News

Not two hours after I posted my last newsletter—alas—I tested positive for Covid.  Which meant no visit to family in Pasadena and San Diego. Which meant no catching up with one of my great mentors in life in Alahambra.  Which meant no gathering in person with the teachers I’d been preparing to meet with.  It was a genuine bummer. 

When I was driving from Tampa, FL home to Atlanta at the end of last month, I passed the first billboard just south of the Georgia border on I-75 for “Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland” in Frankenmuth.  I don’t know why this surprised me.  Being from Missouri I know that the signage for Meramac Caverns starts long before one arrives in the Midwest.  And who hasn’t seen the billboards for Wall Drug in South Dakota? Anyone?  I think those start somewhere in Maine.

Good morning from the humid glory of Florida in July where I am enjoying working with a new group of Catechists of the Good Shepherd only a mile from the beach.  Yes, it is very rough, but someone has to do it!  We are on Day Three now and swimming in work more than waves, so I’ll be brief, but I wanted to share that last week I got wonderful news from the Catholic Media Association.  Two pieces I wrote received awards at their 2022 awards ceremony. 

I’ve enjoyed the gift of spending a good amount of time this past month at the Terra Sancta Retreat Center outside Rapid City, SD.  If you ever get the chance to go there, you should.  A wonderful, sacred setting in the Black Hills with marvelous hospitality and lots of space to roam.  This time round there were no rattlesnake or mountain lion sightings as there have been in the past… but my friend Karen did get charged by a wild turkey.  (Fortunately, there was a glass door between them.)  The groundskeeper explain

Today marks the feast of St. Thomas More--one of the saints that I profile in Redeeming Administration—and, gosh, I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. 

How do you imagine the Holy Spirit?  If you are anything like me, the picture that accompanies this posting is definitely NOT it.  Dove.  Fire.  Wind.  Breath.  These I am all familiar with, but sister of “The Heat Miser” from my favorite Christmas cartoon?… That’s never been part of the litany.  So imagine my surprise in looking up above the exit of the overwhelmingly Baroque Jesuitenkirche in Heildelberg, Germany a couple weeks

If all goes well, by the time you read this, I will be home in bed after a long flight back from Munich to Atlanta.  But that is not where I am right now.  Right now I am on a train to Zurich and then onward to Germany in search of that tiny town of Oberammergau.  Everything that has been said about Swiss trains is totally true.  You can set your watch by them.  They tell me that the German trains have lots of problems and sometimes are very late.  I ask them what “late” mea

If all goes well, by the time you read this, I will be in another country.  No, I’m not fleeing the law or anything that exciting.  Rather, my husband and I are attempting to finally do our 25th wedding anniversary trip.  We’ve been trying for so long that we’ve now been married for 28 ½ years.  But even as I have a hard time putting anything in print for fear of jinxing it, I do think that it will happen this time.  We will be starting in Amsterdam and moving down the Rhine toward Oberammergau for the famed

After several weeks on the road, I was eager to get back to Atlanta and sleep in my own bed… but my husband had other plans.  “I think you should go to St. Louis for Easter,” he said.

Palm Sunday Mass this year at my parish had it all going on.  Technical glitches so that you could only hear two of the three Passion readers. To my left, a duo of five year olds using their palm fronds to sword fight.  To my right, a wailing infant. Me in the middle improvising the congregational responses within the Gospel as I had neglected to pick up the worship aid once I realized that Mass had started at 10:15, not 10:30.