Holy Redeemer Lutheran Church
1948 The Alameda
San Jose, CA 95126
San Jose, CA 95126
[This year I am reading selections from Rumi for my morning devotions. Rumi is a 13th century Sufi mystic and poet, and is the most widely sold poet in North America today.]
The following was found above the door to a Christian Church in Iran:| KPOO | 89.5 FM | jazz, blues, world music |
| KQKE | 960 AM | Air America - Talk Radio from the Left |
Marjane Satrapi grew up wearing sneakers and beating up boys. She wanted to grow up to be a saint. When she was ten years old, her world changed overnight. Girls and boys had to use different doors to enter the school. She had to cover herself with a long dark robe. Grownups around her began to disappear. Marjane has several close encounters with the country's morality police and her teachers at school. Iraqi bombs fall on the street where she lives. Eventually her parents send her abroad to receive a European education, but she is miserable: she loves her family and country, despite their flaws, too much to stay away for long. After a brief return and a failed marriage, Marjane leaves Iran for good.
This is a heartbreaking true story of a childhood coinciding with regime change and war in Iran. It's a story that everyone who counts themselves as a human being should read or watch.
Teresa McGee was struggling with arthritis, anger, and a sense of sin. Her friend Jim Lenihan, a 72 year old Maryknoll missioner, lay dying in a nursing home. It was Jim’s last summer. For Teresa it was a new beginning.
“The last time I sat by his bed,” writes Teresa, “there seemed nothing left of Jim but his essential goodness.”
That goodness remains, in Teresa, and in her moving story of friendship, faith and rebirth.
“Casts a strong light on our own struggle to fully surrender to God, and the ‘secret fear of being human,’ and vulnerable. As she movingly weaves her own battles with chronic illness into the text, Teresa effectively invites us to rediscover the beauty and power that come with being alive.”
Paul D’Arcy, author of Gift of the Red Bird
Teresa Rhodes McGee is the author of Ordinary Mysteries: Rediscovering the Rosary and The Comforter, a winner of the Catholic Book Award. She worked as a lay missioner in Peru and lives with her husband and two sons in Ossining, New York
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.These are revolutionary times. All over the globe people are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the lard are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.”
This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all embracing and unconditional love for all people. When I speak of love, I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life.
Let us hope that this spirit will become the final order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate.
We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality and strength without sight.