While we may acknowledge a need and desire for prayer within ourselves, sometimes, praying itself is a challenge. Finding the time and space –let alone quiet– can be a task in itself, not to mention cultivating focus and connection. “There is no bad...
As we creep further into 2019, it’s no secret that many of our new year’s resolutions have already fallen by the wayside. By now, especially with the world experiencing scorching heat and harrowing-sub-zero cold outside, many of us are huddling indoors...
Saint Thomas Aquinas was a renowned theologian, educator, composer, and philosopher. Thomas Aquinas was born in Italy in 1225 (only four years after Saint Dominic’s death). In 1244, he entered the Dominicans, and, in 1245, he moved to Paris (and later to Naples, Rome,...
Buddhism may not seem like a natural fit for a retreat center owned and founded by Catholic Sisters. However, as Fernando Camacho and Maeve Eng-Wong, both Buddhist priests and the leaders of Four Heavenly Abodes and Introduction to Zen at The Mariandale Center, will...
I first became aware of the word “liminal” in a literary description of the moment just before sunrise, a scene so tinged with the beginning of light and the hint of color that it suggested, deliberately I think, that a new day is an event of magic. Liminal...
There is a poem that calls summer “more eternity-like than the other seasons,” meaning that winter, spring, and fall relate to time-passing while summer represents time-present. Winter is endured more than lived until it’s finally over. Spring, of course, anticipates...