The Restory Retreat Centre

We arrange our lives as best we can, to keep your holiness at bay, with our pieties, our doctrines, our liturgies, our moralities, our secret ideologies, Safe, virtuous, settled. And then you – you and your dreams you and your visions, you and your purposes, you and your commands, you and our neighbors. We find your holiness not at bay, but probing, pervading, insisting, demanding. And we yield, sometimes gladly, sometimes resentfully, sometimes late …. or soon. We yield because you, beyond us, are our God. We are your creatures met by your holiness, by your holiness made our true selves. And we yield. Amen                                                                 Walter Brueggemann

More suffering comes into the world by people taking offense than by people intending to give offence.                                                                                                                        Ken Keyes We don’t want to willingly hurt anybody’s feelings. We don’t want to be insensitive. Offensive remarks, language, behaviour and prejudices are uncalled for, need to be avoided and discouraged. So, on a certain level we are supporters of political correctness. After all, it promotes our very objectives. However, to a large extent the term acquired negative connotations over time. It became too excessive in its vigour. The result being terms and vocabulary often bordering on the absurd. It created a context for politically incorrect humour and jokes to flourish. The latter poking fun at people who are easily offended if they don't have a sense of humour, or an eye for irony, or take themselves too seriously. That type of humour ironically also

  Try this: Happy water! Spring water infused with  lemongrass  and  chilled with  iced berries “Perhaps if one really knew when one was happy, one would know the things that were necessary for one’s life.”                                     Joanna Field When Julie Andrews sang about her favourite things in the classic film, The Sound of Music, it sounded like she knew exactly what made her happy: Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens Brown paper packages tied up with strings These are a few of my favorite things ... Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings... http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/thesoundofmusic/myfavoritethings.htm Lyrics that make you swoon by the sheer joy that the images induce. But we don’t often list things that make us happy together with life’s necessities. It’s as if we don’t allow them to carry the same weight. The mere idea that a happiness inducer might be regarded as a nece

The darkness is still with us, O Lord.  You are still hidden  and the world which you have made does not want to know   you or receive you... You are still the hidden child in a  world grown old... You are still obscured by the veils of this  world's history,  you are still destined not to be acknowledged  in the scandal of your death on the cross... But I, O hidden  Lord of all things, boldly affirm my faith in you.  In confessing you, I take my stand with you...  If I make this avowal of faith, it must pierce the depths of  my heart like a sword,  I must bend my knee  before you, saying,  I must alter my life. I have still to become a Christian. ~Karl Rahner,   Prayers for Meditation