As Sal walked toward St. Anselm’s he pondered Titus’ question. What was the true spirit of Christmas: gift-giving or gift-getting, watching the kids shred the paper, the birth of a special baby two millennia ago, or … what the hell, family?
Mumsey was nothing if not organized. Cooking for a family of six kids and pampering a husband with her schedule was made a little easier with one word: Delegate. One way that was organized was by putting little pieces of paper with the name of an item all around the table: gravy, peas, butter, potatoes, beef, etc. In this way, any kid who was unlucky enough to be around at dinner time had no excuse to not help set the table.
Forest? Trees? This reference is one of my favorite wakeup calls. However, if perhaps English isn’t your native language, the original saying goes something like this, “He (anyone) can’t see the forest for the trees.”
Every day we make decisions. Decisions about when to get out of bed (how many snoozes the alarm will have), what to wear, what to eat, when to eat. And then there are the mundane decisions that are made for us by others leaving us to decide whether we will abide by those decisions. Sometimes we may feel like we have no choice about something, but there’s always a choice. It’s not necessarily a good choice: either to face the bear with your back to the cliff, or jump off the cliff, but it’s still a choice.
Let’s not go nuts over the (religious) disagreement. That’s how we got Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Presbyterians, Catholics, Russian and Greek Orthodox, Lutherans, Methodists, Quakers, Episcopalians, C of E, Amish, Mennonites and all the roughly 4,200 religions in the first place. God is God.
I went to the Unitarian Universalist church for about 6 months until I realized that whatever you, or anyone else believed, they believed.