MSI Press Blog

Today's meditation from  Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living   by Dr. Frederic Craigie. -8-   Irenaeus, the great early church father, said the glory of God is a human being fully alive. Now, if you back off from every little controversy in your life, you’re not alive, and what’s more, you’re boring. It’s a terrible thing that we settle for so much less… The greatest pleasure for me was being with black civil rights leaders and followers, because they were so alive. You can be more alive in pain than in complacency. These often very poor blacks in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, were so wonderfully alive, so cheerful, so courageous.   William Sloane Coffin   You are alive as you extend yourself on behalf of something that matters. William Sloane Coffin was no stranger to controversy. He certainly could have led, in his words, a “polite” and “comfortable” life as a clergyman and college chaplain, but in addition to the...

  Today's meditation from  Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living   by Dr. Frederic Craigie: -49-   To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.   Ho...

  Today's meditation from  Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living   by Dr. Frederic Craigie: -48-   Love is inside us, just waiting to be unleashed. The darkness is an invitation to light, calling forth the spirit in all of us. Every problem implies a question: Are you ready to embody what you say you believe? Can you reach within yourself for enough clarity, strength, forgiveness, serenity, love, patience and faith to turn this around? That’s the spiritual meaning of every situation; not what happens to us, but what we do with what happens to us and who we decide to become because of what happens to us.   Marianne Williamson   I have a remarkable colleague, Julie M Bosch, Ph.D., ARNP, who was deployed twice to Afghanistan as a Lt Col nurse practitioner. Her role was both clinical and educational, caring for casualties of war and teaching nursing skills to Afghan staff. She came to realize that her teaching...