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...

Sometimes when I am dealing with students, I encounter some who are not very responsible.   If it were that simple, we would have narrowed the range of the problem.   However the problem is bigger than the student population.   Certainly in my past I have been irresponsible.   And I am still all-too-capable of not being responsible, even in my ripe old age!   And clearly, there are other adults with whom I deal who are not very responsible.                But it does not even stop there.   We all can cite examples of businesses, which did not operate responsibly.   We know some banking establishments in the mid-2000s that were involved in shady practices that cost thousands of people much, if not all, of their life savings.   We know major sports programs that have cheated on grades---obviously not responsible behavior.   So when we talk about the ethics of responsibility, we...

Much will be made this weekend around the theme of “freedom.”   It would be difficult to imagine any American, or any person from any country for that matter, who is not “for freedom.”   Can you imagine anyone saying, “No, actually I prefer bondage?”   However, it is true that some folks in this country are not really free.   There still exists some bondage in race terms, in gender terms, in economic terms, and even others.   Yet over this weekend, stories will abound about independence.   Probably we will hear again that the British were unfair to our forbearers in the 18 th century and so Americans did what Americans always will do: fight!   I have been in Independence Hall in Philadelphia more than once.   It is an impressive building and the history of the place is almost palpable.   It is easy for my mind to try to imagine those days of drama as those guys discussed why and how the American colonies needed to move forward indepen...

I have no clue when I first heard about a legacy.   I doubt I knew anything about it until college days or even later.   It might have been one of those things I heard about, but it never registers.   I doubt very many young folks pay any attention to those kinds of things.   By the time I was teaching and, especially, doing some fund raising, I became very aware of the idea of legacy.   Only recently and only occasionally have I given any thought to my own legacy. The word, legacy, often is associated with wills that dead people leave and about which the survivors learn in a court session or with the lawyers.   Often, legacies have to do with money and property.   Of course, some people are quite wealthy and their legacies to their heirs are remarkable.   My parents did not fit that category!   They left me and my siblings almost no money or property.   I did not care.   I did not have them as parents to make me wealthy! I...

It is touching to be given gifts.  There are a couple kinds of gifts.  The first kind of gift is the gift one expects.  When I say this, I think of special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries and Christmas.  Giving gifts is part of the norm on these occasions.  While it is not right to say that we expect gifts, it is normal to assume we are going to get gifts.  Of course, we probably don’t know what the gift will be, but we know most likely we will be getting gifts.  So it is not a surprise to be handed a gift.             The other kind of gift is the serendipitous gift.  That is the gift we are given when we did not expect it.  In fact, with these serendipitous gifts, we usually do not even see it coming.  We may well be caught off guard. We don’t know what to say.  We did not even think about getting a gift.  Often it feels quite humbling to be given a gift. ...

On the surface the title of this inspirational reflection makes little sense.   Why would any person with brains want to do the impossible?   Most of us know that sometimes doing the possible is hard enough!   Why would you try to do the impossible?   And likely fail?   I think I would have agreed with this until I read an interesting little account in a book by my friend, Parker Palmer.            I have been using one of Palmer’s books, The Active Life , in one of my classes.   The subtitle of the book gives you a good sense of its focus: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity and Caring .   It is not his best book, but the content matches something I try to help students and adults think about in their normal lives.   Many of us think monks and nuns can live a spiritual life.   They have made special arrangements in life so that being spiritual becomes their full-time job.   But the res...