Mark Piper

"Do or do not," Yoda said in "The Empire Strikes Back." "There is no 'try.' " But what does the Gospel have to say?

For Mark Piper, climbing — and descending — Ireland's holy mountain was a metaphor for the spiritual life.

When this dad first laid eyes on his daughter's fancy first Communion shoes, he found himself reflecting on the shoes worn by saints throughout the ages — and what they might teach us about following the path of Jesus.

A bike ride raises money for pediatric brain tumor research and supports young cancer patients and their families. It also creates a meditation on the grandeur of creation; about beauty and pain; and on relationships.

Lots of Catholics are exasperated these days, and the church feels empty to them. But church leaders are making no effort to bring them back or ask why they left the church. If the message is, "Don't let the door hit you on the way out; don't bother us anymore," it has been received loud and clear.

Young Voices: White people must educate other white people about racism, privilege and value-judgements entrenched in the systemic injustices that pervade professional life. I think it is imperative to speak on this now.

Young Voices: Amid a pandemic, I don't envy the responsibilities of a president or board (or staff or faculty) at any college. But a crisis is not an occasion to abscond from Catholicity or responsibilities.

Young Voices: Every colleague of mine has been burdened and vexed. We're figuring out how to pivot, how to live our mission as places of welcome, acceptance and healing, under a new and existential duress.

Young Voices: I believe individuals can change like bread baking or music modulating. We can change utterly and completely if we attune ourselves to the pulses of space and time.

Young Voices: The young adults I listened to at a recent panel discussion on politics held at Catholic Theological Union choose to engage their faith and our shared political life not through ridicule and criticism but through proclamation and witness. It was a vote of confidence in the future.

Young Voices: Every wall that is built, every journey of justice we refuse, every divisive tweet that is fired off, signifies a theft from the dignity of Christ our brother, from those who are our neighbors.

Young Voices: There are some whose social justice work can be a balm to those they serve. There are also those who are as vicious as St. Peter cutting off someone's ear — though today the cutting tends to be from trolling words.

Young Voices: Then again, who really makes a saint? After my very small role in the canonization process, the best answer I have is that, responding to the grace of God, we can make ourselves into saints.

A few months ago, a priest asked me very seriously, "What keeps you in church?"  I had an instantaneous flashback to a memory of Sr. Fintan in the school gym, telling the bishop that I knew my prayers and that she was proud of me.

Young Voices: As a sign of my love for the Catholic Church — a church that has provided me with hope, beauty and truth, as well as anguish, anger and frustration — I wish to create and share a mixtape.

Young Voices: It was not a literal cheap plastic princess tiara my 4-year-old placed on my head. No, for me, it was a jewel-encrusted papal tiara. Here's how my day as pope would go.

Young Voices: I reunited with an old friend, a gay woman, who was willing to share with me, a straight man, her pain and wistful reminiscence of a church that seemed to reject her.

When my children see me fix my gaze on screens large and small, I'm afraid they will imitate my behavior, which is neither good for the body nor the soul. I'm failing at the ministry of presence in my own home.



 

Young Voices: Catholic ritual and liturgies counter our culture's death-denial. But what of a church that refuses to look upon itself and denies that it is in its own season of death?

Young Voices: Are the five core needs identified by Ikea to engender the feeling of home similar to the core needs of a Catholic to feel at home in a parish?