“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”
“The ideal life is in our blood and never will be still. We feel the thing we ought to be beating beneath the thing we are.”
Phillips Brooks
What a blessing: to have a new school year ahead of us. Fresh start, new plans, new hopes and wishes… I can’t wait.
“If you’re against capital punishment, you must be more against capital punishment against babies, which is carried out without trial or jury or appeal or court-appointed lawyer.
If you’re against war, you must be more against war conducted against babies by their parents and doctors, since unborn babies are the ultimate defenseless pacifists, only wanting to go about their own business of growing and living.
If you’re against poverty, you must be more against babies being deprived of their only property, their own lives and bodies.
If you’re for social justice, you must be more in favor of justice for babies as an integral part of religion and society.
There is no social ill, no injustice, no horror that is not intensified when it involves the unborn, for they have the least power and the most need. If we don’t protect our young, we don’t protect anyone.”
Maureen, Aliens in this World
Science fiction used to be a lot more political. Now it’s… well, it’s quite often about Christianity.
Read this terrific article by Benjamin A. Plotinsky called, ‘How Science Fiction Found Religion’
Think that ‘doing your thing’ in your ordinary daily life doesn’t really matter? Watch this short video about Saint Joseph. Turns out that God can use our simple, ordinary stuff to change the world:
A Prayer for Healing
Father above,
Christ of love,
Holy Spirit healing dove,
Fill my heart, O Triune God.
From sickness heal;
From sorrow seal;
I beg as I kneel;
Fill my heart, O Triune God.
My body cleanse;
My soul defend;
My life whole again;
Fill my heart, O Triune God.
Mary lift me,
Michael carry me,
Brendan lead me,
Brigid hold me,
Patrick protect me,
Columba guide me,
To the perfect place,
Of healing grace,
Where I may see His Face,
And dwell In the heart of the Triune God. Amen.
Msgr. Eric R. Barr
Vicar for Clergy and Religious for the Diocese of Rockford, Illinois
http://anamchara.blogs.com/
I have seen enough evidence to be unshakably convinced that no difficulty, no fear is so great that it can completely suffocate the hope that springs eternal in the hearts of the young. You are our hope, the young are our hope.
Do not let that hope die! Stake your lives on it! We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures; we are the sum of the Father’s love for us and our real capacity to become the image of his Son.
From: 17th World Youth Day Solemn Mass
Homily of the Holy Father John Paul II
Toronto, Downsview Park, Sunday July 28, 2002
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.
This poem has been appearing in my dreams; wonder what it means.
Do you know it already? It’s a great one to study and write about.
Dover Beach
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Matthew Arnold
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