A friend just shared this feature-length article in the New York Times, “A Reminder We Are Not Alone” about priests who have been celebrating the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick for patients with Covid-19. Continue reading
Dying
“Laish” by Aharon Appelfeld
It might seem that Aharon Appelfeld’s novels are mystical. Yet, with the enchanting characters – whose blindness, deafness, muteness, psychic unrest, vulnerabilities of age, and moral defects serve to “exaggerate purposely, to make things visible” (as a character says in a different one of his novels) – there is the splendorous reality of the human condition on full display. Continue reading
A Time to Die
“The cemeteries of the abbeys will always be in bloom.”
This evening I read a beautiful book, A Time to Die: Monks on the Threshold of Eternal Life, written by Nicolas Diat and with a forward by Robert Cardinal Sarah.
Diat travelled to several monasteries in France to visit monks and learn from them about the mystery of death and the art of dying well. Continue reading
