Quotes of the week

"You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."

Eleanor Roosevelt

My darkness has been filled with the light of intelligence, and behold, the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping in social blindness.

~Helen Keller~

A man is not old until his regrets take the place of his dreams.

~Proverb, (Yiddish)~

“Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I am not sure about the former.” Albert Einstein

Meditation of the week

As a child, I walked through the world with wonder and awe. Each day started with a question and ended with a question. I had the mind of a beginner.
--Anonymous

Did you ever notice that children ask the best questions? Why are things the way they are? How do they work? How did we get here? Who made us? Why?

These are the most important questions in life. Most of us never really get our questions answered. We just learn to stop asking people. We act like the things they tell us answer the questions, but they really don't.

Such questions are questions of the spirit. We can ask our Higher Power to help us learn the answers. We can talk with other people who are also interested in these questions and share our thoughts and ideas. Now that we are sober we can even read books that explore these questions. The truth is, we may never understand the answers because we are only human beings. But thinking about these things is good because it helps us be thankful for the mystery of life.

Roosevelt 0f the week

It's the birthday of the longest-serving First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, born in New York City (1884) who said, "A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water." She began a secret courtship with her cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During World War I, she went off to Europe and visited wounded and shell-shocked soldiers in hospitals there. Later, during her husband's presidency, she campaigned hard on civil rights issues — not a universally popular thing in the 1930s and 1940s.

After FDR died in 1945, she moved from the White House to Hyde Park, New York, and taught International Relations at Brandeis University. As anti-communist witch-hunting began to sweep the U.S., she stuck up for freedom of association in a way that few Americans were brave or bold enough to do. She chided Hollywood producers for being so "chicken-hearted about speaking up for the freedom of their industry." She said that the "American public is capable of doing its own censoring" and that "the judge who decides whether what [the film industry] does is good or bad is the man or woman who attends the movies."

She said that the Un-American Activities Committee was creating the atmosphere of a police state in America, "where people close doors before they state what they think or look over their shoulders apprehensively before they express an opinion."

In 1947, a couple years before the McCarthy Era had reached full swing, she announced, "The Un-American Activities Committee seems to me to be better for a police state than for the USA."

She once said, "We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk."

And, "You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."

Video of the week

"I've never told this story to anyone," said Fort Worth City Councilman Joel Burns

You can’t make up such a thing as that, I dare you to even try

It was on this day in 1962 that Pope John XXIII convened the first session of the Second Vatican Council, also known as Vatican II, with the goal of bringing the church up to date with the modern world. More than 3,000 delegates attended, including many of the Catholic bishops from around the world, theologians, and other church officials.

As a result of Vatican II, Catholics were allowed to pray with Protestants and attend weddings and funerals in Protestant churches; priests were encouraged to perform mass facing the congregation, rather than facing the altar; and priests were allowed to perform mass in languages other than Latin, so that parishioners could finally understand what was being said throughout the service.