Faith & Life Inspirational Message

One of the journals I regularly read is the National Catholic Reporter.   While I am not a Roman Catholic, it is important to me to know what the Catholic Church is doing.   I know there are over one billion Catholics in the world---about one out of every seven people on the globe is a Roman Catholic!   Those numbers are staggering to this Quaker who is used to dealing with small numbers.            It is instructive to follow the Catholic Church through the lens of the NCR, as it is often called.   It routinely reports on the current Pope and current issues facing the Church.   Some of these issues are solely the issues of the Catholic tradition.   Some of the issues are also issues for Quakers and the rest of the Christian group.   And some issues are issues for every major religious tradition.             I have been reading this periodical...

Some days I am sure there are some spiritual lessons I missed!   There is so much more talk and literature today on spirituality than was true in my growing-up years.   Perhaps there was more in the Roman Catholic Church, but I doubt it---not for the layperson anyway.   In fact, I never even heard “spirituality” language when I was a boy or even a young man.   The talk was always about “religion.”   For the most part, what I learned I learned by going to the little Quaker meeting.   There was the Sunday School hour, which never seemed very interesting or relevant to my life.                I became more actively interested in religion during my college years.   Part of the reason for this is those college years were the time I was trying to make sense of out my life.   Today I would talk about that as learning how to make meaning in life.   I feel fairly well along that road ...

I like following the Catholic lectionary (daily readings) that is provided by my Benedictine monastery.   This series of readings is neat for me, since it allows me to be connected to the monastic community without having to go every day to a monastery.   It enables me to know what Psalms and other scriptural readings my friends, the monks, are doing at various times of the day.   I know their day is structured around the various worship times throughout the day.   I probably could do a better job of structuring my day, but I don’t.            Of course, my day is structured.   Since I still am teaching, my day becomes structured around the various classes I am teaching.   Sometimes structure comes in the form of committees and other regular commitments I have made.   My life also has other kinds of haphazard structure.   I might have a special meeting called at the last minute.   I might h...