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Filled with passion and energy, 85-year-old Father Ruskin Piedra works tirelessly to support and defend the immigrant community in his Brooklyn parish.
Our Bible study group is reading the prophet Hosea. Someone asked, “Why did God choose Israel to be the chosen people? “
The Gospels are a love story. And we’re a part of it.
Pope John Paul II canonized Conventual Franciscan Father Maximilian Kolbe in Rome on October 10, 1982.
Marianne Cope listened only to God, accepting and caring for people others feared or found distasteful and putting her own health at risk.
To keep our bodies less defended, to live in our body right now, to be present to others in a cellular way, is also the work of healing of past hurts and the many memories that seem to store themselves in the body. The body seems to never stop offering its messages; but fortunately, the body never lies, even though the mind will deceive you constantly. Zen practitioners tend to be well-trained in seeing this. It is very telling that Jesus usually physically touched people when he healed them; he knew where the memory and hurt was lodged, and it was in the body itself.
Exclusion in the name of God is the very worst of religious sins. God speaks in many tongues and to every color and age of people. It is not ours to decide where God’s favor lies. But it is ours to see as a spiritual task the obligation to come to our own opinions. We are not to buy thought cheaply. We are not to attach ourselves to someone else’s decisions like pilot fish and simply go with the crowd. We are meant to be thinking Christians.
I have moved many times in my life. Twelve times, in fact.
The great spiritual problem of the day is being “like fish out of water.” A life without spiritual regularity drifts through time with little to really hang onto when life most needs an anchor. Instead, we often get caught up in someone else’s agenda most of our lives. We put the cell aside for work and its never-ending deadlines. We forget the cell when we need it most and make play a poor substitute for thought and prayer. We think that we can run our legs off doing, going, finding, socializing, and still stay stolid and serene in the midst of the pressure of it all.
