a prophetic voice-

The best-laid plans...why do they do often go astray? Perhaps to remind us that, in the long haul of things, life is not in our control... that things happen- like snowstorms and respiratory viruses...like the death of a beloved son and the birthday of another. In spite of my best intentions to do the daily yoga challenge during Lent, beginning on Ash Wednesday, here I am on Sunday with nothing begun. Yet looking out the window yesterday, seeing the winds pulling the trees this way and that, I realized...I realize that this IS life...this buffeting, this being tossed, this having to respond to happenings rather than controlling them. And it is, after all, our response to what happens that determines who we are, who we will become. Exactly nineteen years ago, my life was devastated by a single phone call telling me of the death of my oldest son...and for nearly two years I was "dead"...inside nothing lived- or so it seemed. Oh, I funtioned, went through the motions, kept p...

Written on August 31, 2004: My firstborn child, Carl, died while scuba diving in Mexico in 1993, at the age of twenty-eight. I had already experienced the death of a husband and the death of a beloved younger sister. Perhaps those losses had prepared me in some small way for this life-wracking pain… but I must confess, it never really goes away, this agony from the loss of a child.   The best proof we have of the hidden gift in every struggle is the fact that we survived the last one. -Joan Chittister today's memories He would have been forty-three, my eldest son, born in the wee hours of this day, all those many years                                                          ago, to a frightened ...