Hello. My name is Ryan O’Rourke and as of this writing I am a board certified Catholic Lay chaplain who has spent the majority of my ministerial career in eldercare.
From a very early age I was interested in all things spiritual. By the time I was a teenager and suffering from the thousand natural shocks that teenage flesh is heir to, I had become hyper-interested in religion less for answers than for relief from the pain of life. I began with my own Catholic faith as it was closest at hand, but in short order ventured into the study of other faiths and philosophies. Never did find many answers, but the pain relief came from people who helped me wrestle with the questions.
I consider myself a person of faith not because of people who presumed to know the answers, but because of those who didn’t let me wrestle alone.
That is still where the relief comes from. Its been quite a journey since my teenage years. Along the way I’ve experienced, as I’m sure you have, success and failure both personally and professionally. I’ve met people who have radically changed the trajectory of my life in ways I could have never foresaw or imagined, some of whom are still in my life today and some who were only meant for a season. I’ve experienced love, light, laughter, community, isolation, depression, darkness, difficulties, peak experiences and the valleys that go with them. I’ve acquired friends and enemies. I’ve loved and lost. I’ve been hurt and I have done the hurting.
And I’ve learned that God can be found in it all.
In a very round-about way I did circle back to the Catholic faith of my childhood, albeit with different eyes. When people ask me my religion these days, I like to say that I’m rooted in Catholicism, but not limited to it. If religion is the language through which we speak to God and God to us, I’m Catholic not because I belief it is a superior religious system, but because it is my native tongue and the language I will always speak the best.
I’ve done a lot of writing over the course of my personal and professional life trying to frame the ordinary day-to-day in the context of the big picture and trying to find meaning in the midst of the madness. Sometimes I write because it is part of my job to prepare sermons and eulogies. Other times I write because I have a flash of insight that seems at the time important enough to capture. Sometimes its simply because I have and itch to scratch or an ax to grind.
This blog will probably include a little of it all. I hope you will find inspiration, humor and comfort in my attempt to frame common experiences and look for God in the midst of them. Thank you for reading.
ryanwriting 