"Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous."  --Pericles

"Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value."  --Desmond Tutu

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing 

than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

--e.e. cummings

“To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that’s its task.” --Dostoyevsky

"Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope. We can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis. . . . We need to focus on equity, and if the solutions within the system are so impossible to find, maybe we should change the system itself."  --Greta Thunberg

Six interrelated layers of knowing and learning

"Six interrelated layers of knowing and learning

1) information;

2) knowledge (where direct experience brings information to the level of mastery and skill);

3) intelligence (integrating intuitive and analytic),

4) understanding (seeing with the eye of the heart);

5) wisdom (blending truth with an ethic of what is right);

6) and finally transformation."

--Tobin Hart

"No one is useless in this world... who lightens the burden of it for any one else."  --Charles Dickens “Our Mutual Friend”

"I also like to think that after the slight shock of separation you will not feel any sorrow … and that if you should sometimes happen to think of me you will do so as one thinks of a book one read in childhood. I do not want ever to occupy a different place from that in the hearts of those I love, because then I can be sure of never causing them any unhappiness."  --Simone Weil 

“You are the author of your story ... Own your weird, your truth, your good and bad. We are the sum of all our pieces. Pursue your happiness, spread love, lift each other up…and Rock on."  --Lzzy Hale

100 years ago Jesus protected Our Lady of Guadalupe in a bomb attack

https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/249660/our-lady-of-guadalupe-bomb-attack?

100 years ago Jesus protected Our Lady of Guadalupe in a bomb attack

 

The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, Mexico. | David Ramos/CNA Staff
By CNA Staff
Mexico City Newsroom, Nov 20, 2021 / 09:22 am

A century ago, in 1921, there was an attack perpetrated against Our Lady of Guadalupe in the old basilica in Mexico City, in which the Marian image was protected by a crucifix.

“Nov. 14 marks the 100th anniversary of the terrible attack against the Blessed Virgin of Guadalupe. They wanted to destroy her blessed image,” Father Eduardo Chávez, doctor in Church history and general director of the Institute of Guadalupan Studies, told CNA's sister agency ACI Prensa.

"We also commemorate 100 years of the wonderful testimony of Jesus, since it was he who covered, cared for and protected his mother and our mother Saint Mary of Guadalupe," said Chávez, who is also postulator of the cause of canonization of St. Juan Diego, to whom the Virgin Mary appeared.

On Nov. 14, 1921, a bomb exploded that a man had hidden in some flowers that he placed in the basilica.

“Around 10:30 in the morning, a dynamite bomb went off hidden among the flowers. The damages were at the steps of the altar, which are made of marble, the brass candlesticks, and the Sacred Image of our Crucified Lord, that fell to the ground and was left bent,” indicates the story that is in the back of the current basilica, with the crucifix and the photos that were taken after the attack.

The explosion bent the crucifix, which is now is ​​known as "Santo Cristo del Atentado," or "Holy Christ of the Attack.”

"Testimony of this is the Christ who is bent and that we have here in the Basilica of Guadalupe itself as a testimony of the immense love of God, of the marvelous love of God for her and for all of us who still have her here,” Chávez said.

The story recalls that the glass of the painting that protected the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe "did not even crash" after the explosion.

The attack was the prelude to what years later would be religious persecution in Mexico, during the government of Plutarco Elías Calles.

Chávez told ACI Prensa that the Virgin of Guadalupe "takes away our fear" and "gives us the faith and hope to live in love."

The priest recalled that “the most holy image of Guadalupe carries Jesus in her womb, in her immaculate womb. It is the center of the same image and that is why it is a sign of the Church.”
In this sense, he explained, "when trying to destroy the image, they tried to destroy the Church itself and they could not because this comes from God."

“Just as Saint Mary of Guadalupe, in her marvelous image, is the work of God, so the Church is also the work of God. Christ is the head of this blessed church that proclaims truth, justice, love, forgiveness, mercy, what our people need so much today,” Chávez said.

"Since they could not destroy the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, we must never destroy it in our hearts, in our family, our community, our Church," Chávez said. "The Virgin of Guadalupe is here to give us Jesus Christ our Lord, her beloved Son, He who is the center of the Church."

 

THE WEIGHING

THE WEIGHING

by Jane Hirshfield

The heart’s reasons

seen clearly,

even the hardest

will carry

its whip-marks and sadness

and must be forgiven.

As the drought-starved

eland forgives

the drought-starved lion

who finally takes her,

enters willingly then

the life she cannot refuse,

and is lion, is fed,

and does not remember the other.

So few grains of happiness

measured against all the dark

and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us

only the strength we have and we give it.

Then it asks more, and we give it.

LOVE AFTER LOVE

LOVE AFTER LOVE

by Derek Walcott

The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

THE TRUELOVE

THE TRUELOVE

by David Whyte

There is a faith in loving fiercely

the one who is rightfully yours,

especially if you have

waited years and especially

if part of you never believed

you could deserve this

loved and beckoning hand

held out to you this way.

I am thinking of faith now

and the testaments of loneliness

and what we feel we are

worthy of in this world.

Years ago in the Hebrides,

I remember an old man

who walked every morning

on the grey stones

to the shore of baying seals,

who would press his hat

to his chest in the blustering

salt wind and say his prayer

to the turbulent Jesus

hidden in the water,

and I think of the story

of the storm and everyone

waking and seeing

the distant

yet familiar figure

far across the water

calling to them

and how we are all

preparing for that

abrupt waking,

and that calling,

and that moment

we have to say yes,

except it will

not come so grandly

so Biblically

but more subtly

and intimately in the face

of the one you know

you have to love

so that when

we finally step out of the boat

toward them, we find

everything holds

us, and everything confirms

our courage, and if you wanted

to drown you could,

but you don’t

because finally

after all this struggle

and all these years

you simply don’t want to

any more

you’ve simply had enough

of drowning

and you want to live and you

want to love and you will

walk across any territory

and any darkness

however fluid and however

dangerous to take the

one hand you know

belongs in yours.

FOR WHAT BINDS US

FOR WHAT BINDS US
by Jane Hirshfield

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down —
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There’s a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest —

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.

--Rachael Carson

"I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused — a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love — then we wish for knowledge about the subject of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate."  --Rachel Carson

"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."  --Martin Luther King

The Blessing Hidden in Grief

"What to do with our losses? . . . We must mourn our losses. We cannot talk or act them away, but we can shed tears over them and allow ourselves to grieve deeply. To grieve is to allow our losses to tear apart feelings of security and safety and lead us to the painful truth of our brokenness. Our grief makes us experience the abyss of our own life in which nothing is settled, clear, or obvious, but everything is constantly shifting and changing. . . . But in the midst of all this pain, there is a strange, shocking, yet very surprising voice. It is the voice of the One who says: “Blessed are those who mourn; they shall be comforted.” That’s the unexpected news: there is a blessing hidden in our grief. Not those who comfort are blessed, but those who mourn! Somehow, in the midst of our tears, a gift is hidden. Somehow, in the midst of our mourning, the first steps of the dance take place. Somehow, the cries that well up from our losses belong to our songs of gratitude."  --Henri Nouwen

"French novelist Honore’ de Balzac, “Man has a horror of aloneness, and of all kinds of aloneness, moral aloneness is the most terrible.” Author Ron Rolheiser expands on this: 

“Our deepest aloneness is moral. Where we feel most alone is, precisely, in the deepest part of our being, our moral soul, the place where we feel most strongly about the right and wrong of things and where what is most precious to us is cherished, guarded, and feels violated when it is attacked.”

This loneliness is not satisfied by being around people or participating in activities with others, it is a longing to be truly understood by those around us; for others to see the deep passions and convictions that animate our dreams of how the world should be."  --Kevin Jane 

"All you need to do is to take 10 minutes out a day to step back, to familiarize yourself with the present moment so that you get to experience a greater sense of focus, calm, and clarity in your life."  --Andy Puddicombe

"Sometimes the true nature of reality beckons from just beyond the horizon… maybe we will always be asking questions and never be able to fully answer them."  --Brian Greene

"I’ve learned about the poetry and the wisdom and the grace that can be found in the words of people all around us when we simply take the time to listen."  --Dave Isay

"A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed."  --Henrik Ibsen

"Toni Morrison said, ‘The function of freedom is to free someone else,’ and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh well, what are you going to do?"  --Anne Lamott

Love Remembers

It is possible to have intimate relationships with loved ones who have died. Death sometimes deepens the intimacy. . . . [I believe] that after separation certain people continue to be very significant for us in our hearts and through our memories. Remembering them is much more than just thinking of them, because we are making them part of our members, part of our whole being.

Knowing this experience allows me to live from the deep belief that I have love to offer to people, not only here, but also beyond my short, little life. I am a human being who was loved by God before I was born and whom God will love after I die. This brief lifetime is my opportunity to receive love, deepen love, grow in love, and give love. When I die love continues to be active, and from full communion with God I am present by love to those I leave behind.

--Henri Nouwen

"Turn your life toward what you love. . . . Become like a tree that shelters other lovers, roots finding secrets beneath, crown top waving in the sunlight no one sees. Be true to that love, not to ownership. Be like wind pouring through forests and clearings, circling mountains, running along rivers. Turn your life to that big love you have always suspected is the country you come from, sing the way they sing there, be that light-hearted and warm-hearted and easy-going even into your death, your sails full of love’s assurance."  --Elias Amidon