Last year when I came to the rural village in Ecuador where I’ve been going I brought a game with me to play with both adults and kids. It’s called Bean-boozled. The idea is you have a large container of jelly beans of different colors. But here’s the thing: each color could be a fantastically…
Here in the village in Ecuador, we lost power on Good Friday afternoon at 5. That night, I sat in a chair in my room staring into pitch darkness and I opened my eyes as wide as I possibly could. I could feel my pupils dilating out to the maximum. Even with my eyes maxed…
Recently, I saw a long line of ants walking along here, each carrying a piece of leaves. Leafcutter ants cut out leaves many times heavier than themselves and bring them to their nest to make a pulp for food. How do they already know how to do that? When it’s time, a caterpillar spins a…
Some years ago, I decided to get a Christmas gift for a spiritual director that I had just stating to meet with that particular year. I didn’t want to get cash, so I thought I would go to a shopping center and look for something in a store. Later, I thought, why not just get…
You may remember the story of Abraham. You know, the guy who agrees to offer his son in a human sacrifice, just because God asked him too. What’s up with that?! And who would want to have a relationship with God who’s going to ask you to go sacrifice your son, as a little test?…
I recently saw a YouTube video where a 94 year-old woman described what it was like to be a maid to Adolf Hitler. She had been poor, and she had gotten to live in a large house in the country as part of the staff at Hitler’s country house. She was part of the cooking…
A while ago while living with some friends, a new visitor came to stay with us who was from another country. In her country, there weren’t all the appliances that we have in the US. She had some experience with a refrigerator, and had seen a microwave before, but many of the other things were…
I was in one of the popular tourist places in Ecuador one day when I got talking to the owner of a bar. He started off with some deep thoughts about the unity of everything, and then a conversation began. By the end of it, he was saying that it was unreasonable to think that…
In the last Thor movie, the main theme is that Thor has to return to his home place of Asgard before it is destroyed. (Here is your spoiler alert.) The whole movie is a struggle to do home to stop the threat. But when he gets there, he finds that it’s inevitable that that an…
At a commencement at Stanford in 2005, Steve Jobs, the CEO and co-founder of Apple, shared some special advice for the graduates: “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that…
If you check through the endless channels on YouTube, you can find videos of a test that some folks did on animals. They placed a large mirror in the middle of their habitat and then left a camera running to see the reactions of the animals. Cheetahs, gorillas, and elephants all have a shot at…
I have another movie spoiler to share. So, if you haven’t seen the movie The Mission, you might want to pass on this reflection until afterwards! The movie is the story about some Jesuits who go to a remote tribe of people called the Guaraní in Paraguay, and the political events that bring about the…
