Author: Sal Umana

Sal Umana, a second-generation Sicilian-American, was born in Boston, in 1929, of parents who were Italian citizens, which makes him a de jure citizen of Italy, and therefore of the European Union. He attended Boston Latin School (the oldest public school in the U.S., founded in 1635), and instead of automatically going to Harvard, he went to a seminary and became a Catholic priest. After a varied career of 24 years working in 49 States, in Canada, in Italy, and the Caribbean, he left the active priesthood to become a psychotherapist and author. He is the author of The Midlife Crisis as a Crisis of Meaning, The Day God Died, The Day My Ego Died, and Back to Earth, as the third book of The Twin Towers Trilogy. Now, at age 91, Sal is dying his way into eternity, and learning that "dying every day is already eternal life."

THE SIMPLEST EXPLANATION OF INFUSED CONTEMPLATION

~ Sal Umana ~ Leave a comment

When I was in the novitiate (1948, age 18), I began to do silent meditation without any words, any thoughts, any feelings. We were studying the mystics, especially John of the Cross, and I wondered if my meditation was what they were writing about: especially John of the Cross who kept saying “Nada, nada, nada” (nothing, nothing, nothing.) But I never really knew what was happening to me, and I still don’t. But I just ran across a passage from Mirabai Starr, a meditation teacher from Los Alamos, New Mexico, that suddenly explained what has been happening to me these last 78 years. Here it is:

“SURVIVING  DOUBT

John of the Cross describes the doubt that disrupts a soul in the dark night, when all sense of knowing God is absent. Mirabai Starr translates from John’s classic work Dark Night of the Soul:

The deep suffering of the soul … comes not so much from the aridity she must endure but from this growing suspicion that she has lost her way. She thinks that all spiritual blessing is over and that God has abandoned her. She finds neither support nor delight in holy things. Growing weary, she struggles in vain to practice the [prayer methods] that used to yield results.

John of the Cross encourages those experiencing this dark night to trust the silence that comes when we surrender our need to speak to God using words:

This is no time for discursive meditation. Instead, the soul must surrender into peace and quietude, even if she is convinced she is doing nothing and wasting time. She might assume that this lack of desire to think about anything is a sure sign of her laziness. But simple patience and perseverance in a state of formless prayerfulness, while doing nothing, accomplishes great things.

All that is required here is to set her soul free, unencumbered, to let her take a break from ideas and knowledge, to quit troubling herself about thinking and meditating. The soul must content herself with a loving attentiveness toward God, without agitation, without effort, without the desire to taste or feel [God]. These urges only disquiet and distract the soul from the peaceful quietude and sweet ease inherent in the gift of contemplation being offered.

The soul might continue to have qualms about wasting time. She may wonder if it would not be better to be doing something else, since she cannot think or activate anything in prayer. Let her bear these doubts calmly. There is no other way to go to prayer now than to surrender to this sweet ease and breadth of spirit. If the soul tries to engage her interior faculties to accomplish something, she will squander the goodness God is instilling in her through the peace in which she is simply resting….

The best thing for the soul to do is to pay no attention to the fact that the actions of her faculties are slipping away…. She needs to get out of the way. In peaceful plentitude, let her now say “yes” to the infused contemplation God is bestowing upon her…. Contemplation is nothing other than a secret, peaceful, loving inflow of God. If given room, it will fire the soul in the spirit of love.”

Easter means love is stronger than death, just as Spring means life is stronger than winter’s death.

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Just a few thoughts about the Easter Season. I tried to observe Lent as spiritually as I could, and when Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of Holy Week arrived, I felt it was one of the most glorious contemplative experiences of my 97 years.  I saw the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus in a marvelous new way, as the Pascal Mystery of Passover from slavery to freedom, as the Hebrews did in Pharaoh’s Egypt. But now, through the Crucifixion of Jesus, all of us rise from the oppression of limited, temporary time and endless death into eternal life. “ I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.” ( John 11: 25-26.) All of a sudden, everything seemed to converge on an understanding of Jesus’ Resurrection as spiritual rather than material. Different sources were saying we must not be fixated on the ‘miracle’ of  Jesus’s body rising from the tomb and physically appearing to Mary Magdalen, then to the Apostles, then to the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Though we will always “wonder” what the physical touching of Jesus’ resurrected body in the scriptures really meant, (after all, the meaning of ‘wonder’ to the scripture writers was what we now call “miracle”, they are not necessarily talking about a literal, actual physical event rather than a mystical vision or a contemplative ecstasy.

    Dominic Crossan, of whom I am a fan, spoke about the hundreds of paintings, stained glass, mosaics, and frescoes, that showed not a bodily resurrection but an “Anastasis”, a “rising up” of followers of Jesus after his crucifixion, convinced that “love is stronger than death.” And Paul saying, “Death, where is thy sting?” Modern scripture scholars talk about the crucifixion and resurrection, not as Jesus dying for our sins, or atoning for original sin, or opening up the gates of heaven by God’s only son to appease God’s anger at the lot of us, as only God could do.

    Instead, Christianity conquered the Roman Empire because the Romans had a morbid fear of death, and were spellbound by a loving, healing, innocent Jewish prophet who came back from a horrible crucifixion and inspired thousands of his followers to face death with joy. The Apostles, the disciples, the many women followers of Jesus went all over the then-known world, and established meetings, gatherings (ecclesias or ‘bringing togethers’)- which we now call ‘churches.’ This is the movement that has always continued to spread throughout humankind because of the Easter Event. Now that’s the miracle mankind was looking for.

This was all confirmed for me when I read that Pope Leo, on the anniversary of Pope Francis’ death, which was on Easter a year ago, made this statement: “Death is not a wall, but a door that opens wide onto the Mercy that Pope Francis tirelessly proclaimed.”     Sounds a lot like Jesus to me.

More and More Meaning of Resurrection

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This amazing exploration of the meaning of Resurrection is from Hans Kung, (March 19, 1928-  Apr. 6, 2021):

“… Resurrection means a life that bursts through the dimensions of space and time in God’s invisible, imperishable, incomprehensible domain. This is what is meant by ‘heaven’- not the heaven of the astronauts but God’s heaven. It means going into reality not going out. Resurrection, therefore, means that Jesus did not die into nothingness, but in death died into that incomprehensible and comprehensible, absolutely last/ absolutely first reality, was indeed taken up into the most real reality which we designate by the name of God. And it is this very act that the first witnesses regard, as having universal importance, as having importance even for us.”

  Hans Kung is directly in the same mystical tradition as the “Cloud of Unknowing” and Meister Eckhardt. He states that our experience of Jesus’ Resurrection is a journey inward into ourselves, through a cloud of unknowing, “through the dimensions of time and space” into God’s “ETERNAL NOW.” “This is what is meant by “heaven.” “It is not going OUT of reality but INTO reality.”

That ultimate reality is God’s FOREVER : ETERNITY, where there is no beginning and no end. It is an ETERNAL NOW, where everything that has ever happened and everything that will ever happen exists forever in the mystery of God.

  This is what faith leads us to. This is why St. Paul can say “Death where is thy sting?” And why the Last Book of the Bible can say “Death is no more !”

  And Jesus has the final word : “I am the resurrection and the life, he/she who believes in me will never die.”

Jesse Jackson’s prophetic words to the Democratic party 42 years ago

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What I loved about Jesse Jackson was his appeal to the Democratic Party to embrace his coalition of “the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised.”

Isn’t it ironic that Trump later demagogued so many of Hilary’s “deplorables” — the same desperate, damned, disinherited, disrespected, and despised people? He cynically seduced so many of them into embracing his lies and voting for him. “What have you got to lose?” Trump asked them. What if the Democratic Party had listened to Jackson and embraced those disinherited, disrespected, and desperate fellow Americans — the poor and disenfranchised that Jesse Jackson was talking about? What if the Democrats had adopted Jackson’s words from the Sermon on the Mount: “Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, teach the illiterate, provide jobs for the jobless.”

Jackson concluded with Emma Lazarus’s lines that Trump now wants to erase from the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, give me your poor, your huddled masses who yearn to breathe free.”

To read the full text of Jackson’s speech, click here.

To read Jonathan Wolfe’s NYTimes article ‘The Jesse Jackson Speech That Helped Redefine the Democratic Party’s Base” click here.

Christmas 2025

~ Sal Umana ~ 3 Comments

For the past 60 years, I have been sending out a Christmas message to as many people as I had addresses for. But now that I am almost 97 and have just moved into Assisted Living at Casa Celeste in Seminole, Florida, I am fighting the temptation to “fageddaboudit,” as they used to say in Boston when I was a kid. Or, as my father used to say during the last few years I went home for Christmas, “Well, this will be my last Christmas.” Then he died at 94.

So, in case this is my last Christmas, I’d hate to deprive you all of the pleasure of hearing from me one more time. I remember well that the first thing my father would read in the daily Boston Globe was the obituaries. How I loved my dad—or “Puppa,” as we all called him. He would be 135 today, and he worked very hard to make this damn country much better than it was when he arrived here at age 14 in 1904. Thank God I.C.E. wasn’t around then, or I wouldn’t be writing this letter. But there was no illegal immigration then. As long as you didn’t have an incurable disease, they let you in, and you built the damn country with your bare hands and a pick and shovel up on the dirt roads of Maine.

Now you can guess where this Christmas message is going. This is a country of immigrants, starting with the Pilgrims, who in 1620 landed in Plymouth—about 30 miles from the pier in Boston where that young kid from Sicily landed. The natives didn’t really like the Pilgrims, who in turn didn’t like the Irish, who in turn didn’t like the Italians, who in turn didn’t like the Poles. But we married each other, and love somehow won—more or less. And their kids are really beautiful. Just look on my Facebook page and laugh your behind off at their names. They are now into the fifth generation, going on sixth, from Seattle to Florida.

I know we can’t have open borders, but why the reckless cruelty in deporting people as if they were animals? Why can’t we put all that money and manpower into creating a legal system that makes people wait in line so they can be absorbed into our society humanely? It sounds naïve and impossible, but Americans have always found a way when they had the will. Do we, the grassroots, have the will? The leadership won’t do it unless we demand it.

Call me naïve, but on Christmas we celebrate the birth of a Palestinian in an occupied country who was later executed by the government for teaching that people should treat each other as if we are all members of the same family, no matter what party we belong to or how much money or power we have.

I’m going to go on praying to Him, and I hope you will join me in praying for all our fellow Americans so we can together solve a problem that is tearing us apart.

Merry Christmas and Peace in 2026 for You and Yours,

Sal and Peggy Umana

AN ADVENT MEDITATION FOR DECEMBER 2025

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Here is a beautiful piece borrowed from Mirabai Starr of the Center For Action and Contemplation:


Saying Yes to Our Lives


Mirabai Starr recounts how she came to say yes to God in her life as it is instead of how she imagined it should be:
“All my life, I have been enamored of the God-intoxicated ones. Those rarified souls who slip into ecstatic states and spontaneously utter poetry. The ones who exude deep stillness, embody equanimity, listen more than they speak. The initiated and the ordained, the monastics….


I wanted to be one of them. Until I didn’t.


I want you not to want that as well…. I want you to want to be exactly who you are: a true human person doing their best to show up for this fleeting life with a measure of grace, with kindness and a sense of humor, with curiosity and a willingness to not have all the answers, with reverence for life.


You do not need to chant all night in a temple in the Himalayas. You don’t have to be the newest incarnation of Mary Magdalene. It is not necessary to read or write spiritual books. You are not required to know the difference between Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism or memorize the Beatitudes. All you have to do to walk the path of the ordinary mystic is to cultivate a gaze of wonder and step onto the road. Keep walking. Rest up, and walk again. Fall down, get up, walk on. Pay attention to the landscape. To the ways it changes and the ways it stays the same. Be alert to surprises and turn with the turning of the seasons. Honor your body, train your mind, and keep your heart open against all odds. Say yes to what is, even when it is uncomfortable or embarrassing or heartbreaking. Hurl your handful of yes into the treetops and then lift your face as the rain of yes drops its grace all over you, all around you, and settles deep inside you.”

Mary at the Annunciation lifted up her face and the rain of Grace came down as the Word of God became flesh in her.
“Be it done to me, according to your word.”

The Sermon on the Mount is About Life on Earth, not in Heaven

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Today, Richard Rohr’s meditation stated succinctly and clearly an insight into spirituality that I have been pondering for fifty years, but have never been able to express as clearly as today’s meditation did.

We were often taught that Jesus was talking about: “Blessed are the poor, the meek, those who suffer, those who grieve, etc., etc. BECAUSE THEY WILL BE REWARDED AFTER DEATH IN HEAVEN.”

Here, the meditation clearly states that Jesus was saying that the poor are blessed and fortunate because if they live in the presence of God, they will not suffer from being poor. They will be filled with joy, as Francis of Assisi was.

Blessed are the meek, the kind, the non-violent because they realize that they already possess the earth. It was given to them by their Father in heaven.

This is the meditation that we need to begin and end each day with. Happy Blessings.

“What Does It Mean to Be Blessed? Heaven begins now, for any saints willing to sign up.” —Barbara Brown Taylor, Always a Guest

Spiritual writer Barbara Brown Taylor considers the promise of “blessing” that is central to Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount:

“We don’t have to wonder what a blessed life looks like. Jesus laid that out right at the beginning of his most famous sermon, though his description is so far from what some of us had hoped that we would rather discuss the teaching than act on it…. In this life, most of us pedal pretty hard to avoid going in the direction of Jesus’ Beatitudes. We read books that promise to enrich our spirits. We find all kinds of ways to sedate our mournfulness.

“According to Jesus, the blessings of the kingdom are available here and now—and later:

“The first words out of Jesus’ mouth are not ‘Blessed shall be’ but ‘Blessed are.’ ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’—not because of something that will happen to them later but because of what their poverty opens up in them right now. ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness’—not because God is going to fill them up later but because their appetites are so fine-tuned right now….

“When people who can’t stop crying hear Jesus call them blessed right in the basement of their grief, they realize this isn’t something they are supposed to get over soon. This is what it looks like to have a blessed and broken heart….

“When people who are getting beat up for doing the right thing hear Jesus call them blessed while the blows are still coming, they are freed to feel the pain in a different way. The bruises won’t hurt any less, but the new meaning in them can make them easier to bear. Who knows? They may even change the hearts of those landing the blows, while they bring the black-and-blue into communion with each other like almost nothing else can.

“This is what the Beatitudes have to do with real life. They describe a view of reality in which the least likely candidates are revealed to be extremely fortunate in the divine economy of things, not only later but right now. They are Jesus’ truth claims for all time, the basis of everything that follows, which everyone who hears them is free to accept, reject, or neglect. Whatever you believe about him, believe this about you: the things that seem to be going most wrong for you may in fact be the things that are going most right. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to fix them. It just means they may need blessing as much as they need fixing, since the blessing is already right there. If you can breathe into it—well, that’s when heaven comes to earth, because earth is where heaven starts, for all who are willing to live into it right now.”

The Cherokee Story of the Two Wolves Within Us

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There’s an old Cherokee tale about two wolves, and I have been thinking about it a lot these days. The story goes something like this:

One evening, an elderly Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside each of us.

He said, “My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all. One is evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.”

“The same fight is going on inside you—and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one that you feed.”

The last line of this story keeps coming to mind as we navigate through these days and weeks. I have always understood the story’s message, but I feel like I am regularly being presented with opportunities to take the wisdom of the story to heart—to ask the question: which wolf am I feeding?

As humans, it is natural for us to experience a wide range of emotions. This is why both wolves reside inside of us. Experiencing some amount of grief, fear, anxiety, or uncertainty, would seem to be both a natural and normal emotional expression of the current situation. However, how much of these emotions do we allow? Do we continually feed them to the point that our bad wolf is dominating?

The tale of the two wolves is a great reminder that we have choice over what we let reside inside of us. Once we become aware of the two wolves, we gain the power to stop feeding the bad wolf and start putting that time and energy towards the good wolf, so that it can thrive.

That doesn’t mean that we will ever completely rid ourselves of fear, worry, or doubt. We simply move around them—towards love, kindness, generosity and hope. We practice keeping our perspective focused on the things that are positive, productive, and beneficial—both for ourselves and for others. This feeds our good wolf.

And this choice can define how we will experience the weeks and months ahead of us.

These cherished words from our native Americans remind me of the Apostle Paul’s admonitions about the fruits of the Spirit from Corinthians and Ephesians: “charity (love), joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, etc.”

According to St. Paul, we are given the Holy Spirit’s gifts to feed the good wolf within us, with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and all of the “amazing grace” that is given to us if we choose to accept it.

On the other hand, we can feed the bad wolf within us with pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, sloth, fear, deception, resentment, rage, and all the human natural urges we are born with. We are free to wallow in our natural instinctual sins, or we can, by honesty and humility, acknowledge them in us while the Holy Spirit is simultaneously offering us the grace of love and kindness and forgiveness.

We saw a perfect example of the good wolf / bad wolf at the memorial for Charlie Kirk a few weeks ago. Erika Kirk accepted the gift of grace and forgave the man who killed her husband.

Right after Erika fed her good wolf, the President fed his bad wolf by saying “Sorry, Erika, I hate all those who want to kill me.” While Jesus gave us the most difficult of all forgiveness stories: Dying on the Cross He said: “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Thank you, Pope Francis

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Saturday, April 26, 2025 will always be a banner day for Peggy and me. We recorded Francis’ Memorial Celebration on two different channels and watched them both when we woke up and were rewarded with an ancient city that still remains in so many ways the center of planet earth. The colors of the vestments, the robes, the dresses and the suits, but especially of the faces, clearly showed the oneness of humanity that gave such a rebuke to the violence, destruction, the suffering and the killing among our brothers and sisters in too many parts of the planet. Pope Francis gave his life in the effort to proclaim our God-given Unity, which we humans have never really accepted. Just one example: the absolute barbarity of war, of brother slaughtering brother, still, after thousands of years of such mindless inhumane destruction. “Where have all the flowers gone? “ Indeed. But for one day, through the life and death of a very ordinary man, as Bergoglio himself said, from the “END OF THE EARTH”, from the tip of South America, as far as you can get from the marble halls of the Vatican, God showed an Eternal Father’s Love for all of us “poor children of Eve” who are mysteriously God’s children from eternity to eternity. Pope Francis, in his thirteen years as Pontifex, ( builder of bridges) tried so hard to bring God’s family together that he made 47 international trips, and flew 291,423 miles. That is 11.6 times around he world.

Thank you, Pope Francis. You asked us to pray for you. Now you have to pray for us: tutti, tutti, ALL OF US !!! Amen.

It is in Dying that we are Born to Eternal Life

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This was a stunning Easter Celebration with the death of Michael Volpe, a beloved friend whom I met on my first Mission in 1956, not quite 70 years ago. He died on early Good Friday, and left us in mourning until early Easter Monday when Pope Francis joined Mike in eternal life. On TV this morning Cardinal Dolan of New York talked about the Conclave in which they elected Pope Francis. Dolan said that they were told at the beginning that the Holy Spirit had already chosen a Pope among them, and it was their task to pray until they were told by the Hol Spirit who to vote for. I really believe that Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a gift from God to us. I also believe that Mike Volpe was a gift of God to us.

We may argue about the miracles of the Bible till the end of time, but I believe the gift of Mike and Bergoglio to us was a miracle. After all, miracle really means “something to marvel at”, “something that seems unbelievable”. But how could you not believe in miracles when you met these men? What a gift they were to us with their kindness, gentleness, above all, quiet overwhelming love?

Pope Francis’s last Encyclical was “Dilexit nos”, that is: “How God loved us” taken from Romans 8. In Romans, Paul says,  “God loved us”, but uses the expression dilexit which means God loved us with delight. God is so glad he made us.

The very first talk Francis made when he was elected Pope in 2013, he addressed the entire world in his urbi and orbi blessing which is every Pope’s traditional Blessing to the “city and to the world”, and he cried out simply, “You are all children of God.” That was an infallible statement.

Now I don’t have to go to Rochester, NY any more to see my friend Mike Volpe, neither do I have to fly to Rome to see Pope Francis. Now by the eternal goodness of God, I can talk immediately to them right now in my heart where they will always remain. So be it.