Mitigating the Tyranny of Time “When were you the happiest?” “High school.” My husband, a therapist, declares his patients invariably answered his question , “What’s the happiest time in your life?” with those two words. For over twenty years, he counseled former combat veterans. That’s a lot of people whose happiest years were decades earler. […]
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Cain and Abel: It’s all about mediocrity Monday’s reading for the Christian liturgy is a Genesis passage most Jews and Christians recall with ease. Abel’s dead, the Lord comes looking for him and asks Cain where Abel is. Cain’s reply? “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Remember the song, he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother? Even back in
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The immorality of stupidity Stupidity’s immoral? Run that by me again? Ever since my week-ago car accident that occured from my own stupidity, I’ve been pondering it. What it truly is, how and why it takes us over, individually and collectively. First, a brief background about the accident. Engrossed in Bishop Barron’s wonderful phrase, egodrama:
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Time belongs to God Time. It’s kind of like breath, or air, or water. We consume them as we do all commodities, thinking we have all we need, all the time in the world. Until suddenly, we don’t. Probably because of serious illness as a small child, I think about my death frequently. Hence my
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Jubilee, hope and a couple of movies Does the phrase read like a series of non sequitors? Jubilee, hope and a couple of movies? Assuming that’s a yes, let’s work backward to integrate them, beginning with “a couple of movies.” Until I met my husband, I had neither heard of nor watched Frank Capra’s classic
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Advent: It’s Wholly Counter-Cultural Reality Quietly competing with the banal and boring commercialism of Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays extended sales is another invitation. But it cannot be heard outside in the streets or while listening to babble. Instead we must silence all the shouts of the marketplace to listen to another voice…more like a
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The heart-brain coherence Our medicalized culture has trained us to think of our hearts as an IED. It’s only a matter of time until the coronary arteries occlude and cause the big bang. Instead of enjoying a steak, we force ourselves to prefer chicken and fish. Since the worldwide primary cause of death is a
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Purgatory, prayer and CS Lewis Before Father Joe, I’d never thought of the souls in Purgatory as my brothers and sisters. In fact I didn’t think of them at all. But then I attended a November week of Masses in Half Moon Bay, California. They were celebrated by a newly ordained priest at Our Lady
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Photo: Signs and Wonders for Our Times The struggle for moral survival Karol Wojtyla’s {Saint Pope John Paul ll) early life was forged in a crucible. The phrase is no overstatement for the man born in 1920 Poland. By the age of twenty-one Karol was expert in the terror tactics of Nazi Germany. Upon “liberation”
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Dei Verbum: God speaks It gets our attention. Even in the Latin which I never studied nor grew up with, the words Dei Verbum: God Speaks don’t bounce off. Rather, they burrow. Even if we consider ourselves above or beside all things religious, we alert–like our dogs–at seeing these words. Because he does, doesn’t he?
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