Luis Parrales

Several winters ago, a few weeks before Christmas, I went to confession. The parish close to work was hosting a reconciliation service, meant to prepare the faithful to celebrate the birth of Christ. A dozen or so priests were scattered across the cathedral. Penitents lined the aisles. Whispers of contrition and pardon filled the air.
The Catholic Church counsels believers to seek confession regularly—at the very least, once a year. I hadn’t been back in a few.

At a convent in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the bell chimes every day at 5 a.m. Then the 40 or so women who live there year-round—Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist—head to the chapel.
Their day begins with an hour of prayer, followed by Mass. At 7 a.m., they have breakfast together, in complete silence.

Toward the end of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and Penelope finally see each other after 20 years apart. Odysseus, disguised as “an ancient old man” by the goddess Athena, tells Penelope that her husband will return to kill the suitors who have tormented her. “Not one will avoid his death and destruction,” he says. This is Homer’s protagonist: wily, aided by a god, and eager for revenge—reflective of a culture that prized honor, strength, and fealty to a set of interventionist deities.

Each Sunday, a group of Catholics meets in the basement of St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village after the 6 p.m. Mass. They mingle over wine and cheese for half an hour, and then Father Jonah Teller, a Dominican friar and priest, usually leads an hour-long discussion—about the nature of freedom, perhaps, or the virtue of hope, or a theologically laden Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. The weekly gathering is called In Vino Veritas, Latin for “In wine, there is truth.