spirituality

There is a spirituality of time, work and rest contained in that. According to the theology of the Sabbath, there is to be a fixed rhythm for our days: We are meant to work for six days and then have a one-day sabbatical; work for six years and then have a one-year sabbatical; and, finally, work for a lifetime and have an eternal sabbatical, an eternity of resting in God.

Former generations, I believe, took this more seriously than we do today. Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day. Until recently it was clearer that this is a commandment, not a lifestyle suggestion. Sabbath, until recent generations, was a day where ordinary life and ordinary activity were supplanted by different sense of time and activity.

What is Sabbath meant to be?

For an observant Jew, Sabbath means that the normal workday is suspended and replaced by a special time of prayer, family, celebration, leisure and enjoyment.

Read More

Or because their families don’t have the money for a Catholic burial, and taking the ashes to the place that represents so much Cuban spirituality and patriotism seems like the most dignified alternative, no matter what the church says.

”It is Miami’s wall of lament,” says Monsignor Agustin Roman, Cuban Miami’s longtime spiritual leader, who ran a fundraising campaign in the 1960s to build la Ermita. “We know people throw ashes back there. But it is not respectful to the departed. If you throw them to the sea, they become fish food. We have a cemetery niche where we will take someone’s ashes if the family cannot afford proper burial.”

There are signs posted along the water’s edge:

“No swimming, fishing, alcoholic beverages, animals, feeding of the pigeons, scattering of human ashes before first seeing a priest for orientation.”

Mostly, people follow the rules.

Read More

“He was always concerned about the poor, and had a real apostolic heart and a tremendous spirituality,” Watters said. “He wanted to make the lives of the people in India better. He remained devoted to them for the rest of his life.”

McGauley was born in Boston, where he developed his passion for the Red Sox. He graduated from Framingham High School and studied at Georgetown University for three years. He then entered the Society of Jesus at the Novitiate of St. Isaac Jogues, in Wernersville, Berks County, Pa.

He first went to India in 1951 as a Jesuit scholastic. After studying Hindi, he taught mathematics, physics and catechism at the Loyola School in Jamshedpur.

He was ordained a Jesuit priest at De Nobili College in India on March 24, 1955.

He served as teacher, pastor and director of retreats in addition to his other duties.

Read More

Is it America’s destiny that one of the foundations of our country—our faith and spirituality—be slowly eroded until we simply topple for lack of belief in anything beyond ourselves?

After reading a troubling story like this I sense that it’s time to re-read the forward to Whittaker Chambers’ “Witness,” and remember his salient warning:

… Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies… At issue … was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it. At issue was the question whether this man’s faith could prevail against a man whose equal faith it was that this society is sick beyond saving, and that mercy itself pleads for its swift extinction and replacement by another.

Read More

Springsteen was raised a Roman Catholic in New Jersey and attended a parochial school where, according to one biography, he clashed with both the nuns and other students.

He told The New York Times a couple of years ago that he isn’t a churchgoer, but “as I got older, I got less defensive about it. I thought, I’ve inherited this particular landscape, and I can build it into something of my own.”

It’s not so much Springsteen’s personal faith in which Symynkywicz finds comfort, but in the singer’s working-class roots.

“It was very much like the working class family I grew up in … the same kinds of fights with my father,” the author says. “That’s why I recognize in him the reality of when he sings about working people and (their) limited horizons, but also the palpable reality of real life.

Read More

He proposed, therefore, that if God should withdraw those ‘things,’ Job’s spirituality would crumble overnight. (How true this is of many in my days, who fill the churches Sunday after Sunday, lobbying God with ‘seed faiths’ and other ecclesiastical candies, for their regular ration of ‘breakthrough’ and ‘blessing,’ by which, of course, they mean material possessions!

God accepted Satan” s malicious challenge over Job, and permitted him to proceed with his proposed test, but not before He had spelt out to the devil the limits beyond which his waves of examination should never go.

The trial was in two phases. In the first phase, Jehovah said to Lucifer the Testing Officer, “Very well, then, everything he has is in your hands, but on the man himself . DO NOT lay a finger” (Job 1:12, NIV).

Read More