Inspirational Story.

Singing Your Song

When a woman in a certain African tribe knows she is pregnant, she goes out into the wilderness with a few friends and together they pray and meditate until they hear the song of the child. They recognize that every soul has its own vibration that expresses its unique flavor and purpose. When the women attune to the song, they sing it out loud. Then they return to the tribe and teach it to everyone else.

When the child is born, the community gathers and sings the child’s song to him or her. Later, when the child enters education, the village gathers and chants the child’s song. When the child passes through the initiation to adulthood, the people again come together and sing. At the time of marriage, the person hears his or her song.

Finally, when the soul is about to pass from this world, the family and friends gather at the person’s bed, just as they did at their birth, and they sing the person to the next life.

To the African tribe there is one other occasion upon which the villagers sing to the child. If at any time during his or her life, the person commits a crime or aberrant social act, the individual is called to the center of the village and the people in the community form a circle around them. Then they sing their song to them.

The tribe recognizes that the correction for antisocial behavior is not punishment; it is love and the remembrance of identity. When you recognize your own song, you have no desire or need to do anything that would hurt another.

A friend is someone who knows your song and sings it to you when you have forgotten it. Those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused.

You may not have grown up in an African tribe that sings your song to you at crucial life transitions, but life is always reminding you when you are in tune with yourself and when you are not. When you feel good, what you are doing matches your song, and when you feel awful, it doesn’t. In the end, we shall all recognize our song and sing it well. You may feel a little wobbly at the moment, but so have all the great singers. Just keep singing and you’ll find your way home.

                                            From a story told by Alan Cohen in his book: Wisdom Of The Heart,

Irish Virgin

In a tiny village on the Irish coast lived an old maid.

In spite of her old age, she was still a virgin and very proud of it.
Realizing that her final days were rapidly approaching, she told the local, part-time postal clerk, part-time undertaker, that she wanted the following inscription engraved on her tombstone:

 BORN A VIRGIN, LIVED AS A VIRGIN, DIED A VIRGIN.

Not long after, the old maid died peacefully. The undertaker then went to carve the inscription that she had requested. It was then that he realized that the tombstone she had selected was much too small for the wording that she had chosen.

He thought long and hard as to how he could fulfill the old maid's final request with such limited space available to him. After agonizing over this dilemma for days, inspiration finally came to him, and the following inscription was carved into her tombstone:

"RETURNED UNOPENED".

Our Lord's Prayer

GOD
Our Father and Mother in Heaven
and Earth!
May your name be honoured
by every person and in everything !
May your kingdom come
through the control of environmental pollutiion,
rather that through more sophisticated factories and faster cars,
through the widow's mite rather that the millionaire's might;
through the sprouting seed rather than the exploding atom.
Your will be done
in our waters so that fish can swim safely in them;
in our atmosphere so that we can breathe it freely,
in our buildings, so that children can play in them,
and the aged find a play to live
Give us today the courage and the imagination to search for a new way of life
Give bread to the hungry
and to those who have bread hunger for the bread of life.
Forgive us when our love is calculating and our concern
mechanical;
when we enjoy the fruits of the earth
but do not care for the sweat that watered it;
nor for the soil in which it grew.
Forgive us
so that we learn to forgive ourselves and those around us
And do not allow us to fail in the test,
by collaborating with the strong against the weak.
But save us from the evil one at work
in an industry that thrives on war,
in gurus who offer instant salvation
and in a church made up only of docile sheep. AMEN

Ignatius Loyola’s

Precious Gift to Me and my fellow Jesuit Brothers...

Praying the Examen

“ Become aware of God/s presence. Take time to

quiet your body and your mind. Pray for a graced

understanding of the day.

“ Thank God for the blessings of the day and ask

yourself:

What were the gifts of the day?

How was I a gift to someone today?

“ Notice the different feelings in the day. Recall and

examine the events of your day

and ask yourself:

Where was God in the events and the

persons of the day?

What moved me to act the way I did?

What habit helped me or hindered me?

Did these feelings move me toward God’s

peace or away from God’s peace?

“ Choose a positive or negative feeling and pray

over it.

That feeling is a sign that something

important is going on.

Simply express spontaneously the prayer that

surfaces as you attend to the

source of the feeling.

“ Look toward the future with hope and ask yourself:

If I am going to be in a situation again that I

did not handle well today, how

Do I want to handle it next time?

“ End with the Lord’s Prayer.

(Courtesy: Wisconsin Newsletter)

Paradoxes...

O Changeless God,

Under the conviction of thy Spirit I learn that
the more I do, the worse I am,
the more I know, the less I know,
the more holiness I have, the more sinful I am,
the more I love, the more there is to love.
O wretched man that I am !
O Lord,
I have a wild heart,
and cannot stand before thee;
I am like a bird before a man.
How little I love thy truth and ways!
I neglect prayer,
by thinking I have prayed enough and earnestly,
by knowing thou hast saved my soul.
Of all hypocrites, grant that I may not be
an evangelical hypocrite,
who sins more safely because grace abounds,
who tells his lusts that Christ's blood
cleanseth them,
who reasons that GOd cannot cast him into hell,
for he is saved,
who loves evangelical preaching, churches,
christians, but lives unholily.
My mind is a bucket without a bottom,
with no spiritual understanding.
no desire for the Lord's day,
ever learning but never reaching the truth,
always at the gospel-well but never holding water.
My conscience is without conviction or contrition,
with nothing to repent of.
My will is without power of decision or resolution.
My heart is without affection, and full of leaks.
My memory has no retention,
so I forget easily the lessons learned,
and thy truths seep away.
Give me a broken heart that yet carries home
the water of grace.

-The Valley of Vision, edited by Arthur Bennett.

hello world...

my first lines into the world of blogs...got this strange idea of blogging..thought y not me into this when the whole world shares it..but i surely confess my amatuership in this...nothing to start wid...except my blank mind with lots of questions pouring in..no clue where the answers would be found...anyways for the time being i wud stay with the questions, may be someday i would step in to the answers unknowingly...