Begin with the Prayer of Abandonment. “Why do they call it ‘Good Friday’?” my nine-year-old wanted to know.  It was a fair question, why we should commemorate the day of the Lord’s death, calling it “good”? Many other adjectives spring to mind: “merciful” … “sad” … “dark” … “deadly.” And yet, the Church calls it “good,” for without Good Friday, there is no Easter. Without the heartache of the Cross, we would never experience the victory of Resurrection. On today, the next-to-last day of the Challenge, we come to the last letter of the alphabet, “Zzzzzzzz.”  It recalls the rest that is such an essential part of […]

  Begin with the Prayer of Abandonment.    A few weeks ago, on March 25, we celebrated the Feast of the Annunciation, when the    Blessed Virgin Mary gave her assent to God’s plan, by which she was to become the Theotokos . . . the God Bearer.  Her “yes” set a series of events in motion that would change the whole human story, making us not just friends but children of God. Today we celebrate a “yes” of a very different kind:  The moment when the Son of God gave his yes — freely and without equivocation — to God’s redemptive plan. It was the […]

Begin with the Prayer of Abandonment. The other day I came across this “Examination of Conscience for Married Couples” by Father Thomas Weinandy.  If you have not yet been to confession this Lent, why not take this opportunity to prepare yourself … and to make arrangements to go? The sacrament of reconciliation does not need to be an onerous chore; it is a bath for the soul that helps us to enter wholeheartedly into the celebration that is Easter. Just as there is no Easter without a Good Friday, so there is no healing without an acknowledgement that we need to be healed. Today’s Challenge:  […]

Begin with the Prayer of Abandonment. Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials. Lin Yutang, author and inventor of the Chinese typewriter Today’s Challenge:  Time to take personal inventory:  Are there any areas of your life in which the good has become the enemy of the best?  What “non-essentials” do you need to eliminate in order to make room for that which is of ultimate importance? Today’s Prayer:  Create in me a heart of generous wisdom, O God.

Begin with the Prayer of Abandonment.  Every morning, we welcome in the day with something akin to a whimper and a squabble, the unfortunate combination of one morning person in a house with three night owls. On weekends, Christopher chatters and prances around the breakfast table as the rest of us glare balefully from behind our teacups and breakfast cereal. “Christopher, have you walked the dog yet? And have you taken your medicine?” Please, just make it stop. I had about 5.2 seconds of REM sleep last night . . . Weekdays at Chez Saxton follow a fairly predictable schedule. At 6:30, Christopher bounces out of bed, […]

Begin with the Prayer of Abandonment. Sometimes surprises can be fun. A little variety — the spontaneous outing or present, the out-of-the-blue card or letter, the date night that he planned and arranged for the babysitter all by himself. Other surprises are much less so. Today, for example, we think of tax returns and their orderly rows of numbers, and our fervent hope that not to receive a criptic response from the IRS, who tend to frown on unexpected deviations and variations. Or, take an example from my college years: on Mondays, the lunch menu always featured a single descriptor: “variety.”  This was code for a surplus of a particular dish that had moved […]

Begin with the Prayer of Abandonment. (Have you got it memorized yet?) If you’ve been waiting to see what I was going to do with my original keyword (“underwear”), perhaps you are disappointed to see that the keyword has changed. Quite frankly, it occurred to me that — however true my original thought, that the state of our underwear drawer reveals something about how we regard marital intimacy — I still have a bit of work to do in this department, myself. So … I changed the keyword to understanding. In the Parable of the Sower (Mt 13:3-9), a farmer strides along, scattering seed haphazardly along his […]