Laura Kelly Fanucci
Recent Posts
The told story is not the whole story. We tend to grasp onto moments as the whole. In a culture obsessed with tiny tweets and shiny surfaces, it’s easier to outrage or comfort ourselves with sound bytes that echo the thoughts between our ears, daily dulling our curiosity. We take the smallest sliver for the…
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Pregnant women inhabit time in a whole new way. I’m 20 weeks, we declare. As if we were the child within us. As if we were the time itself. Our relationship to these womb-weeks is totalizing. Time means everything: how much time the baby needs, how much time we have left. But womb time is…
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When we were dating, then engaged, then married, I used to catch a glimpse of him and think—God, please send us daughters. Because I had never met a man like him, so strong and gentle all at once, so humble and quietly confident, so genuinely kind and caring. I watched how he treated his mother,…
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Their feet crush me. Tiny toes curling, ancient reflex. Baby socks lost in the dryer like doll clothing. Toddler tiptoes to reach the sink. Preschool slip-ons for circle time. Sport shoes for season after season—cleats, sneakers, boots. I know their feet intimately. Kiss them at diaper changes, sweet antidote to stink. Bathe them in bubbles…
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Sitting at my desk, working on words of loss, I watch a thousand cottonwood seeds drift by the window. White wisps rising on the breeze, lifted from my sight. Summer’s snow globe, shaken and set to spin. I remember noticing them, as if for the first time, the summer after our twins died. One afternoon…
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Each year on Mother’s Day, my heart goes out to those who struggle with this holiday. Inspired by this column on “How to Widen Our Hearts On Mother’s Day,” I’ve gathered prayers from readers into a litany to be prayed at church or at home – to remember all the mothers. Feel free to adapt…
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Holy Week—from Palm Sunday through Easter Sunday—is the most sacred week of the Christian year. Whether you’ve always celebrated Holy Week or you are new to these liturgical feasts, we invite you to enter into the beauty of this week however you can. If you’re expecting: Labor’s Stages: A Triduum. If you have a new…
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Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. —Simone Weil Look, mama, look, do you see? A thousand times a day, tugging at my sleeve, calling out in the rearview mirror, yelling from upstairs, downstairs, around the corner, from the other room—look! Come…
READ MOREA beloved theology professor of mine in college used to start each class with a simple prayer, repeating, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). One line spoken slowly, one word dropped each time until there was only “be.” Years later, a favorite writing teacher did the same during a week-long workshop.…
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Advent is a season of strange stories and wonder-full waiting. Angels. Dreams. Miraculous pregnancies. Surprising visitors. But in a season of powerful Scripture and symbols – light, darkness, watching, waiting – we can forget that the first Advent was embodied, too. Without pregnancy and birth – messy, physical experiences – Christmas could not have happened. What…
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He leans forward, eyes bright. Three Hail Marys are his. Each one he has started, and we have followed. He is four years old, sandy brown curls flopped in his eyes. His brothers have taken turns leading decades for weeks, and now he clamors for his chance, with all the gusto of younger siblings. He knows…
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What does it mean to live justly in the world today? How does our faith invite us to work for peace and justice wherever we are – even at home? My friend Haley wrote a wonderful book on how her family embraced a counter-cultural lifestyle of seeking the Gospel more intentionally – The Grace of…
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