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Catch Me If You Can

MY INNER CHILD has the pernicious habit of throwing himself down the stairs. This behaviour began one evening during the winter of '56 when I climbed the stairs up to the second story washroom in our Berry Street . Being only four years old, I was not steady on my feet. The excitement of going to the Ice Capades coupled with the urgency of nature's call and the staccato voice of Danny Gallivan calling the hockey game between the Leafs and the Habs, contributed to my imbalance. The cotton socks that adorned my pudgy, short feet often snagged on the

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Desert Words to Live By

THE DESERT CAN be an empty place where the lost are driven insane by inner demons, or it can be a place of refuge and real where pilgrims escape the insanity of a chaotic world. Our desert experience is determined by how we cope with being alone. Solitude can bring strange illusions and despair or it can strip us of faulty dependence, filling us with a desire for our Creator.

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1975

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Facets of Fat

ARISTOTLE REPRIMANDED GREENHORN scientists in his Academy for their immature disgust toward the gross and unappealing in nature. “The consideration of the lower forms of life ought not to excite a childish repugnance. In all natural things there is something to move wonder" (Boorstin 51). He believed that all things looked at impartially are manifestations of the divine. Ralph Ralph Waldo Emerson Waldo Emerson extended Aristotle's estimate of the beauty of nature into the process of death itself: “There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful. Even the corpse has

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Joyful Happiness: A Spiritual Memoir

WHEN WAS I truly happy? The happiest time of my life dovetails with the time when I felt the most stress and suffering. With the loss of both my job and my first marriage, 1991 was my Annus horribilis and my most blessed year. That year I discovered what it was to be loved and to love through the lens of God's compassion and forgiveness.

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Traintalk: Am I a Tourist or a Pilgrim?

THE LAST FIVE years have been comfortable. THE LAST FIVE Admitting this comes hard for someone with my intensity. An amiable life conjures images of being lazy, being part of a bovine collective, lulled asleep by consumerism and the mind-numbing drone of what my grandfather called “the idiot box” — the family TV set. I laugh as I write this staring at recent additions to that idiot box: a DVD player, a VCR, and Digital Surround Sound. That little distraction that once graced the center of the living room has taken over. My so-called room of living has evolved

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Tribute to a Friend's 50th Birthday

Our challenge is to unselfconsciously give our lives away. In this generative discipleship phase our task is to pass it forward, hand it over, in a sense give it up and refuse to hold on to it. What is the “it” in that sentence? The “it ” is our ego, our sense of self in the best sense. We are still making a contribution but no longer looking to strengthen ourselves.

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Watershed Spirituality

We can't help being thirsty, moving toward the voice of water. Milk drinkers draw close to the mother. Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, shamans, everyone hears the intelligent sound and moves with thirst to meet it. - Jeladuddin Rumi (1207-1273) The Image Unveiled James Hillman, the founder of Archetypal Psychology, has become convinced that individual and corporate spiritual growth is made through the meditation on images. The image of what I refer to as Watershed Spirituality comes from the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel. It has to do with rejuvenating waters which make stagnant things fresh, have healing properties, and perpetuate life

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