How we’re living:
When a friend or associate hurts me, how ready am I to forgive and to restore our relationship? Begin with being realistic about the extent of the hurt. Sometimes, I exaggerate the hurt. Sometimes, I make light of a hurt when it was serious. Which is it? Then, get on to the forgiving and the restoring. [Matthew 18:8-14]
What we’re reading
Citizenship/Wider World: “Don’t Harsh our Mellow, Dude” and “Pot Rules” – oped from the NY Times by Maureen Dowd; click on http://nyti.ms/1mQyQFr and http://nyti.ms/1kY2eLP
Spiritual health: “Chicken keepers” by Terry Brockmanon on both loving and eating animals.
That is certainly an odd notion—to love a creature and then to eat it. But the oddness, or outright discomfort, is a surface dissonance—one that can disguise the deep harmonies beneath. That dissonance may arise from simple, binary thinking (pets vs. wildlife; life vs. death) and from a reluctance to embrace complexity and ambiguity. But beyond the dissonance is the deep harmony of how things work in this world, with plants dying to feed animals and animals dying to feed plants. Native Americans understood these necessary interdependencies and felt their weight. They apologized when taking any living thing for food.
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