It seems like we just cleaned up from Christmas. It’s St. Patrick’s Day for heaven’s sake. Well, the reason goes all the way back to one of the first Church Councils in a place called Nicaea. It figures that a committee must have thought this up.
Looking for some info on Hanukkah? Here is a little bit of content, including prayers for lighting of the candles. Hanukkah, (Chanukka), is also known as the Festival of Lights. It’s an eight-day Jewish holiday commemorating the re-dedication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem at the time of the Maccabean Revolt in the 2nd Century BCE.
ONE members care. We care about the child orphaned by HIV/AIDS. We care about the village that lacks access to clean water. And we care about the millions of people throughout the developing world who will go to bed hungry tonight. For many of us, that caring is borne of our faith.
Life can leave us fragmented and without cohesion. Society often has communicated a not-so-subtle message that we have multiple selves; there’s the self we are at home, the self we are at work, the self we are with friends, the self we are at the gym, and even the self we are at church, the temple, the mosque, and so forth.Joyful living is more likely found when we embrace a holistic, multi-dimensional approach to each of our endeavors and responsibilities. Much of what wears us down across a busy week relates to the effort we put toward not just wearing various hats but various identities—attempting to be one person in a certain set of circumstances, and someone else in another context. It gets exhausting.
Recently, a few weeks after my father Frank’s passing, I spent time with my mother Flora going through some of his things. He didn’t leave much behind, being a simple man with simple tastes. There were a few clothes; some medals from World War II; a few service pins; several books; a 1980 appointment calendar in which he had scribbled dozens of motivational sayings; and a strange piece of metal we found lying in a drawer.
A recent message circulated throughout the internet shows us, “A Sign From God After a Florida Hurricane”. Now normally my spam filter would keep me from ever seeing this, but for some reason, this one caught my eye.
We all have a finite amount of purity—innocence lost. Every time we are intimate we give some away. Like the force George Lucas shows us in the Star Wars universe, our actions effect who we are. We do something good, we shift ever so slightly to the light. And the reverse is also true. Whether it is Anakin slaying a village of sand people or going too far on a first date, our actions have consequences.