Effie Caldarola
By Effie Caldarola, • Catholic News Service • Posted February 26, 2021
Jesus, as I make the 40-day pilgrimage through Lent, I ask that my journey may always be at your side. My one Lenten goal, indeed the one goal of my life, is to enter into a relationship with you. What I do, the time I give to prayer, the sacrifices I make I ask that all may be done as a way of growing in my closeness to you, my friendship with you, my risen Lord.
During Lent, I find myself called to Matthew 25:31-46. In this reading, Jesus, you tell your friends what is necessary to make the kingdom of God our heritage. You didn’t lay down onerous, bureaucratic rules, or ask us to memorize catechism pages, or become great theologians and scholars.
I am on a decluttering kick, spurred on by months of being a virtual prisoner in my own house. I have bags full of clothes to give away, books someone else may enjoy, junk that needs to be pitched.
Most of this is rather easy and kind of fun. But in the past few days, I have tried to tackle the Holy Grail of decluttering, the Mount Everest of those climbing the ladder of reorganizing.
I am trying to weed through boxes of photographs.
Now, to younger readers, this may seem strange. Why do I have such a mountain of photos? But to anyone who raised their kids in the 90s or early part of this century you understand.
My brother has been a faithful member of Alcoholics Anonymous for decades. He s the guy who opens the church and brews the coffee for the weekly meeting.
But since March, his meetings have been on Zoom. So he had an idea. On Zoom, he could meet anywhere, right? So why not go somewhere new. He looked up AA meetings on Google, wrote to a group in County Mayo, Ireland, and asked if they d share their meeting link. Voila! There he was, at a meeting in a little village in Ireland.
Technology and social media are amazing. What would I have done without texting, emails and Zoom during isolation, with kids far away and a new granddaughter in October? It s great to keep up with friends on Facebook. Twitter and other platforms provide lots of news. It s a blessing in so many ways.
Effie Caldarola
By Effie Caldarola • Catholic News Service • Posted December 11, 2020
The 19th-century English poet Christina Rossetti had never heard of COVID-19, climate change or many of the woes that beset us in the bleak midwinter of 2020.
Yet, in her poem, “In the Bleak Midwinter,” she paints a Christmas scene that endures and brings an odd, consoling joy into these troubled times.
She sets the stage for Jesus’s appearance into our chaotic world with these sobering lines, “In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,/ Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.”
Not everyone celebrates Christmas in the middle of a hard winter, but for those in the Northern Hemisphere, there are Advent days when ice forms on window panes and chilly winds whip through sullen grey skies.