Jonathan Ryan's Blog, page 10

What St. Joseph Can Teach Us About Essential Workers

This post is part of a year-long series for the Year of St. Joseph. Read the post for January here and the post for February here. This March, we mark the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration that the SARs-CoV-2 virus had spread into an official pandemic. In the Catholic Church we also […]

Things Keeping Us Going for March 15th

I know that today is the Ides of March,  and that St. Patrick’s Day and St. Joseph’s Day are both coming up this week, but there is another holiday, just passed, that is my subject for TKUG today: Pi Day. My children are all geeks. [Proud Mama grin] Back when my oldest (who is turning […]

Dark Devotional: Darkness and Light

  Whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God (John 3:21).   One of the more annoying aspects to the scriptural readings proclaimed at Mass is that the readings are rarely “complete.” With the exception of the passion narratives during Holy Week, most […]

Keep Walking, Keep Letting Go

  This is the fourth week of our Lenten Series: Sick Pilgrim’s Progress. You can read week 1 here, week 2 here, and week 3 here. In 1992 I heard about the Camino de Santiago, in my case the Camino Francés for the first time. At that moment it whipped itself around me, grabbing me tightly for years and […]

Things Keeping Us Going: Reading & Writing Edition

March is National Reading Month, so I figured we should have a totally lit (see what I just did there?) TKUG. I have been working through a pretty heavy reading list this winter, so this month I am enjoying children’s literature and my beloved Irish poets. My writing of late has consisted entirely of these […]

Dark Devotional: Subversive Worship, In Spirit and in Truth

I can’t believe we’re back here already. Last year on this Third Sunday of Lent, the story of the woman at the well spoke to me differently than ever before. Usually I notice the woman, first and foremost. I grapple with the tension between the almost immediate intimacy she achieves with Christ on the one […]

Taking the Long Way Home

This is the third week of our Lenten Series: Sick Pilgrim’s Progress. You can read week 1 here and last week (week 2) here.   Like Mary, I, too, am at an impasse with my faith.  Like my friend, I find “it is painful, and personal, and ongoing.” Unlike Mary, I have not feared what […]

TKUG for March 1

Life is hard, even when there isn’t a pandemic looming. In my inner circle there is radiation treatment starting for two different beloveds, a brother whose cancer is finally beyond treatment, a brother who is in treatment of another sort instead of jail, a son who is recovering from surgery, a daughter with severe morning […]

Dark Devotional: Letters from an Old Friend

This conversation comes up a lot for me in adulthood, whether in RCIA groups, young adult ministry, small groups—any of those situations where a bunch of us are gathered in some kind of prayerful intimacy, looking for God’s presence in our lives in one of those oh-so-Jesuit ways. One of us will say something like, […]

Pilgrimage of the Soul

This is part of a Lenten series on pilgrimage. Find the first part here. When Kristen suggested that we all go on pilgrimage this Lent, my heart sank a bit. I’ve always wanted to go on a “real” pilgrimage—looking at you, Santiago de Compostela—but right now, even a pretend or virtual pilgrimage is difficult. While […]