God Meets You Where You Are Even though God is always calling us to constant conversion and growth, and even though we are imperfect and sometimes sinful people, God loves us as we are now. As Fr Anthony de Mello, SJ said, “You don’t have to change for God to love you.”…you are loved even…
Complex & Simple
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Come Be My Light – Reading Mother Teresa’s Autobiography
The mission and life work of the Catholic saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta can be summed up in a few succinct comments after reading her posthumous (‘unauthorized’) autobiography. It is not a book that one can simply put down once you have started. She started her mission for the poor, the dying and the infirmed, in…
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Stairs 3
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Stairs 2
Complex & Simple, Nature, Persons, Places, Posts
Tsukiji, Tsujii, and Resilience
This is the fish market at Tsukiji, Tokyo, the busiest fish market in the world. The highly specialised world of the fish traders and their chefs are also featured as a revealing side-story in the documentary on Jiro Ono (Jiro Dreams of Sushi, 2011, David Gelb, Magnolia). Here, there is the unmistakeable scent of the pride…
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Bleak House, Saint Jack and Telescopic Philanthropy
The Singapore Writer’s Festival in November 2014 was an interesting experience because one of my favourite travel writers, Paul Theroux was featured in a few of the programs. Here, at the National Museum, the panel forum was (nominally) on Humanitarian Missions and the Third World, and I was reintroduced to the work of Charles Dickens by Mr…
Complex & Simple, Persons, Posts
The Carpenter
God, an elderly Jesuit once suggested to me, is something like an old carpenter in a small village in Vermont. If you ask the townspeople where to turn to for carpentry work or repairs, they will say, “There’s only one person to call. He does excellent work. He’s careful, he’s precise, he’s conscientious, he’s creative,…
Complex & Simple, Nature, Places, Posts
Nature’s Savage Beauty – the coldest day in Pittsburgh
This picture was taken through the windows of the staff lounge at the hospital where I worked in the burns intensive care unit in December 1993. The beauty of winter, seen through the placid landscape of white roofs and steamy chimneys, is savaged by Man’s need to keep warm and the terrible unexpected fires that sweep through homes with unattended kerosene…
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The Road Not Taken – Robert Frost
The term ‘the road less travelled’ has its origins in the poem The Road Not Taken,written by the august American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963). TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could…
Complex & Simple, Nature, Persons, Posts
The Clearing – Tomas Tranströmer
“Deep in the forest there’s an unexpected clearing that can be reached only by someone who has lost his way.” (Tomas Tranströmer (1931-2015); Nobel Prize laureate in Literature, 2011)