Sponging The Stone

I DON'T REMEMBER reading the book until my adult years, yet Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol seems always to have been with me. The Carol entered my life when I lay on the living room floor with a belly full of Christmas turkey avoiding adult conversation at my grandmother's dinner. My first recollection of the story is in the form of the 1951 American film version Scrooge. Alastair Sim, the most robust interpreter of Scrooge, fascinated me by his depiction of a man who starts off as "solitary as an oyster" and winds up a "second father" to

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Keep My Memory Green

I'M TRYING TO forget. I'm wishing there was a way to wipe out that part of my brain's hard drive which stores hurtful emotional memories. I don't mind learning from mistakes or analyzing the causes of my pain, but reliving all that pain is excruciating! I don't want to see those sad, mental pictures. They are over, done with, and besides my life now is...well, at least it is not as chaotic. It's a gray day as I stare out my window, watching the blue ice melt in patterns on the window pane.

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Who Am I?

As is my obsession, I read enormous selections, and some whole treatments of who Jesus could possibly be culturally, theologically and historically. There were loads of interesting but mostly disappointingly partial treatments. Nothing gave me anything like the assurance I needed to take the step toward saying who Jesus is for me.

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Ash Wednesday

My first encounter of Ash Wednesday was while I had a job at St. Joseph's Vocational School in Winnipeg. Being the only Protestant working there, I was shocked, even somewhat horrified, and leery to ask why every student and our teacher Irene Coulter had a black, cross-like smudge on their foreheads as they entered room. Choosing not to see it as a weird hallucination, I decided to ask what those smudges were about. Irene, a none-too-observant Catholic, gave me the formal answer, "Ash Wednesday is the day that kicks off Lent, a run up to Easter for Catholics." "Okay," I

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