Because Psalm 24 is one of the psalms we read every day for a whole week at a stretch, this past week I decided not to follow my usual temptation to skip it after one day, but to keep reading it first each morning and see what I saw differently by doing this.
The first thing I noticed was how the earth’s foundation in God is not visible to the naked eye and lies below the motion and fluidity of our lives:
“The earth and everything in it — the world and all who live in
it –belong to YHWH. YHWH built it on the deep waters,
laying its foundations in the ocean depths.” Continue Reading »
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The letters O.S.B. after a name don’t usually suggest radical thinking to me. My mistake. Continue Reading »
Tags: Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day, Virgil Michel
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Unlike Advent and Lent, the season of Epiphany doesn’t invite introspection or conscious spiritual development for many of us. And western Christians have ironically let this day of starlight be eclipsed by New Year’s and by a return to our post-holiday routines. Post-expectations, the light shines on us as we somewhat wearily resume our ordinary life-rhythms. Continue Reading »
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Happy New Year. Welcome to Presidential Campaign 2012. Angry is the new happy.
The Occupy Wall Street folks are angry at corporations. The Tea Party is angry at the government. The American public is angry at the Muslim world. The Muslim world is angry at the United States. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are angry at everybody–especially Barack Obama. Barack Obama is angry at congress. Continue Reading »
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While light emerging in darkness is perhaps the most familiar Advent motif, Mary’s pregnancy in preparation for giving birth is a part of Advent I ponder often, too — even as a woman who has never given birth. At this moment draws near, Mary must drop everything to give her attention to act of giving birth, of bringing forth a being who is not herself (though she too now has a mission which has caught up her own life in ways she cannot fathom). Continue Reading »
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Yesterday on my birthday I attended a physics lecture with a friend who’s a creative writer (poetry, a novel in the works). The lecture was about this year’s Nobel Prize winners’ discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, not decreasing.
It was satisfying to think for a ‘time’ of the immensity of the universe, about the invisible presence of dark matter and dark energy that may together account for about 96% of the universe. And even oddly satisfying — because true — to think of our planet’s destiny of extinction, when our sun grows old and expands, then contracts into a white dwarf.
Do you think it makes our lives seem to matter less, to set our lives in the context of the universe and its history? Continue Reading »
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