When we cross ourselves, let it be with a real sign of the cross. Instead of a small cramped gesture that gives no notion of its meaning, let us make a large, unhurried sign, from forehead to breast, from shoulder to shoulder, consciously feeling how it includes the whole of us, our thoughts, our attitudes, our body and soul, every part of us at once, how it consecrates and sanctifies us.

The old man peered from behind the curtain of the iconostasis. "Sign!" he yelled. "Sign! Why aren’t you signing?!"

The more we think about long-familiar things, the clearer does their meaning grow. Things we have done thousands of times, if we will only look into them more deeply, will disclose to us their beauty. If we listen, they will speak.

One cloudy day, I was sitting on the ground outside the poustinia in great turmoil and pain. I was trying to make some very difficult decisions in my life, and I was feeling a desperate need for a sign from God.

We must forgive the society from which we came; we must forgive the ways it has hurt us.

Some twenty years ago, I spent two weeks at Madonna House. Although I had already known the community for a few years and thought I knew them quite well, my short stay made me realize how little, in fact, I had known or understood how demanding and difficult their life could be.

We say, "I’m wounded" or "I can’t help that because I’m wounded." We must learn to say, "No, it’s not my wound that makes me mean and irritable and devious and hateful. It’s the fact that I’m a sinner."

"The priesthood is the love of the heart of Jesus," the saintly Curé of Ars would often say.

Let us reflect with heartfelt gratitude on the immense gift which priests represent, not only for the Church, but also for humanity itself.

The toothless, scruffy old beggar outside the bus station didn’t bat an eye when I declined her sexual pitch. But before I could converse with her along a more favourable line, she said to me, "Got a penny?"

Her question caught me off guard. "A penny?" I asked. "What are you gonna do with a penny?"

If an article in Restoration starts with the theme of "penance," are you likely to continue reading? Are you still with me? If so, let’s look together at the example of St. John Vianney, patron of priests, for this is the Year for Priests, and he is its patron.

by Catherine Doherty.

Lent is God’s lovemaking to man. But God’s lovemaking is strange. He knows, for instance, that a child is trained to jump by having first a little brick to jump over, for his feet are very tiny; then two bricks; then three; and finally the Olympic jump—whatever it is.

The author, who has been a missionary in Russia for fifteen years, is the pastor of the first Catholic parish in Magadan, a city which, under Communism, was an administrative center for the gulags (prison camps).

People outside Russia usually ask me how I am doing and what I am doing. I then give a litany of what we are doing, leaving out what we should be doing and our failures.

"Is it tiring or is it life-giving?" a friend of mine asked. I was telling her on the phone about our Advent. "Both," I said.

Advent in a February newspaper? Well, this is a news column and, as I write this in mid-December, our life these days for the most part, is Advent.