Sunday, December 04, 2016

Second Sunday in Advent

As we begin the second week of Advent, the light of our anticipation, love and hope grows stronger. We are called to repent and make straight the way of the Lord. In other words, we must make a genuine effort to overcome our self-absorbtion and live the Gospel message to do unto others as you would have them do unto you and that what you do to the least, you do to Christ.

These are not only Catholic or Christian values, they stand at the heart of the Progressive project as I understand it. Our Lord commands us to love one another, an instruction which we, as Progressives of whatever faith or of none, strive to follow at all times. It is especially important now, because of what lies ahead starting in the New Year, that we reaffirm our commitment to our principles, that we shine our lights, however small they may be individually, and show that light does overcome darkness.

Link

Second Sunday of Advent (The Oblates of St. Francis de Sales)

15 comments:

  1. This is from the above posted link:

    Donald Trump seems to me a textbook illustration of how a lifelong campaign of self-congratulation and self-aggrandizement (acquiring as much as possible and then pasting his name on everything he owns) represents an attempt to compensate for deeply rooted insecurity. He fears being insignificant, worthless. In fact, his quest to humiliate and conquer, to possess and flaunt, may be strategies to prove to himself that he really exists, reflecting a condition that R.D. Laing called "ontological insecurity" (in a chapter of that name in his classic book The Divided Self). He doesn't even bother -- or maybe just lacks the sophistication -- to conceal how desperate is his craving for attention and approval, how precarious is his mental state.

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  2. puddle--re satellite link.

    The geostationary satellites will all be at the same elevation to the south of you; various ones will be to left and right. Is there an opening in the mountains in some direction? If so, there *may* be another company's satellite that will do the job, or even a Dish satellite that is not optimal for your longitude. Hmmmm....does anyone near you have C-band satellite? (Those are the big steerable dish antennae, now not often seen.) If so, they should have a list of accessible communications satellites.

    --Alan

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  3. No, Dr.Dean; Democrats do need to fight it out. [Click]

    The Remarkable Legacy of Fidel Castro [Click] The U.S. corporate media's implicit assumption that Fulgencio Batista was a paragon of democratic virtue and that Cuba was free before 1959 has not escaped me.

    --Alan

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    1. Batista was a dictator. That's why he needed to be overthrown. Unfortunately, I gather he was "our" dictator. Cuba was friendly to U.S. fruit companies and maphiosi before the revolution and not so afterwards. If Castro had been a nice fascist or something else friendly to America, there would have been no problem. :P

      Damn it all, communism as developed and practiced in the Twentieth Century is certainly not good; but it is better, at least for a while, than whatever it replaces. How did it come about that the word 'communist' draws a Pavlovian reaction of fear and loathing but other words like 'fascist' don't? Both ideologies in practice are equally evil though in different ways. But it's perfectly all right for us to fund and prop up RW dictators no matter how repressive and cruel they might be, just so long as they are anti-communist! It makes me sick! *sigh* But, that's a very old pet peeve.

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  4. From the Dr. Dean article:

    The Democrats had a choice in this election: go with Hillary Clinton – a neoliberal in good standing – or Bernie Sanders, a progressive populist who called the neoliberal and conservative dogma what it is: a rigged system.

    They chose wrong, and the DNC – which supported Clinton and worked to undermine Sanders -- was a big reason they did.

    And they still have not learned a thing and they still do not fight for the people.

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    1. Hear, hear!

      And I doubt they will learn. That's why we need to find an alternative, or create one. They abandoned us; we have no further obligation to be loyal to them. I mean, there comes a point when you have to leave an abusive spouse, after all.

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    2. Well said. This is why I left the Dems after what they did to Howard in Iowa. I tell people I'm an Independent (which get everybody off your case and makes everybody nice to you, since they hope to win you over to their side - ha!), but I don't really know what to call myself. I'm not a one-issue person and I'm not much of a "team" player...especially as politics was never intended to be a sport. I listen to everybody and I vote for what (and who) makes sense to me. So I guess maybe I am an Independent...but the Vermont sort.

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  5. I'm glad I came back to this thread. Susan! Thanks for pulling out the pithy bits to share. I wish you lived next door and we could have tea each afternoon (while quilting of course), hashing over the news of the day. I suppose I ought to bring my quilting here, only...it's hard to quilt and type at the same time. ;-) Tea, then.

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