In my journey through the Christian life, certain spiritual mentors have guided and shaped me in profound ways. In college, it was St. John Paul II whose rich writings I studied under the gentle wisdom of a small but mighty gray-haired priest with an effusive smile. My faith was deepened in a way it never had been, and Pope John Paul II's death marked one of those days when you remember exactly where you were when you heard the news. After college it was Henri Nouwen whose te

I sat down to write a piece on Easter Sunday and inevitably I am brought first to Good Friday. For just as Venerable Fulton Sheen wrote, “Unless there is a Good Friday in your life, there can be no Easter Sunday,” without the painful cross of infertility, our family would not be the miracle that it is. My womb never bore children, I remain infertile almost eight years after my husband and I said “I do”. This might look like an abject failure, like the absence of a miracle, bu

Then, Easter changed. It became a season of darkness and perpetual death. This darkness settled in my heart after we miscarried our first and only biological child. I was left barren and fruitless. Although Jesus died and resurrected, I remained dead inside because my fertility was dead and would never resurrect.