In Every Life: My New Collection of Blog Posts Available on Amazon!

I’m excited to announce that my second book, In Every Life: 50 Reflections, is now available on amazon.com as a paperback or eBook.  In Every Life is a collection of my blogs from 2015-2016. (That Mighty Heart is my 2014 blog collection, also available on amazon.)  To go to the amazon page, click here.

I’m very grateful to my talented and generous brother, John Vineyard, who designed the beautiful cover for me.  Thank you, John!

I’m also proud of the cover because it sports book endorsements from three special people in my life:  Jim Forest, Cackie Upchurch, and Fr. Frank Matera.  Trifecta!

“Amy Ekeh writes one of the best liturgy-centered blogs, as this collection bears witness. Column after column she finds surprising stories that anchor her insights to the real world as well as to the church calendar. And did I mention that she has a sense of humor? If you get the paper edition, put it in a handy location. And if you read the e-book edition, it will be just a few clicks away.” – Jim Forest, author of biographies of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and Daniel Berrigan

 “Beadwork is done by selecting the appropriate colors and shapes, having in mind a final look that will make a necklace or bracelet.  It’s a fine craft to create a piece that is beautiful and timeless. In this book, Amy Ekeh proves that she knows how to select just the right colors and shapes of the spiritual life, stringing them together to make a fitting gift. Her sources are liturgy, family life, Scripture, ministry, even the radio!  She’s perfected the art of finding beauty and humor and, therefore, finding God.” – Cackie (Catherine) Upchurch, Director, Little Rock Scripture Study

 “God is always present to us, but we rarely experience that presence. Amy Ekeh, however, has learned to see God’s presence in the ordinary events of life we take for granted. Throughout this book, Amy shows us how to enjoy the God who is always present to us. Read and savor this thoughtful collection of reflections.” – Frank J. Matera, Professor Emeritus, The Catholic University of America

Thanks also to Mary Lee and Joe Gaffney, Jim Creed and Ruth Vineyard for their valuable editorial assistance!

In Every Life is also available at any of my programs. 

If you read the book, I would love for you to review it on amazon.com!

Thank you all for your support and encouragement as blog readers and as friends!

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Your Paper-Thin Wings

At Saturday’s retreat on prayer, my retreatants and I reflected on how we are made for prayer. We are human; we are free; we are made for relationships. Prayer is our relationship with God. God is not “up there” while we are “down here.” Rather, God is with us, and he desires intimacy with us. Although prayer is indisputably challenging, we were made for it. It was meant to be.

To illustrate this point, I shared something I recently heard on a Radiolab podcast (with four kids in four schools this year, I do a lot of driving and a lot of podcasting!). Radiolab was investigating how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. Do you know how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly?

A caterpillar does not simply grow wings inside its chrysalis. No, first the caterpillar dissolves into a goop. That’s right, goop. If you cut open a chrysalis during this stage, goop spills out! Somehow that goop becomes a butterfly.

But where do the wings come from?

As it turns out, the wings are already formed inside the caterpillar. Careful dissection of a prepupal caterpillar reveals paper-thin, transparent wings, tiny antennae and even legs! The structures of “butterfly-ness” exist just below the caterpillar's outer skin, waiting for transformation.

We were made for prayer, friends. The wings are already there, paper-thin, transparent, and a bit pent up. With God’s help, we can stretch out and fly.

I hope you will enjoy this Radiolab broadcast:  “Goo and You.”

"Life history of the silk moth (Bombyx mori). A, caterpillar; B, pupa; C, imago; the cocoon is cut open to show the pupa lying within." Source: J. Arthur Thomson, M.A., LL.D. Outlines of Zoology (New York, NY: D. Appleton & Company, 1916).

Lent: Are We Living Dangerously Enough?

At Lent retreats, I used to ask participants if they had ever been to the desert.  But after moving up to Connecticut, I finally stopped.  Everyone said “no.”  Except a few who would ask, “Does Las Vegas count?”

No, Las Vegas does not count.

Have you ever been to the desert? 

I have.  I understand what the desert is all about.  It is quiet, still, empty, beautiful, harsh and dangerous.  In the desert, you are always one false move away from needing something desperately.  Like water, or shade, or an antidote for a snake or spider bite. Yes, my desert had tarantulas.

In the desert you face your own fragility and the fragility of those around you.  All it takes is that mercilessly hot West Texas sun to remind you that your place in the universe is small and precarious.  Survival is not a given.

Jesus spent forty days in the desert.  Israel spent forty years.  Days and years of precarious living.  Days and years of facing one’s own weakness, accepting that survival is not a given, looking beyond oneself or one’s environment for certainty. 

Leaning heavily upon God alone, Jesus and Israel emerged from their deserts.  Israel settled in a new land and embarked upon an enormous task, to live faithfully as God’s people.  Jesus was strengthened and resolved for mission, to tell God’s story to the human race and to love his own to the end.

We speak of Lent as our desert time.  In this desert, do we recognize how fragile we are, how precarious life is, how the structures and things we depend on for security are one false move away from falling around us like a house of cards? 

Precarious living is actually Gospel living.  It recognizes that total dependence on God is where true strength is found.  The trials of the desert are where we meet God and live only by what he offers – living water, the shadow of his wing, and the antidote of his love. 

From Lent, from life, from desert, we may not emerge unscathed.  But we can emerge as God’s own, strengthened, emboldened for mission and “filled with the power of the Spirit” (Lk. 4:14). 

* * *

“If we ask God for so little it may well be because we feel the need for him so little.  We are leading complacent, secure, well-protected, mediocre lives.  We aren’t living dangerously enough; we aren’t living the way Jesus wanted us to live when he proclaimed the good news” (Anthony de Mello, Contact with God: Retreat Conferences). 

Briton Riviere, The Temptation in the Wilderness, 1898

A Good Old-Fashioned Lenten Fast

I read something today that I’ve honestly never thought about before.  An article by Fr. Daniel Merz at USCCB.org points out that Adam and Eve were asked to fast.  To fast is to limit oneself in some way, to do without.  God asked Adam and Eve to “do without” that one tree.  As we know, they chose to break that fast.

That tree, and the breaking of that fast, symbolize the choices we have in life, the free will which is the greatest of human gifts.  Without free will, there are no relationships because there is no love.  Without free will, we aren’t human.

Adam and Eve lived in a paradise of sorts.  And yet even in this paradise, they were asked to fast.  This simple idea helps us understand fasting – its purpose, its goodness, and why it should still be part of our lives.  Most of us modern Americans live in a kind of paradise in the sense that we have every single thing we need or want practically within arms’ reach.  Want entertainment?  Get it.  Want news?  Got it.  Want food?  Open the fridge. 

Fasting is a deliberate attempt on our part to put the brakes on “having it all.”  It seems that even God, who wanted the very best for Adam and Eve, thought it wise to give them limits.  Of course this wasn’t to cause suffering or to impose his “rules” on them.  Perhaps the fast simply allows the opportunity to live more deliberately, to make choices.  There’s a link between fasting and freedom.    

I like a good old-fashioned Lenten fast.  I like the idea of giving something up.  It’s so simple.  It’s so obvious.  It’s so good.  I know there’s a lot of buzz out there about not giving up sweets or alcohol or any of those very old-school things.  I disagree.  Put the brakes on.  Exercise your free will.  Feel the freedom of saying “no.”  Because that link between fasting and freedom is really a link between fasting and love.  Our Lenten fast is a deliberate offering of our freedom for the sake of the other.  Perhaps it is a simple offering of love between you and Jesus.  Or perhaps when you fast, you turn that sacrifice into a material gift for someone in real need, someone who doesn’t have a “material paradise” at their fingertips.

Another way fasting helps us love is simply by training us to “put the brakes on” in other areas of our lives.  The discipline we gain from giving up concrete things like food, drink, and entertainment, can help us learn to give up those more abstract things like gossip, grudges and impatience.  If we have the strength to say no to an afternoon snack, maybe we will have the strength to walk away from that hurtful conversation at work. 

The goal of Lent is no different than the goal of life:  to love God and love our neighbor.  I know I can do that better when I have self-control and when I live deliberately, when my life is not about easy living but about slowly turning myself outward, toward the other – God and my neighbor.  There’s a link between fasting and love.  Lent is the right time to discover it.

John Kohan, Mixed Media Collage, Courtesy John Kohan, sacredartpilgrim.com.

That Mighty Heart on Amazon!

Just a note to let you know that my 2014 book, That Mighty Heart, is now available on Amazon as a paperback or eBook! 

I would love it if any of you who have read the book could take a few minutes to leave a review on Amazon.  Here’s the link:  That Mighty Heart on amazon.com.

I’m working on my next blog collection entitled In Every Life, as well as a new title in the Little Rock Scripture Study Series Alive in the Word that will be available in the fall (Lent: Season of Transformation).  I’ll keep you posted! Thank you for reading!