Seven habits of highly happy people

Seven habits of highly happy people

(if it makes you happy to be happy then be happy)

True humility doesn't consist of thinking ill of yourself but of not thinking of yourself much differently from the way you'd be apt to think of anybody else.

-Frederick Buechner

We are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside...True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

We are all receiving Charity.

There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved. It is no one's fault if they do not so love it ... You might as well ask people to like the taste of rotten bread or the sound of a mechanical drill. We can be forgiven, and pitied, and loved in spite of it, with Charity; no other way. All who have good parents, wives, husbands, or children, may be sure that at some times -- and perhaps at all times in respect of some one particular trait or habit -- they are receiving Charity, are loved not because they are lovable but because Love Himself [Christ] is in those who love them.

- C.S. Lewis, from his book, The Four Loves

These are from a book called 'Disorder in the American Courts' and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by court reporters that had the torment of staying calm while these exchanges were actually taking place.

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ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS: I forget.
ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forgot?
_____________________________________

ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam?
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ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the twenty-year-old, how old is he?
WITNESS: He's twenty, much like your IQ


ATTORNEY: Were you present when your picture was taken?
WITNESS: Are you shitting me?
_____________________________________

ATTORNEY: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And what were you doing at that time?
WITNESS: Getting laid
_____________________________________

ATTORNEY: She had three children, right?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: How many were boys?
WITNESS: None.
ATTORNEY: Were there any girls?
WITNESS : Your Honor, I think I need a different attorney. Can I get a new attorney?
_____________________________________

ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS: By death.
ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated?
WITNESS: Take a guess
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ATTORNEY: Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS: He was about medium height and had a beard.
ATTORNEY: Was this a male or a female?
WITNESS: Unless the Circus was in town I'm going with male
_____________________________________

ATTORNEY: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
WITNESS: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.
_____________________________________

ATTORNEY: Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?
WITNESS: All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight.
_____________________________________

ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
WITNESS: Oral.
_____________________________________




ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 pm.
ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS: If not, he was by the time I finished
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ATTORNEY: Are you qualified to give a urine sample?
WITNESS: Are you qualified to ask that question?
_____________________________________

And the best for last:




ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law

because its god's will

creative people often put sex and faith together

the love of a man for a woman echoes of transcendence

and when that love is consummated it sends a product of that love into the world

if that man and woman love their own they will want to create a world where love and righteous dwell

let us go and build the kingdom

where all of us are included

in the community of the beloved

LH

are you the one I've been waiting for

into my arms oh lord

God Gloried...

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God ... gloried in becoming a member of the human race.

- Thomas Merton, from A Book of Hours

The irony would be delicious if it were not so bitter: earnest theologians have been earnestly persuading Christians for sixteen centuries that their gospel supports violence, while massive outpourings of citizens in one officially atheist country after another [during the peaceful overturning of the Soviet regime and its allies at the end of theCold War] recently have demonstrated the effectiveness of Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence as a means of liberation.

- Walter Wink, from his bookThe Powers That Be

dumping on others

To anyone reading this...I have taken a sabbatical from the blog world but from time to time I will add some of the things that are meaningful to me. They may have no context or explanation for anyone else. They will appear random...perhaps in time I will visit this site with a coherent and sustained effort to communicate something but for now this space is my dumping grounds for things i want to save but have no place to store them.


welcome to my garbage dump/treasure pile.


Happy Rooting.

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)

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."

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"

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

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)

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

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

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

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

Codex Sinaiticus world's oldest bible now online

και αποκριθειϲ ο > 

βαϲιλευϲ ερει αυτοιϲ 

αμην λεγω ϋμιν 

εφ οϲον εποιηϲα

τε ενι τουτων τω 

αδελφων μου τω 

ελαχιϲτων εμοι 

εποιηϲατε 

which being translated means

40 And the King shall answer and say to them: Verily I say to you, Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.