Melanie Rigney's Blog, page 118

Filling in the Backstory

Note: On Fridays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.

The Gospels move along at a pretty fast clip, focusing on Jesus’s ministry with only the occasional reference to what the apostles might have been thinking or doing when they weren’t with him. A novel I’ve been reading for a while now, Between the Savior and the Sea by Bob Rice of Franciscan University, attempts to fill in what was going on in the background. And...

“How Can I Renounce Him?”

Note: On Fridays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.

The nineteenth century was a dangerous time to be a Catholic in Korea. It’s estimated that at least eight thousand of the faithful were killed during that century. Today, we remember 103 of those brave souls, who were canonized by Blessed John Paul II in 1984.

Jeoldusan Shrine of Korean MartyrsSince today’s Gospel reading (Luke 8:1-3) mentions some of the women wh...

Bold Messages, Fearless Messenger

Note: On Fridays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.

He wasn’t an intellectual, or a noteworthy theologian, for that matter. But some say Saint John Chrysostom, whose feast day we observe today, was one of the greatest orators our Church has ever known.

He didn’t use metaphors, didn’t try to share the Good News in ways that might be palatable to the establishment or to those in the pew. He just told it as he saw it....

The Night(mare) of the Iguana

Friday, 2 a.m. I bolted up in bed and looked to my open closet door, expecting to see several large lime-green iguanas crawling among my sheets, towels, and shoes.

In my “dream,” I was in an animal park of some sort, strolling along a walkway. The iguanas were in trenches nearby. I’d been warned not to get too close to the trench, as my presence would cause some sort of electromagnetic breach and let the reptiles loose. Obviously, I got too close.

2:30 a.m.: Said a rosary in hopes of falling ba...

What Doesn’t Fall Apart

Note: On Fridays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.

It’s ironic that in “The Second Coming,” W.B. Yeats, who considered himself more mystic than Christian (and no fan of Catholicism specifically), used images from the Book of Revelation as metaphor for post-World War I Europe:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…

Things were falling apa...

On the Nightstand: September

I recently finished (and loved!) Pat Gohn’s Blessed, Beautiful, and Bodacious: Celebrating the Gift of Catholic Womanhood. Part memoir, part instruction, it’s about the awesome gift of being a spiritual mother. Catholics will drink in the Marian connection, but there are plenty of gems for all Christians, including: “God’s spirit is very adaptable. Just open the door a crack and invite him in.”

In addition, I recently started Ear of the Heart, Mother D0lores Hart’s memoir. Women of a certain a...

Being Christ in Our Lives: Virelle Kidder

You may know of Virelle Kidder. She’s a beautiful godly woman and devoted wife, mother, and grandmother who is also a marvelous writer and speaker. Virelle’s six books include Meet Me at the Well: Take a Month and Water Your Soul and The Best Life Ain’t Easy, But It’s Worth It.

Virelle was Christ to me on my forty-ninth birthday. We were roommates at a weeklong Christian writers’ conference, and my day had been horrible. “Something” prompted me to confess I was a fraud–I hadn’t had an active...