Monday, March 26th: Can fathers and mothers become friends of their children? Many children leave their parents to find freedom and independence and return to them only occasionally. When they return they often feel like children again and therefore do not want to stay long. Many parents worry about children’s well-being after they have left home. When their children visit …

Palm Sunday We spend a lot of energy wondering who can be blamed for our own or other people’s tragedies – our parents, ourselves, the immigrants, the Jews, the gays, the blacks, the fundamentalists, the Catholics…. But Jesus doesn’t allow us to solve our own or other people’s problems through blame. The challenge he poses is to discern in the …

Friday, March 23rd: A friend is more than a therapist or a confessor, even though a friend can sometimes heal us and offer us God’s forgiveness. A friend is that other person with whom we can share our solitude, our silence, and our prayer. A friend is that other person with whom we can look at a tree and say, …

Thursday, March 22nd: “Know yourself” is good advice. But to know ourselves doesn’t mean to analyse ourselves. Sometimes we want to know ourselves as if we were machines that could be taken apart and put back together at will. At certain critical times in our lives it might be helpful to explore in some detail the events that led us …

Wednesday, March 21rst: Are we friends with ourselves? Do we love who we are? These are important questions because we cannot develop good friendships with others unless we have befriended ourselves. How then do we befriend ourselves? We have to start by acknowledging the truth of ourselves. We are beautiful but also limited, rich but also poor, generous but also …