Taking a break from painting...

This month I am taking a break from painting in order to meet my goals of cleaning out the closets in the house, getting rid of things we no longer need or use, either giving to charity or selling them on ebay, and I need to get my paperwork pile in order. I took the advice of my mother in law to just throw all the pay stubs and receipts in one box and organize it at the end of the year. I'm not sure if that idea has worked for me. I'm a bit overwhelmed with that stack. So, after the new year I should be picking up a few painting projects again. We are considering converting our porch into a sun room to make more room, and we are in the process of cleaning out our garage to convert into an art studio for me. Right now I'm sharing space with the formal dining room and it's very crowded.

We can afford to move to a bigger house, but we just don't have the time to look for another house, nor do we have the time to pack up and move. Plus, our kids are settled with their friends and are comfortable with their school so adding on may be the best decision. There are ways even to add on to the front of our house if we wanted and even to add a second story loft over the garage. This may never happen, but just knowing that there are 'ways' gives us hope. We are crammed into a 1600 square foot home right now with three boys, my husbands computer/photography pursuits, and my own artist business. It feels a little bit like being a rat in a cage. But I am determined to make the best of it and count my blessings. I have to remember I am from a family of eight that grew up in a home much smaller than this one, and my parents had just as many hobby areas usurping much of that space. My father converted our den into a ham radio operators haven, and my mother shared her sewing space with our dining room. I grew up just fine and I'm not pscyho or anything, so we can also make do. Must think positive !

My husband set up his camera on his tripod with a timer and took this picture of us on the hammock in our back yard this evening. We are trying to take a good Christmas picture to send out as a card. We tried to take some next to our Christmas tree in our house but the lighting was too dark and we don't have all of the needed lighting equipment for indoors. The hammock was my idea because we are dressed casual and we match the hammock with our clothing choices.

I got a friend request on my shoutlife page yesterday morning from this woman who writes devotionals. I thought that was neat !http://www.wordvessel.blogspot.com

Shout Life is a great place to blog and meet other christians. I highly recommend it! www.shoutlife.com

Here is my blog on Shout Life http://www.shoutlife.com/dawnsart

God in the present moment

WHY SHOULD WE LIVE in the moment? For one thing, this moment is all we really have. The past is gone; we can never recapture it or change it. And all our moments to come will hold their own challenges and surprises, no matter how much we plan or dream. The only moment that we have to live is now. And the only way to have any impact on how we experience tomorrow is to live our moments well today.

- Kim Barker
Birthed in Prayer: Pregnancy as a Spiritual Journey

I painted this portrait of my friend Vauhgn Fahie of Sax for God !


http://www.sax4god.com

I was very inspired by the colors and lighting in one of his photographs and asked his permission to paint it. He is getting the original gallery wrapped canvas as payment for his modeling services. I'm putting this on a variety of posters, prints and products.

The Simple Things in Life that Matter Most

My pastor did a homily last Sunday about the simple things in life that matter the most, and about the value of human beings goes beyond their abilities to produce fancy impressive things.

http://www.stcyrilhouston.org/homilies.asp

It's the one titled "the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time"

He recalls something his mother said about not wanting to be a burden in her old age, and it reminds me of someone special in our family that is afraid to be a burden, who I promise will not be a burden.

His homily made me think of that time Mother Teresa said that we cannot all do great things, but to do small things with great love.

Here is an article I found online that fits along with these sentiments...

Do Small things with Great Love

All of us want to do something grand to show our love for our loved ones. It would be marvellous if we have the opportunity to do it. But, we don't need to carry out grand things in order to show great love for others and for God. We don't have to do big things only small things with great love. It is the intensity of love we put into our actions every day that makes them into something beautiful for God and for others. It is not the magnitude of our action that counts but the depth of love we put into it.

So, how do we show how much love we put into our deeds every day? Mother Teresa shows us how, "Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired.

How does a lamp burn? Through the continuous input of small drops of oil. If the drops of oil run out, the light of the lamp will cease, and the bridegroom will say, "I do not know you" (Matthew 25:1-13).

What are these drops of oil in our lamps? They are the small things of daily life: faithfulness, punctuality, small words of kindness, a thought for others, our way of being silent, of looking, of speaking, and of acting. These are the true drops of love that keep our religious life burning like a lively flame.

Do not look for Jesus away from yourselves. He is not out there; He is in you. Keep your lamp burning, and you will recognize Him." (A Life for God, 70)

Even a small thing like being present for others can be done with great love. Mother Teresa says:

"If there is a need God will guide you, as He guided us to serve those with AIDS. We don't judge these people, we don't ask what happened to them and how they got sick, we just see the need and care for them. I think God is telling us something with AIDS, giving us an opportunity to show our love. People with AIDS have awakened the tender love in those who had perhaps shut it out and forgotten it.

Sister Dolores shows how simply being there with love is often enough:

'There is a lot of fear at the beginning for those who come to us with AIDS. It is hard for them to cope with the fact that they are going to die. But being there with us and seeing us with others in their last moments makes a difference. I remember in New York that the mother of a man from Puerto Rico offered to nurse him if he came home. He thanked her but said he would remain with us, though he would visit her. One day he told me, 'I know when I am dying you will be there holding my hand,' because he had seen us doing it with others and knew that he wouldn't die alone.

It's quite simple really. The dying are moved by the love they receive and it may be just a touch of my hand, or a glass of water, or providing them with some kind of sweet they desire. You just take that to them, what they ask for, and they are satisfied and know someone cares for them, someone loves them, someone wants them---and that, in itself, is a great help to them. Because of this they believe that God must be even kinder, more generous, and so their souls are lifted up to God. As we don't preach, we just do what we do with love, they are touched by God's grace.'

Brother Geoff, General Servant of the Ministries of Charity Brothers, also comments of the best way to offer love:

'When people who are used to being rejected and abandoned experience being accepted by others and being loved, when they see people are giving their time and energy for them, that conveys a message that, after all, they are not rubbish.

Certainly, love is expressed first in being with before doing to someone. We have to continually, renew our awareness of this because we can get caught up in a lot of the doing for. You see, if our actions do not first come from the desire to be with a person, then it really becomes just social work. When you are willing to be with a poor person you can recognise his need and if your love is genuine you naturally want to do what you can as an expression of your love. Service, in a way, is simply a means of expressing your being for the person---and often with the poorest people you cannot completely alleviate their problem. But by being with them, by being for them, whatever you can do for them makes a difference. The message we try to convey to the poorest of the poor is: We cannot solve your problems but God loves you even while you are handicapped or alcoholic or have leprosy, and whether or not you become cured, God loves you just as much and we are here to express that love. And if we can help relieve their pain a bit all well and good, but it is more important for us to remind them that even in the midst of pain and suffering, God loves them. It's a difficult message to communicate, obviously, but we believe that being for them is the first thing. If you spend time with a person then that is as much an expression of love as what you can do for them.'" (A Simple Path, 87-90)

"I would like it very much if our Co-Workers, each in his or her own immediate environment, would concentrate more and more on giving service freely and generously to the poor. Let each of them seek out those who live alone, who lack affection, those cut off, in any way, and try to see in them the suffering Christ.
Give some a smile, visit someone for a short time, make a fire for someone who is cold, read something to someone. These are small things, very small, but they will make your love for God more concrete." (Stories of Mother Teresa, 61)

"It may happen that a mere smile, a short visit, the lighting of a lamp, writing a letter for a blind man, carrying a bucket of charcoal, offering a pair of sandals, reading the newspaper for someone—--something small, very small—--may, in fact, be our love of God in action." (A Life for God, 77)

Again, Father Henri Nouwen shows us how we can choose love in the little things we do every day: "We choose love by taking small steps of love every time there is an opportunity. A smile, a handshake, a word of encouragement, a phone call, a card, an embrace, a kind greeting, a gesture of support, a moment of attention, a helping hand, a present, a financial contribution, a visit---all these are little steps toward love.

Each step is like a candle burning in the night. It does not take the darkness away, but it guides us through the darkness. When we look back after many small steps of love, we will discover that we have made a long and beautiful journey." (Bread for the Journey, June 15)

To pay attention to others can also be done with great love, as Father Henri Nouwen says, "Paying attention to our fellow human beings is far from easy. We tend to be so insecure about our self-worth and so much in need of affirmation that it is very hard not to ask for attention ourselves. Before we are fully aware of it, we are speaking about ourselves, referring to our experiences, telling our stories, or turning the subject of conversation toward our own territory. The familiar sentence, 'That reminds me of. . .' is a standard method of shifting attention from the other to ourselves. To pay attention to others with the desire to make them the center and to make their interests our own is a real form of self-emptying, since to be able to receive others into our intimate inner space we must be empty. That is why listening is so difficult. It means our moving away from the center of attention and inviting others into that space.

From experience we know how healing such an invitation can be. When someone listens to us with real concentration and expresses sincere care for our struggles and our pains, we feel that something very deep is happening to us. Slowly, fears melt away, tensions dissolve, anxieties retreat, and we discover that we carry within us something we can trust and offer as a gift to others. The simple experience of being valuable and important to someone else has a tremendous re-creative power." (Compassion, 80)

Ultimately, God will not ask us how many projects we have accomplished, the number of books we have read, nor how many degrees we have obtained, but He will ask us if we have done our best, for the love of Him and others.

From: http://web.singnet.com.sg/~lauho88/do_small_things_with_great_love.html

Well, well, well....Oh boy....I am organizing my life on Microsoft Outlook and little reminders are popping up and dinging reminding me of the many things I have to do and why I should not be sitting on the computer. Must limit my time online and get my life as a homemaker pulled together so I can be a better mom and wife, and if I am going to have any time to paint. So, this is what I am doing and not spending as much time online. I found this woman's page on You Tube called WAYCLEAN and she gives challenges every week and she posts before and afters of her housework. It's so funny, but anyway, at least her friends and family knows what she is doing and can sort of 'be there' in a way, so to speak, while she does her lonely work. It is VERY LONELY like solitary confinement being a stay at home mom and I appreciate little things like these silly videos. I'm not complaining. I'm happy to be able to stay home. I just get restless because it requires a lot of solitude being in the house cleaning all day with no one to talk to. Kids are at school and husband is at work. Hey, I guess if you can't beat it, might as well turn it into a show to share her world so we don't all feel so alone with our chores. LOL ! Check it out !


http://www.youtube.com/user/wayclean

I think I'm going to start making goals like she is doing and sticking with them until this house is spic and spac and completely organized.

Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things !






Great things are done by a series of small things brought together. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

I love to hear Dr. Alveda King speak !

This is Dr. Alveda King, neice of Martin Luther King Jr. I love to hear her speak ! There is something calming about her. She has such a beautiful soul.

Steven Delopoulos, The Ruin of the Beast, and a Quote

Grace me, O God, with your gift of wisdom. It will challenge me to get my head out of the clouds and follow the rain down here below. Only then will my heart rediscover the life-giving waters of love's experiences and life's lessons.
— Enkindled: Holy Spirit, Holy Gifts

The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he produces. ~ St. Thomas Aquinas

Jennifer O'Neill, Silent No More

Actress/Model Jennifer O'Neill's Message to Arizona Women: Making Abortion Unthinkable

By Dennis Durband, Editor
April, 10, 2005

PHOENIX -- Abortion exacts an overwhelming toll – for the poor, the middle class and the rich and famous, too. There is no socio-economic safe zone for the women who have prevented their babies from being born alive.

Author of the books, "Surviving Myself" and "You're Not Alone," and national spokeswoman for the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, actress and model Jennifer O'Neill told a Women's Expo audience that she was not exempt from abortion's exorbitant costs. O'Neill, now 57 and a grandmother of four, was selling a positive image as a Cover Girl model at age 15, she starred in 28 movies with the likes of John Wayne, Robert Duvall and Chuck Norris, among others. She was an icon of youthful beauty, fame and wealth; she had it all.

Or so we all thought. Today, she told the real story of her life to Expo-goers who had been hearing pitches for miracle cleaners, getting their cholesterol checked, sampling the latest craze in fitness drinks and registering for trips to Las Vegas.

O'Neill sent her "You're Not Alone" book to Elizabeth Taylor, who read it and then responded that she and O'Neill have much in common.

Both have been married a few times and failed at relationships more than a few times. She says she was looking for love in all the wrong places. O'Neill was also shot, was in a coma for two weeks, had eight miscarriages and one abortion. She almost died three times. And just recently, O'Neill had a skin graft on her nose to help her overcome skin cancer.

As she explained in Phoenix today, O'Neill said the hurting began in her childhood when she could not get the love and attention she craved from her parents. Her parents sent her brother to boarding school, sent Jennifer's beloved dog to the pound and moved to Manhattan.

By age 15, O'Neill was modeling in Paris as the youngest Cover Girl ever. She only wanted to make enough money to buy a horse and a dog, because animals never stop loving their masters.

"The hole in my heart started at age nine," O'Neill said. "My parents' love for each other was so strong that I felt invisible. I tried to be an over-achiever to please them. I developed a negative image. I was tall, skinny and immature. I took sleeping pills and was in a coma for two weeks. God took care of me before I knew Him."

As a young adult, O'Neill thought that if she got married, she would be more fully accepted. She got involved in a co-dependent relationship and became a mother at age 21. Depression, hospitalization and therapy followed. Healing did not.

"My negative tape got longer," O'Neill said. "I went to Manhattan and fell in love with a very powerful man."

During their engagement, O'Neill became pregnant. Her new man already had four children; she had one. Overjoyed, she rushed straight from the doctor's office to her fiancee's Wall Street office to deliver the great news.

"He said, 'you're gonna have an abortion. I was shattered, devastated and rejected. I couldn't believe he didn't want our child."

O'Neill's parents said that she couldn't have a baby if the father didn't want to have it. Friends agreed with her parents.

"The doctor then spoke the lies that come straight from the pits of hell," O'Neill recalls. "He said it's only a glob of tissue."

Forty-three percent of American women 45 and under have had an abortion. And 85 percent of them have been coerced – often by a man in their life – to have abortions. O'Neill was one of them – coerced and threatened.

"I folded," O'Neill said. "I didn't yet know God's faithfulness. I didn't have that strength to lean on."

O'Neill had additional abortions. Eventually, the healing began when she accepted Jesus as her Lord and Savior and then became national spokeswoman for Silent No More. Today, she says, "My child is up there (in Heaven) saying, 'Go, Mom! Tell the truth!" as she debates pro-aborts and spreads the Silent No More message: abortion hurts women, it is not political and it should be unthinkable.

Mom and Dad are now in their 80s and O'Neill recently got her multi-linguist father to translate her latest book into Spanish. More importantly, she received her parents' love. Her three children talked her into the title of the "Surviving Myself" book.

"After reading the book, your mother and are now pro-life," O'Neill's father said. "I wish your mother and I had known the truth when you came to us for help."

O'Neill now looks for love only in Heavenly places. More than eight years ago, O'Neill married her present husband. Prior to the wedding, they did it God's way – maintaining their abstinence. Her life has come full circle. She could easily retire from public life, rather than debate Planned Parenthood abortion-mongers. But there are too many people at risk out there, and they need to hear her message of love and forgiveness.

The Message

Love: "Love is something we choose to do; it's a choice," O'Neill says.

Messing up: "If you mess up, you can start again. God is the God of second and third chances. We can never get to the bottom of God's love. I had many tears and failed relationships along the way. God has used all my messes to talk about the tough issues: sexual abuse, teen suicide, depression and more. Parents and grandparents need to keep our ears open to kids' hurts. Teen suicide is a big problem."

Regretting abortion: "Millions of men and women regret abortion."

The pain of abortion: "Abortion hurts women and it hurts families. … Today, I met a grandmother who was heartbroken over her grand-daughter's abortion."

Opposing viewpoints: "We now have the ultrasound machine. They still say abortion is as simple as a trip to the dentist's office. That's when I say it's my experience over their theory."

Risks of abortion: "There is a good risk of depression, cancer, drug abuse, relational difficulties; abortion is not safe. Each year, there are 140,000 immediate medical needs after abortions."

Post-abortion guilt: "There is hope, healing, grace and forgiveness. Your lives do not have to be hurtful. God died on the cross for each of us – including our abortions. With Christ, there are no more tears. He does not punish us. Our babies are in Heaven with Him and there is no recrimination. The hardest thing is to forgive ourselves, but there is hope today. The truth will set you free."

Weapons of mass destruction: "There are 4,000 abortions a day in the U.S. We want to make the truth of abortion known. There are free ultrasounds available. Abortion hurts families and women. Women have been pitted against their own babies. We've been sold a bill of goods that choice is an inalienable right."

The early feminists: "They were pro-life and they wanted to be able to buy land."

Changing attitudes: "Seventy percent of teens today are pro-life. They looked around and figured out that one-third of their generation has been aborted."

Adoption: "Birth mothers who place their children up for adoption are my biggest heroes."

Rape and incest: "A majority have the child because they don't want to perpetrate another violent act."

Parenthood: "Today, sacrifice has bad connotations, but it has its benefits."

Faith: "As sisters, we have to work together and lift each other up. If we speak the truth, God will bless our lives. Choose to accept God's grace so you can be all you can be: better moms and better citizens. We all have made a mistake and through God we become whole. We don't need to do this alone."

Photo courtesy of Jennifer O'Neill's website

http://www.azconservative.org/ONeill_Silent.htm

Her official website

http://www.jenniferoneill.com

Video : You're Gonna Be

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg1-l2bsM8w

The common good can not be incarnated if it is aborted

Address by Cardinal Francis George to the US Catholic Bishops

Monday, November 10, 2008

Cardinal George is the President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Archbishop of Chicago

Dear Brother Bishops:

At the opening session of the recently concluded Roman Synod on the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church, Pope Benedict XVI reflected on Psalm 118, that magnificent chorus praising the law, the order, that unites us to God. "The Word of God," the Pope said," is solid, it is the true reality upon which to base one's life. Let us recall the words of Jesus: '...Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away'…It is words that create history, it is words that give form to thoughts…the Word of God is the foundation of everything, it is the true reality. And to be realists, we must truly count on this reality."

The Holy Father offered these reflections in the face of bank closures, the collapse of giant corporations, the uncertainty of political regimes, with full awareness of the insecurity and suffering of so many around the world. His words echoed what he had told us in our own country last April, when he constantly directed our thoughts and actions toward the Word of God made flesh, whom the Pope called "Our Hope."

The Pope invites us to place our hope in what lasts forever. We have recently finished a contest for the presidency in which both candidates invited us to hope in change. Perhaps that is the difference between a vision that looks at what is ultimate and one that, by the very nature of things, is most concerned with what is less than ultimate. No political order conforms fully to the Kingdom of God. Separation is built into our faith itself, yet we can hope and work and pray that things political and economic not impede or contest the things that are of God.

We come to this Assembly in the interim before a new presidential administration takes office in our country. Symbolically, this is a moment that touches more than our history when a country that once enshrined race slavery in its very constitutional order should come to elect an African American to the presidency. In this, I truly believe, we must all rejoice. We must also hope that President Obama succeed in his task, for the good of all. The odds against success are formidable. We are internally divided and, in a global order, we will be less the masters of our economic and political fate. Nevertheless, we can rejoice today with those who, following heroic figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., were part of a movement to bring our country's civil rights, our legal order, into better accord with universal human rights, God's order. Among so many people of good will, dutiful priests and loving religious women, bishops and lay people of the Catholic Church who took our social doctrine to heart then can feel vindicated now. Their successors remain, especially among those who quietly give their lives to teaching and forming good and joyful children in Catholic schools in African American and other minority communities.

We can also be truly grateful that our country's social conscience has advanced to the point that Barack Obama was not asked to renounce his racial heritage in order to be president, as, effectively, John Kennedy was asked to promise that his Catholic faith would not influence his perspective and decisions as president a generation ago. Echoes of that debate remain in the words of those who reject universal moral propositions that have been espoused by the human race throughout history, with the excuse that they are part of Catholic moral teaching. We are, perhaps, at a moment when, with the grace of God, all races are safely within the American consensus. We are not at the point, however, when Catholics, especially in public life, can be considered full partners in the American experience unless they are willing to put aside some fundamental Catholic teachings on a just moral and political order. The hubris that has isolated our country politically and now economically is heard, but not usually recognized, in moral arguments based simply and solely on individual moral autonomy. This personal and social dilemma is not, of course, a matter of ultimate importance, for America is not the Kingdom of God; but it makes America herself far less than she claims to be in this world.

At our meeting last spring, we heard statisticians tell us that the Catholic Church is a laboratory for our society. What the Church looks like today, in her ethnic composition, her economic situation, her generational cohorts, the entire country will look like in twenty five to thirty years. This gives Catholics a perhaps prophetic perspective on our society's life and concerns. In Holy Scripture, a true prophet's life is always marked by suffering. What is of major importance to us, as bishops of the Church, is that the Church remain true to herself and her Lord in the years to come, for only in being authentically herself will the Church serve society and its members, in time and in eternity.

In working for the common good of our society, racial justice is one pillar of our social doctrine. Economic justice, especially for the poor both here and abroad, is another. But the Church comes also and always and everywhere with the memory, the conviction, that the Eternal Word of God became man, took flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary, nine months before Jesus was born in Bethlehem. This truth is celebrated in our liturgy because it is branded into our spirit. The common good can never be adequately incarnated in any society when those waiting to be born can be legally killed at choice. If the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision that African Americans were other people's property and somehow less than persons were still settled constitutional law, Mr. Obama would not be president of the United States. Today, as was the case a hundred and fifty years ago, common ground cannot be found by destroying the common good.

This is the fiftieth year since the calling of the Second Vatican Council by Blessed Pope John XXIII. The Pope looked at a divided world and hoped that the Church could act as Lumen Gentium calls us, as the "sacrament of the unity of the human race." Those who would weaken our internal unity render the Church's external mission to the world more difficult if not impossible. Jesus promised that the world would believe in him if we are one: one in faith and doctrine, one in prayer and sacrament, one in governance and shepherding. The Church and her life and teaching do not fit easily into the prior narratives that shape our public discussions. As bishops, we can only insist that those who would impose their own agenda on the Church, those who believe and act self-righteously, answerable only to themselves, whether ideologically on the left or the right, betray the Lord Jesus Christ.

Our episcopal conference is given us in the Church's canon law so that we might have an instrument for shaping spiritual unity, for creating the bonds of affection that help us to govern in communion with each other, especially in a divided world and in a Church that knows dissent from some of her teachings and dissatisfaction with aspects of her governance. As we all know, the Church was born without episcopal conferences, as she was born without parishes and without dioceses, although all these structures have been helpful pastorally throughout the centuries. The Church was born only with shepherds, with apostolic pastors, whose relationship to their people keeps them one with Christ, from whom comes authority to govern the Church. Strengthening people's relationship with Christ remains our primary concern and duty as bishops. We extend that pastoral concern, especially at the beginning of a new administration and a new Congress, to Catholics of either major party who serve others in government. We respect you and we love you, and we pray that the Catholic faith will shape your decisions so that our communion may be full.

We meet amidst enormous challenges to our Church, our country and our ministry, but that is, to some extent, always the case. Sometimes I've been tempted to think that bishops should be given, at their consecration, not crosiers but mops! What we are given before the crosier, if you recall, is the Word of God in written form, held above our head so that it may permeate our spirit. With you, I pray that all the topics we consider in our meeting now and all we do in the difficult days to come will be done together in the charity of Christ, who is the source of our unity and our strength. In so governing, in calling all to join us in listening to the incarnate Word of God from within his body, the Church, what we do now will have consequences for eternity; and we will be good shepherds to our people, good servants in our society and good disciples of Our Lord.

Francis Cardinal George, OMI

"The common good can never be adequately incarnated in any society when those waiting to be born can be legally killed at choice." ~ Cardinal Francis George

It is fine to be zealous, provided the purpose is good, and to be so always and not just when I am with you. My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you, how I wish I could be with you now and change my tone, because I am perplexed about you! ~ Galatians 4:18-20

[To Joe Biden] "While grateful for the effective collaboration you and your office have offered on so many worthy projects and concerns, I also observe, by your support for laws that fail to protect the unborn, a profound disconnection from your human and personal obligation to protect the weakest and most innocent among us: the child in the womb," ~ Bishop John Richard (Biden's Bishop)

An Arabic Christmas Carol (Byzantine Hymn of the Nativity)






Till Christ shall be fully formed in you

A reading from Augustine's explanation of the letter to the Galatians, 5th century

So the Apostle says, 'Become as I am' who though born a Jew, have now learnt by spiritual insight to treat all carnal matters with contempt; 'for I also have become as you', which is to say, I also am a man like you. After saying that, he very properly and becomingly added a reminder of his love for them, fearing no doubt that they might otherwise begin to suspect him of having turned against them. So he says, 'Brethren, I beseech you, you did me no wrong', as if he would prevent them form thinking he wanted to do them wrong.

He even calls them 'my little children', so that they would imitate him as they would a parent. 'With whom I am again in travail', he adds, 'until Christ be formed in you!'

Now Christ is formed in a believer through faith implanted in his inmost soul. Such a one, gentle and lowly of heart, is summoned to the freedom of grace, and he does not boast of the merit of works which are of no value. But from the grace itself there is a beginning of merit, so that Christ who said 'As you did it to one of the least of my brethren, you did it to me' can call him the least bit of himself. Christ, then, is formed in him who accepts his form; and he receives the form of Christ who cleaves to Christ with spiritual love

The result is that through this imitating he becomes, in the measure permitted to him, the same as Christ whom he imitates. 'He who says be abides in him', says John, 'ought to walk in the same way as he walked'.

But since human beings are conceived by their mothers in order to be formed and once they are formed are brought to birth through the pangs of labor, we can ask what is meant by the words, 'with whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you!' We can take 'travail' to mean the anxious care with which he was in labor so that they might be born in Christ; and now again he is in travail because of the danger he sees them in of being led astray. The anxiety of such concern about them, which leads him to say that he is in some way in travail can endure 'to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ, so that they may no longer be carried about with every wind of doctrine'.

Hence, it is not in reference to the beginnings of faith by which they were born, but concerning the strengthening and perfecting of faith that he says, 'with whom I am again in travail until Christ is formed in you'. Elsewhere he commends this sort of travail in other words when he says, 'There is the daily pressure on me of anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to fall and I am not indignant?'

"Whoever saves one life saves the world entire." ~ The Talmud

Artist gives old saints new faces

What a neat story...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94064077

Listen to the clips of the artist speaking on the site. That's a nice man.

"If you can find the sacred in the world around you, rather than in something that's distant and apart from you," Walker says, "then maybe you can be better integrated to the world you live in."

A slideshow of his work :

http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2008/aug/saints/index.html

His blog is quite interesting:

http://allthesaints.wordpress.com