Wonder in the eyes of 3yr old Granddaughter

David Jackson added 2 new photos.

6 hrs · Edinburg, TX · 

STAR OF WONDER....👧
This Christmas season I've been inspired by a number of posts on Facebook that show us wonders of the universe, the ocean, animals, etc. But little did I think that I would discover wonder in our Compost bin. Zennie (3 year old granddaughter) and I were outside providing food for our wild chicken who has been with us for months. After providing her with food a voice called for us to return to the back door and take out the compost container from inside ...

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Thomas Merton, Prophet of our Time

from: A Life in Letters, p.203  from a Sept. 1961 letter to Ethel Kennedy

"As a nation we have begun to float off into a moral void and all the sermons of all the priests in the country (if they preach at all) are not going to help much...It seems to me that there are dangerous ambiguities about our democracy in its actual present condition.  I wonder to what extent our ideals are now a front for organized selfishness and systematic irresponsibility...We cannot go on living every man for himself.  The most actual danger of all is that we may someday float without realizing it into a nice tight fascist society in which all the resentments and all the guilt in all the messed up teenagers (and older ones) will be channeled into a destructive groove..."
"Certainly our basic needs is for truth, and not for "images" and slogans that "engineer consent."  We are living in a dream world.  We do not know ourselves or our adversaries."

Ecumenical prayer gathering at the Wall in Hidalgo, Tx.

Blow the Shofar, let the Wall come down.

Some 50 people representing a number of different Churches prayed together.

Prayers for:

Our National Leaders.

All Nations

Law enforcement/Peace officers

Humanitarian treatment of all immigrants.

Sacramentalized but not Evangelized.

This quote from the book FORMING INTENTIONAL DISCIPLES sticks with me. "The majority of Catholics in the United States are sacramentalized but not not evangelized."

Pope Francis in THE JOY OF THE GOSPEL #3 "I invite all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them;  I ask all of you to do this unfailingly each day."

      "Could you briefly describe to me your lived relationship with God to this point in your life?" The author of the book Forming Intentional Disciples tells of the difference that this question made in their giving evangelization seminars. They found that The National Directory for Catechesis outlines two critical steps that should precede catechesis: pre-evangelization and initial proclamation of the basic kerygma, or the Great Story of Jesus. 

      They propose a pre-evangelization process.  "There is no way of knowing what a particular person's journey has truly been and where the person is now until we earn the right to hear his or her story and then listen carefully and prayerfully." 

Two short books: APOLOGETICS AND THE BIBLICAL CHRIST & SILENCE SPEAKS.

The Youth Minister at St. John the Baptist Church directed my attention on FACEBOOK to the web page
"Catholic Fundamentalism".  I interacted with the page and the anonymous postings for a bit.  It reminded me of the "Outside the Church No Salvation" controversy of some time past.  Many of the postings on this page reminded me of the course in Apologetics that began my Theological Studies back in 1963.  The text for that course was in Latin and used the classical Catholic "thesis-hypothesis".  Thanks be to God during the course of my studies I discovered Avery Dulles, S.J.'s book APOLOGETICS AND THE BIBLICAL CHRIST. We suffered from the same professor for Apologetics and then our Scripture Courses. Within the last week I re-read Dulles' book which had saved me from the horrors of our Theology courses from 1963-1967.
The second book SILENCE SPEAKS by Robert Nugent caught my attention because it covered four men who lived and suffered from Roman Silencing.  One of them was Teilhard de Chardin.  Roger Karbon in his homily posted in the National Catholic Reporter mentioned Chardin.  I recalled that the Rector of our College seminary made a dramatic announcement that Chardin's books were being removed from the library. Luckily I saw a reference to this book and read with great interest about Chardin, Yves Congar, John Courntey Murray and Thomas Merton.   The chapter on John Courtney Murray mentioned two theologians that our Professor of Moral Theology often referred to, Father Francis J. Connell and Father Joseph Fenton.  The latter our Moral teacher referred to as "Butch Fenton." For our Moral courses as well as our Dogma courses we used Manuals in Latin.  The moral teacher we had I often referred to as an "Obstructionist".  The two adversaries of John Courtney Murray, Connell and Fenton I believe were his mentors. 
One of my priest friends, now deceased, was a great disciple of Thomas Merton.  I must admit that I haven't read too much of his works.  I did read The Seven Storey Mountain and The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton by Michael Mott.  On retreat near Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky I also got directions on how to sneak in to find the Hermitage of Merton.  I took some pictures inside and out. 

THE DANGER OF SLOPPY THEOLOGY

Lately I have become aware how easy it is to live a kind of double life.  (I'm not thinking of political people here but of  "religious" people.)  This is connected with "piosity" which is a surface sort of religion but doesn't get beyond this surface.  This allows people to be very devotional and live in a contradictory way.  It's captured in the saying, "some people live one way on Sunday Morning and in a different way the rest of the time.  There is a lack of "integrity" in this way of living. 
Paulo Freire in his book, PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED tells us that perception or the recognition of our current situation is the beginning of transformation.  In psychological terms we can live out of "ego" and not own it.
I believe that Sloppy Theology leads to sloppy counseling, to sloppy living on the surface and never going very deep.

Don't Text and Drive

Not sure if there are any statistics about who text and drive more, women or men.  But my unscientific observation is that many more women text and drive than do men.  Secondly are there any statistics about whether more men or women are involved in accidents caused by texting and driving?  It occurs to me that women are much more used to "multi-tasking" than are men.  I'm curious however whether women's experience with multi tasking allows them to do this more safely than men.
Anyone have any thoughts or statistics on this ever present reality?