Just for the fun (and to mess with folks at a cabana club in Palm Beach):

Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico.

“Don’t join the book burners. 
Don’t think you are going to conceal faults 
by concealing evidence that they ever existed. 
Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book….”
President and General and 
1915 United States Military Academy graduate 
Dwight David Eisenhower 
at the Dartmouth College commencement exercises 
in Hanover, New Hampshire on June 14, 1953

Bless me, Me, for I have (sortta)(almost) sinned.

By accident, I discovered Only Boys Aloud and, for the first time ever (Honest, Me!), I lost (but didn’t waste) almost four hours going bonkers with YouTube following them, and Only Girls Aloud and Only Kids Aloud.

“Pilate sentence him due to fear,
in accordance with the petition and intention of others.
These people sentence him for their own advantage
and without any fear,
by dishonoring him through sin that they could abstain from, 
if they wanted. 
But they neither abstain from sin
nor are they ashamed of their already committed sins,
for they do not take into consideration
their unworthiness of the kindness
of the one whom they do not serve.”
Bridget of Sweden

In the almost twenty-two-hundred years of Christianity, it was a liturgical celebration of the Lord’s Resurrection unlike any other.

It is a truth few “professional” religious – I know I can speak for some really great, genuinely holy, profoundly spiritual priests, Sisters, ministers, rabbis and imams – will admit: Sometimes we just get “prayed out.”

Ooooouuuuuccccchhhhh!!!!!!!!!!

This is so painful that we’ll just quote, cite and provide sources:

• “Oklahoma’s teen birth rate is 25.0 births per 1,000 women - the fourth-highest teen birth rate in the United States… 1-in-5 births to girls ages 15 through 19 are not the mother’s first child.

Senator Lloyd Benson never resided at Number One Observatory Circle, the official residence of the vice president of the United States.

His 1988 vice presidential debate opponent, Senator James Danforth (“Dan”) Quayle did.

True story…

One of my absolutely closest and most cherished (a far better word than “prized” or “special,” because, for me, it means I “carry him in my heart”) friends was kicked out of the prayer service the night before my father’s funeral.

His crime?

Crying too loudly.

Some introductions just don’t come easily.

Others can become an almost-fulltime task.

We’ll try to simplify this one.

A son of Syracuse, New York and immigrant parents from Ukraine, Borys Gudziak ain’t no academic slouch. 

“Your ‘yes’ to God requires a ‘no’ 
to all injustice, to all evil, to all lies,
to all oppression and violation 
of the weak and poor.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

By telling the tale, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) taught the lesson in his Politics:

It is anomalous that wealth should be of such a kind that a man may be well supplied with it and yet die of hunger…

“Stop and think...”

Our father’s voice echoes through the decades. 

They may have been preceded by “Did you bother to…”

And followed by “before you open your mouth” or “before you do something foolish.” (He’d probably say “stupid.”)

The quote struck like a thunderclap…

And we’ll return to it quickly.

Looking for an explanation for why we write AuthenticHealers, we thought of Rabbi Asher Finkel…

I don’t remember my father ever speaking with me about my eleven days as a political prisoner in Chile’s infamous Estadio Nacional or that I had been told that “in fifteen minutes” I would be put “in front of a firing squad.”

“A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, 
preach a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, 
proclaim a word of God 
that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin,
a word of God that does not touch the real sin 
of the society in which it is proclaimed – 
what gospel is that?
Very nice, pious considerations that don't bother anyone,
that's the way many would like preaching to be.
Those preachers who avoid every thorny matter
so as not to be harassed,
so as not to have conflicts and difficulties,
do not light up the world they live in.”
Bishop Oscar Romero, Saint and Martyr
The Violence of Love

In governance and international diplomacy, life is never as simple as badly punctuated (and improperly capitalized) blathering posts would have some people believe. 

History and context are as important as knowing what the hell you’re talking about.

Here’s context.

The final scene is so brutal, so disturbing, so beyond words that it grabs you by the throat and puts such weight on your chest that, for fifteen minutes, it is almost impossible to breathe.

There’s a problem – actually, many – in teetering on the edge of eighty and half-a-century as a priest: We tend to think of the now-grown folks we’ve worked with in counseling or as altar servers as “kids.” 

Goshen, Indiana native and Maryknoll Missioner, Father Bob McCahill 
has lived and served in Bangladesh since 1984. 
Every three years, he moves to a new village 
and resumes his mission of helping obtain medical help 
for the poorest of God’s poor – especially children, 
often carrying them on his bicycle to hospitals or doctors 
whom he miraculously conscripts into this service.
The following is an edited version
of his 2024 Christmas letter to family and friends.