Category Archives: religion

The Vanishing of Belief

January 30, 2025 – 2:14 pm

My Aunt Gloria loved to tell the story about my baptism. The christening was on a hot June day in 1952. Her husband was my godfather. He wore Marine officer whites and a smile. Uncle Jack was glad to be back from Korea. He was lucky to have survived the Chosin Reservoir. The priest recited […]

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BLESS ME FATHER by Peter Nolan Smith

January 30, 2025 – 8:38 am

Written February 10, 2022 My First Holy Communion and Confirmation of Faith to the Catholic Church took place at a church in Maine in 1960. My mother dressed me in white to symbolize the purity of my soul, although she had me wear a red jacket with a black velvet lapel. I had a fight […]

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Pagan Solstice – 2016

December 18, 2024 – 12:49 pm

Fourteen years ago I woke at 3:33 am. I remembered reading in the New York Times that there would be a lunar eclipse. The first to occur on the winter solstice in over 400 years. I looked out the window and saw the shadowed moon. A sliver of silver atop the Earth’s satellite. I stripped […]

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TORAH TORAH TORAH by Peter Nolan Smith

December 7, 2024 – 1:12 am

TORA TORA TORA was one of my mother’s favorite films. She loved history and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor burned bright in her memory. Her friends from Jamaica Plain enlisted in the Marines, Army, and Navy by the scores. Many of the them failed to return to Boston. Their bodies rest on islands across […]

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All Souls Day

November 3, 2024 – 2:24 pm

My older brother and I were altar boys in the early 1960s Pre-Vatican II. We were taught to say the Mass in Latin by the diocesan priest assigned to the local church on the edge of the Blue Hills south of Boston. We understood nothing other mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa or ‘forgive […]

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