Columns – Page 162 – Madison Catholic Herald

Ax felled autumn is no fall at all, death only has color when entered by the living.

The bright hues of orange, yellow, and red which will festoon our trees these coming weeks make an important statement. Namely, what was there all along finally becomes visible for us to see and enjoy.

Leaves which had been green for months gradually show their true colors as the seasonal process of dying takes its course. If this process were to have been stopped by laying an ax to the tree, the leaves would simply have turned brown as the result of having been cut off from their roots, their life source.

On November 29, 1999

Bishop Robert Barron

The disorienting quality of real prayer

Editor’s note: Because of its length, this column by Bishop Robert Barron will be published in a two-part series.

One of the most impressive literary figures of the 20th century was the Irish writer Iris Murdoch. You may have heard of her surprising and thoughtful novels such as A Severed Head and The Good Apprentice; or perhaps you are conversant with her more abstract philosophical texts such as The Sovereignty of Good and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

She reached her greatest notoriety, posthumously, in the work of her husband John Bayley, who penned a moving memoir of his wife’s slow and emotionally wrenching descent into Alzheimer’s disease. To hear the story of one of the brightest women of her time gradually losing her mind is, to say the least, unnerving. But due to Bayley’s artful telling, the experience becomes, almost despite itself, uplifting as well.