MSI Press Blog

  Today's meditation from  Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living   by Dr. Frederic Craigie. -33-   [Let’s] remember the great truth that moments of surprise want to teach us; everything is gratuitous, everything is a gift. The degree to which we are awake to this truth is the measure of our gratefulness. And gratefulness is the measure of our aliveness. Are we not dead to whatever we take for granted? Surely to be numb is to be dead. For those who awaken to life through surprise, death lies behind, not ahead. To live life open for surprise, in spite of all of the dying which life implies, makes us even more alive.   David Steindl-Rast   Speaking at Columbia University Teachers’ College in New York a couple of years ago, I took some extra time to be a tourist. Having known a sculptor who worked on the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, this was one of my priority stops. Like other Gothic cathedrals aroun...

  Today's meditation from  Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living   by Dr. Frederic Craigie. -32-   You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. Do the thing you think you cannot do… do one thing every day that scares you.   Eleanor Roosevelt   I admire stories of courage. Can you imagine the courage of the Apollo 11 astronauts landing on the moon, facing the very real possibility of being stranded looking down at the earth 250,000 miles away with no way to return? (If your car battery dies outside the hardware store, it’s one thing, but for them…). No less inspiring are stories of everyday courage. I have had many patients like the man who was terrified to leave his home but summoned the courage to walk to the mailbox, then drive down the street, and then go to the grocery store. Or my neighbor who spoke to the unpopular opinion of supporting the scho...

Today's meditation from  Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living   by Dr. Frederic Craigie. -31-   It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.   Wendell Berry   Bill Wilson looked at his life and recognized that it wasn’t working. He was deeply depressed and in the grip of severe addiction to alcohol. He recounts that he “gagged badly” on the idea of a Power Greater than himself, but cried out that if there were a God, that God would come to him and that he would do anything God might ask in order to change his life. Suddenly, he experienced a “great white light;” he felt a spirit of ecstasy and transformation and realized that he was a free man. Known widely as “Bill W,” he became one of the two co-founders of Alcoholics Anonym...