We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.
There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it.
His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow.
The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.
The angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified.
He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay.
Then go quickly and tell his disciples: 'He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.' Now I have told you."
So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples.
Suddenly Jesus met them. "Greetings," he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him.
Then Jesus said to them, "Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me."
One does not need to be Roman Catholic to appreciate this.
The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything by the Revered James Martin, SJ (My Life with the Saints) is a practical spiritual guidebook based on the life and teachings of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus. Centered around the Ignatian goal of “finding God in all things,” The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything shows us how to manage relationships, money, work, prayer, and decision-making, all while keeping a sense of humor. Filled with user-friendly examples, humorous stories, and anecdotes from the heroic and inspiring lives of Jesuit saints and average priests and brothers...
As I understand it in my feeble way (not a theologian, so corrections welcome), there were ancient middle eastern atonement rituals designed to re-align oneself to gods or God. Whatever the rules were.
Like the Greeks, the Jews were prone to animal sacrifice. Human sacrifices were not unusual (see Abraham) but when animals were precious possessions, these were real sacrifices too beyond the symbolic.
Christians didn't keep Yom Kippur because Christ's death was taken as the ultimate sacrifice to cleanse all sins for confessors and believers. A final human sacrifice. However, Mother Church kept weekly confession and Lent anyway. Fortunately, because of human need. I do not get the doctrine of that.
I have a personal confessor, but a Jewish pal and his family do group confession over dinner on Yom Kippur. Even his kids and parents speak out about their dark sides and their shameful actions, and their aspirations to be more worthy of G-d. Wow.
Not in a million years can I imagine my Protestant family doing such a thing.
Each year at the start of the Jewish High Holidays, Rosh Hashanah, I ask a question, usually how to be more constructive and helpful in my personal relationships in general or with a special person. The answer eludes me and it troubles me that I can't see the way.
As I go through the days of prayer and reflection, various alternatives come from my mind, only to be rejected as too unreal or hollow or evasive or inadequate to the need.
On Yom Kippur, which begins tonight, the longest night and day of prayer, and of a 25-hour fast, the worry that I won't find the answer gets more urgent. My fear rises of not finding the answer. As my mind gets submerged in repetitious prayers and wanders, as I get more light-headed with hunger, as the prayers of repentance get more fervent, an answer always comes late in the day, from my heart.
It's never what I thought it would be. It is complete. It is not complex, though requires more focus, discipline, understanding. It always works for the coming year.
Life is only complicated when avoiding simple truths.
The miracle brings me closer to the person I want to be. It keeps me coming back for more.
"The Last Supper" is thought to have been a Passover seder. That supper was the source of Communion: "For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes again."
In our church, we remember this event with a group Passover supper on Maundy (Middle English, "holy") Thursday, eaten in silence. No wine, though, as a consideration to the abstinent.
Below, Bassano's Last Supper (1542), depicting the reaction to Jesus' prediction that one of them would betray him.
... already in the sixth century, one of the first great writers about hell, Pope Gregory the Great, ruefully acknowledged that the warning (of hell) is not very effective. And the long history of human behavior bears witness to the truth of this acknowledgment. The strictly instrumental use of hell finally boils down to a remark quoted by Voltaire: “My good friend, I no more believe in the eternity of hell than yourself; but recollect that it may be no bad thing, perhaps, for your servant, your tailor, and your lawyer to believe in it.”
Bach's Christmas Oratorio (1734) was written to be performed in 6 parts on 6 days, the first on Christmas Day at both St. Thomas' and St. Nicholas' Churches, Leipzig. (Complete, it runs 3 hours.)
Interestingly, it was what was termed a "parody," that is, a recycling of his previous music which had been written for secular purposes.
It's a centuries-old complaint that Christian morality detached from its religious roots can turn into a monstrous and terrifying thing. Take utilitarianism, take angry moralizers, take witch trials, take communism, and a hundred more examples of humanist evil.
Christianity is not primarily about morals and resistance to humanity's animal nature. I think Christ was clear about that in word and deed. I think he was clear about it, and that Paul elaborated on the religious truth that transcendent blessings like those of faith, mercy, love and kindness, hope and good cheer, are consequences nurtured through interactions with God and Christ through the Holy Spirit. Not rules, but secondary effects which can bind people together through God's graciousness and His tough sort of love.
As One Cosmos often explains, earthly gravity pulls us to the x-axis, the horizontal plane, of daily life and its struggles, but there is the vertical axis, the transcendent axis, available to us and for which we were born.
It's been part of my religious "journey" (I hate that smarmy expression) to come to realize that spiritual warfare is not Good vs Bad or Evil, but the inner battle of holding highest what is most high vs. the temptation to worship false idols. "I, me, mine," etc etc. Even pride in virtue is a false idol - it is about Self Love.
"Stop that, Bird Dog! No more preaching! You ain't no eddicated Preacher!" Well, ok, but Advent is our chance to be pregnant, in a spiritual sense, with holiness, and a time to have a dramatic chance to feel reborn ourselves as naked babies. That's the story of A Christmas Carol.
Matthew 18:2
2 He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. 3 And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Happy Advent. Whether my theology is correct or not.
My heart beamed Friday night as my sons welcomed the Sabbath with perfectly sung prayers.My heart broke Saturday night as my sons fought while I grilled a perfect wild-caught salmon, and I got indigestion instead of the meal I thought I deserved.
I'm reminded of the saying, "A Man's children and his garden both reflect the amount of weeding done during the growing season." And, the growing goes both ways as we fathers grow, have to grow -- into the men we want to be under our children's careful observation, into the men that they need.
We yearn to please but, most important, to pass on life's lessons.
Father's Day is full of platitudes and real feelings, of missed and appreciated opportunities. And, of how much we care by just being there. I'm reminded of GeorgeStrait's "A Father's Love", of Conway Twitty's "That's My Job", of Rascal Flatt's "My Wish."True, heartfelt, and missing the tougher choices we have to make and impose to make as sure as we can that our children grow into responsible, resilient and caring adults.
There's a wisecrack, "If God is so perfect, how do you explain us."As fathers, we're not perfect, but we try to find and know the ways to be better, and most of us find it. We continue to strive, and so may our children, with a higher hand to reach for and give us the strength to be better and have hope.
"I drink beer whenever I can get my hands on any," Merton confessed. "I love beer, and by that very fact, the world." But even in the hermitage, Merton struggled with other people's infatuation with his hermit identity.
In an age where there is much talk about "being yourself" I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else. Rather, it seems to me that when one is too intent on "being himself" he runs the risk of impersonating a shadow. . . I am accused of living in the woods like Thoreau instead of living in the desert like St. John the Baptist. All I can answer is that I am not living "like anybody." Or "unlike anybody." We all live somehow or other, and that's that. It is a compelling necessity for me to be free to embrace the necessity of my own nature.
Betrayal is a common catechism in the Church of the Self. Hymns to Me are the hosannas it hurls at an empty heaven. The politics of such a church require as First Things a rejection of all things not of, by, and for the self. A religion or a country of the people, by the people, and for the people is high on the list of things to be abhorred since it requires an allegiance that is other than to the self. The Church of the Self effectively mandates treason, and we see it now manifested daily in the bright robes of “unstiffled dissent” which shroud an increasingly vicious anti-Americanism that has its roots, not in reasoned criticism, but in unreasoned hate. We hear the hate but what we have not been allowed to see is the treason behind it.
I always have crafted my own "studies" in Judaism for the major, and some minor, Jewish holidays. This time I am so impressed with a column written by a scholar at the solid and liberal Hartman Institute in Israel, which my esteemed rabbi attends each year and which offers courses and speakers around the US at synagogues.
This column confronts the anti-Israel agenda of trying to disassociate Jews from our thousands of years of roots and attachment in favor of relative newcomers, many indeed only since Israel brought relative prosperity to the formerly barren desert. Most recently, UNESCO ignored the Jewish temples on the Mount in Jerusalem -- our holiest place-- instead just referring to the site by later Arab names.
Here's the column, well worth the read, about Jews as a people and a religion, with Passover and its narrative being highlighted for its a central portion of our daily prayers, our ethic, and our unending attachment to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount-- regardless of diaspora and persecutions.
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a member of the Institute's iEngage Project, and a contributing editor to The New Republic. His latest book, Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation, was named the 2013 National Jewish Book Council Book of the Year. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, has just been released in paperback by HarperCollins.
Envy is diabolical. It is also human, however sinful. I am learning to identify it in myself, and then to address it when I see it. Nobody likes to identify it in themselves. My red flag is when I feel like putting other people down. Sure, other people can be jerks, idiots, mercenary, lazy, and character-flawed in a multitude of ways, but so am I. It's fair that I try to use discernment when assessing others, but that is different.
I used to deny it, or rationalize it. A bit of that came from wanting to boost myself up by mentally putting down others. That is not only sinful, but a complete and futile waste of mental energy. I recommend prayer, with humor, as an approach to malignant envy. My preaching to myself this Lenten season is to confirm that Christ is my rock, not my damn self.
To begin with a point to which many Christian thinkers would agree, the United States and other nations rooted in Judeo-Christianity have entered a time of paganization—what we might also call “re-paganization.” The gravitational pull of traditional religion seems to be diminishing, even as a-religious and anti-religious elements accumulate mass. This paganization is especially ascendant among the young, now famously more prone than any other group to checking “none of the above” when asked for their religious affiliation; according to the Pew Research Center and others, the combination of self-described atheists and self-defined “nones” is now the fastest-growing “religious” group.
Wider manifestations of this ongoing paganization have also become commonplaces: the proliferation of religious liberty court cases, legal and other attacks on Christian student groups at secular universities, demonization and caricature of religious believers, intimidation aimed at those who defend Judeo-Christian morality, and other instances of what Pope Francis himself has dubbed the “polite persecution” of believers in advanced societies...
The miracle of Chanukah, the celebration of which begins tonight, is about more than the sacred oil lasting eight days. It is about the determination of mankind to overcome despair, to rise up in our faith, to have freedom. This meditation is appropriate:
Hanukkah [Chanukah, properly, with a gutteral "ch"] begins on the 25th of Kislev. All through this period, our days grow ever shorter with light leaving our world as we move from the Jewish month of Cheshvan to Kislev. The Jewish calendar is lunar and the first of any month always coincides with the new moon, so it is easy to make certain that Hanukkah always falls at the darkest time of the year, the time when the sources of light --the moon and sun -- together cast as little light as possible. This always falls in the period from the 25th of Kislev to the beginning of the next month, Tevet. All during Hanukkah we light more and more candles, as the moon wanes and disappears and the world becomes progressively a darker place. We are rewarded on the last day when a sliver of the new moon finally appears, daylight increases, and the world outside grows progressively lighter. We can also think of this as spiritually connected with the High Holidays. Rosh Hashanah is on the 1st of Tishrei, just three months earlier, a time when we confront the darkness of our souls and the hope that we can take steps towards the light. Hanukkah demonstrates that this can take place in our physical world if we keep faith and act and persevere no matter how hopeless it all seems. The victory we will celebrate at Hanukkah is also a victory over fear and hopelessness wherever it exists –- including within ourselves.
Odetta, great folksinger and inspiration to many others ("The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta."- Bob Dylan), explains the meaning of one of her favorite songs. Listen closely. Then clap hands and sing along with her.
Book recommendation: 
It's a centuries-old complaint that Christian morality detached from its religious roots can turn into a monstrous and terrifying thing. Take utilitarianism, take angry moralizers, take witch trials, take communism, and a hundred more examples of humanist evil. 
From 