James and his friend Al went out for coffee. James found himself telling Al that he couldn’t get back to where he’d been before his wife died three years earlier. Work helped him keep going, as did his kids, friends and parish. He was praying, exercising and volunteering — but he felt worse instead of better, lost and uncertain. Nothing seemed to fit anymore.

To listen to a young child babbling as children love to do, wanting to be heard, needing and learning to speak, is to hear the oft-repeated words: mama, dada (or baba).

What is spirituality? It’s a word used so variously that defining it can seem like pinning a cloud to the wall. In Christianity, spirituality has a clear meaning. It refers to living a relationship.

Moving day, for most of us, might not be our favourite. Usually full of chaos and hard work, stress and mess, it’s something we put up with rather than look forward to.

My mother was an eager learner, but with little patience for pretence. She’d recount her dismay at asking a school teacher about the dogma of the Trinity, only to be shut down by being told: “It’s a mystery.”

As with the disciples who walked the earth with Jesus, belonging to Him means belonging to each other — and this raises unavoidable questions, from who gets to be in charge, to what to do when somebody starts stealing. Even with Christ at the centre, it’s not easy to be a community.

At a Project Rachel retreat, one participant approached a facilitator toward the end of the weekend. “Why?” she asked, incredulous. “Why would someone who’s never had an abortion want to spend their time helping us who have?”

A certain young woman had deep faith in God, but little connection with religion. Later she embraced Church life and revisited concepts, stories and Scripture passages she’d learned as a child and still understood in childish ways. She was astonished to discover one of the beatitudes declares: “Blessed are the meek” (Matthew 5:5).

“The proudest moment in my life,” Tom Sawyer calls it. It’s a comically poignant moment in Mark Twain’s novel when Tom and Huck attend their own funeral.