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Day of the Dead
Image by judge_mental
The day after Halloween is known for nothing more in Britain than the results of excessive sugar consumption and wiping egg from your front door.
But in Slovenia as in other Catholic countries 1 November is the Day of the Dead, a tradition European Catholics are wholly unaware evolved from the Aztecs’ worship of their deity Mictecacihuatl.
My exploration of Slovenia’s afterlife party began at a small graveyard in Ptuj, Slovenia’s oldest city. I had set off with a rucksack containing some equipment I thought might come in useful – a mouth organ, the skipping rope, and a cassette player. For jewellery I chose exclusive bracelets by Voodoo Chicken.
I have no Slovenian relatives, dead or otherwise, so this was never going to be more than reconnaissance for a Slovenian death. I am secure in my atheism. Being around religious people no longer irks me. You shouldn’t have sex with them, of course. Not really speaking Slovenian offers further protection from any strange ideas that might be floating around.
A few people were pottering around various plots but it was pretty dead. Like Peter Pan, the cemetery was clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that flow from trees. A woman stood over one grave smoking a fag. I found the tomb of the Klinger family.
Last opened in 1955 it was unattended. I enjoyed Klinger’s transvestite combat-dodging Korean War character in M.A.S.H. so I stood for a minute with the Klingers before heading off across town to a bigger, more successful graveyard.
Here there were many more people, both types. Familiar surnames from Facebook leapt out at me from a worryingly high proportion of the neatly-rowed monuments.
No beanstalks here. But would I see anyone I knew? Yes! Here was the plumber who sold me some copper pipe at a quick profit before disappearing forever without doing the work. But that is but a footnote in the sagas of Slovenian plumbing.
1.8288 METRES UNDER
Everyone was looking miserable. I wanted to cheer them up with some skipping, but it would send little stones flying at everyone. I mulled over the choice between blues harp and getting out the cassette to play "Fool For A Cigarette" by Ry Cooder.
But the sheer weight of this odd, organised death cult made any attempt at jollity pointless.
It was obvious that the purpose of this gathering had nothing to do with reminding us to live life to the full, especially not here and especially not now.
By two o’clock the gravewatching was going full pelt. This was just a lot of standing around in family groups though. There were no outward signs of grief, no crying, no hankies. No meeting the people from the grave next door. For a moment I thought a woman might be wiping away a tear. But she just had something in her eye. On death as in life Slovenians are as buttoned up as ever.
Burning of a good quantity of saponified fats was under way. At least some of the recent improvements to the European Capital of Chicken’s stink may be attributable to Slovenia’s highly developed memorial candle industry.
BACK FROM THE GRAVY
Like the fats, the chances of pulling a rich widow or a cynical young slut were to evaporate. The few more glamorous widows present had already spent the money on perms and leatherwear. As for guerillas in the midst, Ptuj has no edge players to keep these type of proceedings in balance.
I took a seat near the obligatory suffering Jesus. If only, in real life, he had been provided with a little roof to keep off the elements, as here, he might have suffered longer. At this venue his upturned-V-shaped canopy had vicious-looking serrated edges like a log saw, suggesting that Our Saviour was about to be bitten in two by a copper crocodile, on top of everything else.
As I pondered the meaning of this, a team arrived to erect PA speakers on either side of Jesus, in a parody of where the criminals are supposed to go. Marjan, owner of Catholic-metal pub Shamerocks, went by. An enormous howl of feedback almost jolted me off the bench. "Ena, dva, ena, dva." Crocodile Rock Jesus seemed a real possibility.
The sun’s rays belted down unseasonably on the dark-clad worshippers. One or two alcoholics in various shades of religious purple shuffled by. But widows outnumbered widowers by a considerable margin. By now the meaty aroma of cheap candles was becoming quite sickening. More feedback sent the vibe lurching in the direction of Dead concert.
Ritualised misery edged into maudlin despair. The dead themselves, unconcerned with their fetishisation, slept on. "What are we to do?" the expressions seemed to say. People talked a little. But there did not seem to be any fresh ideas on how to prevent more of this sort of thing.
They died not from environmental or genetic causes, but from Acts of God. Helplessness, futility, and insurance premiums seemed to be the order of the day.
DUDS FOR THE DEAD
Evidently a goodly part of the pain and stress of the Day of the Dead comes from deciding what to wear.
Slovenians, often drab at the best of times, can however play with drab. A tall blonde in fishnets and black and white plaid brightened proceedings ever so slightly. Or why not go grey: here was a lad in Desert Storm camoflauge. Ladies vied for Dead-glam with bauble necklaces from H&M, alligator skin boots, a binbag-flavour puffa jacket and a black spandex top from the Nolans era.
Priests appeared and disappeared into the little building for their quick change. Would they emerge dressed as Sister Wendy and Captain Hook? What about the Lost Boys? If I struck up The Sailor’s Hornpipe on the harmonica would the crowd these priests control at that moment come to life, if only to kill me?
There was little or no eye contact or interaction between priests and crowd. This religion involves a lot of looking down. A survey of priests’ footwear revealed that sandals, hush puppies, and pigskin were in. In Catholic circles it seems brown shoes do make it. Inside the chapel a choir was kicking off.
The procession of relatively colourful priests emerged and the choir, like Dylan, sold out and went electric. The fat churchmen – not all looking like the kind of character you would not trust alone with your nine-year-old son or daughter if you were some kind of naive country bumpkin – lined up for incantations and there was some very nice singing of "Naj na mir gospod" from the poor people in jeans and hoodies, as a woman in velveteen strides and lace-up stiletto dominatrix boots picked her way across the gravel with a big kinky shiny black clutch bag.
HERE TO DIE…
As a priest took the mike to deliver some advice to the assembled mourners, several people seemed to make a point of leaving. Coincidence maybe, or perhaps they didn’t get any practical help from the church before their dear departed, and they weren’t in the mood to start listening now.
If so, one wonders why they came, on this particular day, or at all. This is symptomatic of the ambivalent relationship with Rome here in Slovenia, where even the angriest atheists unblinkingly do Catholic things. Obediently and without question.
Atheism is the fashionable top-coat, a badge of modernity. Disappointingly, this is image atheism, devoid of argument, spineless. Deep down in their Y-fronts and panties Slovenians have their metaphysics and their mummies all mixed up – and you can’t get more Catholic than that.
Priests began moving through the crowd. A man flinched as a fat one flicked allegedly holy water in his face rather aggressively, the way you would dry a paint brush. You can’t be too careful when vampires are about.
After a gigantic monk had had his turn, a priest with a very deep voice got the crowd muttering. They seemed to know the words. Flanked by his fellow pirates right there under the mast/cross, his Blair-ish wavering hypnotic cadences were amplified through some miracle into a monotone in glorious mono via 250 watts per channel of Golgotha, bringing into focus the fear and trembling our Catlick cousins love so much.
A sea of conformist faces droned away and the three great hepcats, o?e, sin and sveti duh, were duly honoured. It could as easily have been Marx, Engels and Tito. And if either trio might have preferred to bury the other, all six were united against the most dangerous ideological enemy Yugoslavia ever faced.
A BIG LYE
Although I did hear "incesta" mentioned it could have been something about a road. Anyway, no-one jumped up and shouted "You ruined my life!" While there was no great enthusiasm from either ministers or ministered, neither was there any sign of all this going away. Everyone was trapped in the cycle, paralysed, no more able to decide what to do next than the occupants of the graves themselves.
All in all a sea of utter dreariness, on which the faithful are destined to sail, directionless, for some time to come.
Is there anything the church might try to liven up this unpleasant occasion? I’m sure the Aztec Queen of the Underworld would be the first to offer social approval were some ergot to take root in the sacramental Jesus munchies, or the heady aroma of kaneh-bosem gave them inspiration.
How can you believe, which receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that comes from God only? Because doing what society expects you to do – and for no other reason – helps you to stop other people having fun, and it helps them to stop yours. God isn’t available just now to interfere in your sexual happiness. But your relatives and neighbours have a direct line.
Christianization of the Slavs took plenty of alcohol – it makes them too wobbly to run. The viticultural revival behind this was a Minorite monky business. Choose this mental illness and you can postpone all the fun you might have had in this life until the "next one". With brains softened and final destination assured it seems many in the region, for genetic and alcoholic reasons, just can’t wait to get there. These days our credulous country drunks follow a gung-ho pesticide tradition just to make sure.
SUZIE WENT AND LEFT US FOR SOME FOREIGN GUY
Go on and get it over with then: spend your one and only certifiable existence mooching around all your yesterdays and selfishly saving up for a comfortable eternity. We’re not waiting for the last laugh. We’ll have our laughs right now. Is that a Celestial Being, Widow Twankey? It’s behind you! Oh no it isn’t!
As the rank smell of burnt fat lingered in the warm November air, I wondered if I would die here. And in the unlikely event that I would inhabit one of these expensive looking family tombs, whether anyone would join me, either inside or outside.
Probably not. I will be undisturbed, like the Klingers. And about this I feel no more sentiment before, than I will afterwards.
As the faithful made the short journey from the supernatural to the supermarket car park across the road, I paused for a piss at the petrol station. Robbie Williams’ "Feel" was playing on the forecourt, its mock pop profundity a strange contrast to the mumbo-jumbo I had just witnessed, and yet NOT.
I scare myself to death,
That’s why I keep on running.
Before I’ve arrived, I can see myself coming.
It was a return from a truly fantastical "explanation" of existence to the reassuringly mundane reality of charcoal briquettes and damned big bags of Chappi dog food, although here too the candles were piled high.
That probably makes sense on Slovenia’s roads.
MORE DIRTY TRICKS FROM YOUR SOCIALIST/MARXIST PRESIDENT AND HIS NASTY LITTLE ADMINISTRATION HACKS
Image by SS&SS
Obamacare’s Dirty Tricks
By Peter Ferrara on 1.5.11 @ 6:08AM
Most commentators have focused on the revelation just before Christmas that Obamacare’s end of life death panel consultations rejected by Congress were resurrected by the Obama Administration by regulatory requirement. There is no truth to the rumor that President Obama has agreed, after his term of office ends, to head up a new organization called Democrats Against Democracy.
But while this regulatory authoritarianism is, indeed, yet another dirty trick of Obamacare, it is small potatoes compared to the real dirty tricks of Obamacare. A dirty trick is defined here as burying in vague language in the abusive, several thousand page Obamacare legislation socially repulsive policies that the public overwhelmingly opposed and that Congress denied it was adopting. Like the end of life death panel consultations.
Phasing Out Private Insurance
But as indicated above, the emerging abuses of Obamacare are much graver than that. Also just before Christmas, on December 21, HHS Commissar Kathleen Sebelius claimed authority buried deep within the Obamacare abomination to impose federal price controls on health insurance companies, which members of Congress again denied they were adopting when they passed Obamacare. In fact, she issued a 136 page "regulation" providing precisely for such federal rate regulation.
Most states have long regulated health insurance premiums. The state regulators know from long experience that in this regulation they have to make sure that the insurance company has the money to pay the promised benefits. If the regulators don’t allow sufficient premiums to pay benefits, in the states they know that it is the sickest people covered by the insurance company who lose out. Because then the insurance company goes out of business and the sick people it was covering don’t have the money to pay their medical bills.
State insurance regulation is consequently simply a matter of mathematics. The regulators analyze the cost data, and the actuarial probabilities, and they set premiums based on that data sufficient to allow the insurance company only a modest, reasonable, market rate of return on its operations. As a result, the hard numbers unquestionably show that health insurance companies only make modest if not below average profits at best. That is why in many states there are so few health insurance companies left, and so many of those that remain are actually non-profits.
The resulting bottom line is that health insurance company profits are not a significant factor in overall health costs. And those politicians who rant and rave about them, calculating that they can take political advantage of the clueless and gullible, are shameless demagogues who dishonor our democracy by their participation in it.
Under the new federal power that Sebelius has seized, the supposed smarter, wiser bureaucrats in Washington will review the state regulation, and Washington will decide if the state approved rate increases are "reasonable." If the Washington wise guys decide the increases are not, they will deem the state regulation not "effective," and substitute Washington’s rate regulation.
Sebelius has already decreed, not based on a review of the actual data, that increases over 10% are probably not reasonable, even though many increases across the country are coming in over 20%, based on the analysis described above, as predicted. Indeed, the Red Queen has intimated that even lesser premium increases may be deemed too much.
But there is socialist method behind the madness. Obamacare raises health insurance costs by mandating that health insurers provide expensive new benefits. That is why it was so obvious that Obamacare will raise health insurance costs. But now come the federal regulators who plan to dictate to the insurers that they cannot reflect those costs in higher premiums.
It will work just like the Democrats’ "affordable housing" policies worked in causing the financial crisis. First the regulators forced banks to lend mortgage money to so many who were not financially qualified under traditional lending standards. Bill Clinton bragged in 1995 that through this scheme he had found a way of spreading housing prosperity to so many "without costing the taxpayers a dime."
But now we know how all that turned out. When so many proved unable or unwilling to pay the mortgages, as the displaced traditional lending standards suggested they might, the mortgage backed securities that had been spread so widely throughout the financial system began their downward spiral that froze credit markets, and the whole financial system began to unravel, costing taxpayers a fortune in bailouts and lost jobs.
Left-wing sophisticates know from experience that their grassroots troops can’t follow that logic. Your average grassroots Democrat supporter can’t understand that if the law forces health insurance costs up with required new benefits, but the insurance company can’t raise premiums to cover those higher costs, the company goes out of business.
But this is exactly what the Reds who now run today’s modern Democrat party want. They are planning precisely to use this new federal rate regulation power to drive private insurers out of business, so the only option left will be the outright socialized medicine public option that first the public and then the Congress rejected in the health care "debate" last year. Hence the foundation for the new organization, Democrats Against Democracy.
This plot against the people is already underway in the more Left states that the Democrats still control. On December 22, the Wall Street Journal editorialized regarding the ongoing "political thuggery" in Connecticut regarding former state insurance commissioner Tom Sullivan. The Journal explained, "In September, following a thorough actuarial analysis, Mr. Sullivan approved some rate increases reaching 20% for Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, the largest insurer in the state by membership."
Even though the higher rates applied only to new customers, to cover the new costs of Obamacare, "Attorney General Richard Blumenthal made the approval a centerpiece of his Senate bid, while Mr. Sullivan was demonized by local labor unions." In a letter to Blumenthal explaining his resignation, Sullivan explained that he could not sensibly operate in an environment where "we are required by Congress to approve richer benefit packages, while simultaneously being called upon by you to reduce rates." To complete the travesty, his successor, under federal pressure from the same bureaucrats who have now seized new federal ratemaking power, overturned the increase, and Blumenthal rode his shameless demagoguery to election. Similar travesties are now playing out in Massachusetts as well.
But once the private insurers have been driven out, patients will have nowhere to turn but the friendly Obama national political machine. The leading lights in that operation, such as the recess-appointed, unconfirmed head of Medicare and Medicaid, "Dr. Doom" Donald Berwick, have already made the determination that more votes can be bought redirecting all the money that is now spent saving the sickest and most vulnerable to other causes.
Health Coverage, Not Health Care
President Obama barnstormed the nation promising health care for all, to achieve passage of Obamacare. But the legislation he delivered is already on course to decimate the ability of the health care system to deliver critical health care to the sickest and most vulnerable. Most Democrats and liberals have no idea what they have done. This assault on the most essential health care of the American people, achieved flying under false pretenses, should be recognized as a national scandal.
The assault begins with Medicare. I have previously reported that my analysis of last summer’s annual Medicare Trustees Report concluded that the President’s Obamacare policies involve cutting trillion in payments to doctors and hospitals for services and treatment to seniors under Medicare, over the first 20 years of full implementation of Obamacare.
Confirmation of this and more now comes from the recently released 2010 Financial Statement of the United States, from the U.S. Treasury Department. That report openly brags, repeatedly, about the Medicare cost savings resulting from Obamacare. The accompanying data reveals, in fact, that the total future Medicare cuts in payments to doctors and hospitals under Medicare accumulate to trillion! The Obama Administration is apparently convinced that its supporters cannot understand that if the government does not pay the doctors and hospitals for medical care and treatment under Medicare, seniors are not going to get medical care and treatment under Medicare.
This is why Medicare’s Chief Actuary has already reported that ultimately under these Obamacare policies Medicare payment rates will be only half of what is paid by Medicaid, where the poor often can’t find access to essential care. The Chief Actuary also reports that even before these cuts already two-thirds of hospitals were losing money on Medicare patients. Cuts of this magnitude will consequently wreak havoc and create chaos in health care for the elderly. Health providers will either have to withdraw from serving Medicare patients, or eventually go into bankruptcy.
Too many conservatives have been reticent to criticize Obamacare for these draconian cuts, out of recognition that Medicare is hopelessly bankrupt over the long run, and will have to be sharply cut in any event. But this view is far too simple minded, for refusing to pay the doctors and hospitals for the health care they provide under Medicare is no way to reform the program.
That would not only suddenly leave seniors without the health care they have been promised, and have come to rely on as a result. It would suddenly leave doctors, clinics, specialists, and hospitals with uneconomic practices for seniors that they entered in good faith on the promise of payment from the government. This is like trying to achieve budget savings in national defense by not paying the manufacturers of the Air Force’s planes, the Navy’s ships, the Army’s tanks and artillery, and the bullets, bombs and guns. How long do you think our national defense would last under that policy? The same goes for health care for America’s seniors.
Think of it this way. You wouldn’t try to balance your own family budget by just refusing to pay your bills, particularly for goods and services you planned to continue to consume. You would recognize that is really just impractical stealing. Yet that is the Obamacare policy for Medicare. Except that what they are really thinking was explained above. They have decided, as every government running socialized medicine programs has, that more votes can be bought with all the money spent on saving the sickest and most vulnerable by spending it elsewhere. That is the dirty little scandal of Obamacare.
Conservatives should assail this socialist assault on the most important of all medical care for the American people, an essential and fundamental component of their rapidly receding highest standard of living in the world, and advance more fundamental, more carefully structured Medicare reforms, that can achieve far more in savings over the long run.
One example of that is the Medicare reforms in the Ryan Roadmap. Seniors would receive vouchers they could use to buy their choice of coverage in the private sector, including Health Savings Accounts. The growth of the voucher amounts would be restrained over time, so seniors would have to pay more out of pocket for such coverage over time than they would otherwise. But at least they would be able to get the essential health care they want and need. The lowest income seniors would be protected by supplemental payments. The Ryan Roadmap has been scored as achieving full solvency for Medicare, and permanently balancing the federal budget over the long run.
But the most long run budget savings by far would be achieved by allowing younger workers to save and invest their Medicare payroll taxes in personal accounts. In retirement, those accounts would finance their health insurance vouchers, and would be able to finance far more because of the accumulation of all the market returns over the years. This would shift huge amounts of spending out of the federal budget altogether, and to the private sector. The general revenues currently used to finance so much of Medicare would be used for means tested supplements for lower income seniors to ensure that they could afford essential coverage and care. But these general revenues devoted to Medicare would be limited to grow no faster than the rate of growth of GDP, providing further huge savings over the long run.
These more basic, more fundamental reforms would be far more politically salable that than the wholesale slaughter of health care for seniors that is going to result from the current Obamacare policies. Seniors showed in the last election that they understand this. Why not conservative political strategists?
Already we see on our current course the beginnings of the disappearance not only of private health insurance, but also of private, independent medical practices as well. Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute reports that while in 2005 at least two thirds of doctors practices were private, independent operations, less than half are today, and that is expected to fall below 40% by the end of this year.
Instead they are fleeing to salaried positions at large hospitals, where they are safe from Obamacare’s draconian cuts in their compensation, and they can sharply reduce the patient load they take on when their personal economic survival is at stake. This trend is strongly supported by President Obama’s top health care aide Nancy-Ann DeParle, who openly cheerleads the consolidation of America’s health care system into modern HMOs, called now Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). Such a system will be far more able to enforce the health care rationing and denial policies of the Obama political machine.
spectator.org/
~day 73: Love repaid by love~
Image by theroamincatholic
‘Love is repaid by love alone.‘
~motto of St. Therese of Lisieux, derived from St. John of the Cross
Although it’s ‘business as usual’ for most Americans today, people throughout the Spanish-speaking world are gathering together to celebrate Epiphany. What is Epiphany? It is the day on which we commemorate the arrival of the Three Magi in Bethlehem. They were men of reason and science, but also seekers of Truth. They observed the natural world and depended on prophetic, astrological calculations. This mix of science and faith ultimately led them to God.
We imagine these ‘Three Wise Men’ laying down their gifts before a tiny baby laying on a bed of straw in a dirty stable. The wisest men of the time came to prostrate themselves before Truth; these same men of pomp and state came to recognize this Truth as their King, and importantly, these gentiles found Salvation at the heart of Israel.
There were so many options God could have chosen from, when it came to presenting Himself among us. How best to be one with us, and yet, how still to be true the state of being a King? Should the Messiah be a golden-robed Deity that appeared suddenly, full-grown before us, come to claim His throne and hold His sway? It’s a possibility, but it’s not what God chose to do. Think: the first thing the Infinite and Eternal One, the Creator of the Universe, the great I AM, did—was to make Himself a little one. So small we could hold Him in our arms. Later he would say,
‘Suffer the little children to come to Me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.’
This Epiphany story is about being a little one, the gracefulness of little souls.
In Spain, the children spent this morning excitedly opening presents from the Three Magic Kings. Families gathered, ate the the ‘Roscon de Reyes,’ found warmth and something reassuring in the rhythms of traditions. And last night, towns in Spain were busy with the cavalcade of the Kings’ caravans, which parade through the streets dispensing treats to all the little ones of the country.
A friend of ours was actually in costume on one of the King’s caravans, helping to make a lot of children very happy during this exciting yearly event. During the parade, a father with a small child came up to our friend and asked him:
‘Are you King Balthasaar?’
‘No,’ our friend said.
A significant glance by the father towards his child and a repeating of the question informed our friend what the purpose of this inquiry was.
‘Are YOU King Balthasaar?’
“Ohhh, YES, I am!’ said our friend.
‘Look Marcos!’ said the father, ‘It’s King Balthasaar! What do you have for him?’
The child extended his little arm towards our friend, offering up his precious gift:
‘What do you have for him?’ the father said.
‘My pacifier,’ replied the little child.
The picture you see here is of our friend’s ‘Belen’ (Nativitiy) at home. You can see, that the pacifier received from this little child has been laid before another, one who was once a very little Child, one at whose feet we all come to lay our best gifts.
St. Therese of Lisieux found that growing up meant letting go of yourself; being a person for others. She discovered this by meditating upon the Cross, upon the open arms of Christ—at once, sacrificing the Self, and embracing Others.
But after she had grown up, St. Therese discovered that the real business of this life consists in becoming small again. Her teaching was, that the simpler we become, the closer we are to God.
‘All is grace,’ she wrote, ‘Even if I had performed all the deeds of St. Paul, I would consider myself an unprofitable servant. I would notice that my hands are empty. But that is precisely the cause of my joy: since I have nothing, I shall expect everything from the good God."
This story shows one of those ‘little acts of tenderness’ that St. Therese considered so important on the pathway to sanctity. It’s not important what we offer—but the love with which we give it. Can you imagine, being two-years-old, and wanting to give your pacifier away to the great King on his way to see the Baby Jesus? Can you imagine possessing this sort of simplicity?
We often misunderstand God because He really is this simple. We are alarmed at the cantness of the phrase, ‘God is Love.’ There has to be more to it than that. Just as God had so many possibilities before Him when it came to the manner of His Incarnation, there are a great many sorts of gods possible to our imagination. But to the true God, Love is the only possibility worth considering. Simplicity does not make us less able to fathom the infinite Mystery, it only makes us more aware of it. At a time like Epiphany, when we celebrate this ‘discovery’ of the Mystery of God and His Incarnation, especially significant to those who have encountered Christ in conversion, we may ask ourselves, why do some men find God, and others do not?
Pope Benedict reflects on this question:
“Therefore, we can ask ourselves: what is the reason why some men see and find, while others do not? What opens the eyes and the heart? What is lacking in those who remain indifferent, in those who point out the road but do not move? We can answer: too much self-assurance, the claim to knowing reality, the presumption of having formulated a definitive judgement on everything closes them and makes their hearts insensitive to the newness of God. They are certain of the idea they have formed of the world and no longer let themselves be involved in the intimacy of an adventure with a God who wants to meet them. They place their confidence in themselves rather than in Him, and they do not think it possible that God could really be so great as to make Himself small so as to come really close to us.”
We often discount the importance of our ‘insignificant’ actions because we assume that God is a big thing, too significant and too mysterious to notice the tiny details of real life. Open your mind to the possibility that God has no size, that He does not measure in volume, nor did He make this REAL life in this REAL world without a view to its instrinsic dignity and importance.
Therese said: “You know well enough that Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, nor even at their difficulty, but at the love with which we do them.”
The Little Way to Holiness is really the same path the Magi trod, the journey from being that wise seeker of Eternal Truth, to the humble creature who simply warms itself in the Light of a Mystery it cannot fathom. Love is the light that shines around the Cradle; the wisdom of stargazers and scribes pales beside it. The Light transforms all who approach it, and when our gifts are weighed in its balance, a simple pacifier can weigh much more than a coffer of gold.
Photo taken by Agustin (recipient of the pacifier).
