Mary > Recent Status Updates

The past is gone, the future is not yet here. If we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.

A tiny bud of a smile on our lips nourishes awareness and calms us miraculously. It returns to us the peace we thought we had lost.

"The biggest problem is, we usually are right about others' faults! But you can be right and have the wrong attitude, and you are dead wrong." --Jack Frost

...as we are less attached, less grasping, less clinging, there is also less suffering in our lives.

The Buddha emphasized the importance of generosity when he said, "If you knew what I know about the power of giving, you would not let a single meal pass without sharing it in some way."

It takes at least 40 words of praise to counteract just one word of criticism.

"Those who profess to love God and who diligently live by a strict form of law and legalism are sometimes the greatest hindrance to the advancement of the Kingdom of God." --Jack Frost

"The old 'I've prayed about it and God told me to tell you' gambit. It's not that, at the very least, you can't appreciate your accuser putting some level of contemplation into the matter, but the frequency of which prayer is used as the impetus for confrontation is uncanny. I've never sat through one of these kinds of meetings when someone simply claims responsibility for their own opinion or disapproval." - Knapp

"I had in back of my mind a vague recollection of Anita Bryant's gay witch hunt through Kansas in the late seventies. I found it comical that Jerry Falwell's favorite scapegoat for disastrous earthquakes was homosexuality and not a natural shifting of tectonic plates. The lunacy and demonization that they preached didn't seem to add up with the gay people I had met in my own life." - Jennifer Knapp

"...even after I had read the Bible, what seemed important was the heart of a person, anyway, not so much the body." --Jennifer Knapp

"My life had literally been saved, but it sounds so cliché to me (even still) to say that Jesus saved me, when there is so much more to the story. My choice to be a Christian was important, so I didn't want to be trivial in my writing...It was all well and good to say that Jesus had saved me, but so too had a good therapist and some serious cognitive therapy." --Jennifer Knapp

"A man has many social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups." -William James

"I have naturally formed the habit of restraining my thoughts. A thoughtless word hardly ever escaped my tongue or pen. Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. We find so many people impatient to talk. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world...My shyness...has allowed me to grow. It has helped me in my discernment of truth." -Gandhi

"The idea that Father is the vengeful arm of the Trinity and that Jesus is the compassionate One pleading for our undeserved pardon, is not just harmful to our relationship with God, but it runs totally contrary to the teachings of Jesus. Jesus came to demonstrate who the Father is and what He is like, and He does this through His words and actions."

What seems to be most important in marriage is not whether the partners are anatomically different from one another or infertile/unable to procreate. It's whether the inherently different people involved are willing to keep covenant with each other in a relationship of mutual self-giving & sacrifice which reflects Christ's sacrificial love for us. Same-sex couples can & do live out that deepest sense of difference.

There is no word in ancient Greek, Hebrew, or Latin that corresponds to the English word for "gay," as the concept of an exclusive, permanent same-sex orientation that is little more than a century old.

"I have come to believe, through my life's journey, in a God who is love and in a love that is free." ~Fr. Robert L. Arpin

I have come to believe, through my life's journey, in a God who is love and in a love that is free.

the blood clotting cascade & irreducible complexity

So naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.

I got so lost in my book that I forgot to go to the pharmacy... oops :P