I must admit that with the necessary recovery time afterwards, I am sometimes tempted to wonder if time away is actually worth it. Perhaps this is part of why the Church encourages us to undertake a daily examin at the end of each day - not only to regularly consider where we are need of God's mercy, but also to regularly rejoice with Him in how His graces have touched us. I won't say I wrote my Ignite NW 2026 daily reports for that purpose (check them out - parts one, two, and three, with a final reflection probably coming soon!), but reflecting on God's grace during that time away is a reminder that there are often a plethora of graces that come from a chance of pace, environment, and even people! One wonders: bed.... or medieval...

Last week I joined my brother priests and the bishops of our archdiocese down in Ocean Shores for our annual priest convocation or 'Priest Days'. For about three days, we come together for prayer, presentations, and fellowship. Spread apart as we are in our archdiocese - from the border of Canada to the border of Oregon! - this is, for the majority of us, the only occasion we have to be together, catch up after a year apart, and get to know priests new to the archdiocese (or just new to us!). Just the most lovely greeting from Sacred Heart Radio as we drove into Aberdeen! This is also the second year of Partners in the Gospel, which has been a challenging one for every Catholic in our archdiocese - but especially so (I would assert) for...

This weekend we celebrated the (transferred) solemnity of the Ascension. The Church proclaims that in ascending above the highest heavens, Jesus did not do so to distance Himself from our lowly state (to which He has united to Himself) but so that we, His members, might be confident of following where He, our Head and Founder, has gone before. These words - proclaimed in the collect and preface of the Mass - remind us that rather than being a moment of loss, it is celebration of the joyful promise of what is to come. That understanding, it seems to me, is hard-won among Christians. For the Apostles standing below, their hearts must have been torn (and how!) beween confusion and sadness. Having made it through three days of sorrow and loss...

When the world gets to be too crazy, I often find myself taking refuge in great stories. One of the great authors of such a story - no less personage than J.R.R. Tolkien himself - wrote a full essay on this phenomenon titled On Fairy-Stories. It is well worth reading, but a point he makes there that I find most arresting is the idea that, when we are struggling to encounter them in the real world, virtue can not only be encountered in stories but can (re)inspire the reader to bring that virtue from the realm of the imagination back into real life. In one of his letters, Tolkien also talks about this connection of the imaginative to the real, and their mutual orientation to the final - I daresay eternal! - victory: “Actually I am a...