conversion

Journey to the Heart: A Timeline

/ J. Thorp / 5 Comments

One of the obstacles to sharing this roundabout path to the Sacred Heart with you is that in many cases it is only visible in retrospect. The sequence is hazy at this point, even to me. So I’m going to start with a timeline, which will hopefully serve as an outline for the sequence of posts to come. Though I may not write them chronologically, we ought to be able to plug them into the timeline in the end.

Part of the reason for doing this exercise at all is that every so often someone hears me say something like, “God has me here for a reason,”  “God told me such-and such,” or “God is leading me toward X,” and asks me what that means. God doesn’t speak to me audibly, but He opens some doors—in my heart, in others, and in the world—and closes others. This timeline and sequence will hopefully show what I mean.

We begin nearly two years ago… Continue reading →

Journey to the Heart of Love

/ J. Thorp / 16 Comments

I’ve been meaning to write a blog post, then putting it off time and again because I don’t know how I can possibly do it. For more than year now God has been moving in me, pulling me in what seems like a hundred different directions, softening and shaping my stony heart in various ways and encouraging, pushing, even forcing me to surrender, little by little, to Him.

In some sense, it has all come to a head, in this month of the Sacred Heart, as that seems to be the destination toward which He is calling me, the burning, bleeding, beating heart of Love Himself, the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.

I don’t know how explain the connections in one coherent post, so I’ve decided to attempt something I’ve not done in a long while: short daily posts to explain how God has lured me toward the Heart of Love. Continue reading →

Urgent Conversion

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Sometimes when Jodi and I rise early in the morning to reflect on the daily Scripture readings and pray together, I fail to check the calendar for special feasts. Instead I go straight for the daily missal and read the regular readings for the day, only to open our emailed gospel reflection to learn that it’s the Feast of Such-and-such, with a special gospel reading.

That is what happened on Thursday morning, with the happy result that it caused me to focus on the call to urgency and action in our conversion.

Continue reading →

Airedale Chronicles: My Lord and My Dog

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PupMug

Bruno underfoot…

One of the best and most trying aspects of owning an Airedale “puppy” is Bruno’s relentless desire for affection and affirmation. In our household we joke that I finally have someone else who shares my primary love languages: physical touch and words of affirmation. If that’s true, I know now why I drive my wife and children as crazy as I do. As a little pup, this constant desire to be in contact with us and praised by us was adorable—less so when a fifty-pound dog (however young) piles into the back of your knees on the stairs, when he circles your feet while you are carrying groceries or sits on them while you are walking.

And sometimes I get impatient, forgetting he is not quite ten months old, and wish he would “move!” “get back!” or “go lay down!”

A week or so back I came home from work, and Bruno was waiting at the top of the stairs above our split-level front door, sitting lopsided on one hip with his big front paws on the first step down so he could better see who was coming. As I came up, he came down, making it nearly impossible to pass, and I told him to get back. He followed at my knee, nosed my hands as I sat to take off my shoes, then licked my pant leg. Continue reading →

Reflections on ‘Vocation: The Universal Call and the End of Man’

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Blogger’s Note: This is a short reflection I wrote on Deacon Joseph Michalak’s Catechetical Institute Formative Session talk, “Vocation: The Universal Call and the End of Man.” Since I missed the session traveling to Michigan to see my folks, I was asked to write a short essay to show I had listened to it on my own.

Some years ago I wrote an essay about “the Jim in my Head,” a version of myself who is always a gentleman, always charming and courteous, always knew what to say and when to be still. That Jim, if he existed, would be loved and admired by others…but he became a source of frustration to me.

When I wrote about the Jim in my Head, he was meant to be a humorous sort of inspiration, but he became a yardstick with which to beat myself. I acted as though everyone else saw the imagined ideal and could judge to what extent I came up short. I fell into the “if-only” trap: if only I were in a different situation; had a different job; had more time and money, a different degree, etc. I finally saw the trap for what it was a year or so ago when I caught myself thinking, If only I had different gifts. The implication was that I would be a better person if God had made me better—as if the One who is all love had withheld something from me, or the One who is perfect wisdom had made a mistake. Continue reading →