A little more than a year ago, the Sacred Heart started pushing its way back into my consciousness. I wasn’t seeking it; I didn’t really understand why it was suddenly front and center. All I knew was that the Sacred Heart would no longer be ignored. I found myself saying novenas, saving images I found online, and repeating the prayer, “Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in you.” I even drove up to O’Connor’s Church Goods in Latham to pick up a few of the plastic covered Sacred Heart badges that my mom and grandfather always had in their wallets. I’ve got one tucked in my wallet now.

Soon after, I was digging through some files at home and pulled out a card with my mother’s handwriting on it. Since she’s been gone for more than 38 years, that’s a pretty moving thing for me. It was her Apostleship of Prayer card, with an image of the Sacred Heart on both sides. The card sits on my desk now, next to a small crucifix, a daily reminder of both my mother and the Sacred Heart that binds us to each other across time and space.

To be honest, after last year’s brief-but-intense period of prayer and interest in the Sacred Heart, it faded into the background a bit, only to re-emerge last month with even stronger force. Obviously, this is not something I am supposed to move to the background. Over and over, the Sacred Heart was front and center everywhere I turned — in a book on spiritual poverty I had been asked to “blurb,” at a workshop someone suggested I attend, in the spiritual reading I picked up for retreat planning. Even as my interest and spiritual curiosity increased, however, I felt something holding me back.

The portrait we had at home.

The old-style devotions to the Sacred Heart often felt cloying or quaint to me, something that didn’t seem to have a place in the prayer practices that feel most powerful for me now. But then I happened upon the medieval Nuns of Helfta during a retreat day at Dominican Retreat and Conference Center and came face-to-face and heart-to-heart with the deep mystical tradition that gave rise to this devotion.

Pope Francis, in his last encyclical, referenced the Nuns of Helfta and focused on the heart of Jesus as it pertains to our contemporary world. “Let us turn, then, to the heart of Christ, that core of his being, which is a blazing furnace of divine and human love and the most sublime fulfillment to which humanity can aspire,” he wrote in ‘Dilexit Nos,’ (He Loved Us). “There, in that heart, we truly come at last to know ourselves and learn how to love.”

As always, it all comes back to love, whether we are praying to the Sacred Heart of Jesus specifically, reading the words of saint and mystics, reflecting on the Gospels, or receiving the Eucharist — Jesus broken and given for each one of us out of sheer love.

“Christ’s love can give a heart to our world and revive love wherever we think that ability to love has been definitively lost,” Pope Francis wrote in 2024.

In a world seemingly “lost” to hate, division and violence, the Sacred Heart shows us the way forward on the path of love. It’s not an easy path, as evidenced by the crown of thorns that surround the Sacred Heart, but it is a path where love always has the final word.

This column originally appeared in the June 11, 2025, issue of The Evangelist.

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It’s hard to look around at our world and not think we have lost all sense of the sacredness of life. From unborn babies who never get to take a first breath, to people fleeing the indiscriminate bombing of their homeland, to students and concertgoers and restaurant deliverymen gunned down in the street, to elderly people abandoned in nursing homes to die a slow and lonely death.

As much as these stories garner the headlines in the media and perhaps in our own hearts and minds, the reality is that when we widen our view, seeking out beauty even amid the horrors, we begin to notice the small and loving actions taking place around us every day. These mundane miracles remind us that, although we cannot change the world on a grand scale, we can change our world day by day through the power of the Gospel that Jesus proclaimed and that we strive to follow.

Always, everywhere, every day, we are challenged to come back to love, even when it would be easier to hate. We are called to live our lives not to the rhythm of the mob (be it on social media or in the street) but to the steady beat of a heart that knows the only way to piece together this broken but beautiful world is through constant love in the face of sorrow and hatred, anger and violence. Our Blessed Mother did just that. From the moment of the Annunciation, she set her life to the beat of the most sacred rhythm. She trusted and loved; loved and trusted.

And so we entrust ourselves and the cause of life to her today, knowing that our sorrowful mother will give us the courage and strength to keep love always before us, even amid heartbreak and injustice. Dorothy Day, who saw how love could spring up amid brokenness and suffering, taught this truth: “The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?”

This month as we pray for life, let us take a hard-but-tender look at our own hearts and see where God is calling us to an interior revolution that will ripple ever outward to help change our world.

Credits:
Mary DeTurris Poust, “A Prayer for Life,” from the January 2023 issue of Give Us This Day, www.giveusthisday.org (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2023). Used with permission.

Photo by Marius Masalar on Unsplash

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The couple ahead of me looked at one another, and I saw the young woman put her hand to her face and double over. I wondered if she found the whole scene too upsetting, or maybe she was sick. When we entered the parking garage, the woman in the wheelchair and her aide headed to the elevator, while the couple and I moved toward the stairs. As they rounded the top stair and turned on the landing, we were facing each other. It was at the point I realized the woman wasn’t upset; she was laughing so hard she could not contain herself. She was laughing at the woman in the wheelchair.

I felt anger rising and debated saying something but held back, not wanting to get into a contentious conversation with strangers in a stairwell. I could see that her partner was not laughing and looked uncomfortable. They exited at the second floor, the woman still laughing uncontrollably, while I continued to the roof level. When I arrived at the top of the stairs, the woman in the wheelchair was being escorted toward a van. She was still crying out, and as I watched them move across the lot, I felt tears coming. Tears for the cruelty of our world today. Tears for the woman in the wheelchair, whose suffering is greater than anything I can understand. Tears for the woman pushing the wheelchair, smiling and talking so gently. Tears for the laughing woman, who perhaps didn’t know how to respond to a such a difficult situation and so opted for something terribly inhumane out of her own fear.

For as long as I can remember, when people saw others suffering, they would say to themselves, “There but for the grace of God go I.” There was a recognition that none of us do anything to earn our place or condition in this world and should, therefore, look with kindness on—and in solidarity with—those who have been asked to shoulder a heavier burden. Have we forgotten that, or is it buried under the avalanche of ridicule and bullying and intolerance that make up social interaction today?

When we close off our hearts and minds to those whose situations scare us or make us uncomfortable, the only ones we cheat are ourselves. I have to remind myself that this truth applies to all the women in the parking garage that day.

It is not enough to feel compassion toward the woman in the wheelchair and the woman who cared for her. Despite everything inside me that wants to fight against it, the Gospel calls me to have compassion for the woman who laughed as well. She has a condition that doesn’t require a wheelchair but is clearly much more debilitating. And I can only hope that those women looked at me with compassion for whatever fault or flaw they might have spotted but to which I am oblivious.

We move through this world viewing everything and everyone through the prism of our own experience, but Jesus tells us to throw away the prism and see everyone in the same light, the light of love. These days, that can feel nearly impossible, but it just might be true that only love can save the world.

This column originally appeared in the Nov. 4, 2020, issue of Catholic New York.

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Now my original essay is part of this wonderful collection from Orbis Books. I am so honored to have my writing included alongside that of spiritual writers such as James Martin, Richard Rohr, Joyce Rupp, Brian Doyle, and so many others. A special word of thanks to Mike Leach, publisher emeritus of Orbis Books and creator of Soul Seeing, for asking me to write that first essay and for inviting me to be part of this book. It’s a lovely collection, something that would make the perfect Christmas gift for anyone who’s traveling the spiritual path and looking for a little nourishment along the way.

You can order Soul Seeing directly from Orbis Books or Amazon. You’ll find me on page 179 under the title “Brokenness Lets Us See Where True Beauty Lies.”

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Grace is one of those elusive things. We kind of get it in an indefinable sort of way, and yet it can be so hard to grasp, like trying to catch a cloud. We know we need grace to get through this life, to get through this day, but it can be easy to miss, even when it’s right there in front of us. We have to want it and watch for it. But how do you watch for something when you’re not quite sure what you should be looking for?

Back when I was writing “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Catholic Catechism,” I struggled to define grace in a way that would make sense to people, especially people who may have never contemplated that word or what it might mean in their lives. To make matters worse, we Catholics get into categorizing kinds of grace: sanctifying or deifying, habitual, sacramental, and even special graces and states of grace. If we’re not careful, we can begin to believe that grace is so complex and lofty it’s off limits to just-struggling-to-get-through-every-day kind of people. The reality is, it’s ours for the taking.

Grace is a gift we get for no other reason than simply showing up in this life and turning toward God. The catechism defines grace as the “free and undeserved help that God gives us.” Or, to put it another way—with a rock-star spin: “What once was hurt, what once was friction, what left a mark, no longer stings. Because grace makes beauty out of ugly things. Grace finds beauty in everything. Grace finds goodness in everything.” That’s a line from the U2 song “Grace,” and it really is a perfect description— so simple and yet so beautiful, like that silver necklace sent years ago by a long-distance friend, and which now hangs from my neck once again.

My friend Cathy A., whom I have never met in person, had become such a close virtual friend, a soul sister, really, that she knew instinctively when I needed some grace, even if it had to be mailed directly to my house in a padded envelope. That’s how grace works—not literally, but spiritually—arriving when we least expect it, in surprising packages, from far-off places or maybe from right next door. It’s there, if we keep our hearts open, coming at us from all directions, lifting us up and carrying us forward.

Grace does not punish or seek an eye for an eye. Grace does not exist in a what-goes-around-comes-around reality. Grace supersedes all of those human constraints and goes straight for the heart. Grace heals, grace saves, grace loves—always.

As we journey through these last days of Holy Week, we know all too well that we must go through absolute darkness and desperation to get to the ultimate light and salvation of Easter. But even in darkness there is grace, maybe especially in darkness. Even in the cross of Good Friday, even in the cross that casts a shadow across your life today, whatever it may be.

Before I wrapped up this column, I signed on to Twitter and saw this tweet from Pope Francis: “If we learn to read everything in light of the Holy Spirit, we realize that everything is grace!” Maybe grace isn’t so elusive after all. Maybe it’s right there in front of you. Grab it now before it slips away.

This column first appeared in the April 13, 2017, issue of Catholic New York.

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P.S. The photo to the left is actually our own love lock. (Ours is the small one in the center.) You can find it locked to the stair railing in the tunnel leading up to St. Peter in Chains in Rome. I’m happy to take you there to see it.

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Prescription for a better marriage? Start dating.

About eight or nine years ago, my aunt gave me a lovely picnic basket backpack, complete with cloth napkins, plastic wine glasses, everything you’d need for a romantic al fresco meal in a park or on a beach. And every year since then I have considered donating it to a school garage sale because, quite frankly, romantic picnics just weren’t on our “to do” list.

But something stopped me from throwing that backpack into the Hefty bags along with old puzzles and board games bound for the bargain bin. I had a tiny glimmer of hope that some day we would dust off that backpack and take it for a spin.

Today was that day. Dennis and I met at Washington Park in Albany, across from his office at the New York State Catholic Conference, spread out a picnic blanket and ate a romantic lunch amid the sounds of giggling toddlers, buzzing bees and a distant lawnmower. Granted we had chocolate milk in the wine glasses since this was a workday lunch, but it was one of the best dates ever.

Why am I telling you this seemingly insignificant story? Because it is anything but insignificant. For 19 years of marriage, Dennis and I have all but ignored one very important element of our marriage: each other. Well, each other in a fun, relaxed, sometimes playful and romantic sense. We do everything together, I mean, everything, even a lot of our work, but we never seemed to be able to make the time for a date.

To make matters worse, in 19 years of marriage, we have not gone on a single vacation alone. We never even had a real honeymoon, just two nights away sandwiched in between job interviews and an apartment hunt. Last fall we finally made our first maiden voyage as a couple, but even then, it was a work trip.

We recently decided to look at our standard operating procedure and tweak the routine. We talked about how we want our marriage to look tomorrow and 20 years from now, and we realized that we needed what amounted to a marriage makeover. We had forgotten how to be a couple in the most basic sense, something that’s all too common among long-married husbands and wives. We assumed we needed to take care of everyone else first and neglected our couple-ness, but if we don’t take care of our love before all else, we’ll find ourselves looking at each other across the breakfast table one day, wondering who that stranger is staring back at us.

All of this was confirmed when I read a book Dennis received from a priest he met in Rome this past April, Marriage Insurance: 12 Rules to Live By, by Father Francis “Rocky” Hoffman. The book offers 12 steps to a happier life together: weekly dates, annual vacations, regular “business” meetings, Sunday Mass, monthly confession, and daily prayer as a couple are among the steps. But at the heart of it all is one key instruction: “Spend time together.”

“That sounds easy, doesn’t it? And it is. But it’s the foundation of everything else,” Father Rocky writes. “Spend time together. Don’t drift apart until you’re living separate lives. If all you do to improve your marriage is spend time together, you’ll be making a big difference.”

Not time together paying the bills, not time together planning the kids’ extracurricular activities, but time together holding hands and doing the things that drew you together in the first place.

For the past few months, Dennis and I have kept up a weekly date night and a daily prayer routine, and what a difference it’s made. But the big news is that in October we will fulfill our dream of that never-taken honeymoon when Dennis joins me on the 13-day pilgrimage I’ll be leading through Italy. That’s amore!

When was the last time you went on a date with your mate? Get out your calendar, put something down in ink, and see what you’ve been missing.

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Click the link below to watch for yourself. My favorite part was when he asked if they spoke Spanish and they all prayed the Our Father together.

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The National Marriage Week Retreat with Pope Francis: Keeping Love Alive is being sponsored by For Your Marriage, an initiative of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to strengthen marriages. Here’s the description of what’s to come in the days ahead:

“Looking for a way to enrich your marriage? Take our seven day virtual retreat based on Pope Francis’s advice about marriage and family life! Each day for seven days, set aside some time for prayer. Read about the theme for the day, reflect on a real-life marriage scenario, and think about ways to strengthen your own marriage. End each mini-retreat by praying a prayer for married couples. If possible, do the retreat together with your spouse!”

Dennis and I are starting the retreat tonight. Why not join us and check back in at the end of the week to compare notes. Tonight’s theme: “Marriage is the Icon of God’s Love.” Click HERE to get the retreat reading, reflection, prayer, and practice. By Valentine’s Day you and your spouse should be ready for a real celebration of your love.

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“All my heart is tangled all around you
When you’ve got trouble I’ve got trouble, too
All my life is arm in arm with you
When you’ve got trouble I’ve got trouble, too”

So what, what, what do you need?
I’ll kiss you awake when you’ve had a bad dream
And I’ll tell you a story… make it up as I go
Or I’ll sing you a song that I know that you know, it goes…

All my heart is tangled all around you
When you’ve got trouble I’ve got trouble, too
All my life is arm in arm with you
When you’ve got trouble I’ve got trouble, too

You and I live like the tree and the vine
Oh my darling we’re so delicately intertwined
I’ll ease your pain ’cause you’ve eased mine.”

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