Jonathan Ryan's Blog, page 40

Stations of the Cross: A Spectator to the Execution

You have my whole heart. You always did. —Cormac McCarthy, The Road   Imagine for a moment the greatest love of your life. Your beloved. This person is the center of your existence, a person who makes you feel truly alive. Before you met your beloved, you were anxious, distracted, frail, broken. But now in [Read More...]

For the People Who Cry During Holy Week

On Palm Sunday, we process into church waving blessed fronds. The priest walks amongst us, bearing the crucifix. We’re recreating a scene that has the power of a cruel joke: Our Lord, greatly feted by his people, riding to his kingship on a borrowed ass. And Jesus knows, as we know, waving our palms like [Read More...]

RIP Rich Mullins: Palm Sunday Dark Devotional

“You had no stones to throw You came without an ax to grind You did not tow the party line No wonder sight came to the blind You had no stones to throw You rode an ass’s foal They spread their coats and cut down palms For You and Your donkey to walk upon But [Read More...]

What Your Outrage at LeFou’s Presumed Sexuality Says to the Mom of an LGBT Child

In case you live more in your own little bubble than I do, there has been a good deal of controversy around the character of LeFou in Disney’s reboot of Beauty and the Beast. Yes, THERE IS A SUPPORTING CHARACTER WHO MAY OR MAY NOT BE GAY. Despite the fact that this shocks no one, [Read More...]

Dark Devotional: Lazarus

  My uncle died a few weeks before Easter last year, an uncle who lived a complicated life wrought with struggle and isolating mental illness. Given the difficult task of planning a way to commemorate his life, my mom called to ask me if I would be the one to officiate the services. Not only [Read More...]

Sick Confessions: I’m a Bad Pray-er

“You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty.” –Flannery O’Connor It’s almost here. My freaking ride. April 1. Three little days away. My past two practice rides left me panting, worn out, [Read More...]

Things Keeping Us Alive, March ’17

How’s Lent going for you, pilgrims? The 40 days of preparation before Easter is typically a time of somber reflection on our own mortality – you know, Catholic. Our Protestant famille likes to celebrate only the joy of the Resurrection, the empty cross. But we Catholics have Jesus’ bloody body on our crosses; we symbolically [Read More...]

Dark Devotional: Faith and Doubt in the Labyrinth

I am easily led to anxiety in unfamiliar situations. I don’t like to do things with other people, and though I recognize the necessity in community, I’d almost always prefer to go about my day on my own, for comfort’s sake. Like most of us, I like certainty. Like most of us, I realize life [Read More...]

St. Joseph’s Altar: The Lenten Feast?

Every year in my school, the classes would take a bus to a nearby banquet hall in our town of Opelousas, where we’d be able to eat some of the great food prepared for the St. Joseph’s Altar, a practice especially popular in Catholic southern Louisiana. That “altar” was really just a few tables adorned [Read More...]

Dark Devotional: To Die for an Ungodly Neighbor

For Christ, while we were still helpless, died at the appointed time for the ungodly. Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die. But God proves his love for us, in that while we were still sinners Christ died [Read More...]