To commemorate the day the bombs fell there was a concert in the Dresden opera: Johannes Brahms: A German Requiem. When the music had ended the audience did not clap. Quietly, everyone stood up and remained standing, long, in silence.
A six-year-old first grader in Colorado was suspended from school for one day for sexual harassment because he bent over and kissed his "girlfriend's" hand during a reading lesson.
These are called "Trip-Stones" and are to be found on the sidewalk in front of houses where Jewish families lived who were deported and murdered during the Nazi regime.
I must consciously free my mind from the idea that God is just a person who lived in Palestine. Christianity keeps me focused on that. Break away from that notion and begin to realize more what God means.
The most important things we do in life we do without knowing: like taking a spouse, like choosing a career, like bringing up children. We take the leap!
How many people sit before their TV sets watching Sunday services? Will that some day be forbidden so that people will have to go back to their church and fill up the benches?
A humbled President came and spoke, and made no attempt to upstage J.F.K with his famous speech, ..."Ich bin ein Berliner" fifty years ago, June 26, 1653.
Little did I realize that those Latin prayers I had to learn to be an altar boy would end up, seventy years later, as the prayers I recite day in and day out.
Spera in Deo, quoniam adhuc, confitebor illi: salutare vultus mei,
He looked at me and said: If the Eucharist really is the Body of Christ, that is all the more reason to share it. If that is so, we should be welcoming everyone to the table.
He said that I should realize that everything in my life fits in to the great inscrutable plan of God. There is nothing that is not as it should have been.
The first qualification games for the World Soccor Championships are being held now. Germany looking very strong. The Germans will play two friendly matches in US, one in Boca Raton, Florida, the other in Washington, D.C. in May and June.
They say there is a power struggle going on in the Vatican. Others say the Holy Ghost is at work descending on the cardinals with inspiration from on high . . . ?
We were talking about love when he said: The novice and the 80 year old monk both love God but in quite different ways. You will never be able to keep on loving like the novice does.
He looked at me and said: Most men do everything they can to alleviate spiritual suffering, to rid themselves of it. But you must learn to suffer, to make peace with it and accept what it brings about.
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Sunrise on Christmas morning.
All was quiet and as the sun came up behind the hills it was as if some magnificent music was being played.
During our talk he looked at me and said: "Maybe it's a matter of age, but later in life one seems to shift the emphasis away from the Son over to the Father."
There were ways to You she taught us, Ways we never knew about or thought possible: Like being a simple ball of no value, she said, that You "could play with, one You could throw on the ground toss about, pierce, leave in a corner or press to Your heart just as it might please You".
It was a struggle between calculation and trust: At night on the stairway in total darkness, instead of mobilizing all his sense perception he learned to trust his feet to find the steps.