A Jesuit on Mars

By Eric Hanna, S.J.

I think I'd like to be
A Jesuit on Mars
To soar through that black, airless sea

And evangelize the stars



Perhaps some child of the red sands

Awaits the Word of God

They'll gape in amazement as I land

In my ecclesial space pod

Journey Home: Finding God in Me (& All Things)

By Santiago Rodriguez, S.J.

Home is where the heart belongs. Being at home is about finding out where our hearts feel at peace, where we experience joy and transformation. For me, this very exercise of discernment has been my quest for God. For the last 13 years, it has been an intentional search. The adventure to find God in my life has been nothing short of an odyssey, or a quest for the Holy Grail. It meant my preparation for this expedition would lead me to God. When I set out, I knew that if the quest leads me to attain God, it would mean transformation and eternal life.

This story is like that of every eager and aspiring person who has set out to find the meaning of Life and the fountain of Truth. My intent to find God has configured me into Odysseus – leaving home to wander the open seas – while becoming a stranger, a guest in a world he did not fully understand. At first, the journey was about all the things I would have to learn, to acquire or to give up in order to experience the Divine. It was as much about learning as it was about unlearning. I had to unlearn unhealthy behaviours and habits. I had to relearn to accept myself.

The Sensual Worshipper

By Artur Suski, S.J.

When we go to Church, we often tend to forget that we are both body and soul. We make efforts to block out what comes to us through the senses in order that we may all the better engage the spiritual. What ends up happening is that we see our body working against our soul. “Keep the sensual to a minimal,” you say. “Don’t add things that will pull you away from the spiritual,” you say.

But is this attitude healthy? One that should dominate our Sunday Masses? Are we not both body and soul? If so, should we not try to have a liturgy that involves both aspects, a liturgy that enables us to reach out to the Lord even through the senses? It is true that there are moments of inner contemplation in which we retreat from the senses; but for the most part, our lives do not allow for such a retreat. In that case, we have to discover how to engage the senses in such a way as to lead us closer to Jesus in our worship. A good liturgy would involve the five senses, yet in such a way as not to overwhelm us. Here are a few reflections on each of the senses:

What I Love About Rose

By John D. O’Brien, S.J.

Those who know me are aware that I have a particular affection for a certain girl. There are many others who are attracted to her as well. She has great personality, has had a fascinating life, and makes me want to be a better person. I thought I’d share a bit about her today – readers, meet Rose Prince.

Rose was born in northern British Columbia, the daughter of Chief Joseph and his wife Agathe of the Carrier Nation, and studied at a residential school at Lejac, near Fraser Lake – about a two-hour drive west of the city of Prince George. I mention this because when I was a Jesuit novice, I hitchhiked there for my pilgrimage. It is silent and rugged country, awesome in its beauty. Bald eagles soar its skies, and mule deer and black bears rummage the grass along the side of the highway in late May.

Collaboration and Communion

By Adam Hincks, S.J.

And from my pillow, looking forth by light
Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold
The antechapel where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
(Wordsworth)

A research group I work with, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration, has recently published a couple of exciting papers. In one of them, we demonstrated the first-ever detection of the average motion of distant galaxy clusters using the afterglow of the Big Bang as a back-light. A few months earlier, we reported our discovery of an abnormally large, very ancient cluster of galaxies.  Perhaps because the catchy name we gave it―El Gordo―our announcement was picked up by not a few news agencies (BBC, CBC, NPR, CNN).

Doing little things with Great Love

By Brother Daniel Leckman, S.J.

How do we experience God’s Will for us? Many struggle with this question. We think we know what God wants, or maybe we confuse that with what we want. Either way, it seems that the struggle to know God’s Will is always part of our lives: “ What does the Divine and Infinite Lover want me to do with my life?”

This past week, a homily at the Newman Centre, a Catholic chaplaincy at the University of Toronto, put things into perspective for me and brought me back to St Therese of Lisieux. The priest contemplated and explored the struggle to know God’s Will by simply saying, “God wants you to be wherever you are, to do whatever you can with love, and in service to others.” I’m slowly getting this lesson!

With a Little Help from My Friends

By Edmund Lo, S.J.

Today is the feast day of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha. Now I have only read one book on Blessed Kateri, so I am by no means an expert on the Lily of the Mohawks. I know that she underwent much suffering and discrimination to become a Christian, and that she was also known for her chaste life. She is perhaps most renowned for being a Native of North America.

I suppose this is how we conventionally learn about the saints of the Church: we read about them. A criticism on hagiography – the writings on the saints – is that this kind of “literary genre” is written in a way that portray the saints as perfect, impenetrable spiritual warriors. The portrayals of the saints are not human enough. It places too much emphasis on the good, and little, if any, on the bad. It is difficult to relate to them.