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Most people seem to admire the type of person that we call a “go-getter”.  By that, I mean  a person who has a high energy level and is continually getting things done.  And that is indeed an admirable personality trait.  But any person who tries to manage life strictly on that basis will come to a time and a place where this method is utterly useless.  When tragedy strikes, and our hearts are broken, we cannot handle that by getting things done.  When age increases, and strength diminishes, and the limitation of time becomes            inescapably clear, we cannot handle that […]

Today is the first Sunday of Advent.  As we know so well, the word simply means ‘coming’ or ‘arrived’.  We use it in this context to refer to the coming of Jesus into the world.  Most of us have celebrated Advent many times and are quite familiar with its meaning.  But what many sometimes fail to recognize is that the coming of Jesus is a three-dimensional concept.  Our usual habit of thought is to limit it to only one meaning or two at the most. Characteristically, we think of Advent in terms of the Christmas story.  This is when we […]

Some say that people today are losing, or perhaps have already lost, a capacity to be deeply moved by human suffering.  The kind of world we live in inevitably has a numbing effect on the human spirit.  One hour with a newspaper or thirty minutes in front of the television exposes one to an overwhelming amount of tragedy.  Day in and day out, we are served a steady diet of war, murder, terrorism, kidnapping, rape, robbery, and torture.  The more we see of man’s inhumanity to man, the less we seem to be shocked by it. Then we come to […]