Should you move after retirement? If you do, you will want to make a home. And if you stay in place, you will want to deepen and secure your home. Here are five steps that will help: Continue reading
Category Archives: Spirit
The Secret Lives of Old Men
“Gee,” I yelled in the wind, and Hickory, my lead sled dog, guided the team to the right across the lake and northward toward the mountains. We entered the forest and began the ascent, steep switchbacks, dogs pulling hard. “Easy, Easy,” I said as we approached a left turn with a steep drop at the right side of the trail. We were hundreds of miles into the snow and silence of Alaska. Continue reading
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
Here are a few photographs of the Christmas season. Hope they help you remember what a wonderful season it is.
Hang On to Humor as You Slide toward the Grave
We’re all sliding toward the grave, and older people naturally think about it more. Maybe that is one of the reasons many old people sink into despair. I say, “To hell with despair.” We all know where we’re going, so let’s have some fun along the way. Humor surely gives as much help for despair as a shrink, and it’s free.
- A lawyer called his client overseas to tell him his mother-in-law passed away. “Should we order burial, embalming or cremation,” asked the lawyer. The fellow replied, “Take no chances—do all three.” (unknown author) Continue reading
Memories As Moments of Peacefulness
[A week or so ago I mistakenly published this post for a few minutes. Emails were sent out to subscribers, but the post was not available except in the email. It was supposed to be published October 2, as it now is. Sorry for the confusion.]
In later life it seems memories occupy our minds, crowding out missions, goals, and objectives. Recalling the past is a worthy enterprise especially if we bring to mind hopeful experiences or beautiful images.
Fall is here—temperatures are cooling—and winter is surely coming. Continue reading
A Summer Retrospective—Southern Magnolia
The smothering heat of summer is gone, and from a cooler vantage point, we can look back to one element of summer that has special charm—the southern magnolia. The magnolia is a large tree with dark green, leathery leaves and spectacular white flowers.
Today we look back a few weeks and view images of magnolia blossoms at their most beautiful, from their beginning as flower buds to the end as fruits with developing seeds. Continue reading
Truth Is in the Air
In the last two posts I’ve described the relatively new teaching in the Catholic catechism that God is lasting truth and love. Yet truth strikes me as getting skimpy treatment in much of our lives, including at church. People often say, “God is love,” but I seldom hear, “God is truth.” So I am on the lookout for truth. Continue reading
Has God Changed for You?
Last week I introduced the most recent Catechism of the Catholic Church and pointed out the “definition” of God as being everlasting truth and love. A God of truth and love is nothing like the hard-nosed punisher-God of my youth, so I looked into the history of Catholic notions of God.
Vatican II (the twenty-first Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church, held in four sessions between 1962 and 1965) marks the beginning of a new understanding of God. For hundreds of years before Vatican II, an old God of power and mystery dominated Catholic teaching. Then in the decades after Vatican II, God emerged gradually as a warmer, more reachable deity, coming into an integrated theology in the 1994 catechism. The change is important and as best I can tell, largely underappreciated. Continue reading
Have You Seen God Lately?
People often grow more spiritual as they move through later life, and especially for men, that growth can be halting, timid, and incomplete.
People enter Twelve-Step programs to rid themselves of addictions, and central to the method is acknowledgement of a “higher power,” which may be God for the religious, but may be something else, something people choose or define for themselves. Continue reading
Can We Read Our Way to Redemption?
Our class
A varying bunch of us seniors have been studying literature together for two years. Our class is part of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Georgia, which offers classes, clubs and social events for mature adults.
We just read A Good Man Is Hard to Find, a short story by Flannery O’Connor, first published in 1953 when she was 28 years old, then again in a book of the same name in 1955.
The story involves a deadly confrontation in rural Georgia between a criminal, The Misfit, and a family heading to vacation in Florida. The final scene portends Christian salvation juxtaposed with violence and death, and redemption occurs in so ordinary a way as to invite us to reflect on our own prospects.