Jonathan Ryan's Blog, page 59
April 10, 2016
Festival of Faith and Writing: Come Meet Us!
Sick Pilgrims! Come hang with us at the Festival of Faith and Writingnext week.Jess and Jonathan will both be speaking on panels (schedule below). And if you’re interested in hanging outFriday nightafter we all listen to Tobias Wolf, let us know on our Facebook page.We’ll be posting details there. During the week, we’ll be [Read More...]
April 7, 2016
Dark Devotional: Broken and Multiplied
My husband and I lived in Edinburgh, Scotland for three years in graduate school. We felt at home amongst dead theologians, drizzly sideways rain, and a dram of whisky that would warm you up when it got dark at 3:30. We ate cheaply, walked miles a day, and spent too-many hours in small, chilly offices [Read More...]
Bringing Catholic Magic Back
An article inThe Atlanticgrabbed our attention last week–about young Jews embracing the more traditional practices their parents had rejected. We completely identified. The return to traditional faith practices–what the Catholic Church refers to as “popular piety”– played a significant role in both of our returns toCatholicism, the religion ourparents had abandoned. Our familieshad been Catholic [Read More...]
April 6, 2016
Sick Pilgrim Now Has Two Things in Common with the Pope
1. We’re Catholic. 2. We share a publisher. We’rewriting a book for Loyola Press, the finefolks who brought you this and this and this. The book will draw on our most challenging personal experiences–grief, death, divorce, mental illness, natural disasters, infidelity, humiliation, addiction—while walking with you through the liturgical year, seeking God even in [Read More...]
April 4, 2016
The Nasty Truth of a Mother’s Heart
“They appear more often now, both of them, and on every visit they seem more impatient with me and with the world,” begins Colm Toibin’s novella, The Testament of Mary. “There is something hungry and rough in them, a brutality boiling in their blood, which I have seen before and can smell as an animal [Read More...]
April 3, 2016
Is this Heaven? An Ode to the Sacramental Beauty of Baseball
Our regular Sick Pilgrims might be shocked to read a meditation on sports gracing the pixelated pages of our broken spirituality blog. Sometimes, I encounter a sniffy disdain among my artier friends when we talk about sports. Whenever I gush about my love for baseball, I get the usual lectures about how obsession with sports [Read More...]
March 31, 2016
The Dark Devotional: St. Thomas Didymus: A Heart Made Double by Breaking
Thomas, called Didymus, one of the Twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples said to him, “We have seen the Lord.”But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his handsand put my finger into the nail marks and put my hand into his side, [Read More...]
March 30, 2016
Light One Candle
Every week after Mass I light a candle. I love the smell of hot wax and matches, the action of my own hand kindling one small flame that will burn for hours, a visible sign of my unseen petition flickering beside the anonymous hopes and burdens of others. I’ve always clung to this little ritual. [Read More...]
March 28, 2016
A Mid-Life Report Card from St. Peter…..
(We are taking a week off here at Sick Pilgrim. So, Jess and I will be posting some pieces we wrote for other forums. I wrote this piece for my now defunct blog, The Rogue. It didn’t really fit there, but it works here very well. I wrote it when I turned 40 and [Read More...]
March 26, 2016
Dark Devotional: Holy Saturday: Sitting Outside of the Tomb
And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and laid it in his ownnew tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock; and he rolled a large stone against theentrance of the tomb and went away. And Mary Magdalene was there, and the otherMary, sitting opposite the grave. (Matthew [Read More...]
