Here’s a fun fact. “The Sound of Silence,” the hit song by Simon and Garfunkel, has turned 60. Its birthday slipped by somewhat silently (naturally) several weeks ago. It’s a reminder about the importance of silence, how we need it like we need food. Or air.
Something to get quiet about Read More »
Today is a good day to talk about peace, starting with Alfred Nobel. As the story goes, when Alfred’s rich brother Ludvig died, Europe’s newspapers mistakenly thought it was Alfred. So the Swedish scientist who’d invented, among other things, dynamite, awoke one day in 1888
Looking for peace in the world, and ourselves Read More »
Eat. Read. Pray. Fly out the door. School mornings this is the routine in our home.
A recent reading was about waiting. Cereal went into empty stomachs. I closed the book and made a comment about slowness. The children’s mother said, “But remember, with God a day is like
Waiting and living: an Advent reflection Read More »
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, December 20, 2014)
ISTANBUL, TURKEY ✦It was a Sunday, the first day of Advent, en route from Hamilton to my African home, when I toured the Old City here, a place where religions and cultures and empires have collided for centuries. This is when my guide for the day said what he did.
I had asked him about some historic notes and holy relics in the Topkapi Palace Museum, items identified as thousands of years old from ancient Israel, but looking dubiously more modern and Ottoman-like, when he told me as plainly as if he was giving the weather report that, “It’s all mythology anyway. Whatever you believe is true, that’s the truth.”
The paradox of Christmas Read More »
OK, so what if Chicken Little was right? Chicken Little is that bird who got hit on the head by a falling acorn and then ran around screaming “The sky is falling!” He got all his forest friends in an alarmist tizzy and, on their way to tell the king, they were summarily fooled and eaten by that Foxy Loxy.
At some point, there’ll be a new Earth Read More »
