INSIDE MY HOLY OF HOLIES

Dear Audrey,

Greetings in our Good Lord, my friend!

My name is Avera Maria Santo. We've never met before, but we are Sisters in Christ. I'm feeling lead by His Holy Spirit to write you this letter.

I write to you as a sister in faith, I write to you as a beloved Daughter...

It feels like a stab in the back.

Like he doesn't see me, but a lesser aspect of me. Like he won't look at me, only what he wills to see of me.

It feels like he's dismissing me.

Like I am not his spiritual daughter, but a figment of his ideology. Like I'm nothing more tha...

“I don’t think you actually understand what prayer really is…”

My spiritual director pointed this out to me when we met just a few weeks ago. He’d asked me previously what my most vivid memory of experiencing the presence of God in prayer was, and I couldn’t think of an...

I use to really hate sleeping alone.

There’s just something about it that makes me so uncomfortable sometimes.

I think it’s probably a bit more accurate to say that I hated the idea of sleeping alone forever. The idea that I could remain single for the rest of my life be...

About a month ago, I saw the movie Boy Erased after I was asked to write a review of it. If you're unfamiliar with the film, it's based off of true events and tells the story of a teenage boy, Jared, who comes out to his parents as gay and is enrolled in a conversion t...

Dear Bishops of the Holy Catholic Church,

When I was made aware of the efforts being made by pro-LGBT groups trying to persuade Catholic Bishops to change Church teaching on homosexuality, specifically at this year's Youth Synod, it devastated me.

As someone who has not...

I've been watching a bunch of TED Talks on YouTube as of late, trying to learn from people as I begin speaking more and more, and I thought that it would be so cool to give a TED Talk myself one day!

Just in case you don't know, TED is an organization that shares ideas,...

Recently I've been watching the film The Letters, which documents the later life of St. Teresa of Calcutta. Her willingness to serve the poorest of the poor in India, responding to the call God placed in her heart, blew me away. I knew I wanted to be like her, but I ju...

A couple of months ago, I was talking with a good friend from college who identifies as homosexual. I'm not sure what sparked the conversation, but she expressed her concern that she felt I honestly believed God would hate me if I dated a woman.

She was genuinely concer...

As Catholics, many of us are aware that June is the month that we celebrate and revere the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. The tender Heart of God made man, which shed blood and water on the Cross out of love for us. This Heart, placed in the world to be exposed to both ha...