With Mother and Father’s Day fresh on our minds and hearts, I find myself thinking about sainthood and parenting. It is the chicken-and-the-egg type question... Does parenthood make you a saint? Or do you first need to be a saint to be a great parent to your kids?...
Great question, right? You can google this question or google Near Death Experiences and you will find hundreds, if not thousands, of stories of people who have seen that there is something waiting for us beyond death. Here are two examples of stories that touched me...
“Now get up and go into the city and you will be told what you must do.” Acts 9:6. Archbishop Chaput asked three things from the Community: do something for families, share the beauty of the liturgy and teach on the Jewish roots of our faith. Christian and I took the...
We are often asked what brought us to the United States. The short answer is, “The Catholic Church.” There’s a lot more to the story than that, of course. Here is how it happened. In September of 1990, we entered into the Catholic Community of the Beatitudes, in the...
My family sure didn’t have as adventurous life as Christian’s! My father’s grandfather’s name was François, and he was born in 1865 in Gilly sur Loire, from a family of farmers. Francois came to Le Creusot, the nearby booming industrial town, in search of a better...
It’s during the liberation of Alsace, in the winter of 1945, that my Dad met my Mom in a little day dancing/coffee/pub that’s still in business to this day. I don’t believe World War II happened so that my parents could meet, but really, what were the odds that these...
Before and during WW II Between 1922 and 1925 Michel Henry traveled to Belgian Congo to establish railroads there. While he was gone, the rest of the family went back to Versailles, France, and stayed with the grand parents. After the Congo episode, the whole family...
Not long ago, one evening after dinner, I was showing our friends Mike and Marylyn a beautiful wooden trunk from Alsace, dated 1776, that I'd inherited from my Mom. It had been in the family since… 1776! I also showed them some antique silver Berber jewelry from...
We had already been married seven years and had three gorgeous daughters. We'd bought a beautiful farm house in the country side, close to my wife’s parents in the heart of Burgundy and its famous vineyards. We had great friends with children the same age as ours. We...
Christian It’s very hard to revisit these times, very painful. Not only for the loss and the pain of losing this baby, but also for the pain I had inflicted on Christine. I should have been her protector and I did nothing. I was desensitized completely. Pregnancy was...