Faith & Life Inspirational Message

On its own the title for this inspirational journey makes no sense.  Of course, the words are understandable.  Everyone knows what ordinariness is.  And sweetness is a no-brainer!  But together, who knows?  What is missing is a context. Actually, context is more important than we usually think it is.  So often, meaning is gained when we know the context.  For this phrase, “ordinariness into sweetness” (the text), to mean anything, we need other surrounding words (providing the “con,” which means “with,” for the text!).  Those surrounding words form a context.  They would shape to how we are supposed to understand “ordinariness into sweetness.” Let me build the context by making suggestions.  The first suggestion is when I came up with the phrase, “ordinariness into sweetness,” I was thinking of Halloween.  No doubt, now the “get” half of it!  Halloween---candy---sweetness!  And you are exactly right.  Everyone thi...

Occasionally, I realize not all good ideas come from books.  It is true that many of the things I ponder and the help I get for my own spiritual journey come from the reading I do.  I feel privileged to have been taught how to read.  It is unimaginable not to be literate, but I realize half the nearly seven billion people in our world cannot read.   It is difficult to underestimate the breadth and depth brought to my life because I can read.  Just think, we can go back to ancient Greece when we read Plato or Aristotle.  We can go to first century Palestine to get a glimpse of how the apostle Paul experienced the work of the Spirit in his life and how he came to formulate his theology of early Christianity.   The great thing about literature and the ability to read is different worlds and dead people are still available to us for conversation.  I can interact with Gandhi; I can converse with Karl Marx.  I can know those early Qua...

I recently read a charming, but provocative, little essay in Brian Doyle’s book, Eight Whopping Lies .  Doyle entitles the chapter, “Our Daily Murder.”  I have found Doyle’s book so intriguing because I never know where he is going in his essays.  Doyle is a Catholic, so I was not surprised this one was fashioned as a confession.  However, in the beginning I was not sure what he was confessing. He begins the essay, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…” (30)  He continues to recount a recent school shooting in his state.  Sadly, this has been too common in the news.  In spite of this commonality, he laments his reaction and this is his confession.  In typical Doyle fashion, he speaks boldly.  He confesses, “I want to shoot the shooters.  In the head.”  He causes me to squirm a little, because he names something that I feel---at least in a slight form, so I rationalize.  And then he acknowledges, “And I was ashamed of myself, Fa...

“The Buddha diagnosed our problem as ‘mindlessness,’ meaning that we live semiconsciously because our awareness is clouded and our spiritual vision asleep.”  This comment from Roger Walsh’s book, Essential Spirituality , is a good description of our cultural norm.  And of course, if living mindlessness is a cultural norm, then it seems normal.  Most of us would not think we are living mindlessly.  That is because we seldom see any evidence or folks living mindfully. This is fascinating to me because there is so much interest today in being mindful.  It has become commonplace for businesses to offer mindfulness training.  Those kinds of classes and experiences have blossomed across college campuses.  And yet, I am confident students do not report less stress.  Maybe they do for a little bit while they are in a class or taking advantage of an 8-week mindfulness experience. What I have learned over some significant amount of time is simply having an ...

To write about anger is not something I do easily.  Instead I know myself to be one who too often avoided getting angry, being angry or expressing.  For anyone who wants to be in control, anger is a tricky situation.  You may not be in control, the situation in which you find yourself may go into chaos and then what?  Many families have a tacit agreement that no one gets angry.  Of course, that seems really nice, but it is obviously unrealistic.  And so the anger is repressed or displaced in unfortunate ways. And so it was that I hit upon the theme of anger when I read Sister Joan Chittister’s recent editorial about anger.  Sister Joan is a globally-known Benedictine nun from Erie, PA.  She is older than I am, so she has been around for a few years!  For decades she has been a prophet within the Catholic Church and beyond.  She reminds me what Jesus might have been like.  Often her thoughts cause me to be a little uneasy, but I am s...

I have many reasons to be thankful.  One of the reasons I am thankful is the fact that I am able to read some interesting material and spend time with others in conversation about that material.  Of course, for me much of that conversation time is with students.  But I really don’t like to call them students. I like to tell my students I prefer to call them colleagues.  After all, that is what a college should be doing---making colleagues.  In some areas I know more than they do.  In other areas they know more than I do.  Many are smarter than I am.  They just have not lived as long and, therefore, don’t have as much experience as I do.  But the problem with having experience is we too often think we know it all.  We become less open; we make too many assumptions.  We forget to be learners, too. Some interesting material I am reading and have the privilege of spending some time in conversation with my colleagues is from the earl...

Doubtlessly all of us deal with failure from our early days.  We don’t always use the word, failure, to describe one-year olds who try to walk.  But I have recently watched my grandkids negotiate that momentous step in human growth.  They look like tiny drunks lurching through the living room.  They crash with frequency.  It is funny that all of us bystanders keep encouraging the young one, who has barely mastered standing up, now to take those first steps.  And then, they try.  Inevitably they fail.  And they fail often.  But they keep trying and, soon enough, to begin to walk. We don’t think about their earlier wobbly efforts as failures, but that’s what they are.  This proves the first point we all should register when we think about failure.  Failure is not always final.  Often it is part of the process.  It is part of the process of growth.  It is part of the process of development.  If the one-year old is n...