[T]his January first, I would challenge you to make a different kind of resolution.
Resolve to learn something from the woman we honor today.
Resolve to dwell in possibility. Resolve to see every day, not just this one, as a fresh beginning. Resolve to welcome every blank page, every new start, with trust that God will see you through it -- and then reflect on it in your heart. Just like Mary did.
[I]f anything the Holy Family often seems too distant to be much of a practical exemplar. I mean, you've got one person who's sinless, one person who's God, and even the weakest link, Joseph, always seems able to do God's will without question.
Maybe you have loved one who is sick or maybe God has taken a loved one from you at this time of year which is supposed to be joyful and you wonder "how can I make myself sing, Joy to the World?"Let me remind you that that first Christmas too, looked nothing like the pretty pictures we see on the Christmas cards. That first Christmas a haggard Joseph was probably in a panic looking for someplace to stay in Bethlehem, and Mary was probably worried, asking herself, "will my child be born in a barn?" The shepherds were the lowest of low, despised and outcast. They weren’t all clean and shiny when they visited the manger.
But God still came in the midst of all that.
There was something described to me a couple of weeks ago called the 5 minute rule. It means that if you were thinking of something other than Allah(swt) for about 5 minutes before the prayer, then it is pretty much a guarantee that you'll be thinking about that thing during the prayer.
I have discovered an important thing about myself. Rest is not all that restorative for me...Sometimes I don't need a break, I just need an accomplishment. A mother's life is full of repetition and maintenance. There is joy to be found there, and much meat for reflection, but it can get wearying and sometimes I need a little shot in the arm of accomplishment.
Silence is so much an aspect of the spirituality of the old and New Testament. Everything comes out of silence and returns to it. So it should be a part of education...It is through the practice of silence that we begin to become vulnerable to the true self and the supernatural organism we receive with grace and baptism...We think that even preschoolers should be introduced to silence.
I grew up in a world where I always worried about being a "bother" as a child...When I committed to becoming open to life, I worried about "inflicting" too many needy grandchildren on my parents and too many messy nieces and nephews on my two siblings. I'm so please to witness first hand what grace, ease and wonder my children add to our family gatherings.
I was...rather badly shaken up by this old film that everyone else seems to find so mild and safe. I had no way of knowing, in my simplicity, that It's A Wonderful Life is old-fashioned, sentimental, and preaches an easy, cheap optimism. It seemed to me a rather horrifyingly costly optimism: take up your cross—for whoever clings to his life will lose it, but whoever lays down his life will save it unto life eternal.
Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mary McCarthy said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the 'most portable' person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, 'Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.' That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.
-Flannery O'Connor
For a growing number of impoverished Guatemalans, it is a matter of faith: God doesn't want them to be poor.
In a traditionally Roman Catholic country with one of the highest poverty rates in the Western Hemisphere, a conversion is afoot -- nearly 20% of Guatemala's population is now Pentecostal, the highest proportion in Latin America. The growth of Pentecostalism has come about thanks in part to a new entrepreneurial ethos being preached from the pulpit known as "prosperity theology," reports Sara Miller Llana in the Christian Science Monitor.
The movement is more often associated with middle- and upper-class worshippers at some North American megachurches, but it has caught on at even the more traditional Pentecostal churches in Guatemala. Worshippers are told that being poor isn't a blessing, and at churches like Showers of Grace, a megachurch in Guatemala City, worshippers are offered business classes and are taught how to manage their money.
In 2000 B.C. wealthy Greek families sailed to the Isle of Rhodes to get spiced honey cakes.
There is no inherent difference between nature and what we call the miraculous. We simply use the former word "nature" for the miracles to which we are accustomed, and the latter one for those we have not before experienced.
My husband and I had six blissful years together before Tony was born, years of intimate dinners and holidays with lots of strolling hand-in-hand down cobbled streets soaking up the culture of some delightful foreign city. [...]
[A]fter all those years of trying for a baby and finally achieving my goal, his arrival made me somehow unhappier than I had been before.
Human evolution has been moving at breakneck speed in the past several thousand years, far from plodding along as some scientists had thought, researchers said on Monday...For example, Africans have new genes providing resistance to malaria. In Europeans, there is a gene that makes them better able to digest milk as adults. In Asians, there is a gene that makes ear wax more dry.Interesting.
There is a doctor in Kansas who does abortions to 26 weeks...so when we have a patient like that we send them to Kansas.
When I worked in Mexico doing some research in fetal physiology, because in Mexico I could do things with pregnant women that I couldn't do in America...
Customer service, tech support...these days we outsource everything to India. So why not pregnancy? Here is a report on the growing number of Indian women willing to carry an American child.
Mary's command to the servants at Cana -- "Do whatever he tells you" (Jn. 2:5) -- represents her last recorded words in the Bible. And they serve as much more than an exhortation to obedience. They echo the Old Testament spousal covenant of love between Yahweh, the divine Bridegroom, and Israel, His bride.
Ever since my conversion, I found the same thing over and over again: that the illogical or unfair parts of the Christian Dogma I was being asked to accept on faith, upon closer inspection, turn out to say, not what the world told me the Church said, but something more like what natural reason and supernatural love would be likely to say.
I have been dealing with just this same issue in the past four days! A friend and mother of eight had recommended a $3 CD to me that she (and then I) bought at our parish gift shop. It's called Anger and Forgiveness and it's by a wonderful man I had never heard of before (but "coincidentally" came across yesterday again), Deacon Dr. Bob McDonald. He is a permanent deacon and an M.D./psychotherapist. This CD taught me things on anger that I had never known. In fact, it completely debunked the notion that I had been "preaching" for years, that "the emotion of anger is morally neutral." Wrong! Boy, was it a wake up call for both me and my husband!
"All that we call human history--money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery--[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy." - C. S. Lewis
Advent is concerned with that very connection between memory and hope which is so necessary to man. Advent’s intention is to awaken the most profound and basic emotional memory within us, namely, the memory of the God who became a child. This is a healing memory; it brings hope. The purpose of the Church’s year is continually to rehearse her great history of memories, to awaken the heart’s memory so that it can discern the star of hope.…
It is the beautiful task of Advent to awaken in all of us memories of goodness and thus to open doors of hope.
If you would like my wife who is breastfeeding our baby to go to the bathroom so that our baby can eat, then why don't you have your wife or daughter with their low cut or midriff baring top join her with their meal? I could probably say the same thing about your son with his unkempt hair and shirt that has a phrase I don't want my eight year old to read.
Each and every year I spent Christmas in tears. That is not an exaggeration. It became a running joke in the family. I remember it so clearly. I felt such sorrow each Christmas. I couldn’t explain it. I didn’t know why I felt this way but my heart hurt. Even just remembering it makes me a little sad. I now know why.
Today is the first Sunday of Advent, during which we remember the long years before Jesus’s birth, and we prepare for him to be born again. The Christian calendar is a way of remembering, not as nostalgia, but as a celebration of God’s faithfulness in his saving acts, which have made us his family. In celebrating the holy days of the calendar, we defy our own loneliness.
