Category Archives: Jeannette de Beauvoir

Dec 28 2019

The Thorn Among the Roses

Click here for daily readings It hasn’t been a very good year, has it? No matter what one believes politically, there is no Catholic who can feel good about children separated from their parents, put into cages, dying of n...

Dec 16 2019

Are You Asking the Right Questions?

Click here for daily readings She always knew the answer before she asked the question. Who tracked the mud in the kitchen? Who ate the last cookie and didn’t get rid of the wrapping? Who left their bookbag in the entry-wa...

Nov 18 2019

Seeing is Believing

Click here for daily readings I have a confession to make: I don’t notice things. I’ll have spent half an hour with someone, and they’ll finally ask, “So what do you think of my new glasses?” I neve...

Oct 30 2019

Where Does Goodness Come From?

Click here for daily readings There are days when everything goes ever-so-slightly wrong, aren’t there? When you feel you’re just not paying attention? I have those days fairly frequently. I snap at someone I care ab...

Sep 30 2019

Who Belongs?

Click here for daily readings Every time I catch myself doing or saying or even thinking something unkind, and every time I chastise myself for it, I’m generally able to look to Scripture and find that while my reaction wa...

Sep 16 2019

Love Your Enemies

Click here for daily readings My father and his family lived through the German occupation of France in World War Two. For the duration of the war, uniformed strangers lived—literally—in his home, told him where he...

Aug 30 2019

What: Me, Holy?

Click here for daily readings For a very long time, I thought I might have a vocation to the religious life. It turned out that I didn’t, but I gave the possibility a lot of time and thought and prayer. My everyday life ...

Aug 07 2019

It Just Has To Be Somebody

Click here for daily readings When I was in school—I went to a small Catholic girls’ school—I started writing. A lot. My reason for this burst of literary activity was revenge. I was most definitely not one of...

Jul 08 2019

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Click here for daily readings I will start with a confession: I’m a junkie, and my drug of choice is English mystery shows. Foyle’s War, Grantchester, Single-Handed, Christie… the list goes on and on. I like ...

Jun 27 2019

The Power of Storytelling

Click here for daily readings The first humans, we learned in school, domesticated fire, and in so doing they changed their species’ trajectory dramatically. Now humans could cook food. Now they could live in colder clima...

Jun 15 2019

Everything is Different Now

Click here for daily readings Life-altering events change our perspective on everything around us, don’t they? I remember so clearly how I felt the day my mother died. I walked down the street and looked around me and fel...

May 18 2019

How Love Changes Everything

Click here for daily readings Love. We sing about it, talk about it, aspire to it, even are blessed enough to experience it. People do both intensely beautiful and amazingly wicked things for love. It can be the most selfless an...

May 17 2019

Where’s My Map?

Click here for daily readings When I was twenty, I knew exactly what the rest of my life would look like. I had it all mapped out. I’d created goals and lists for the steps it would take to attain them. And now, decades la...

Apr 04 2019

Disappointed? Remind Yourself of this Instead

Click here for daily readings One of the aphorisms with which we try to reassure ourselves when we’re feeling things we don’t want to feel is this: “into every life some rain shall fall.” In other words,...

Feb 16 2019

Who Should Eat?

Click here for daily readings I work for a Catholic publishing company, and so now in early February, we’re already preparing for Lent. That means, naturally, that it’s on my mind, and so I’ve turned my own att...

Jan 16 2019

Memento Mori

Click here for daily readings It’s one of those thoughts that occur to you when it’s three o’clock in the morning and it feels like you’re the only person in the world who’s awake and everything tha...

Nov 16 2018

It Only Takes A Moment

Click here for daily readings It’s easy to think, sometimes, that our lives are on a steady and pretty much predictable—even boring—course. That the days are standard-issue: we get out of bed, do our morning ro...

Oct 16 2018

Cleaning The Outside Isn’t Enough

Click here for daily readings Have you ever seen a surgical team scrub up before an operation? It puts mere handwashing to shame! It’s a good thing, of course, that the team puts so much effort in, and there’s an exc...

Aug 16 2018

Forgiveness Without Conditions

Click here for daily readings For most people, forgiveness has conditions. I’ll forgive if someone apologizes to me, or if they do something to somehow “make it up” to me. I’ll forgive if they take the fi...

Jul 12 2018

The Kingdom Of Heaven Is At Hand

Click here for daily readings Sometimes that’s hard to believe. It’s easy to look out over the landscape of what humanity has done to the world and believe that this isn’t what God had in mind for us. We’...