Our notes may be practical or they may be impressionistic. They may be things that we cannot remember or that remain important to us. But is it going too far to say there is something holy in the hearing of them?

It can take a lot of failure to get to success. When I think back on the things I failed at in my life, I see that the failures either taught me a hard lesson or nudged me forward on a better path.

”I told him that women from the Amazon and North America are making this path of discernment for the ministry of women in the church and [about] the need to advance in recognizing the diaconal service that we provide to the church.”

An old teacher once said, “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” She was right. An even older Jesuit once said, “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly.” He was right, too.

Birth and death bookend our temporal experience, but we are called to fill everything between them with love and mercy and decency, not cling to fantasies of a fraudulent eternity.

I have heard it said that if the public could see the physical images of violence after a shooting, perhaps we would all be more fervent in our demand for radical change. I have seen it. Must I make you look, too?