My sister-in-law Amy is one crafty gal. You can check out her skills through etsy.com, the homemade crafty people’s domain! Her “current obsession” is wool and needlefelting. Look at these little chickies emerging from their woolen wombs! What a great gift idea! (I’m not being paid for this advertisment… unless homemade jams or dandelion wine counts?)
Archive for January, 2010
Newt Knees and Easter Gifts
January 31, 2010What Must I Do?
January 27, 2010“Come, all you who pass by the way, look and see whether there is any suffering like my suffering…”– Lamentations 1:12
“For we are like olives, only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us.”– Talmud
Some Pictures from the March for Life
January 24, 2010It was such a blessing this year for my wife and I to bring our little boy to the March for Life in our nation’s capitol. And this year’s numbers were incredible; over 300,000! All of us from all over the country, different colors, different creeds, all in support of the dignity of human life, born and unborn, womb to tomb. The Boy and his sign got lots of smiles and oooos and ahhhs. He even marched a few steps! As always, the mass media either completely ignored or grossly misrepresented the March for Life this year. For the most accurate coverage and for links to the mainstream media’s poor reporting, read this article!
A Heart for Haiti
January 20, 2010Avatar (or Pocahontas in Space): A Reflection
January 17, 2010…But certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile.’
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Now that being said, the theme of civilized man meets savage and gets civilized by the savage is a powerful one, and worth repeating. It’s a chance for introspection and self-examination; a culture clash and conversion opportunity worth reflecting over. There’s also a “green” agenda in Avatar that’s as prolific as weeds. Truth is though, we need to hear it. We’ve had a love/hate relationship with Creation since that Fall in Eden. It’s time to make peace! I was refreshed and inspired by the harmony of the Na’vi with their world, and found it in harmony with what Pope Benedict XVI’s been saying of late. That’s right, even the Pope has “gone green.” (Actually, the Church has called us to be so from the start):
Nature expresses a design of love and truth. It is prior to us, and it has been given to us by God as the setting for our life. Nature speaks to us of the Creator and his love for humanity. It is destined to be “recapitulated” in Christ at the end of time. Thus it too is a “vocation.” Nature is at our disposal not as “a heap of scattered refuse”, but as a gift of the Creator who has given it an inbuilt order…”– Pope Benedict XVI (Caritas in Veritate, #48)
…it should also be stressed that it is contrary to authentic development to view nature as something more important than the human person. This position leads to attitudes of neo-paganism or a new pantheism — human salvation cannot come from nature alone, understood in a purely naturalistic sense. This having been said, it is also necessary to reject the opposite position, which aims at total technical dominion over nature, because the natural environment is more than raw material to be manipulated at our pleasure; it is a wondrous work of the Creator containing a “grammar” which sets forth ends and criteria for its wise use, not its reckless exploitation.
– Pope Benedict XVI (Caritas in Veritate, #48)
The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity… If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves.– C.S. Lewis, in a review of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.
– C.S. Lewis
Helping Haiti
January 13, 2010
Should you wish to make a donation, please send it to Hands Together at P.O.Box 80985, Springfield, MA 01138. You may also make contributions on their website at www.handstogether.org
Bible Smackdown – The Moses Edition
January 10, 20101. There are three teams, electing one “Moses” each (beards and robes provided).
THE PRIZE:
Saint du Jour – The Porter of Paradise
January 6, 2010How often do we stop and really look at one another? How often do we really listen to each other’s stories, as opposed to waiting for them to stop talking so we can “one up” them? Do we notice the face of the person at the pharmacy, the Wawa cashier, the drive-thru window as we drive through our lives at often break-neck speeds? Our fast-paced culture is almost conditioning us to miss many face to face encounters, and many souls are slipping through the cracks.
Enter Blessed André Bessette, born in 1845 near Montreal, Canada. His story as it pans out would appear to be one of total insignificance. He could have gone unnoticed, could have felt unwanted, lost in the shuffle, just another number… but it was not so. André is the voice of the Invisible Man, he is the shadow cast by the little ones who seemingly don’t matter in this culture. The eighth of 12 children, he was weak and sickly from birth. When both parents had died, he was adopted at age 12, worked as a farmhand, then slipped into a variety of unsuccessful trade careers: shoemaker, baker, blacksmith. He was a factory worker in the US during the Civil War.
At 25, André tried to enter the Congregation of the Holy Cross. He was rejected at first because of his poor health, but at the request of a kind Bishop Bourget, he was finally received into the Order. He was given the obscure job of doorkeeper at Notre Dame College in Montreal (with some additional duties). “When I joined this community,” André once said, “the superiors showed me the door, and I remained 40 years.”
A listening heart, a prayerful demeanor, and a deep compassion for all he encountered at that door is what changed things. André had a strong devotion to St. Joseph and would visit the sick, applying oil for healing to their bodies. When an epidemic exploded at a local college, he nursed the infirm. Not one person died in his care. A stream of sick people began to move towards his door, and soon it became a gushing river of souls. “I do not cure,” he said. “St. Joseph cures.” At the end of his life, four secretaries were hired to handle the 80,000 letters he received every year!
André saw people by the hundreds and he listened. He was a magnet whose holiness and compassion were the main attraction. With 65,000,000 Catholics in the USA alone, what would happen if just a handful of us had that listening heart? That attentiveness to the needs and the experiences and the stories and the sad news and the joyful news of the other? What if we really looked and listened, like the children’s books always told us? What would we see?
André, the 8th child in a dozen, the weak one, the uneducated porter who held the door open for people, died at the ripe old age of 92. And I’m sure at his death a Door was opened for him. The Door to Paradise.
Blessed André Bessette, pray for us, and at our death, may we see you at your post again, with the light of the Son streaming through that Open Door that leads into Life Eternal!
The Human Experience: A Review
January 2, 2010A young man is tucked in the back seat of a car, looking up and often out the window. He is reflecting on his life, his experiences, his hopes and frustrations. Outside the world blurs past. Jeff is searching for meaning, for purpose. He is on a journey, and we the viewers are invited to join him.
From Grassroots Films of Brooklyn, New York comes THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE
– the story of a band of brothers who travel the world in search of the answers to the burning questions: Who am I? Who is Man? Why do we search for meaning? Their journey brings them into the middle of the lives of the homeless on the streets of New York City, the orphans and disabled children of Peru, and the abandoned lepers in the forests of Ghana, Africa. What the young men discover changes them forever. Through one on one interviews and real life encounters, the brothers are awakened to the beauty of the human person and the resilience of the human spirit.