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Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas! I hope your celebrations have been beautiful! Even if it hasn’t been everything you hoped for, Christmas keeps going for 12 days, and then some — so there is plenty of time to experience all that this Season of Grace has to offer. I’ve been making a conscious effort to try to live these days in a celebratory manner — despite the challenges of being part of a family business and having to take care of many practical things at year end. Many years ago, a rousing game of “paper, scissors, rock” granted me the position of CFO for our family business. Clearly I lost. It’s almost a…
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Let’s Talk About Christmas Feasting and Why It Matters
Did you know that there was a heresy in the early centuries of the Church, known as gnosticism? The Gnostics thought the human spirit was naturally good, but it was imprisoned in the body, which was naturally evil or simply an illusion. Their goal was to free the spirit from its embodied prison. Why this matters is because many of us struggle with this same heresy today. We find ourselves seeing the body as bad or evil — and spiritual things as good and in conflict with the body. It’s understandable, considering the sex-saturated, botox injected world in which we live — but the proper response to all the craziness…
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The Importance of Leisure
Leisure is an important thing. This statement might seem obvious to some — and slightly offensive to others. In fact, our American work ethic might make it difficult to believe that leisure is an important part of our lives. You might even equate leisure with laziness, sloth, or vice. Spiritual direction over the years has made one thing abundantly clear: filling your day with lots and lots of work is not necessarily a virtuous pursuit. Perhaps even more shocking: moments of leisure help to shape you into the person that you will become. It is really that important. A recent visit to Italy reminded me of this truth. We were sitting in St. Peter’s Square,…
