50 Stories for 50 Years — Post 35 Recently, at my 45th reunion, we were standing in line to get into the football stadium talking with my classmates when one of my male classmates asked me a question: “Did any of the women ahead of you help you out?” A simple question. It didn’t have a fast answer. For the first women at USNA, every step meant figuring out how to be a new first,…
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I am currently a student at the Renovaré Institute, a two-year online and in-person school dedicated to learning how to live in deeper intimacy with God. The program blends academic study with practical exercises aimed to shape us to become more like Christ. In August, our practice was to pray the “Jesus Prayer”, an early Christian prayer dating back to the 6th century. The invocation of Jesus’ name began even earlier, and the “Jesus Prayer” has…
Leave a CommentSo here I am, officially in a zone I never wanted to join, the “worry about falling” club. You know the one? Where every step becomes a calculation, every uneven sidewalk a potential hazard? In the past year, my bum knee has betrayed me twice. Same pattern both times: knee refuses to extend fully, gravity wins, and down I go. It’s humbling, really, how something as simple as walking can suddenly feel like a high-stakes…
2 CommentsDuring this past spring’s spiritual formation program residency, my instructor noted that the average time someone spends looking at a piece of art in a museum is just 21 seconds. Glancing is the hurried impulse to see it all.Gazing is something altogether differenta willingness to let everything else fall away,to focus wholly on one thing. The Cliffs by Jules Breton – National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Photo taken 3/17/25 The image above is currently…
Leave a CommentIn the rich tradition of Ignatian spirituality, we discover not an esoteric practice reserved for monasteries, but a spirituality woven into the fabric of everyday life. At its core lies a radical proposition: God is present in our world and actively engaged in our lives, not just in moments of transcendence, but in the mundane, and perhaps most powerfully, in our suffering. Ignatius of Loyola understood something profound about human experience: our imagination is not…
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