Photo credit: © 2010 BouncebackCafe.com
Originally published on December 7, 2010.
The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don’t come to mind when we want them.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
While December is a joyous holiday season, for Catholics, November is the month of remembrance. It starts with All Saints Day on the 1st and All Souls’ Day on the 2nd. All Saints Day is when we remember all those who the Catholic Church has recognized as being holy. All Souls Day is for remembering everyone else who has died.
In a previous post I described how I use the Jewish tradition of Yahrzeit to remember my family and friends who have died. I learned about this tradition from Continue reading » Thanks for the Memories
Photo credit: © 2010 BouncebackCafe.com
The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don’t come to mind when we want them.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
While December is a joyous holiday season, for Catholics, November is the month of remembrance. It starts with All Saints Day on the 1st and All Souls’ Day on the 2nd. All Saints Day is when we remember all those who the Catholic Church has recognized as being holy. All Souls Day is for remembering everyone else who has died.
In a previous post I described how I use the Jewish tradition of Yahrzeit to remember my family and friends who have died. I learned about this tradition from Continue reading » Thanks for the Memories
Miracles are natural. When they do not occur something has gone wrong.
— Anonymous
Look around you. What miracles do you see?
Last week, as the Chilean miners were successfully being brought out of the mine, Roger Ebert blogged on the nature of miracles. Mr. Ebert was raised a Catholic and was an altar boy in his day. In his post, What Do You Mean by a Miracle?, he pushes back, HARD, on the idea that events like the rescue of the miners are miracles. Because he was so well-educated by the nuns, Ebert gives us the Catholic definition of a miracle as an event that stands outside the laws of nature and occurs for one reason – to reveal and demonstrate the glory of God.
Now if you’re Catholic, you know that they use this definition in the literal sense. One of the problems with this idea, as Arthur C. Clarke points out, is that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Continue reading » I Believe in Miracles
The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.
— Flora Whittemore
I describe myself as a recovering Catholic, though I’m never sure exactly what that means. For the first 20 or so years of my life, I was a devoted Catholic. As a matter of fact, I knew almost nothing about any other Christian denomination. Having been the only “goy” family in the neighborhood, I knew that there were Catholics and Jews, and on a practical level that was all I knew.
I’d been baptized shortly (minutes) after I was born, so that if, heaven forbid, I were to die, at least I wouldn’t end up in limbo. (At the time, limbo wasn’t a dance, it was where unbaptized babies went if they died. They could never leave limbo because they didn’t have the appropriate “certification” by the Church to go to heaven, but at least they wouldn’t Continue reading » Help Me, I Think I’m Turning Into My Mother
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