Sitio. I thirst (John 19:28). This is the shortest of Jesus’ sayings from the cross, but it says everything. Dehydration from sweating, bleeding, shock, asphyxia and acidosis produced a thirst beyond all telling. To contemplate that thirst is to go to the heart of the paschal mystery, the culm

It was a fascinating little church, tucked away in the back streets of Toronto. The guide pointed out with pride the frescoes and the stained glass windows of this hidden jewel. We arrived at a three-panelled window right at the back of the building. This is Faith, Hope and Charity,’ she said,

Winters in Rome can be grim. It is often rainy and gray. The outside is cold and damp; the rain falls at angles that defy the use of umbrellas. In buildings filled with rooms that have very high ceilings and marble floors, buildings from get a single poof of heat at 7 a.m. and the next at 9 p.m., th

The world, the flesh and the devil were the original “axis of evil.” Of the three, “the flesh” often gets the hardest rap. “Sins of the flesh” entail sins of our senses. “Extracting the last ounce of flesh” refers to dominating power. The “flesh

The Sufi poet Rumi tells the tale of a holy man who sees a snake crawl into a sleeping man’s mouth. Shouting, the holy man wakes the sleeper and forces him to eat rotten apples. He then makes the astonished man run for hours, whipping him as the man cries out in exhaustion. Finally the former

I don’t want to be humbled; you don’t either, I suspect. Yet there are people who say it was the best thing that ever happened to them. Members of Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, say that they began to move toward sanity and wholeness only after they had been deeply humbled. Likewise,