My dear fellow pilgrim, have you ever wondered how unprocessed trauma in your family and culture of origin may have distorted how you relate to God and live out your faith?  After I fell in love with Christ, I decided that my faith would be the most important determinant of my identity. I thought...

One of the most significant discoveries I made in 2024 was that my cherished Catholic faith - as I have known and experienced it for most of my life - has been a trauma response. That is, the way I have understood, absorbed and practiced my Catholic faith has been from a place of compulsion and n...

If you are yourself in a season of estrangement or distance from the Church but feel pressured to come home to mass this Christmas, I invite you to read this as you consider your relationship to the parts of you that are needing the distance from Church and/or God. Christmas and Easter are often...

I am a little embarrassed to share this with you, but in the years 2009-2015, my spiritual life had such a steep, continuous "ascent" in terms of how close I felt to God, how consistent I was in my prayer and sacramental life, and how much I learned intellectually about my faith that I actually t...

At this time of spiritual midlife, we experience a series of rude inner awakenings where we begin to see things about the inner state of our souls that we had not had the ability to see before. We suddenly realise that our relationship with God - even if it has been growing in depth and emotiona...