Christ asleep on a pillow The first time I actually thought about being in a fishing boat in a raging storm with Christ asleep on a cushion, was during a meditation given on that Gospel passage shortly after I converted to Christian Catholicism. The Legionnaire priest giving the meditation guaranteed my undivided attention because of […]
The lure of giving up seems irresistible for so many in this arguably most educated and comfortable of all cultures. Our own. I realized that I never got to the fundamental reason that I so liked the film Tomorrowland in a recent post. And decided that it had to do with giving up, or rather
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Remember Big Hairy Audacious Goals? Made famous a couple of decades ago by management and leadership gurus like Tom Peters, BHAG stands for big, hairy, audacious goals. I was reminded of my love hate relationship with goals by Dan Pink while listening to a podcast of his speech to the 2014 graduating class of Northwestern
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It’s been a week since I saw McFarland, USA but still within the first five minutes of talking with friends, I find myself exhorting him or her to see this movie. The film is an allegory for our lives, here is why:
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Joy and Sorrow: Essential Paradox During those years in which I considered myself an atheist, I discovered the writings of Kahil Gibran (only after I joined the Catholic Church did I learn that Gibran had been Catholic) ; there was one meditation of Gibran’s in particular that I loved: On Joy and Sorrow. Your joy
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Friends and family who know me well have referred to me as a food Nazi either sotto voce, tongue-in-cheek, or jokingly. And the sobriquet (love that word and only rarely get to use it) is fitting for those who don’t care about GMO, dwarf grain, epigenetics or much of the information on nutrition I find
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Of course we don’t need church to pray. ‘I pray while I am hiking’, ‘while walking in the forest’, ‘while fishing’; I have heard many statements like these, in the past I would nod somewhat uncomfortably; not infrequently, I felt the comments were said as if to ward off contagion from those of us who
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Christmas-What do we celebrate? An excerpt from a treatise against the heresy of Noetus by Saint Hippolytus was a reading in the Divine Office for December 23rd; a reminder of exactly what and why we celebrate during this Christmas season. The reading counters a prevailing belief of our modern culture: The early Christian Church suffered
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The Cosmic Christ “Doesn’t this make you feel like you’re about to explode?” My new Benedictine Oblate sculptor friend Jan Aiijan and I grinned at one another in recognition. On the heels of my enthusiastic yes to Jan’s first question, she asked “Have you heard the phrase ‘lucid intoxication’?” Once again, we smiled at one another
Happiness: is there a key? Strange question, maybe, maybe not. “So, how exactly, do you decide to be happy?” My friend looked bemusedly at me as she replied to my statement that I thought happiness was a decision we made. “LOOK at that tree!” I exclaimed loudly and with vehemence, knowing that my reply to her question
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