Max Lerner (1902-1992) The American journalist and educator known for his controversial syndicated column; some years ago made this statement: He said: “Our demonic civilization is like a painted face on a balloon. As the balloon swells, the face becomes more and more monstrous. If we take it at face value we will be terrified.... But actually it is hollow within. One pinprick will destroy it.” Keep in mind that Max Lerner wrote these words long before the bubble burst.
Are you struck, as Dick Donavan (who sent this to me) and I was by its appropriateness for the time in which we are living. Not long ago, we were living in a world where people were getting rich -- making millions or even billions of dollars. All of us were watching the value of our houses increase. We were spending money like crazy. But we failed to notice that the balloon was swelling -- and that the painted face on the balloon was becoming more and more monstrous. We didn't see it, in part, because we didn't want to see it.Nobody wanted to see it.Business people didn't want to see it, because it would have required them to manage their businesses more conservatively.Politicians didn't want to see it, because who wants to yell "Fire!" and see the party come to an end.We didn't want to see it, because we were making money and buying things and watching our retirement accounts soar. Nobody wanted to see it come to an end. But it took only a pinprick to bring the whole thing down!
Now everyone is trying to figure out what happened and who is to blame. Like Humpty-Dumptybusiness people and politicians who were blowing up the balloon a year ago are now trying to paste it back together. They are trying to get it to hold air again. They haven't really managed to paste it together, but they are already pumping massive amounts of air (meaning our tax dollars) into the broken balloon to try to stave off disaster.
And so we are mortgaging our children's futures by throwing money at failed corporations in the hope that we can breathe life into their dying bodies.It seems too much like putting a corpse on a respirator.
Admittedly you and I do not have all the answers. But of great concern is that we seem not to be learning anything from this massive failure. We got where we are by greed and excess, and we seem to be trying to repair the damage by applying more greed and excess. Do you agree that the whole thing offends our common sense?
... What attracted Dick’s eye to that quotation were the opening words -- "Our demonic civilization."
Our Gospel lesson study this week (Mark 1:21-28) talks about an encounter that Jesus had with the demonic or unclean spirit ("unclean spirit" and "demon" are used interchangeably in the Bible). We don't talk much about demons these days. We've outgrown that kind of talk, haven't we! But we have not outgrown the reality. If you think that the word demonic is too pre-scientific -- too extreme -- not in keeping with our modern sophistication -- just read your newspaper or watch the evening news. If you can't find something demonic there, you need to get your glasses checked. Every new day brings new evidence of the demonic among us.
... There’s an old Native American story about a chief instructing some braves about the struggle within. “It is like two dogs fighting inside of us,” the chief told them. “There is one good dog who wants to do the right and the other dog wants to do the wrong. Sometimes the good dog seems stronger and is winning the fight. But sometimes the bad dog is stronger and wrong is winning the fight.”
“Who is going to win in the end?” a young brave asks “The one you feed, the chief answered.”
I am often asked, “How is it that you have such an interest in the various denominations and religions?” Or more often it’s “what church do you believe in?”
There was a period of time when I was asking myself the same thing.
Somewhere along in my spiritual journey came an answer.
First, I came to realize that my “spiritual curiosity” was a gift from God.
Since then, and during all these years, I have learned that many in all the various faiths love God and one another to a degree worth emulating.
For me personally, I am grounded in the “inclusive” message of the New Testament.
I have also found solitude; silence and prayer have been effective paths toward self-knowledge and have helped to bring me in touch with my inner center. This is the place where God dwells in each of us.
I also fully understand and realize that a formative spiritual life is a communal progress and to experience soul nurturance apart from spiritual companionship is quite inconceivable.
So, right here and now I want to thank you all for being a part of my life and letting me be a part of yours.
Your Fellow SojournerAl
THOUGHTS
Jesus said, "If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him."--John 14:23
At many Christian funerals, the preacher emphasizes how Jesus has left to make a place ready for us to join him in heaven. Then he is going to come back for us. But just a few verses later, Jesus adds this promise. He's telling us that until we can come be with him at his place, he will come live with us here in our hearts. It all hinges on one thing, our willingness to obey him. Not a bad deal is it. So let's not let obedience be a forgotten word in our lifestyle!
For churches to get along, sometimes their leaders must remind them about unity, using the authority of the One who made his dying prayer a prayer for unity. We must work together or perish.
God will not forget us when we're in trouble or when we are old. We may outlive our friends and be forgotten by those who know us, but God will never leave us or forsake us. He will sustain, carry, protect, and rescue us.
Being depressed and dissatisfied with life can be caused by a myriad of things. But for many of us, these are symptoms that we have focused too much on ourselves and are angry with life. We have forgotten to count our blessings, thank and praise God, and help those around us.
PRAYERDear Lord, in these troubled times make your presence known to all people in all faiths around the world so that they may see peace as the only way.
Bless all efforts to promote friendship among all nations. Cause us to recognize our own faults and shortcomings.O God accept this prayer and bring this to pass.Amen
My Dear Fellow Sojourners, There is a cease fire and withdrawal in Gaza right at this time but I thought I’d share with you how I responded to the question “What are your thoughts on the Gaza –Israeli war?” The following was my answer at the time and holds true to other conflicts as well.......................................
My views on the Palestinian Arabs and Israel conflict? As I think you know I’m anti-war. The reasons are many but mainly because of my Biblical worldview (not necessarily the Church’s view) and even from what I think are simply logical reasons. I have never been a soldier but Dwight D. Eisenhower ( as well as many other soldiers also) expressed pretty much my view, he said, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” People in power, on either side of a conflict, tell us that we must make the sacrifice for the sake of peace. They tell us that death is necessary for peace. This is a profound propaganda deception. Even the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said: "Enough of blood and tears. Enough!" Let us echo that demand and value human blood and tears too precious to be shed through war.” But now, as I see it, the politicians in power in Israel and Gaza have lost their way! Similar to what has happened here in America. None seem to understand war is not the answer. War cannot bring peace! I personally cannot justify the Arabs, Israelis or us to willingly violate human bodies and souls; spill blood and tears via the extreme violence of war for some (usually) political end. They, as well as us, obviously value the end higher than the blood and tears, higher than the damage and destruction to property, bodies and souls. Expressing myself Biblically here I frequently ask---“Did Jesus advocate for the overthrow of the despotic Roman rule?” Or sometimes “Doesn’t anyone hear the voices of the poor children? I perhaps should quickly add here though that I don’t put the entire blame on politicians and capitalists but also on what’s taught and not taught in the churches, synagogues, mosques, and schools; which throws some blame as well on the adult citizenry. But it is the powers that be that send young men to die for politics.
.... The Bible teaches "God so loved the world." God loves and cares for all people; people on both sides of the fighting; the innocent civilians both in Israel and in Gaza. My compassion is equally distributed in Israel and Gaza in proportion to the number of injured non-combatants and innocent civilians in both locations. I heard a woman on the radio say “When we are told that rockets ought to launch to keep our enemy wary, we ought to say the cost is too high and the goal unachievable. And when we are told that bombs must fly and fall in densely populated areas to weaken a terrorist organization, we ought to say that the blood of the innocent as well as those of the terrorists is too high a price to pay.” I don’t know if she was Israeli or Arab but I will say this is a person that knows that all these wars only lead more to the moral bankruptcy of all of humankind. One last thing here, (a little bit off the subject though} our culture of consumerism, materialism, greed, pride, dishonesty, unaccountability, pornography, abortion on demand, filled jails, loss of the arts, and watch a movie or TV show and see how many times you hear God's name taken in vain, and see how the women dress. I bet that you won't find that in Arab countries like it's found in the USA. Yet with all these imperfections (we don’t call them sins anymore) we somehow think we are privileged to tell them how to run their country........ Because we are so good at it?........ What do you think? I’d be interested in hearing from you as to what you thought of my response concerning the war in question. Also let me ask you; what effect on the suffering young knowing the world from its very cruelest side, do you think this will have on this and the next generation?
Jesus is the light. Light illuminates; light reveals; light purifies; light contrasts with darkness; it symbolizes truth and knowledge and wisdom; it is associated with happiness and optimism. And so if Jesus is the light, then we can ponder all the layers of meaning of light and what it means for Jesus to be our light. We can ponder them for hours or even a lifetime and still discover new insights that enrich our spiritual lives.
During this coming year let us pray continually for our brothers and sisters in faith, around the world and in our own communities. Let our reaching out be an active worship, and should we find it painful, let us reach out joyfully, testifying to the Light.
Christ's coming to us is a spiritual blessing so great that the only appropriate response is to mourn our sins and ask to be reborn into holy and blameless lives. Let us make repentance and renewal in this new year
our resolution and theme.
Here Is Some Wisdom Light From Others
Make it a practice to judge person and things in the most favorable light at all times, in all circumstances.St. Vincent de Paul
He who carries God in his heart bears heaven with him wherever he goes.St. Ignatius of Loyola
Christianity can be condensed into four words: Admit, Submit, Commit and Transmit.
Samuel Wilberforce
For a small reward, a man will hurry away on a long journey; while for eternal life, many will hardly take a single step.Thomas a Kempis
Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.
St. Peter Julian Eymard
Conquer your foe by force, you increase his enmity; conquer by love, and you will reap no after-sorrow.
Fo-Sho-Hing-Tsan-King
Man improves himself as he follows his path; if he stands still, waiting to improve before he makes a decision, he'll never move.Paulo Coelho
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.Abraham Lincoln
Prayer:
Precious Lord, I want to obey your word, your will, and your example. I want to obey you to honor you, to love you, and to know you. So please, help me come to know you better this year as I walk more closely in your steps. Help me to know what it means to live your life in my world.Amen.
We all know of religion that in the time past and in our present time is so debased that it has become an instrument of violence. I think that a true Christian has to be in opposition to the times. The church has been too timid! It is now up to the laymen to act!
I’m going to used the following story as a preface to our discussion on faith and violence.
I’ve heard the following story used in different ways to emphasize a variety of points. It comes from the
Hassidic Rabbi Baal-Shem-Tov (The Master of the Good Name 1698-1760).
Two men were traveling through a forest. One was drunk, the other was sober. As they went, they were beset by robbers, beaten, robbed of all they had, even their clothing. When they emerged, people asked them if they got through the woods without trouble. The drunken man said: "Everything was fine: nothing went wrong: we had no trouble at all!" They said: "How does it happen that you are naked and covered with blood?" He did not have an answer. The sober man said: "Do not believe him: he is drunk. It was a disaster. Robbers beat us without mercy and took everything we had. Be warned by what happened to us, and look out for yourselves."
For some "faithful” and for unbelievers too” faith" seems to be a kind of drunkenness, an anaesthetic that keeps you from realizing and believing that anything can go wrong. Or perhaps you are confident that your Church’s theology is correct. Such faith can sometimes be immersed in a world of violence without objection. The violence is perfectly all right. It is quite normal unless of course it happens to be exercised by Muslims, Blacks, or,you fill in the blank_________. Then it must be put down instantly by superior force. The drunkenness of this kind of faith, whether in a religious message or merely in a political ideology, enables us to go through life without seeing that our own violence is a disaster and that the overwhelming force by which we seek to assert ourselves and our own self-interest may well be our ruin. Is faith a narcotic dream in a world of heavily-armed robbers, or is it an awakening? Is faith a convenient nightmare in which we are attacked and obliged to destroy our attackers? What if we awaken to discover that we are the robbers, and our destruction comes from the root of hate in ourselves?
Remember hearing of a commandment "Thou shalt not kill"? We live in an age today when man, as a individual and as a nation, is not only more frustrated, more crowded, more subject to psychotic and hostile delusion than ever, but also has at his disposition an arsenal of weapons that could make global suicide a possibility. I pray that the nuclear powers restrain impulses to reduce one another to radioactive dust. I am very uneasy about the escalating Asian wars.
All these "small" wars go on with unabated cruelty. I saw a statistic the other day that stated more bombs have been exploded in the present Middle East war than were dropped in the whole of World War II. I suspect that is because of the use of missiles.
Our own affluent nation has become (I don’t think any will deny) intrinsically violent. Have you picked up a paper lately that did not report a murder, mugging, rape, robbery, corruption, or other sort of crime? The problem of violence is not just a problem of a few rioters and rebels, but the problem of a whole social structure which is outwardly ordered and respectable, and inwardly ridden by psychopathic obsessions and delusions and injustices.
Try not to misunderstand, I recognize that it is perfectly true that violence must at times be restrained by force; but a convenient mythology which simply legalizes the use of force by big criminals against little criminals whose small-scale criminality is largely caused by the large-scale injustice under which they live only perpetuates the disorder. A famous saying of Saint Augustine states: "What are kingdoms without justice but large bands of robbers?"
The problem of violence today must be traced to its root; not the small-time murderers but the massively organized bands of murderers whose operations are global. The moral theology of war with many of our major Christian denominations seems to concern itself chiefly with specious discussions of how far the monarch or the sovereign state can justly make use of force.
We are not declaring in any way in this writing that the use of force is never considered necessary. That is not what is being stated. Understandable there are situations which the only way to effectively protect human life and rights is by forcible resistance against unjust encroachment. We find no fault then when the Church remains silent or admits then that force is necessary. The problem arises not when theology admits that force may be necessary, but when it does so in a way that implicitly favors the claims of the powerful and self-seeking establishment against the common good of mankind or against the rights of the oppressed.
We tend to judge violence in terms of the individual, the messy, the physically disturbing, and the personally frightening. In other words, the violence we want to see restrained is the violence of the hood waiting for us in the parking lot, crowd gatherings that get out of hand, etc. etc. That is reasonable, but it tends to influence us too much. It makes us think that the problem of violence is limited to this very small scale, and it makes us unable to appreciate the far greater problem of the more abstract, more global, more organized presence of violence on a massive and corporate level. The real problem is not so much the individual with a revolver but death and even genocide as big business. The white-collar violence of today is the systematically organized bureaucratic and technological destruction of man. But this big business of death is all the more innocent and effective because it involves a long chain of individuals, each of whom can feel themselves absolved from responsibility, and each of whom can perhaps salve his conscience by contributing with a more meticulous efficiency to his part in the massive operation. We know, for instance, that Adolph Eichmann and others like him felt no guilt for their share in the extermination of the Jews. This feeling of justification was due partly to their absolute obedience to higher authority and partly to the care and efficiency which went into the details of their work. This was done almost entirely on paper. Since they dealt with numbers, not with people, and since their job was one of abstract bureaucratic organization, apparently they could easily forget the reality of what they were doing. The same is true to an even greater extent in modern warfare in which the real moral problems are not to be located in rare instances of hand-to-hand combat, but in the remote planning and organization of technological destruction. The real crimes of modern war are committed not at the front (if any) but in war offices and ministries of defense in which no one ever has to see any blood. Modern technological mass murder is not directly visible, like individual murder. It is abstract, corporate, businesslike, cool, free of guilt feelings and therefore a thousand times more deadly and effective than the eruption of violence out of individual hate.
It is this polite, massively organized white-collar murder machine that threatens the world with destruction; not the violence of a few desperate teen-agers, Convenient Store robbers etc. It seems in my view, our church theology fails to see this and seems to principally stay focused more on the individual violence. We’re horrified at the muggings and killings where a mess is made on our own doorstep, but we can bless the antiseptic violence of corporately organized governmental murder because it is respectable, clean, patriotic and above all profitable.
“Love" is unfortunately a much misused word; almost not much different than a salutation greeting. It trips off the Christian tongue so easily that one gets the impression it means others ought to love us regardless of our motives. A theology of love cannot afford to preach edifying generalities about charity, while identifying "peace" with mere established power and legalized violence against the oppressed. A theology of love cannot be allowed merely to serve the interests of the rich and powerful, justifying their wars, their violence and their bombs, while exhorting the poor and underprivileged to practice patience, meekness, long-suffering and to solve their problems nonviolently. The theology of love must seek to deal realistically with the evil and injustice in the world, and not merely to compromise with them. Such a theology will have to take note of the ambiguous realities of politics, without embracing the specious myth of a "realism" that merely justifies force in the service of established power.
The Church should not exist merely to appease the already too untroubled conscience of the powerful and the established. A true theology of love may conceivably turn out to be a theology of revolution; a resistance to participate in the evil that reduces a brother to homicidal desperation.
Enough for now................Your comments are welcomed...........
We all know of religion that in the time past and in our present time is so debased that it has become an instrument of violence. I think that a true Christian has to be in opposition to the times. The church has been too timid! It is now up to the laymen to act!
I’m going to used the following story as a preface to our discussion on faith and violence.
I’ve heard the following story used in different ways to emphasize a variety of points. It comes from the
Hassidic Rabbi Baal-Shem-Tov (The Master of the Good Name 1698-1760).
Two men were traveling through a forest. One was drunk, the other was sober. As they went, they were beset by robbers, beaten, robbed of all they had, even their clothing. When they emerged, people asked them if they got through the woods without trouble. The drunken man said: "Everything was fine: nothing went wrong: we had no trouble at all!" They said: "How does it happen that you are naked and covered with blood?" He did not have an answer. The sober man said: "Do not believe him: he is drunk. It was a disaster. Robbers beat us without mercy and took everything we had. Be warned by what happened to us, and look out for yourselves."
For some "faithful” and for unbelievers too” faith" seems to be a kind of drunkenness, an anaesthetic that keeps you from realizing and believing that anything can go wrong. Or perhaps you are confident that your Church’s theology is correct. Such faith can sometimes be immersed in a world of violence without objection. The violence is perfectly all right. It is quite normal unless of course it happens to be exercised by Muslims, Blacks, or,you fill in the blank_________. Then it must be put down instantly by superior force. The drunkenness of this kind of faith, whether in a religious message or merely in a political ideology, enables us to go through life without seeing that our own violence is a disaster and that the overwhelming force by which we seek to assert ourselves and our own self-interest may well be our ruin. Is faith a narcotic dream in a world of heavily-armed robbers, or is it an awakening? Is faith a convenient nightmare in which we are attacked and obliged to destroy our attackers? What if we awaken to discover that we are the robbers, and our destruction comes from the root of hate in ourselves?
Remember hearing of a commandment "Thou shalt not kill"? We live in an age today when man, as a individual and as a nation, is not only more frustrated, more crowded, more subject to psychotic and hostile delusion than ever, but also has at his disposition an arsenal of weapons that could make global suicide a possibility. I pray that the nuclear powers restrain impulses to reduce one another to radioactive dust. I am very uneasy about the escalating Asian wars.
All these "small" wars go on with unabated cruelty. I saw a statistic the other day that stated more bombs have been exploded in the present Middle East war than were dropped in the whole of World War II. I suspect that is because of the use of missiles.
Our own affluent nation has become (I don’t think any will deny) intrinsically violent. Have you picked up a paper lately that did not report a murder, mugging, rape, robbery, corruption, or other sort of crime? The problem of violence is not just a problem of a few rioters and rebels, but the problem of a whole social structure which is outwardly ordered and respectable, and inwardly ridden by psychopathic obsessions and delusions and injustices.
Try not to misunderstand, I recognize that it is perfectly true that violence must at times be restrained by force; but a convenient mythology which simply legalizes the use of force by big criminals against little criminals whose small-scale criminality is largely caused by the large-scale injustice under which they live only perpetuates the disorder. A famous saying of Saint Augustine states: "What are kingdoms without justice but large bands of robbers?"
The problem of violence today must be traced to its root; not the small-time murderers but the massively organized bands of murderers whose operations are global. The moral theology of war with many of our major Christian denominations seems to concern itself chiefly with specious discussions of how far the monarch or the sovereign state can justly make use of force.
We are not declaring in any way in this writing that the use of force is never considered necessary. That is not what is being stated. Understandable there are situations which the only way to effectively protect human life and rights is by forcible resistance against unjust encroachment. We find no fault then when the Church remains silent or admits then that force is necessary. The problem arises not when theology admits that force may be necessary, but when it does so in a way that implicitly favors the claims of the powerful and self-seeking establishment against the common good of mankind or against the rights of the oppressed.
We tend to judge violence in terms of the individual, the messy, the physically disturbing, and the personally frightening. In other words, the violence we want to see restrained is the violence of the hood waiting for us in the parking lot, crowd gatherings that get out of hand, etc. etc. That is reasonable, but it tends to influence us too much. It makes us think that the problem of violence is limited to this very small scale, and it makes us unable to appreciate the far greater problem of the more abstract, more global, more organized presence of violence on a massive and corporate level. The real problem is not so much the individual with a revolver but death and even genocide as big business. The white-collar violence of today is the systematically organized bureaucratic and technological destruction of man. But this big business of death is all the more innocent and effective because it involves a long chain of individuals, each of whom can feel themselves absolved from responsibility, and each of whom can perhaps salve his conscience by contributing with a more meticulous efficiency to his part in the massive operation. We know, for instance, that Adolph Eichmann and others like him felt no guilt for their share in the extermination of the Jews. This feeling of justification was due partly to their absolute obedience to higher authority and partly to the care and efficiency which went into the details of their work. This was done almost entirely on paper. Since they dealt with numbers, not with people, and since their job was one of abstract bureaucratic organization, apparently they could easily forget the reality of what they were doing. The same is true to an even greater extent in modern warfare in which the real moral problems are not to be located in rare instances of hand-to-hand combat, but in the remote planning and organization of technological destruction. The real crimes of modern war are committed not at the front (if any) but in war offices and ministries of defense in which no one ever has to see any blood. Modern technological mass murder is not directly visible, like individual murder. It is abstract, corporate, businesslike, cool, free of guilt feelings and therefore a thousand times more deadly and effective than the eruption of violence out of individual hate.
It is this polite, massively organized white-collar murder machine that threatens the world with destruction; not the violence of a few desperate teen-agers, Convenient Store robbers etc. It seems in my view, our church theology fails to see this and seems to principally stay focused more on the individual violence. We’re horrified at the muggings and killings where a mess is made on our own doorstep, but we can bless the antiseptic violence of corporately organized governmental murder because it is respectable, clean, patriotic and above all profitable.
“Love" is unfortunately a much misused word; almost not much different than a salutation greeting. It trips off the Christian tongue so easily that one gets the impression it means others ought to love us regardless of our motives. A theology of love cannot afford to preach edifying generalities about charity, while identifying "peace" with mere established power and legalized violence against the oppressed. A theology of love cannot be allowed merely to serve the interests of the rich and powerful, justifying their wars, their violence and their bombs, while exhorting the poor and underprivileged to practice patience, meekness, long-suffering and to solve their problems nonviolently. The theology of love must seek to deal realistically with the evil and injustice in the world, and not merely to compromise with them. Such a theology will have to take note of the ambiguous realities of politics, without embracing the specious myth of a "realism" that merely justifies force in the service of established power.
The Church should not exist merely to appease the already too untroubled conscience of the powerful and the established. A true theology of love may conceivably turn out to be a theology of revolution; a resistance to participate in the evil that reduces a brother to homicidal desperation.
Enough for now................Your comments are welcomed...........
We live in an age when there is unlimited information available about everything imaginable and unimaginable, but there is a shortage of wisdom that sorts the information and distills the essential.
Also our culture is in a remarkable period of decadence, which means cultural death and the evaporation of values---or should I say loss of soul?
Like you and many others, my desire is to see the church and our nation operate according to Biblical principles and be of full expression of God's grace and truth. True Biblical wisdom is difficult to come by in these times and seems to receive very little respect in our present culture.
I believe our meeting together for Scripture study, prayer and reflection is more important now than ever before. Remember, God was willing to spare Sodom if there were found to be ten righteous. Often I wonder how many there are at present responsible for holding back the wrath of God.
As I have said many times, we are on a journey. We need companions for the journey.
Let us give each other comfort, compassion, and encouragement, on our travel to that sacred destination
I don’t remember where I found this but it somewhat fits this discussion: “A pessimist, they say, sees a glass of water as being half-empty; an optimist sees the same glass as half-full. But a giving person sees a glass of water and starts looking for someone who might be thirsty.”
Motivation is very important, and thus my simple religion is love, respect for others, honesty: teachings that cover not only religion but also the fields of politics, economics, business, science, law, medicine-everywhere. With proper motivation these can help humanity…The Dalai Lama
First a person should put his house together, then his town, then the world.Rabbi Israel Salanter
We can never be the better for our religion if our neighbor is the worse for it. Anonymous
Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.Dr. Seuss
Error moves with quick feet…and truth must never be lagging behind.
Alexander Crummell (1819-1898) Cleric and scholar
Kindly words, sympathizing attentions, watchfulness against wounding men's sensitiveness--these cost very little, but they are priceless in their value.-F. W. Robertson
He who can work in the realm of the real and live in that of the ideal, has attained the highest.
Ludwig Boerne, German-Jewish political writer and satirist
Lose with truth and right rather than gain with falsehood and wrong.Maimonides,
Shalom
P.S. Here’s a spiritual exercise. Look again at your Christmas cards and say a short prayer for each person that sent you a card.
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