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On clear mornings from my apartment window which faces Platteville’s Mound, I enjoy watching the morning sun, like a huge orange-red host, rise majestically from earth’s chalice, inspiring me to offer a new day to God.
Beautiful sunrises deepen my respect for God’s gift of creation. Celebrating Earth Day on April 22 reminds me of my responsibility to care for this gift.
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| Ask IPS |
Question: “How can I take responsibility for my own sinful actions, while still recognizing the mercy and love of God?”
Response: William McKenna, M.S., Clinical Extern at the IPS Center for Psychological Services
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I was pleased that the United States Supreme Court dismissed a suit brought by Michael Newdow, a Sacramento man who wanted to remove the phrase “In God We Trust” from the nation’s coins and paper currency, as well as from the fronts of our public buildings.
The argument that the gentleman brought forward was that this custom somehow violates the First Amendment guarantee that the government shall make no law either establishing an official religion or prohibiting the free exercise of religion in the United States.
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Galatians 1:15-18 is not your basic witness-to-the-Resurrection text.
Yet St. Paul’s mini-spiritual autobiography helps us understand just how radically the experience of the Risen Lord changed the first disciples’ religious worldview, and why an evangelical imperative was built into that experience.
Here’s the Pauline text:
Editor’s note: During this Year of Consecrated Life, this is the third in a series based on the Second Vatican Council’s document, Perfectae Caritatis (Decree on the Adaptation and Renewal of Religious Life) written by Abbot Marcel Rooney, OSB, former abbot primate of the Benedictine order who now resides in Madison.
The decree of the Second Vatican Council on which these reflections are based speaks in the very first paragraph about special gifts of the Holy Spirit which have been imparted to the Church.
The purpose of these gifts is the building up of the Church in the world, and for manifesting God’s own kind of Life in the world.
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Over the years, there have been numerous films that feature the character of the “monster-mentor,” by which I mean an elder who forms a young apprentice through the toughest kind of tough love.
Think of Lou Gossett, Jr.’s character in An Officer and a Gentleman who puts Richard Gere’s young Navy recruit brutally through his paces; or of the awful drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket who ruthlessly prepares one young man to be a soldier, even as he leads another to commit suicide; or of Pai-Mei in Kill Bill, Vol. 2, the Kung-Fu master who brow-beats one recruit until she is able to put her fist through a four-inch thick piece of wood.
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The reputations of the great often diminish over time. Ten years after his holy death on April 2, 2005, Karol Wojtyla, St. John Paul II, looms even larger than he did when the world figuratively gathered at his bedside a decade ago.
Tens of millions of men and women around the world felt impelled, and privileged, to pray with him through what he called his “Passover” — his liberation through death into a new life of freedom in the blazing glory of the Thrice-Holy God.
On this anniversary, as at his canonization last year, what seems most memorable about the man, at least at this historical moment, was that he refused to accommodate to the “tyranny of the possible:” the idea that some things just can’t be put right; that we’re stuck with the way things are, however much we may dislike them.
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In February 1991, during Operation Desert Storm, Ruth Dillow received the sad news from the Pentagon that her son Clayton had stepped on a mine in Kuwait and was killed.
Ruth said that the grief and shock she felt was almost unbearable. For three days she wept constantly. For three days family and friends tried to comfort her, but they could not. Her grief was too great! She felt some of the grief that Mary surely experienced when her son, Jesus, was crucified.
After the third day, the telephone rang. “It’s just another stranger trying to comfort me,” she thought. Reluctantly, she picked up the phone. The voice on the phone shouted joyfully, “Mom, it’s me. I’m still alive! It’s me!”
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| Patrick Gorman |
Lent is a season of preparation and recollection of our Baptism. This is the seventh and final article in a series of articles reflecting upon the Sacrament of Baptism.
Our Lord’s parting words to his disciples were, “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Mt. 28:19-20).
Ever since that day, that is what the Church has done.
Q I am an only child with parents who are nearing their mid 70s.
My mother recently pointed out that some of their friends are speaking to their children about power of attorney for health and financial matters in the event of an illness or loss of capacity.
Is it automatic that I, again as an only child, should be responsible for everything? Is that wise? I am not even sure what all of that responsibility would entail.
(From a daughter in Portage).
