Tag: moments

All that we ever really have.

Season’s Regreetings

THE NEXT TIME SOMEONE OUTSIDE your comfort zone wishes you a merry holiday-you-don’t-celebrate, don’t take umbrage — just wish them a happy “Same To You.”

This three-syllable Teflon Shield of Banter will save you from giving and receiving earnest but endless dissertations on cultural supremacy, cultural relativity, hegemonic religion, religious hegemony, justified indignation and getting-over-whatever-someone-else-thinks-“it”-is. (We’re all busy people here — who has time for such nonsense?) Continue reading “Season’s Regreetings”

One Conversation

WE WERE DISCUSSING SYNAGOGUE FUNDRAISERS, and I suggested an egg toss.

E. G., who knows who he is but may not want you to, looked at me with the sad seriousness of the ex-military and first responder. “Eggs aren’t for tossing,” he said. “They’re for eating. It debases us to play with something that half the world is starving for.”

That was ten years ago. To this day, the sight of someone playing with or otherwise wasting their food still makes me itchy inside.

One conversation was all it took to change my mind about something I had never seriously thought through. What will it take to change yours?

For The Kids (A Mini Rant On NorCal “Spirituality”)

“There’s so many choices here, a man could half-starve before picking breakfast.”
— Ol’ Thinkypants

THAT MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY WILL NOT long endure whose members celebrate every festival but their own(1). C’mon people — whatever your tradition is, it got Grandma and Grandpa over here, fed them through wars and afflictions, and kept them and your folks together long enough to produce you. Don’t you want to know their secret? So dust off the shelf, pick up whatever’s yours and have at. It’s yours by right of succession through love; It only lives in that way when someone qualified is at the controls — and that’s you!.

So don’t dabble — delve! and remember what Ol’ Thinkypants says: “Drink deep, or don’t even spit.”

_____
(1) Written after reading one more Sunday-papers account of a ritual-appropriating church and reflecting rather sourly on those who embrace something else due to ignorance of their own. (Informed choice I got no problem with.)

Arm’s Reach To The Stars

PERHAPS “ARM’S REACH TO AN asteroid” would be more accurate, but: For the first time ever, humanity has reached out with metal fingers and grabbed a hunk of asteroid to hold before its face.

To put it less poetically, Japanese scientists announced today that the space probe Hayabusa, battered and crippled but still greatly game, did indeed scoop up a bit of asteroid Itokawa and return it to Earth. As John Matson writes on Scientific American‘s blog today:

Material scooped out … with a special spatula and examined with scanning electron microscopy revealed “about 1,500 grains…and most of them were judged to be of extraterrestrial origin, and definitely from Asteroid Itokawa,” according to a JAXA press release. Most of the rocky particles are less than 10 microns in length. (A micron is one millionth of a meter.)

For the rest of the story, click http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=hayabusa-probe-succeeded-in-returni-2010-11-16. Meanwhile, could we please have a standing ovation?

Reb Drunkard’s Wisdom

THE MAN WITH THE UNWASHED face was dressed in baggy street-person clothes which seemed to cushion the cold concrete beneath him.

He was laying in front of the Carl’s Jr. restaurant in San Francisco’s Justin Hermann Plaza one cool night in 1986, perhaps one of a series of nights and days spent drifting through passersby from liquor store to curb.

He wasn’t moving, at first. Then he lifted his head and looked around in bemusement, his eyes sliding over the passing faces like a mariner seeking harbor. Continue reading “Reb Drunkard’s Wisdom”

Al Tirah – Fear Not

A MOVE TO KICK DESPAIR out of Lower North American political life is taking a Biblical imperative to the 21st century — and “joining” is as easy as deciding not to be manipulated by people who want you to hate your neighbors.

“When the heroes of biblical times despaired, God would speak to them. ‘Al Tirah! Fear Not!’ God commanded. Good advice then, good advice now,” proclaims the website for Al Tirah USA, a project of Jewish Funds for Justice. “Al Tirah America! Fear Not! Time to shake off our despair, and get back in the game.”

We at Metaphorager.Net applaud anyone opting for calm over cynicism, reason over rancor and thought over fear. (And the cool thing is, you don’t even need to believe in anything other than your own free agency. Right?)

5 Thoughts: How To Preach A Sermon

1. Make ’em laugh with, but not at, you and your topic. But make ’em laugh first.

2. Remember that you’re a student too, no more learned (and perhaps embarrassingly less) than those listening to you. Your task is to reveal rather than entertain, to share rather than “teach.”

3. Be honest. It shows. Continue reading “5 Thoughts: How To Preach A Sermon”

Favicon Plugin created by Jake Ruston's Wordpress Plugins - Powered by Briefcases and r4 ds card.