Family 2014
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Something to chew on (aka Meditation).....
We prescribe for one another remedies that will bring us peace of mind, and we are still devoured by anxiety. We evolve plans for disarmament and for the peace of nations, and our plans only change the manner and method of aggression.
The rich have everything they want except happiness, and the poor are sacrificed to the unhappiness of the rich. Dictatorships use their secret police to crush millions under an intolerable burden of lies, injustice and tyranny, and those who still live in democracies have forgotten how to make good use of their liberty.
For liberty is a thing of the spirit, and we are no longer able to live for anything but our bodies. How can we find peace, true peace, if we forget that we are not machines for making and spending money, but spiritual beings, sons and daughters of the most high God?
- Thomas Merton (The Monastic Journey)
The rich have everything they want except happiness, and the poor are sacrificed to the unhappiness of the rich. Dictatorships use their secret police to crush millions under an intolerable burden of lies, injustice and tyranny, and those who still live in democracies have forgotten how to make good use of their liberty.
For liberty is a thing of the spirit, and we are no longer able to live for anything but our bodies. How can we find peace, true peace, if we forget that we are not machines for making and spending money, but spiritual beings, sons and daughters of the most high God?
- Thomas Merton (The Monastic Journey)
Monday, January 29, 2007
Something Interesting to Ponder....
Healing Our Memories
-- Henri Nouwen
Forgiving does not mean forgetting. When we forgive a person, the memory of the wound might stay with us for along time, even throughout our lives. Sometimes we carry the memory in our bodies as a visible sign. But forgiveness changes the way we remember. It converts the curse into a blessing.
When we forgive our parents for their divorce, our children for their lack of attention, our friends for their unfaithfulness in crisis, our doctors for their ill advice,we no longer have to experience ourselves as the victims of events we had no control over.
Forgiveness allows us to claim our own power and not let these events destroy us; it enables them to become events that deepen the wisdom of our hearts. Forgiveness indeed heals memories.
-- Henri Nouwen
Forgiving does not mean forgetting. When we forgive a person, the memory of the wound might stay with us for along time, even throughout our lives. Sometimes we carry the memory in our bodies as a visible sign. But forgiveness changes the way we remember. It converts the curse into a blessing.
When we forgive our parents for their divorce, our children for their lack of attention, our friends for their unfaithfulness in crisis, our doctors for their ill advice,we no longer have to experience ourselves as the victims of events we had no control over.
Forgiveness allows us to claim our own power and not let these events destroy us; it enables them to become events that deepen the wisdom of our hearts. Forgiveness indeed heals memories.
Friday, January 26, 2007
Quote of the day....
Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.
— Martin H. Fischer
— Martin H. Fischer
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Quote of the Day
Always borrow money from a pessimist, he doesn't expect to be paid back.
— Anonymous
— Anonymous
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
I've Been Tagged ....
.... by that wild and crazy Paul Wilkinson. I like games, so I'm in. Here's the senario:
So it's about a five hour to flight to Los Angeles, and you've been given a free upgrade to first class and find yourself sitting next to ________________.
Of the Christian leaders and writers you're aware of, who would be the ultimate conversation for a five hour flight?
Okay, I'll let you name up to three.
So it's about a five hour to flight to Los Angeles, and you've been given a free upgrade to first class and find yourself sitting next to ________________.
Of the Christian leaders and writers you're aware of, who would be the ultimate conversation for a five hour flight?
Okay, I'll let you name up to three.
Dr. Helen Roseveare
Dr Ron Sider
Dr Jean Vanier
Leave a comment with your answers. I'll let you decide if you want to tag somebody else.
Monday, January 22, 2007
Rev. King Is Selectively Remembered - January 20, 2007
This past Monday, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have turned 78. He has been dead as long as he was alive – 39 years – and the world and especially his country are still grappling uneasily with his memory and message.
As Seattle journalist Geov Parrish has noted, many often recall King's"I Have a Dream" speech from the 1963 March on Washington. But our memories of King are often selective.We don't always recall, for example, that his home was bombed, his chest pierced by a knife, his body beaten and repeatedly jailed, his face rendered a spittoon by white racists, his personal world invaded by theFBI, and his life, and that of his wife and four children, constantly menaced by death threats, at times up to 40 a day.
Though each year on his birthday, now an official U.S. holiday, we are reminded of his lofty rhetoric and successful desegregation campaign inthe U.S. South, we seem to forget about mainstream U.S. scorn for King during his lifetime, and his widely held sobriquet, "Commie dupe."
We often even forget that he was a Baptist minister, and that his Christian faith and black church community served as wellsprings of his activism. Yet our recollections become particularly dissipated when it comes to his powerful indictments of poverty, state-sanctioned violence, and unchecked U.S. militarism, especially in Vietnam.
One of King's most prescient and compelling speeches, in fact, is one of his least quoted – his April 1967 address to a meeting of Clergy andLaity Concerned about Vietnam at Riverside Church in New York City. It was the first time King spoke out publicly against the war, and his outspokenness continued until he was silenced by a bullet in Memphis one year later.
King's diagnosis of our society that night remains as pertinent today asit did 40 years ago:"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the worldrevolution,"
Rev. King intoned, "we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a`thing-oriented' society to a `person-oriented' society. When machinesand computers, profit motives and property rights are considered moreimportant than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, andmilitarism are incapable of being conquered."
Anticipating the Jubilee international debt relief campaigns of Canada,the U.S. and the U.K. (not to mention U2's Bono), King continued:"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is nothaphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values willsoon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa andSouth America, only to take the profits out with no concern for thesocial betterment of the countries, and say: `This is not just.'"
In light of the Bush administration's failed and morally insupportable invasion of Iraq, and Bush's recent order to escalate U.S. troopcommitment there, King's words could have been uttered yesterday:"The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: `This way of settlingdifferences is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane,of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled withwisdom, justice and love.'" A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
King's speech invites us to pause and reflect on what kind of future we want for our children and ourselves. Do we want a future marked by endless war? Do we want to live in a future increasingly divided into the desperately poor and insouciantly rich? King had a dream, and he asks us, across the years, to ponder what our own dream as a society might be. He also invites us to ensure that our collective dream is not a nightmare.
--- Stephen Scharper
The Star.com
As Seattle journalist Geov Parrish has noted, many often recall King's"I Have a Dream" speech from the 1963 March on Washington. But our memories of King are often selective.We don't always recall, for example, that his home was bombed, his chest pierced by a knife, his body beaten and repeatedly jailed, his face rendered a spittoon by white racists, his personal world invaded by theFBI, and his life, and that of his wife and four children, constantly menaced by death threats, at times up to 40 a day.
Though each year on his birthday, now an official U.S. holiday, we are reminded of his lofty rhetoric and successful desegregation campaign inthe U.S. South, we seem to forget about mainstream U.S. scorn for King during his lifetime, and his widely held sobriquet, "Commie dupe."
We often even forget that he was a Baptist minister, and that his Christian faith and black church community served as wellsprings of his activism. Yet our recollections become particularly dissipated when it comes to his powerful indictments of poverty, state-sanctioned violence, and unchecked U.S. militarism, especially in Vietnam.
One of King's most prescient and compelling speeches, in fact, is one of his least quoted – his April 1967 address to a meeting of Clergy andLaity Concerned about Vietnam at Riverside Church in New York City. It was the first time King spoke out publicly against the war, and his outspokenness continued until he was silenced by a bullet in Memphis one year later.
King's diagnosis of our society that night remains as pertinent today asit did 40 years ago:"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the worldrevolution,"
Rev. King intoned, "we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a`thing-oriented' society to a `person-oriented' society. When machinesand computers, profit motives and property rights are considered moreimportant than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, andmilitarism are incapable of being conquered."
Anticipating the Jubilee international debt relief campaigns of Canada,the U.S. and the U.K. (not to mention U2's Bono), King continued:"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is nothaphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values willsoon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa andSouth America, only to take the profits out with no concern for thesocial betterment of the countries, and say: `This is not just.'"
In light of the Bush administration's failed and morally insupportable invasion of Iraq, and Bush's recent order to escalate U.S. troopcommitment there, King's words could have been uttered yesterday:"The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: `This way of settlingdifferences is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane,of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled withwisdom, justice and love.'" A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
King's speech invites us to pause and reflect on what kind of future we want for our children and ourselves. Do we want a future marked by endless war? Do we want to live in a future increasingly divided into the desperately poor and insouciantly rich? King had a dream, and he asks us, across the years, to ponder what our own dream as a society might be. He also invites us to ensure that our collective dream is not a nightmare.
--- Stephen Scharper
The Star.com
Friday, January 19, 2007
Pearls of Wisdom... From My Momma
- Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.
- If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin'.
- Sometimes you get, and sometimes you get got.
- The biggest troublemaker you'll probably ever have to deal with, watches you from the mirror every mornin'.
- Always drink upstream from the herd.
- Good judgment comes from experience, and a lotta that comes from bad judgment.
- Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than puttin' it back in.
- If you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin' somebody else's dog around.
- Live simply. Love generously. Care deeply. Speak kindly. Leave the rest to God.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Quote of the Day.....
Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.
— Michael Burke
— Michael Burke
Monday, January 15, 2007
For Sale
We are downsizing. Purging. Simplifing.
Here is one thing that's gotta go.
Email for details.
Friday, January 12, 2007
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Quote of the Day.....
Daily Meditation for January 2, 2007
by Henri Nouwen
Joy and sorrow are never separated. When our hearts rejoice at a spectacular view, we may miss our friends who cannot see it, and when we are overwhelmed with grief, we may discover what true friendship is all about. Joy is hidden in sorrow and sorrow in joy. If we try to avoid sorrow at all costs, we may never taste joy, and if we are suspicious of ecstasy, agony can never reach us either. Joy and sorrow are the parents of our spiritual growth.
by Henri Nouwen
Joy and sorrow are never separated. When our hearts rejoice at a spectacular view, we may miss our friends who cannot see it, and when we are overwhelmed with grief, we may discover what true friendship is all about. Joy is hidden in sorrow and sorrow in joy. If we try to avoid sorrow at all costs, we may never taste joy, and if we are suspicious of ecstasy, agony can never reach us either. Joy and sorrow are the parents of our spiritual growth.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)