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Not only can I not believe that it's been ONE YEAR since I started blogging, but I find it hard to believe that I am remembering to announce this in the midst of all the preparations for my kids coming home--though they won't be here for a few more hours.
My children are traveling by cars and planes to get home to see MJ graduate on Sunday. AE and KA flew from Seattle to Austin this evening and have safely arrived in (HOT) Texas. Big brother DC will drive them with his wife tomorrow to Corpus Christi. And coming from the northeast will be brother BJ driving from Houston. They will probably all arrive around noon-- or so I hope.| Ray High School | ||
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| Valedictorian | | Salutatorian |
by Bill Quigley
"Memorial Day is not actually a day to pray for US troops who died in action, but rather a day set aside by Congress to pray for peace. The 1950 Joint Resolution of Congress, which created Memorial Day, says, "Requesting the President to issue a proclamation designating May 30, Memorial Day, as a day for a Nation-wide prayer for peace." (64 Stat.158).
"Peace today is a nearly impossible challenge for the United States. The US is far and away the most militarized country in the world and the most aggressive. Unless the US dramatically reduces its emphasis on global military action, there will be many, many more families grieving on future Memorial Days.
"The US spends over $600 billion annually on our military, more than the rest of the world combined. China, our nearest competitor, spends about one-tenth of what we spend. The US also sells more weapons to other countries than any other nation in the world."
“Though the human body is born complete in one moment, the birth of the human heart is an ongoing process. It is being birthed in every experience of your life. Everything that happens to you has the potential to deepen you. It brings to birth within you new territories of the heart. Patrick Kavanagh captures this sense of the benediction of happening:
O’Donohue, John. Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998. 6.
PeopleNo people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.
There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them. -- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
I’ll sing you a story of a silly young king
Who played with the world at the end of a string,
But he only loved one single thing --
And that was just a peanut-butter sandwich.
His scepter and his royal gowns,
His regal throne and golden crowns
Were brown and sticky from the mounds
And drippings from each peanut-butter sandwich.
His subjects all were silly fools
For he had passed a royal rule
That all that they could learn in school
Was how to make a peanut-butter sandwich.
He would not eat his sovereign steak,
He scorned his soup and kingly cake,
And told his courtly cook to bake
An extra-sticky peanut-butter sandwich.
And then one day he took a bite
And started chewing with delight,
But found his mouth was stuck quite tight
From that last bite of peanut-butter sandwich.
His brother pulled, his sister pried,
The wizard pushed, his mother cried,
“My boy’s committed suicide
From eating his last peanut-butter sandwich!”
The dentist came, and the royal doc.
The royal plumber banged and knocked,
But still those jaws stayed tightly locked.
Oh darn that sticky peanut-butter sandwich!
The carpenter, he tried with pliers,
The telephone man tried with wires,
The firemen, they tried with fire,
But couldn’t melt that peanut-butter sandwich.
With ropes and pulleys, drills and coil,
With steam and lubricating oil --
For twenty years of tears and toil --
They fought that awful peanut-butter sandwich.
Then all his royal subjects came.
They hooked his jaws with grapplin’ chains
And pulled both ways with might and main
Against that stubborn peanut-butter sandwich.
Each man and woman, girl and boy
Put down their ploughs and pots and toys
And pulled until kerack! Oh, joy --
They broke right through that peanut-butter sandwich.
A puff of dust, a screech, a squeak --
The king’s jaw opened with a creak.
And then in voice so faint and weak --
The first words that they heard him speak
Were, “How about a peanut-butter sandwich?”
This is my clothesline with sheets hanging on it.Matthew 5:13-16 (the Message)
Let me tell you why you are here. You’re here to be the salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth. If you lose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness? You’ve lost your usefulness and will end up in the garbage.
Here’s another way to put it: You’re here to be light bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. If I make you light-bearers, you don’t think I’m going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I’m putting you on a light stand. Now that I’ve put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine! Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The [A] Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
Last Tuesday night was the Top Ten Banquet for this school district, which meant that the top ten juniors and top ten seniors from each of the five high schools came together to be honored, accompanied by their parents and favorite teacher. This picture shows daughter MJ (who is #2 in her class) with CB and me after the three-hour affair was over.
" Late in 1999 Janet McKenzie’s painting “Jesus of the People” was selected winner of the National Catholic Reporter’s competition for a new image of Jesus by judge, Sister Wendy Beckett, host of the PBS show “Sister Wendy’s Story of Painting”. In the words of Sister Wendy, “This is a haunting image of a peasant Jesus – dark, thick-lipped, looking out on us with ineffable dignity, with sadness but with confidence. Over His white robe He draws the darkness of our lack of love, holding it to Himself, prepared to transform all sorrows if we will let Him.” "
From Songbird: Many other RevGals are headed for the Festival of Homiletics in the coming week (click here for information on a RevGals meetup!!). In honor of these upcoming trips, herewith your Grand Tour Friday Five."President Bush was right when he said there is an axis of evil, but he was wrong when he said it is Iran, Iraq and North Korea. It has been said the true axis of evil is pandemic poverty, environmental degradation and a world awash in weapons. This triplet has caused enormous suffering and pain.
"The nations of the world have united behind eight Millennium Development Goals intended to make poverty history. They are:
"These goals comprise the best anti-terrorism campaign around. We can’t build enough guns, tanks and war planes to stop the anger and frustration that leads to terrorism. I do know, though that we now have the capacity to re-shape the world so that a good and decent life is enjoyed by all of God’s children.
"Can we imagine a new future? We must."
Go here to read the rest of the speech, which was published in this week's "Faith In Action" e-newsletter.
If you would like to subscribe to the weekly UM Church and Society "Faith in Action" newsletter, you may sign up here.
– Saint Augustine
"In India we have a flaming-hot chili pepper called “little thing” in my mother tongue. It is smaller than your little finger, so small that you don’t take it seriously; but even a tiny bite will burn your mouth. Self-will is like that; a little dose of it can cause harm for a long time.
"The remedy, in the Buddha’s language, is nirvana, from nir, “out,” plus vana, “to blow.” You don’t snuff self-will out in one day; you have to keep blowing away, in meditation and then during the day, especially in your relationships. This world is a place where we learn to return good will for ill will and love for hatred, to work harmoniously with others, and to put other people’s welfare before our own. You keep blowing for years and years and one day the fire goes out."
~~Eknath Easwaran
The Thought for the Day is today's entry from Eknath Easwaran's Words to Live By. (Copyright 1999 and 2005 by The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation.)
Select the Thought for the Day for any day of the year.
“… do not give up the form of prayer that comes naturally to you; and do not be disheartened if it seems at first a barren and profitless performance. It is quite possible to obtain spiritual nourishment without being consciously aware of it.”
— Evelyn Underhill, The Letters of Evelyn Underhill
(also in An Anthology of the Love of God)
Cisco is the shepherd mix, who was given to husband CB for Christmas 2006 by our kids after our old Lab died. Baillie is the cocker, whom AE gave me as a surprise when MJ was in 1st grade. The puppies are brother and sister, but look quite different. They belong to husband CB's friend who is gone for a project with AmeriCorps. He got the puppies from a litter born in the yard next to one of the Habitat houses they were building.
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Everybody is unique.
Do not compare yourself with anybody else
lest you spoil God’s curriculum.
To receive such quotations every day, subscribe to Word for the Day at Gratefulness.org.
Some delegates stand to protest the outcome of the vote. A UMNS photo by Paul Jeffrey.
I am saddened and very disappointed, as are these people at the United Methodist General Conference in Fort Worth, TX, that the majority of delegates (55%-45%) voted to keep the exclusionary wording the same for the United Methodist Church.
You can read about this at "United Methodists uphold homosexuality stance."
Rev. Richard Bates wrote:
"It's been a sad day. The Plenary Session this afternoon lasted from 2:30 until 6 pm dealing solely with the issue of homosexuality. The majority report from the committee of which Carl was chiefly responsible was defeated 55% to 45% in favor of the minority report which retained the exclusionary language, with the sole exception that they added back a phrase from an earlier Social Principles admonishing parents and friends to not alienate themselves from their GLBT loved ones.
"When the vote was posted on the giant screens, almost everyone wearing rainbow stoles stood in silent witness either with a black veil over their face or wearing a black arm band. There were probably between three and four hundred people in the visitors galleries who stood in solidarity. Gradually more than one hundred fifty people on the floor of the convention hall began also standing in silent witness to this injustice. There was a profound sadness throughout the hall and many were observed sobbing. Randy Miller, a lay delegate from the Cal-Nevada conference (and a friend of ours from our old church in San Francisco) then began to softly sing over and over again, "Jesus loves me, this I know." This was gradually picked up around the hall as more and more people joined in the singing and linked up hands. At this point today's Plenary Session was dismissed for the day. "
