CHRISTMAS IS OVER (UNLESS IT ISN’T)
W A I T. . .
W H A T. . .
C H R I S T M A S
I S
O V E R
(UNLESS IT ISN’T)
THE DECORATIONS
and all of the festivities are down
and safely packed away
and now the memories
safely secured and kept
some 18 days
P A S T
christmas but. . .
I’m a firm believer that
Christmas isn’t a day
or a season
or a 12 Day song
so much as a
L I F E S T Y L E
and that the greatest
Christmas Moments
don’t come all at once
or on a given
day, season, song, event, occurrence
BUT ALL OF THE TIME
When I first saw this, I didn’t read the following caption/words; I let it shout everything I was seeing that my ears could no way hear but my heart heard perfectly…
The image above is an Anglican Rosary. It was made by the loving hands and intention of Reverend Rosalind Hughes at
Church of the Epiphany
Episcopal Church of Euclid, Ohio
This Rosary is made from a melted down gun that was safely surrendered through the Church’s Guns to Gardens program.
The wood is from the handle of the gun and the beads are from the metal.
I’m going to pray on this powerful Rosary of transformation, in order to release all my own personal triggers. I’m going to pray on it in order to ask for forgiveness for my own thoughts that are of judgment and attack.
I’m going to pray on it for the children of Cleveland and Gaza and Israel and Ukraine.
I’m going to pray on it for all of us. That we may learn to drop our swords, heal our triggers and find our truest safety by loving and caring for one another.
May you be blessed by loving kindness and mercy during this season of light. And may we all find our way towards uncovering the internal and ever lasting light that shines within us.
Blessed Be We. Love and Blessings to all.
When I read my colleague, my friend’s Mary’s post, I immediately reached out to her and asked her about this beautiful Rosary; I wanted one, and instead of telling me first where she got it, she actually brought me one she also had that had not been gifted to her but now she wanted to Gift to me. . .
Ohhh, but wait, CHRISTMAS IS JUST A DAY, A SEASON, A sentiment in a set of songs or carols, uhhh, not THAT DAY, NOT THAT MOMENT; THE GIFT, as it often is was THE GIVER and my, my my, did a get GIFTS from GIVERS who turn out so powerfully to be my most precious GIFTS of all. . .
I would like to think that I am not a humble Receiver but a most grateful Beneficiary of some of the most generous-blessed-wrapped-in-flesh-bestowers beyond imagination.
So when the 25th of every month comes around for the next 11 months and I shout out to you:
HAPPY PRACTICE CHRISMTAS
I hope it’ll have your Yule log glowing bright
and your Christmas Heart beating strong
And how about one last
GIFT
from this grateful Given
ONE OUT OF ONE OF US
With a wide-reaching spiritual message in books like “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” he drew on his own experience with grief and doubt.
![A black and white photo of a middle-aged Rabbi Kushner wearing thick-framed eye glasses and a suit and necktie. He holds a copy of his book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.”](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/04/30/multimedia/28kushner1-qvjp-print1/28kushner1-qvjp-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)
Rabbi Harold Kushner, a practical public theologian whose best-selling books assured readers that bad things happen to good people because God is endowed with unlimited love and justice but exercises only finite power to prevent evil, died on Friday in Canton, Mass. He was 88.
His death, in hospice care, was confirmed by his daughter, Ariel Kushner Haber.
Several of Rabbi Kushner’s 14 books became best-sellers, resonating well beyond his Conservative Jewish congregation outside Boston and across religious boundaries in part because they had been inspired by his own experiences with grief, doubt and faith. One reviewer called his book “When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough” a “useful spiritual survival manual.”
Rabbi Kushner wrote “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” (1981) after the death of his son, Aaron. At age 3, just hours after the birth of the Kushners’ daughter, Aaron was diagnosed with a rare disease, progeria, in which the body ages rapidly.
When Aaron was 10 years old, he was in his 60s physiologically. He weighed only 25 pounds and was as tall as a three-year-old when he died in 1977 two days after his 14th birthday.
The book was rejected by two publishers before it was accepted by Schocken Books. It catapulted to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list and transformed Rabbi Kushner into a popular author and commentator.
His thesis, as he wrote in the book, was straightforward: “It becomes much easier to take God seriously as the source of moral values if we don’t hold Him responsible for all the unfair things that happen in the world.”
Rabbi Kushner also wrote:
“I don’t know why one person gets sick, and another does not, but I can only assume that some natural laws which we don’t understand are at work. I cannot believe that God ‘sends’ illness to a specific person for a specific reason. I don’t believe in a God who has a weekly quota of malignant tumors to distribute, and consults His computer to find out who deserves one most or who could handle it best
He was making the case that dark corners of the universe endure where God has not yet succeeded in making order out of chaos. “And chaos is evil; not wrong, not malevolent, but evil nonetheless,” he wrote, “because by causing tragedies at random, it prevents people from believing in God’s goodness.”
Unpersuaded, the journalist, critic and novelist Ron Rosenbaum, writing in The New York Times Magazine in 1995, reduced Rabbi Kushner’s thesis more dialectically: “diminishing God to something less than an Omnipotent Being — to something more like an eager cheerleader for good, but one decidedly on the sidelines in the struggle against evil.”
“In effect,” he wrote, “we need to join Him in rooting for good — our job is to help cheer Him up.”
Rabbi Kushner argued, however, that God was omnipotent as a wellspring of empathy and love.
Image
![A color photo of an older Rabbi Kushner wearing wire-frame glasses, a light-gray shirt and a dark necktie. The altar of his synagogue and a colorful stained-glass window can be seen behind him.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/04/30/multimedia/28Kushner2-pltw-print2/28Kushner2-pltw-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)
Harold Samuel Kushner was born on April 3, 1935, to Julius and Sarah (Hartman) Kushner in the East New York section of Brooklyn. His mother was a homemaker. His father owned Playmore Publishing, which sold toys and children’s books, especially Bible stories, from a shop at Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street that he hoped his son would take over. Harold felt he lacked his father’s business sense.
He was raised in Brooklyn (the family moved to the Crown Heights section when he started elementary school), where he was a passionate Brooklyn Dodgers fan. After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in 1955 and a master’s there in 1960.
He had planned to major in psychology but switched to literature after studying under Prof. Mark Van Doren, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. On a lark, but armed with a solid religious upbringing, he enrolled in an evening program at the Jewish Theological Seminary. By his junior year at Columbia he had decided to become a rabbi.
After Columbia, he enrolled full-time at the seminary where he was ordained, graduated in 1960 and received his doctorate in 1972. He studied later at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He volunteered for two years in the Army’s Chaplain Corps at Fort Sill, Okla., where he became a first lieutenant. Returning to New York after his discharge, he served for four years as an assistant rabbi at Temple Israel in Great Neck, N.Y., on Long Island.
Rabbi Kushner married Suzette Estrada in 1960 and moved to Massachusetts, where he became rabbi of Temple Israel in Natick, a suburb of Boston, in 1966. He served as the congregational rabbi there for 24 years and remained a member of the congregation until he moved into a senior living residence in Canton in 2017.
His wife died in 2022. His brother, Paul, a rabbi in Bellmore and Merrick on Long Island, died in 2019. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by two grandchildren.
Among Rabbi Kushner’s other books are “How Good Do We Have to Be? A New Understanding of Guilt and Forgiveness” (1997), “Living a Life That Matters” (2001) and “The Lord Is My Shepherd: Healing Wisdom of the 23rd Psalm” (2003).
He also collaborated with the novelist Chaim Potok in editing “Etz Hayim: A Torah Commentary,” the official commentary of Conservative Jewish congregations, which was published by the Rabbinical Assembly and the Jewish Publication Society in 2001.
Rabbi Kushner often said he was amazed at the breadth of his readership across theological lines. In 1999, he was named clergyman of the year by the organization Religion in American Life. In 2007, the Jewish Book Council gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award.
In his books, other writings and on-air commentary, often as a radio and television talk show guest, he became a font of aphorisms embraced by clergy of all denominations. Among them were: “Forgiveness is a favor we do for ourselves, not a favor we do to the other party,” and, “If we hold our friends to a standard of perfection, or if they do that to us, we will end up far lonelier than we want to be.”
“People who pray for miracles usually don’t get miracles, any more than children who pray for bicycles, good grades, or good boyfriends get them as a result of praying,” he wrote. “ But people who pray for courage, for strength to bear the unbearable, for the grace to remember what they have left instead of what they have lost, very often find their prayer answered.”
He explained that his book “When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough” was intended to be “an examination of the question of why successful people don’t feel more satisfied with their lives.”
“Drawing on the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, it suggests that people need to feel that their lives make a difference to the world,” he wrote. “We are not afraid of dying so much as of not having lived.”
Psssssssssssssssssssssssssssst:
One out of One of us dies. . .even Rabbi’s I first fell in love with this book even before I opened up the cover to the first page just by the Title: WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE Did you catch it? W H E N not IF We live in a world today that not only defies DEATH, it actually believes it doesn’t exist; that a drug, a therapy, an intervention, even a prayer, eliminates the possibility of it in our lives.
Rabbi Kushner showed us that DEATH and GRIEF are real; they are not to be cured, but HEALING is more than possible. . .
NOW THAT IS A LITTLE HARSH. . .
T R U T H
SOLUTION TO LIFE AND DEATH:
LOVE
THE
DEEPEST
ONLY TIME WILL TELL (TISSUES MAY BE REQUIRED)
Only Time Will Tell By JJ Heller, David Heller and Andy Gullahorn
There’s not enough paper in this world There’s not enough ink to write it down No melody is sweet enough No metaphor is deep enough To describe the treasure I have found
I keep trying to tell you how I feel But I always come up short How beautiful you are to me But there aren’t enough words I keep trying to write a love song But it’s hard to say it well Love is a story that only time will tell
It’s one thing to say “for better or worse” And another when you find out what that means So much happens over time Some dreams come true and some will die How do you describe that kind of thing
I keep trying to tell you how I feel But I always come up short How beautiful you are to me But there aren’t enough words I keep trying to write a love song But it’s hard to say it well Love is a story that only time will tell
I’ve searched libraries And dictionaries Studied poets Still all I know is
I keep trying to tell you how I feel But I always come up short How beautiful you are to me But there aren’t enough words I keep trying to write a love song But it’s hard to say it well Love is a story that only time will tell Love is a story that only time will tell
PRETTY POWERFUL, STUFFS, huh, but not quite as powerful as the LOVE that’s shown here. J J Heller, is an artist I’ve loved for a long time because the music that she and her husband, Dave create often create something in us, or at least shines a light on what’s been created and now needs some special noticing.
J J goes on to share, even more personally:
This video gets me every single time.
When we’re young we make vows imagining an easy and wonderful future. We say “for better or worse” even though we don’t know what lies ahead. We promise to be faithful, supportive and true no matter what.
Making these promises is indeed an act of love, but living out this love in hospitals, worse-case diagnoses and late-night bouts with pain.. that’s a love on another level. A deeper, expanded love.
With that said, this beautiful video is dedicated to those fighting through intense physical challenges, and to those who love them fiercely and relentlessly.
A huge thank you to this brave couple who has allowed us to share part of their story with the world in hopes it will bring healing and encouragement.
And another giant thank you to Joy Prouty for capturing this sacred footage, both of their labor and delivery several years ago, and also of the recovery from a double mastectomy mere weeks ago.
And thanks to Dave Heller and Andy Gullahorn for writing this beautiful song with me.
Love is a story that only time will tell. 🧡
Just one Question:
WHAT
OF
YOUR
L O V E. . . ?
A DIFFERENT KIND OF PRAYER
Sometimes the most powerful prayers
come from unbowed heads
open eyes
and wordless expressions
that get shouted from the
h e a r t
what a mouth can’t whisper
and what dirty unfolded hands
can’t begin to grasp
Sometimes prayer
come askew
not quite picture-perfect
with a new ending:
Millions of people pray the Serenity Prayer, which is based on the Lord’s Prayer, but most have never read the last eight lines to the prayer:
“Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His will; so that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him forever in the next. . .
Amen.”
That’s where the power is!
Power comes when you
surrender anything
you’ve been trying to control;
And that will lead you to living a life of serenity. . .
or
You can try it
YOUR WAY
A Different Kind of Prayer
maybe
but the purest
of them all:
YOUR PRAYER
PRAYING
. . .so, do you
P R A Y. . .
HOW?
Head Bowed
Eyes Closed
Silently
Out Loud
With Music
With People
IN A CLOSET. . .
Think on this as Ellen Bass’s Poem tingles you brain cells as it drips into your soul:
PRAY FOR PEACE
Ellen Bass
Pray to whomever you kneel down to:
Jesus nailed to his wooden or plastic cross,
his suffering face bent to kiss you,
Buddha still under the bo tree in scorching heat,
Adonai, Allah. Raise your arms to Mary
that she may lay her palm on our brows,
to Shekhina, Queen of Heaven and Earth,
to Inanna in her stripped descent.
Then pray to the bus driver who takes you to work.
On the bus, pray for everyone riding that bus,
for everyone riding buses all over the world.
Drop some silver and pray.
Waiting in line for the movies, for the ATM,
for your latte and croissant, offer your plea.
Make your eating and drinking a supplication.
Make your slicing of carrots a holy act,
each translucent layer of the onion, a deeper prayer.
To Hawk or Wolf, or the Great Whale, pray.
Bow down to terriers and shepherds and Siamese cats.
Fields of artichokes and elegant strawberries.
Make the brushing of your hair
a prayer, every strand its own voice,
singing in the choir on your head.
As you wash your face, the water slipping
through your fingers, a prayer: Water,
softest thing on earth, gentleness
that wears away rock.
Making love, of course, is already prayer.
Skin, and open mouths worshipping that skin,
the fragile cases we are poured into.
If you’re hungry, pray. If you’re tired.
Pray to Gandhi and Dorothy Day.
Shakespeare. Sappho. Sojourner Truth.
When you walk to your car, to the mailbox,
to the video store, let each step
be a prayer that we all keep our legs,
that we do not blow off anyone else’s legs.
Or crush their skulls.
And if you are riding on a bicycle
or a skateboard, in a wheelchair, each revolution
of the wheels a prayer as the earth revolves:
less harm, less harm, less harm.
And as you work, typing with a new manicure,
a tiny palm tree painted on one pearlescent nail,
or delivering soda or drawing good blood
into rubber-capped vials, twirling pizzas–
With each breath in, take in the faith of those
who have believed when belief seemed foolish,
who persevered. With each breath out, cherish.
Pull weeds for peace, turn over in your sleep for peace,
feed the birds, each shiny seed
that spills onto the earth, another second of peace.
Wash your dishes, call your mother, drink wine.
Shovel leaves or snow or trash from your sidewalk.
Make a path. Fold a photo of a dead child
around your Visa card. Scoop your holy water
from the gutter. Gnaw your crust.
Mumble along like a crazy person, stumbling
your prayer through the streets.
Which bubbled this up inside of me
and now maybe you. . .
Bowing the head
gently
not tightly closing the eyes
as if you were greeting sleep
a few breaths away
and not strongly
squinting out the first rays
of a new day
Don’t pray that way
Wide eyed
head held high and firm
Blinkless
Offer up not what a mouth
can whisper
But a heart shouts
Full vibrato
To not make your needs known
But your promises
Powerfully Claimed
Humbly Received
Gratefully accepted
Pray that way
Not with a softend amen
But an exalted hurrah
and don’t blink
for fear of missing
the something
that compares to nothing
in this world
or the one
seemingly unfolding
before us all
especially if it’s
unlabeled
Psssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst:
WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE A PRAYER
BE
ONE
(The only true prayer you’ll ever really need is the one
YOU ARE
Monster Chasers
I cry
. . .A lot
Movies
Well written passages
Music
Always music
And this time certainly was no exception
It’s more than a cleansing
It’s a renewing
It’s a bare vulnerability
That’s never made me feel more
Naked
And warmly clothed
At the same time.
It makes my heart beat
So much differently
And so much better
It makes me care deeper
Love without limits or any hints
Of conditions
It makes me purely
A Caring Catalyst
And I’m tempted
Always
To ruin
THAT MOMENT
knowing that it can’t last
But here’s the best news:
IT DOESN’T HAVE TO
It’s what makes the moment
THE MOMENT
AND YES,
A Lifetime can be lived in a moment
And ohhhhhhhhh
look at the time
THAT MOMENT
THAT LIFETIME
can can
BE
right now. . .
Especially if I’m about chasing away
A loved one’s monsters
The only thing better than the title of
MONSTER CHASER
is actually
BEING ONE
Join me
You lifetime-in-a-moment-Liver
![](http://thecaringcatalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_0768-1024x1024.jpg)
PLACEBIC PRAYERS
![](http://thecaringcatalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/IMG_0469-1024x768.jpg)
They are not real
But they don’t have to be
They can’t be found
On fragile paper
In a prized, hallowed book
Oozed from a pen tip
Or recited to a faithful scribe
They are rarely recited
But brought forth
With the wild lonely beat
Of a Broken Heart
Pierced together
By a glue that
Never secures
And They
Are more real
Than any encounter
Ever Experienced
Prayer Placebos
PLACEBIC PRAYERS
Not prayed from a heart
Or spoken with a mouth
Heard by an ear
Or gently
Securely transferred by a Touch
Encapsulated in a pill
But known
Assuredly known
By a soul
E A C H
Placebo Prayers
are not real—
They’re better
![](http://thecaringcatalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/IMG_1951.jpg)
A Prayer’s PRAYER
I’ve always been a Mary Oliver fan
but I’ll also admit that I’ve read much more of her
now that she’s dead
than when she was alive
I suppose which not only makes her
not only more Alive
than ALIVE
but still doing
what she did the best
(and still is)
S H A R E
![](http://thecaringcatalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_7912-473x1024.png)
As I page
through this Anthology
I often have the same feeling
that I have when I heard her voice
reading this poem
with a resounding
E C H O I N G
of when you need a prayer
notice that nothing all around you
is miraculously short of that
with the worldly unspoken invitation:
WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE A PRAYER
B E
O N E
![](http://thecaringcatalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/IMG_0494.jpg)
(The only true prayer you’ll ever need
is the one you are)
A LIVING PRAYER
A LIVING PRAYER NEVER NEEDS TO BE SPOKEN OR PRAYED
SO MUCH AS EXPERIENCED AND SHARED
. . .Some transcend and do both
at the same time
like Rick,
my friend/colleague’s
honest scribbled prayer:
![](http://thecaringcatalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/IMG_9972-1024x768.jpg)
Rick proves that it doesn’t matter how you long you’ve been a hospice nurse so much as HOW and THAT you are a person of Caring; Rick’s prayer shows how it encapsulates anybody who is any kind of a caregiver in any capacity. He did for us what sometimes we can’t do for ourselves or others; he made sure that we could experience what our hearts shout and our mouths can’t begin to whisper and he put words to them.
Can it actually be that simple:
KINDNESS/COMPASSION PERSONIFIED
It requires mostly just showing up. . .
We usually muck it up by calling
THE SHOWING UP
different things like
PRESENCE
or
SHARING SPACE
or
TONGLEN
— sadly just by labeling it,
naming it,
we incapacitate it;
we kind of negate it
because all of those things mean much more
than the words they try to define. . .
In fact, words can’t define them at all
but our actions do. . .
There is no special training required,
certificates earned,
licenses obtained~~
nor neither is there any special equipment
tools
procedures
or how-to’s~~
just a willingness to be with another person
maybe when no one else can
or maybe even wants. . .
When you bring that kind of
WANT-TO
to Another,
you bring them much more than
prescriptions
injections
procedures
therapies
interventions
or plans of care. . .
Literally, by sharing your breath
by sharing your heartbeat
to One’s who no longer have the strength
or the ability to use their own,
you give what can’t be received
any other way
or by any other ways. . .
Self to Selves. . .
is more than some catchy call to action
at it’s very least
and way past it’s utmost best
BEING WITH ANOTHER
is a holy, hallowed act
that’s a religion unto itself
that never needs Words
Creeds
special holy days
Fasts
or a bowed head
with lightly shut eyes. . .
It only beckons
not merely
for open-eyed prayers
but a LIVING ONE. . .
Y O U R S
And here’s the secret:
WE ALL POSSESS IT
we just don’t always choose to
utilize
SHARE
i t
BEING
s h a r i n g
A Living Prayer makes all the difference in this world
and the one that is ever unfolding before all of us
in a blink of the eye quickness
![](http://thecaringcatalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/me-and-mom.jpg)
A LIVING PRAYER NEVER NEEDS TO BE SPOKEN OR PRAYED
SO MUCH AS EXPERIENCED AND SHARED
SEE
BE
FREE
THAT in you;
in me
I PRAY. . .
A M E N