November is the month for remembering the dead, and with cold weather rendering the lives of homeless people even more difficult, my own remembrance of the dead focuses on a Catholic Worker named Michael Kirwan. The third anniversary of his death from cancer was Nov. 12.   I met Michael two dec

Just after I leave the church and step into the sparkling sunlight on the way to my car, a woman I hadn’t noticed before comes up to me. A recent widow, she speaks, at first hesitantly, about her faith not helping her when she needs it most. It has been a year since her husband died, and she f

I drove to a retreat house in Wilmington, Del., wondering how I had come to this point in my life. Up until two months earlier, I felt only animosity for the Catholic religion and disdain for its teachings. But now I had driven an hour away from my home, to be with people I didn’t know, on a r

It was unusually hot that July afternoon. Cara had just asked me for some more water so that the sand would pack better. Sweating, frustrated and with a two-year-old getting the best of me, I said to myself, “What are you doing?” Here I was stuck in the backyard, trapped in a sandbox, an

Motherhood is monastic. Walking into Gethsemane Abbey during Night Prayer, I had to catch my breath. Not one to be swept up by hero worship, even of such a worthy figure as Thomas Merton (or for that matter, Kathleen Norris), I had braced myself to be critical. Nevertheless, entering the chapel, sea

Our Palestinian friend Khaled, a respected elder in the local Arab-American community, called last week: “We’re planning a prayer vigil for peace at a downtown church. Could you call some of your Jewish friends to join us? I don’t know many.”It took a flurry of faxes, e-mails