… for the person suffering it, but the hardest thing is not being able to experience sickness in a truly human way. Enzo: The Adventure of a FriendshipEnzo: The Adventure of a Friendship. Emilio Bonicelli. p. 50
sickness is an excruciating event … Read More »
When we listen to stories of terrible pain and we know we can’t do anything about it, we touch our own vulnerability. We have heard the scream of pain, but we don’t know what to do with it. None of us knows what to do with the deep brokenness of our world. Maybe that realization
facing pain together … Read More »
“This desire to possess what is good, that it be mine, is common to all men. But to reach it means loving, adhering, that is, involving our freedom, and sometimes, as we well know, we want to spare ourselves this. It is an ever lurking temptation. Luisa Muraro writes, ‘We always have the wish to
We had a meeting in my community not too long ago where we talked about fear. Everyone was asked to talk about their fundamental fear in some way. What were they most afraid of? Different words came out: rejection, abandonment, not succeeding, failure, deterioration, death. When you look at all these kinds of fears the
walls that divide humanity … Read More »
… before his heart’s curtain? Rilke’s 4th Duino Elegy … O trees of life, O when are you wintering? We are not unified. We have no instincts like those of migratory birds. Useless, and late, we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind, and fall down to an indifferent lake. We realise flowering and fading together.
who has not sat, scared, … Read More »
Adele V. (not her real name), mid-60s, morbidly obese, heart disease, diabetes, dependent edema that became painful by late afternoon … Adele’s husband, slim and well dressed, strides through the front door. He nods at his wife, then me, and sits without a word in the corner … What the room tells me, what her
everyone has a story … Read More »
“Judgments of others are alienated expressions of our own unmet needs.” Marshall Rosenberg in Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life … discussed at pp. 52-61 a related post
identifying unmet needs … Read More »
… is a parable of scientific hubris that prefigures much of modern day bioethics. The story with a brief introduction. The Presidents Council on Bioethics discusses. the story begins … In the latter part of the last century, there lived a man of science—an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy—who, not long before
nathaniel hawthorne’s ‘the birth mark’ … Read More »
If you are going to be anywhere in the vicinity of New Haven, Connecticut between now and September 16, you owe it to yourself to get to the Knights of Columbus Museum. The goal of your visit is an art exhibition of paintings by William Congdon, accompanied by excerpts from “Meditations on Holy Week” written
William Congdon’s Sabbath of History exhibit … Read More »
“In the past few decades, there has been an increase in the use of life review techniques to improve mood, cognition, and quality of life among elderly individuals. The underlying theory is that late life depression is often caused (or at least worsened) by an inability to remember the trajectory of one’s life. By reliving
