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In this evening’s Holy Hour, I was reading from Jacque Philippe’s Time for God. The book discusses mental prayer.

Philippe emphasizes that prayer is not a technique — it is a gift, something received.

Because prayer is something received, what matters most are the dispositions that we have.

Are we ready to receive? Are we willing to have insight and attitudes that come from a source other than ourselves?

I’ve been taking more photographs lately than I usually do. I’ve also been taking them in black and white, with the “square” setting.

Here’s one from the front yard:

Here’s one of my daughter and her dog:

And here’s one more, of another daughter in Costco:

I’m enjoying the simplicity of the format. Eliminating the dimension of color allows me to focus on lines, shapes, and composition.

On April 19, 2020, Divine Mercy Sunday, my family and I drove to the Hassayampa Rest Area outside Wickenburg, Arizona.

On the way there, we listened to an Opus Dei podcast on Divine Mercy. The priest told a story:

A woman tells her spiritual director that Jesus is appearing to her. The spiritual director, to test the validity of the apparitions, tells the woman to ask Jesus what his last mortal sin was.

When she returns to the spiritual director she says: “He can’t remember.” It’s then that the spiritual director knows the apparitions are authentic.

Jesus does not hold repented sins against us.

A good story to hear on a day dedicated to Mercy.

Here’s some writing advice from Elmore Leonard: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

I remembered it as: “Get rid of the boring parts.”

It’s good advice.

To anyone reading this site: I’m sorry if I’ve failed to remove any boring parts from anything you’ve read.

In an earlier post, I wrote about the relative ease of writing a blog post. Let me emphasize “relative.” Writing a blog post is easy when you compare it to writing something else: like a full-length novel.

But writing a quality blog post that another human being might actually want to read – that’s not “easy” in the sense of “effortless” or “automatic” or “it just sort of happens.”

Writing a blog post – even if it’s short – takes the effort of opening up your mind to the world and sharing what’s in it. It takes the willingness to give your attention to something that does not yet exist and that might turn out poorly or get ignored entirely by the people you want to reach.

Writing a blog post requires emotional labor. The emotional labor is what makes a blog post difficult, even though it’s short.