Sunday, December 27, 2009

Not Bah Humbug exactly

I sometimes think we expect too much of Christmas Day. We try to crowd into it the long arrears of kindliness and humanity of the whole year. As for me, I like to take my Christmas a little at a time, all through the year.

- David Grayson
American author and journalist (1870-1946)

Sunday, October 18, 2009

The Origins of Life

The Origins of Life

Shared via AddThis

the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff

Noble laureate, Professor of Biology, Harvard University, the late George Wald, from

"Life and Mind in the Universe" for the 1984 Quantum Biology Symposium:

"It has occurred to me lately -- I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities – that both questions [the origin of consciousness in humans and of life from non-living matter] might be brought into some degree of congruence. This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality – the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create: science-, art-, and technology-making animals. In them the universe begins to know itself."

Friday, October 09, 2009

I do not go to Mass to make myself "better." I go because, in the dimmest reaches of my scattered, angst-ridden mind, there is something that wants me to get down on my knees and, in spite of my own suffering and all the suffering around me, give thanks. I go because I am beginning to believe that heaven is not in some other world, but shot through the broken world in which we live.

- Heather King, from her essay "Heaven and Earth"

Monday, September 21, 2009

Reconciliation is the ultimate aim of nonviolence because nonviolence holds not only for the absolute inviolability of the human person, both friend and enemy, but maintains that human beings are ultimately one family, brothers and sisters to each other.

- Niall O'Brien,
Columban priest in the Philippines

Friday, September 18, 2009

The hunger for God can only be satisfied by a love that is face to face, person to person. It is only in the eyes of another that we can find the Icon of Christ. We must make the other person aware we love him. If we do, he will know that God loves him. He will never hunger again.

- Catherine de Hueck Doherty,
Catholic social activist and founder of Madonna House (1896-1985)

Friday, August 28, 2009

Whatever else may be said of man, this one thing is clear: He is not what he is capable of being.

- G.K. Chesterton

Thursday, August 20, 2009

success means different things to different people

“I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.

- C.S. Lewis

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

let us work together

If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

- Lilla Watson,
Aboriginal elder, educator, and activist

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

if You're up there and You can hear me, show me the way


In one of motion pictures' most moving pertayals Jimmy Stewart wasn't really acting; those tears were real.

In this 1977 article that Stewart wrote forGuideposts, the actor recalls that George "is unaware that most of the people in town are arduously praying for him. In this scene, at the lowest point in George Bailey's life, Frank Capra was shooting a long shot of me slumped in despair. In agony I raise my eyes and following the script, plead, 'God...God...dear Father in heaven, I'm not a praying man, but if You're up there and You can hear me, show me the way, I'm at the end of my rope. Show me the way, God...'

"As I said those words, I felt the loneliness and hopelessness of people who had nowhere to turn, and my eyes filled with tears. I broke down sobbing. This was not planned at all, but the power of that prayer, the realization that our Father in heaven is there to help the hopeless had reduced me to tears."


Damn the Torpedoes

The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.

- Abraham Lincoln


If we confront injustice only when we can be sure that we will succeed, we will likely never advance the Kingdom.

Of course we can and should count the cost and weigh options to determine what action will most effectively improve the situation but once the course is known we need to 'damn the torpedoes and go full steam ahead'.

The life and death of Jesus and so many of his followers is a lesson in how to change a world of power and abuse to one of love and justice. The desired results have not fully come but like leaven in the loaf the sacrifice will have its effect and the Kingdom will arise.

LH


Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.

Reinhold Niebuhr





Saturday, June 20, 2009

The care of another--even material, bodily care--is spiritual in essence. Bread for myself is a material question; bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.

- Jacques Maritain







Thursday, June 18, 2009

the cross brings us to an equality that politics and force never could...........let us exalt every valley and bring low every mountain

If I cannot in honest happiness take the second place (or the twentieth); if I cannot take the first without making a fuss about my unworthiness, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

- Amy Carmichael

Stop the cycle of self and other abuse

Say 'No' to Suffering

What we most frequently see when the mind is focused and clear are the habits of mind that create unnecessary suffering, habits fueled by greed and hatred and delusion. Over and over we struggle with our lives, resenting our experiences, blaming ourselves for not being other than who we are. We are unable to see past the immediate, overwhelming drama of our personal story to find relief—indeed, liberation—in the consoling realization of an astonishingly lawful cosmos. Paying attention to current experience stops the stories that create and recreate suffering.


Text from Commit to Sit: Tools for Cultivating a Meditation Practice 

A worthy goal for any pilgrim

Move Toward Kindness

The practice of seeing clearly is what finally moves us toward kindness. Seeing, again and again, the infinite variety of traps we create for seducing the mind into struggle, seeing the endless rounds of meaningless suffering over lusts and aversions (which, although seemingly urgent, are essentially empty), we feel compassion for ourselves. And then, quite naturally, we feel compassion for everyone else. We know as we have never known before that we are stuck, all of us, with bodies and minds and instincts and impulses, all in a tug-of-war with our basic heart nature that yearns to relax into love. Then we surrender. We love. We laugh. We appreciate.


Text from Commit to Sit: Tools for Cultivating a Meditation Practice 

The Art of Connecting Robin Hood to Rosebud

Become Clear

meditation

Like the archer straightening his arrow and perfecting his aim, the practitioner of meditation straightens out the mind while aiming his or her attentional energy at its object. Learning to drop what we're doing, however momentarily, and to genuinely pay attention in the present moment, without attachment or bias, helps us become clear, just as a snow globe becomes clear when we stop shaking it and its flakes settle.



Text from Commit to Sit: Tools for Cultivating a Meditation Practice 

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are anger and courage. Anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain as they are.

- St. Augustine

Hey 'Kid' be a mensch and just shake and make up like a good boy?

It is the acid test of nonviolence that ... there is no rancor left behind, and in the end, the enemies are converted into friends.

- Mohandas Gandhi

Sunday, June 14, 2009

speared in the groin

The agony of defeat took on new meaning when I learned that the captain and the heart soul and (testicles) of my team, Nicholas Lidstom, required surgery in the previous round to repair damage caused by a stick to the groin.  I thought he wasn't quite up to his best game in the finals. Now we know why.









May God Bless all the wounded warriors but especially our incredible Captain Nik and his nicked knackers.

it certainly is a good deal for the half-hearted and the corrupt

It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death. It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization—it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

- Graham Greene,
The Power and the Glory

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

we are your bad conscience

Everywhere and at all times of greatest trial [people] have appeared, prophets and saints who cherished their freedom, who preached the One God and who with [God's] help brought the people to a reversal of their downward course. Man is free, to be sure, but without the true God he is defenseless against the principle of evil.... We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience.

- Sophie Scholl,
and her co-resisters in The White Rose, a nonviolent student movement against the Nazis.

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

we must never forget that our choices have consequences

The picture is that of a 21-week-old unborn baby named Samuel Alexander Armas, who is being operated on by surgeon named Joseph Bruner.

The baby was diagnosed with spina bifida and would not survive if removed from his mother's womb. Little Samuel's mother, Julie Armas, knew of Dr Bruner's remarkable 
Surgical procedure. Practicing at Vanderbilt Uni v Med Ctr in Nashville , he performs these special operations while the baby is still in the womb.

During the procedure, the doctor removes the uterus via C-section and makes a small incision to operate on the baby. As Dr Bruner completed the surgery on Samuel, the little guy reached his tiny, but fully developed Hand through the incision and firmly grasped the surgeon's finger. Dr Bruner was reported as saying that when his finger was grasped, it was the most emotional moment of his life, and that for an instant during the procedure he was just frozen, totally immobile. 

The photograph captures this amazing event with perfect clarity 

Little Samuel's mother said they 'wept for days' when they saw the picture. 
She said, 'The photo reminds us pregnancy isn't about disability or an illness, it's about a little person. 'Samuel was born in perfect health, the operation 100 percent successful. 

Now see the actual picture........ 








Friday, May 29, 2009

"The Law of the Garbage Truck."



 

One day a fellow hopped in a taxi and took off for the airport. They were driving in the right lane when suddenly a black car jumped out of a parking space right in front of them.  

The taxi driver slammed on his brakes, skidded, and missed the other car by just inches!  The driver of the other car whipped his head around and started yelling at them. The taxi driver just smiled and waved at the guy.  And I mean, he was really friendly. 

When asked, why did he react so positively, 

The taxi driver merely recited "The Law of the Garbage Truck." 

He explained that many people are like garbage trucks.  They run around full of garbage -- frustration, anger, disappointment.  As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it and sometimes they'll dump it on you.  

Don't take it personally. Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on.  

Don't take their garbage and spread it to other people at work, at home, or on the streets. 

The bottom line is that successful people do not let garbage trucks take over their day.  Love the people who treat you right. Pray for the ones who don't.

Life is ten percent what you make it and ninety percent how you take it!

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

humanity hanging on a cross

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

How hard is it to be in our Right Minds when living in a bent World? .....very hard!

"He is mentally not stable, because he had the courage to say in his blog that he is a Christian. Anyone in his right mind in Saudi Arabia wouldn't do that."
Gamal Eid, director of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information, explaining why Saudi officials released blogger Hamoud Saleh Al-Amri. 





Wednesday, May 20, 2009

I try to be a Christian


Can anyone ask or do anything more?



might be an excellent epitaph for honest men's gravestones. 

an enigma wrapped in a paradox....a prince in pauper's clothing. An honest man in search of Diogenes. A man of letters seeking a fitting climax.



In 1982, Merv Griffin asked the director about it during an interview. Welles replied, "I try to be a Christian. [But] I don't pray really, because I don't want to bore God." In fact, prayer was almost as uncomfortable subject for Welles as the birds and the bees. He told the French New Wave magazineCahiers du Cinema, "In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God."