Imagine being a Catholic student on Good Friday, pressured to eat meat by people who don't share your faith. This is a small, but meaningful, example of religious freedom being threatened.

Canadian writer Michael D. O'Brien is one of the great spiritual writers of our age. Though most of his books are novels, they invite one into a deeper contemplation of the great questions of faith and of what it means to be a disciple.

For many reasons, certainly among them challenges that I have been recently called upon to address, I have been reflecting again upon when things in life unexpectedly arise and demand our attention and our focus.

God is infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, so far beyond us. And yet, He is also simplicity. He is love.

We need to ask ourselves: does my communication generate hope? If it doesn't, what do I have to do to change it?

When we long for a deeper encounter with God; when we are felled by failure and futility, when we cannot carry on without a strengthening and recommissioning, we can plunge our hands and indeed our whole being into the deep cave of Christ’s heart and wait for His love to revive us.

In a world that pits humans against the environment, how can the Church point the way forward? The great gift of “Laudato Si'” was to apply the principles of Catholic social teaching to the problem of creation care. The result was the concept of integral ecology, which does justice to both persons and the environment, because everything is connected.

On the fourth anniversary of the Kamloops announcement, it is the Pontius Pilate question that echoes through Canada. But if Canadians cannot agree on the meaning of “truth” as it applies to residential schools, how does reconciliation take place?

We are never truly lost: God knows where we are, and He creatively uses any interior place to draw us deeper into His heart.