The older I become, the more penance I crave. I never expected this evolution in my spiritual maturation...

I had never seen a field of wildflowers quite like it. The ground had responded to the spring rains with a fertility that flashed flames of fire: reds, oranges, and yellows dancing in the wind like the tongues above the apostles on Pentecost...

I’m in my truck when I get a call from my great-nephew, Gus. He tells me he landed a job with a harvest crew. His voice sounds scuffed, like a work boot kicking a tire. 

My four-year-old niece is in my arms, her wispy blonde hair floating above her head like spider webs adrift the fall wind. We are jumping on a discarded box-spring mattress near a pond on the backside of a spillway dam. A giggle bursts from her lungs. “Again!!” This time, we are astronauts on the surface of the moon...

“You are in my prayers.” I say this all the time. Most the time I mean it and most of the time I hold myself to it. Truth be told, it’s hard to hold back the intentions logged in my memory...

I sit in a bedroom of my grandparent’s old house, a shelf over my head containing hundreds of thimbles collected by my grandmother who had no use for them, her fingers tougher than any ceramic after sewing the blue jeans, feed sack dresses, and cloth diapers of seven children...

Sometimes people kneel to pray. Sometimes people kneel to play: a girl on a sidewalk with a piece of chalk; a boy on a creek bank skipping a stone. Sometimes people kneel to work...

The truck rumbles to a stop, gravel crunching underneath the tires. The doors on the old pickup slam shut, causing blackbirds to flee into the morning light. We ease our way down to the river, waves lapping the city park sidewalk. Debris crunches beneath our feet: sticks, moss, cicada shells. On the side of a rusted walking bridge, chalked in white: John 15:13.

I have never been to Rome, but I’ve been to the Rockies. No offence, Michelangelo, but no Renaissance glory can compare to the beauty of Creation. I suppose this is why I love the story of the Lord’s Transfiguration atop Mt. Tabor.

Metal slides shimmering in sunshine/Slope down to the soft sand below...

I have a horse named Buddy. He is gentle and eager to please. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a lot of self-confidence. He lets other horses push him around and, sometimes, they beat him up pretty bad...

My ten-year-old fingers shove a nail into the feet a Christ I have drawn upon some discarded wood laid across the workbench in my dad’s shop...

As a priest, when I prepare engaged couples for marriage, my mind returns to my sister’s wedding over sixty years ago....

We crawl through charred landscape, trees like burnt toothpicks against a twenty-foot cliff. “To the next ravine!” My buddy’s voice raked in my ear. “Hurry!” His voice downshifts to a husky whisper. “Remember, grunt, we’re in enemy territory!” I scramble behind him...

Street lamps circled the city blocks like lights on a Christmas tree. The snow, silent and soft, swirled amid steeples and tenements. It was around 3 AM...

I didn’t expect the fatherhood of the priesthood to be so analogous to natural fatherhood. For instance, I feed my children while making faces to help them eat the Bread of Life from my consecrated hand…

In Genesis, Eve was created in the garden. But Adam was created in the wild, before the garden took shape. Formed from dust in the outback, his soul—and hence the soul of every man—would bear the imprint for that primitive place where God molded mud into muscle...