I don’t know about you, but I find when things around me are getting crazy, it becomes difficult to connect to any deeper sense of self or God.

I did not expect that the first time I administered the sacrament of baptism would be at 2 a.m. in a hospital. And I could not have guessed it to have happened at the intersection of my vocations as both a Jesuit and a nurse.

All my life, I’ve been waiting for Roe v. Wade to be overturned. Now it looks like it’s going to happen, and it does not feel great.

The great Catholic irony is that the Mass—that ripe cadenced insane activity at the heart of the church—is weirdly, bizarrely, the right and fitting place to bring our concerns about the Mass itself.

I’m afraid, but not of the virus. Frankly, I’m afraid of what I will see, of what I will hear when I get there and step inside the church.

The practice of sitting in the front pew has helped to focus my own wandering mind.