Purify my heart
Let me be as gold and precious silver
Purify my heart
Let me be as gold, pure gold
Refiner's fire
My heart's one desire
Is to be holy
Set apart for You, Lord
I choose to be holy
Set apart for You, my Master
Ready to do Your will
Purify my heart
Cleanse me from within
And make me holy
Purify my heart
Cleanse me from my sin
Deep within

During Medical Christian Fellowship (MCF) yesterday, everyone was asked to share about a bible verse that they had encountered during their quiet time over the week. God had prompted me study the bible and look to a verse with the word "heart" in it. I turned to Luke 6:44-46 - "Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers. The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks." The last words "For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks" captured me. It took me a while of pondering to figure out the biblical principle and message behind these words. In the end, I decided that what God meant to teach me is that the state of our hearts will reflect the words that come forth from our lips. If we entertain negative and unclean thoughts in our hearts, we know that the fruit that we bear will not be good. When we choose to set our hearts on things above (Colossians 3:1) and meditate on things that are true, right, noble, lovely, pure and admirable (Philippians 4:8), the fruit that we bear will be good and pleasing in His sight. Also, when we ask God to purify our hearts and set us apart to make us holy in His sight, He can use us to bring edification to the lives of others and shine the light of His love and glory in the lives around us. I suppose that's what it means when the bible tells us to "Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone." (Colossians 4:6) May God use me as an instrument of His love and peace in the lives of those around me, and as I continue to surrender my heart and life to Him.

Spirit of God, descend upon my heart;
wean it from earth; through all its pulses move;
stoop to my weakness, mighty as thou art,
and make me love thee as I ought to love.

I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies,
no sudden rending of the veil of clay,
no angel visitant, no opening skies;
but take the dimness of my soul away.

Has thou not bid me love thee, God and King?
All, all thine own, soul, heart and strength and mind.
I see thy cross; there teach my heart to cling.
O let me seek thee, and O let me find.

Teach me to feel that thou art always nigh;
teach me the struggles of the soul to bear.
To check the rising doubt, the rebel sigh,
teach me the patience of unanswered prayer.

Teach me to love thee as thine angels love,
one holy passion filling all my frame;
the kindling of the heaven-descended Dove,
my heart an altar, and thy love the flame.

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
"Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown."

And he replied:
"Go out into the darkness and put your hand in the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way."

(From the poem "God Knows" by M Louise Haskins)

So maybe we live our days wandering, wondering, hoping for something better after the next hurdle we have to cross. 

Reject the worldly lie that says that life lies always up ahead...

But the truth that sets us free is that we can live in the now, one day at a time, with Him, and fully for Him.

So maybe some of us try to find a deeper meaning to living each day at a terrible cost:
The power that this world promises deceptively enslaves us to an empty dream.

Let power go before control becomes a crust around your soul...

The more we try to want people to be something we want them to be, the more we lose ourselves, and the more difficult it is for them to find the truth that there is a God who loves and cares for them just the way they are.

And our posessions seem to own us the more we try to own them.

Escape the hunger to posess...

When the truth is that there is nothing in the world we possess that can replace the greatest treasure we own in Him.

So we keep chasing after the wind, hoping that the next achievement, or the next, will bring a lasting happiness.

And soul diminishing success... 

Only to discover that it is a futile attempt to fill that emptiness we know is borne out of a deep inner insecurity. One that many are reluctant to face, because it is one that bring us to the crushing realisation that we, as human beings, are truly weak. It is this that we can only see in it's stark truth once everything is stripped away. In that moment, all strivings shall come to naught as you struggle and writhe, only to come to the full confrontation of the truth that all you have, and all you really need is in Him.

And you learn that the truth you struggled so hard against, and to avoid, brings you a deep sense of inner peace and security you never found in all the things you worked to own, but never did own anyway. 

Grace. The one precious thing that we can never understand that we're all desperate for.
And all words shall fail me here, save that I see grace given me

In the simple merriment of friendship, laughter abounding
In a smile of a lady and her cheerful encouragement as you stopped to look into a church
In a prayer of faith shared between a fellow Christians over a meal

This world is full of narrow lives
I pray by grace, your smile survives...

Try looking at tomorrow not yesterday
And all the things you left behind
All those tender words you did not say
The gentle touch you couldn't find...

Dare to live until the very last
Dare to live forget about the past
Dare to live giving something of yourself to others
Even when it seems there's nothing more left to give

Could that same finger come and trace my soul-sacred sand?

And make some unexpected space where I could understand,

That my own condemnation pierced and broke that gentle hand

That scratched the words I'll never know

written in the sand...

Michael Card
(Song writer and artist) 

"Between stimulus and response, there is a

space.

In that space is our power to choose our response.

In our response lies

our growth and

our freedom..."

"When we are no longer able to change a situation...we are challenged to change ourselves"

Quoted from "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl
(1905-1997)
Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist
Holocaust survivor

Who am I?
That the bright and morning star,
Would choose to light the way,
For my ever wandering heart.

Not because of who I am.
But because of what you've done.
Not because of what I've done.
But because of who you are.

Gone on to eternity...

My junior-friend (11 years old this year) had an intriguing MSN sign-in name that inspired the following reflections about death and life:

She wrote, "If good things lasted forever, would we appreciate how precious they are."

My instinctive reaction to her statement was to disagree.
"No! Because good things DON'T last forever, we can appreciate how precious they are!"

For I have but looked around me every day only to realise the sad, sobering truth that nothing in this world lasts. Whatever I see now is only ephemeral, because everything will wear down with time. We do not take the present existence for granted, that we may cherish the here and now.

I would be happy and content with this, save for the stark truth that has been looming before me:

"Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool.
But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom."

~Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892)~

3 I'm speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. Living then, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it's important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him.

4-6 In this way we are like the various parts of a human body. Each part gets its meaning from the body as a whole, not the other way around. The body we're talking about is Christ's body of chosen people. Each of us finds our meaning and function as a part of his body. But as a chopped-off finger or cut-off toe we wouldn't amount to much, would we? So since we find ourselves fashioned into all these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts in Christ's body, let's just go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren't.

6-8 If you preach, just preach God's Message, nothing else; if you help, just help, don't take over; if you teach, stick to your teaching; if you give encouraging guidance, be careful that you don't get bossy; if you're put in charge, don't manipulate; if you're called to give aid to people in distress, keep your eyes open and be quick to respond; if you work with the disadvantaged, don't let yourself get irritated with them or depressed by them. Keep a smile on your face.

9-10 Love from the center of who you are; don't fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle.

11-13 Don't burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don't quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Help needy Christians; be inventive in hospitality.

14-16 Bless your enemies; no cursing under your breath. Laugh with your happy friends when they're happy; share tears when they're down. Get along with each other; don't be stuck-up. Make friends with nobodies; don't be the great somebody.

17-19 Don't hit back; discover beauty in everyone. If you've got it in you, get along with everybody. Don't insist on getting even; that's not for you to do. "I'll do the judging," says God. "I'll take care of it."

20-21 Our Scriptures tell us that if you see your enemy hungry, go buy that person lunch, or if he's thirsty, get him a drink. Your generosity will surprise him with goodness. Don't let evil get the best of you; get the best of evil by doing good.

Translation: "The Message" from biblegateway.com

by J.K. Rowling
Speech Details
2008 Harvard University Commencement, June 5, 2008. Copyright of J.K. Rowling, June 2008

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates,

The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honor, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticize my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticized only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person's idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International's headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilizes thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathize.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathize may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I wish you all very good lives.

Thank you very much.

Copyright of J.K. Rowling, June 2008

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, "Progress in Brain Research."

Some brains do deteriorate with age, through Alzheimer's disease, for example. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.

"It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing," said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. "It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind."

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of- place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.

"For the young people, it's as if the distraction never happened," said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. "But for older adults, because they've retained all this extra data, they're now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they've soaked up from one situation to another."

Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others' yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker's real impact.

"A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what's going on than their younger peers," Hasher said. "We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser."

In a 2003 study at Harvard, Carson and other researchers tested students' ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.

This phenomenon, Carson said, is often linked to a decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Studies have found that people who suffered an injury or disease that lowered activity in that region became more interested in creative pursuits.

Jacqui Smith, a professor of psychology and research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the current research, said there was a word for what results when the mind is able to assimilate data and put it in its proper place - wisdom.

"These findings are all very consistent with the context we're building for what wisdom is," she said. "If older people are taking in more information from a situation, and they're then able to combine it with their comparatively greater store of general knowledge, they're going to have a nice advantage."

(C) 2008 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved

Retrieved 23 May 2008 from: http://www.psycport.com/showArticle.cfm?xmlFile=bhsuper%5F2008%5F05%5F22%5FINHT%5F0000%2D1241%2DKEYWORD%2EMissing%2Exml&provider=International%20Herald%20Tribune

"Curing is the work of experts..... (but) healing is the work of human beings. We heal ourselves, we heal one another, we enable one another to grow, not only in spite of an illness, but because of it. So all of this, and the ways in which we help one another, are very old and very powerful. They have lost none of their power over thousands of years. We get our students to rewrite a mission statement, a personal hippocratic oath in this course. And they write about what it is they want their medicine to be. They don't write about Science. They often write about love, and about being used well by life and by other people... And this is one of these mission statements written by a young man many years ago... And he wanted to be a surgeon... He dedicates this to his future patients and it goes like this:

'May you find in me the Mother of the world
May my hands be a Mother's hands, my heart be a Mother's heart
May my response to your suffering be a Mother's response to your suffering
May I sit with you in the dark like a Mother sits in the dark
May you know through our relationship that there is something in this world that can be trusted'"

This is an exerpt taken from an interview with Rachel Naomi Remen by Krista Tippett

Stage I Intuitive-Projective faith is the fantasy-filled, imitative phase in which the child can be powerfully and permanently influenced by examples, moods, actions and stories of the visible faith of primally related adults.

The stage most typical of the child of three to seven, it is marked by a relative fluidity of thought patterns. The child is continually encountering novelties for which no stable operations of knowing have been formed. The imaginative processes underlying fantasy are unrestrained and uninhibited by logical thought. In league with forms of knowing dominated by perception, imagination in this stage is extremely productive of long-lasting images and feelings (positive and negative) that later, more stable and self-reflective valuing and thinking will have to order and sort out. This is the stage of first self-awareness. The "self-aware" child is egocentric as regards the perspectives of others. Here we find first awarenesses of death and sex and of the strong taboos by which cultures and families insulate those powerful areas.

The gift or emergent strength of this stage is the birth of imagination, the ability to unify and grasp the experience-world in powerful images and as presented in stories that register the child's intuitive understandings and feelings toward the ultimate conditions of existence.

The dangers in this stage arise from the possible "possession" of the child's imagination by unrestrained images of terror and destructiveness, or from the witting or unwitting exploitation of her or his imagination in the reinforcement of taboos and moral or doctrinal expectations.

The main factor precipitating transition to the next stage is the emergence of concrete operational thinking. Affectively, the resolution of Oedipal issues or their submersion in latency are important accompanying factors. At the heart of the transition is the child's growing concern to know how things are and to clarify for him- or herself the bases of distinctions between what is real and what only seems to be.

Stage 2 Mythic-Literal faith is the stage in which the person begins to take on for him- or herself the stories, beliefs and observances that symbolize belonging to his or her community. Beliefs are appropriated with literal interpretations, as are moral rules and attitudes. Symbols are taken as one-dimensional and literal in meaning. In this stage the rise of concrete operations leads to the curbing and ordering of the previous stage's imaginative composing of the world. The episodic quality of Intuitive-Projective faith gives way to a more linear, narrative construction of coherence and meaning. Story becomes the major way of giving unity and value to experience. This is the faith stage of the school child (though we sometimes find the structures dominant in adolescents and in adults). Marked by increased accuracy in taking the perspective of other persons, those in Stage 2 compose a world based on reciprocal fairness and an immanent justice based on reciprocity. The actors in their cosmic stories are anthropomorphic. They can be affected deeply and powerfully by symbolic and dramatic materials and can describe in endlessly detailed narrative what has occurred. They do not, however, step back from the flow of stories to formulate reflective, conceptual meanings. For this stage the meaning is both carried and "trapped" in the narrative.

The new capacity or strength in this stage is the rise of narrative and the emergence of story, drama and myth as ways of finding and giving coherence to experience.

The limitations of literalness and an excessive reliance upon reciprocity as a principle for constructing an ultimate environment can result either in an overcontrolling, stilted perfectionism or "works righteousness" or in their opposite, an abasing sense of badness embraced because of mistreatment, neglect or the apparent disfavor of significant others.

A factor initiating transition to Stage 3 is the implicit clash or contradictions in stories that leads to reflection on meanings. The transition to formal operational thought makes such reflection possible and necessary. Previous literalism breaks down; new "cognitive conceit" (Elkind) leads to disillusionment with previous teachers and teachings. Conflicts between authoritative stories (Genesis on creation versus evolutionary theory) must be faced. The emergence of mutual interpersonal perspective taking ("I see you seeing me; I see me as you see me; I see you seeing me seeing you.") creates the need for a more personal relationship with the unifying power of the ultimate environment.

In Stage 3 Synthetic-Conventional faith, a person's experience of the world now extends beyond the family. A number of spheres demand attention: family, school or work, peers, street society and media, and perhaps religion. Faith must provide a coherent orientation in the midst of that more complex and diverse range of involvements. Faith must synthesize values and information; it must provide a basis for identity and outlook.

Stage 3 typically has its rise and ascendancy in adolescence, but for many adults it becomes a permanent place of equilibrium. It structures the ultimate environment in interpersonal terms. Its images of unifying value and power derive from the extension of qualities experienced in personal relationships. It is a "conformist" stage in the sense that it is acutely tuned to the expectations and judgments of significant others and as yet does not have a sure enough grasp on its own identity and autonomous judgment to construct and maintain an independent perspective. While beliefs and values are deeply felt, they typically are tacitly held-the person "dwells" in them and in the meaning world they mediate. But there has not been occasion to step outside them to reflect on or examine them explicitly or systematically. At Stage 3 a person has an "ideology," a more or less consistent clustering of values and beliefs, but he or she has not objectified it for examination and in a sense is unaware of having it. Differences of outlook with others are experienced as differences in "kind" of person. Authority is located in the incumbents of traditional authority roles (if perceived as personally worthy) or in the consensus of a valued, face-to-face group.

The emergent capacity of this stage is the forming of a personal myth-the myth of one's own becoming in identity and faith, incorporating one's past and anticipated future in an image of the ultimate environment unified by characteristics of personality.

The dangers or deficiencies in this stage are twofold. The expectations and evaluations of others can be so compellingly internalized (and sacralized) that later autonomy of judgment and action can be jeopardized; or interpersonal betrayals can give rise either to nihilistic despair about a personal principle of ultimate being or to a compensatory intimacy with God unrelated to mundane relations

Factors contributing to the breakdown of Stage 3 and to readiness for transition may include: serious clashes or contradictions between valued authority sources; marked changes, by officially sanctioned leaders, or policies or practices previously deemed sacred and unbreachable (for example, in the Catholic church changing the mass from Latin to the vernacular, or no longer requiring abstinence from meat on Friday); the encounter with experiences or perspectives that lead to critical reflection on how one's beliefs and values have formed and changed, and on how "relative" they are to one's particular group or background. Frequently the experience of "leaving home"--emotionally or physically, or both--precipitates the kind of examination of self, background, and lifeguiding values that gives rise to stage transition at this point.

The movement from Stage 3 to Stage 4 Individuative-Reflective faith is particularly critical for it is in this transition that the late adolescent or adult must begin to take seriously the burden of responsibility for his or her own commitments, lifestyle, beliefs and attitudes. Where genuine movement toward stage 4 is underway the person must face certain unavoidable tensions: individuality versus being defined by a group or group membership; subjectivity and the power of one's strongly felt but unexamined feelings versus objectivity and the requirement of critical reflection; self-fulfillment or self-actualization as a primary concern versus service to and being for others; the question of being committed to the relative versus struggle with the possibility of an absolute.

Stage 4 most appropriately takes form in young adulthood (but let us remember that many adults do not construct it and that for a significant group it emerges only in the mid-thirties or forties). This stage is marked by a double development. The self, previously sustained in its identity and faith compositions by an interpersonal circle of significant others, now claims an identity no longer defined by the composite of one's roles or meanings to others. To sustain that new identity it composes a meaning frame conscious of its own boundaries and inner connections and aware of itself as a "world view." Self (identity) and outlook (world view) are differentiated from those of others and become acknowledged factors in the reactions, interpretations and judgments one makes on the actions of the self and others. It expresses its intuitions of coherence in an ultimate environment in terms of an explicit system of meanings. Stage 4 typically translates symbols into conceptual meanings. This is a "demythologizing" stage. It is likely to attend minimally to unconscious factors influencing its judgments and behavior.

Stage 4's ascendant strength has to do with its capacity for critical reflection on identity (self) and outlook (ideology). Its dangers inhere in its strengths: an excessive confidence in the conscious mind and in critical thought and a kind of second narcissism in which the now clearly bounded, reflective self overassimilates "reality" and the perspectives of others into its own world view.

Restless with the self-images and outlook maintained by Stage 4, the person ready for transition finds him- or herself attending to what may feel like anarchic and disturbing inner voices. Elements from a childish past, images and energies from a deeper self, a gnawing sense of the sterility and flatness of the meanings one serves any or all of these may signal readiness for something new. Stories, symbols, myths and paradoxes from one's own or other traditions may insist on breaking in upon the neatness of the previous faith. Disillusionment with one's compromises and recognition that life is more complex than Stage 4's logic of clear distinctions and abstract concepts can comprehend, press one toward a more dialectical and multileveled approach to life truth.

Stage 5 Conjunctive faith involves the integration into self and outlook of much that was suppressed or unrecognized in the interest of Stage 4's self-certainty and conscious cognitive and affective adaptation to reality. This stage develops a "second naivete'' (Ricoeur) in which symbolic power is reunited with conceptual meanings. Here there must also be a new reclaiming and reworking of one's past. There must be an opening to the voices of one's "deeper self." Importantly, this involves a critical recognition of one's social unconscious-the myths, ideal images and prejudices built deeply into the self-system by virtue of one's nurture within a particular social class, religious tradition, ethnic group or the like.

Unusual before mid-life, Stage 5 knows the sacrament of defeat and the reality of irrevocable commitments and acts. What the previous stage struggled to clarify, in terms of the boundaries of self and outlook, this stage now makes porous and permeable. Alive to paradox and the truth in apparent contradictions, this stage strives to unify opposites in mind and experience. It generates and maintains vulnerability to the strange truths of those who are "other." Ready for closeness to that which is different and threatening to self and outlook (including new depths of experience in spirituality and religious revelation), this stage's commitment to justice is freed from the confines of tribe, class, religious community or nation. And with the seriousness that can arise when life is more than half over, this stage is ready to spend and be spent for the cause of conserving and cultivating the possibility of others' generating identity and meaning.

The new strength of this stage comes in the rise of the ironic imagination-a capacity to see and be in one's or one's group's most powerful meanings, while simultaneously recognizing that they are relative, partial and inevitably distorting apprehensions of transcendent reality. Its danger lies in the direction of a paralyzing passivity or inaction, giving rise to complacency or cynical withdrawal, due to its paradoxical understanding of truth.

Stage 5 can appreciate symbols, myths and rituals (its own and others') because it has been grasped, in some measure, by the depth of reality to which they refer. It also sees the divisions of the human family vividly because it has been apprehended by the possibility (and imperative) of an inclusive community of being. But this stage remains divided. It lives and acts between an untransformed world and a transforming vision and loyalties. In some few cases this division yields to the call of the radical actualization that we call Stage 6.

Stage 6 is exceedingly rare. The persons best described by it have generated faith compositions in which their felt sense of an ultimate environment is inclusive of all being. They have become incarnators and actualizers of the spirit of an inclusive and fulfilled human community.

They are "contagious" in the sense that they create zones of liberation from the social, political, economic and ideological shackles we place and endure on human futurity. Living with felt participation in a power that unifies and transforms the world, Universalizers are often experienced as subversive of the structures (including religious structures) by which we sustain our individual and corporate survival, security and significance. Many persons in this stage die at the hands of those whom they hope to change. Universalizers are often more honored and revered after death than during their lives. The rare persons who may be described by this stage have a special grace that makes them seem more lucid, more simple, and yet somehow more fully human than the rest of us. Their community is universal in extent. Particularities are cherished because they are vessels of the universal, and thereby valuable apart from any utilitarian considerations. Life is both loved and held to loosely. Such persons are ready for fellowship with persons at any of the other stages and from any other faith tradition.

From the Lay of Leithian (JRR Tolkien) 
  

    A king there was in days of old:
    ere Men yet walked upon the mould
    his power was reared in caverns' shade,
    his hand was over glen and glade.
    Of leaves his crown, his mantle green,
    his silver lances long and keen;
    the starlight in his shield was caught,
    ere moon was made or sun was wrought.

    Afar then in Beleriand,
    in Doriath's beleaguered land,
    King Thingol sat on guarded throne
    in many-pillared halls of stone:
    there beryl, pearl, and opal pale,
    and metal wrought like fishes' mail,
    buckler and corslet, axe and sword,
    and gleaming spears were laid in hoard:
    all these he had and counted small,
    for dearer than all wealth in hall,
    and fairer than are born to Men,
    a daughter had he, Lúthien.

    Such lissom limbs no more shall run
    on the green earth beneath the sun;
    so fair a maid no more shall be
    from dawn to dusk, from sun to sea.
    Her robe was blue as summer skies,
    but grey as evening was her eyes;
    her mantle sewn with lilies fair,
    but dark as shadow was her hair.
    Her feet were swift as bird on wing,
    her laughter merry as the spring;
    the slender willow, the bowing reed,
    the fragrance of a flowering mead,
    the light upon the leaves of trees,
    the voice of water, more than these
    her beauty was and blissfulness,
    her glory and her loveliness.

    A night there was when winter died;
    then all alone she sang and cried
    and danced until the dawn of spring,
    and chanted some wild magic thing
    that stirred him, till it sudden broke
    the bonds that held him, and he woke
    to madness sweet and brave despair.
    He flung his arms to the night air,
    and out he danced unheeding, fleet,
    enchanted, with enchanted feet.
    He sped towards the hillock green,
    the lissom limbs, the dancing sheen;
    he leapt upon the grasy hill
    his arms with loveliness to fill:
    his arms were empty, and she fled;
    away, away her white feet sped.
    But as she went he swiftly came
    and called her with the tender name
    of nightingales in elvish tongue,
    that all the woods now in sudden rung:
    `Tinúviel! Tinúviel!'
    And clear his voice was as a bell;
    its echoes wove a binding spell:
    `Tinúviel! Tinúviel!'
    His voice such love and longing filled
    one moment stood she, fear was stilled;
    one moment only; like a flame
    he leaped towards her as she stayed
    and caught and kissed that elfin maid.
    
    As love there woke in sweet surprise
    the starlight trembled in her eyes.
    A! Lúthien! A! Lúthien!
    more fair than any child of Men;
    O! loveliest maid of Elfinesse,
    what madness does thee now possess!
    A! lissom limbs and shadowy hair
    and chaplet of white snowdrops there;
    O! starry diadem and white
    pale hands beneath the pale moonlight!
    She left his arms and slipped away
    just at the breaking of the day.

    And thus in anguish Beren paid
    for that great doom upon him laid,
    the deathless love of Lúthien,
    too fair for love of mortal Men;
    and in his doom was Lúthien snared,
    the deathless in his dying shared;
    and Fate them forged a binding chain
    of living love and mortal pain. 

Grandma and the Lottery

Grandma was nearly 90 years of age when she won $375,000 on the lottery. Her family was extremely worried about her heart and feared that the news of her large win would come as too much of a shock to her.

"I think we had better call in the doctor to tell her the news," suggested the eldest son.

The doctor soon arrived and the situation was explained to him.

"Now, you don't have to worry about anything," said the doctor. "I am fully trained in such delicate matters and I feel sure I can break this news to her gently. I assure you, there is absolutely no need for you to fear for her health. Everything will be quite safe if left to me."

The doctor went in to see the old lady ad gradually brought the conversation around to the lottery.

"Tell me," said the doctor, "what would you do if you had a large win on the lottery - say over three hundred and fifty thousand dollars?"

"Why," replied the old lady, "I'd give half of it to you, of course."

The doctor fell down dead with shock.

The Dog

It was one of the strangest looking dogs they had ever seen at the pub, and the regulars found it a great topic of conversation.

Eventually one of them sidled over to the dog's owner and said, "That's a stupid looking dog you've got there. Can it fight?"

"Sure," replied the owner.

"Well," said the man, "I bet you $10 that my labrador can beat your dog."

The owner accepted the bet and the labrador was led in to fight. After 25 seconds, the labrador lay dead on the floor. The loser, looking down at his dead dog, shook his head sadly and said, "Your dog can certainly fight. But I still think it's a funny-looking dog."

"Yes," agreed the owner. "And it looked even funnier until I shaved its mane off."

The Scotsman's Dentures

The Englishman was in a restaurant in Scotland when he was suddenly attacked by a severe burst of coughing and sneezing - and he sneezed so violently that his false teeth flew out of his mouth and dropped to the floor, where the broke at the feet of the Scotsman.

"Don't worry, sir," said the Scotsman. "My brother will soon get you a new pair and at far less cost than an English dentist would charge. And he can provide a suitable set almost immediately."

The Englishman couldn't believe his luck and gladly accepted the Scotsman's offer. The Scotsman left the restaurant and returned 10 minutes later with a pair of false teeth which he handed to the Englishman.

"Fantastic!" exclaimed the Englishman, trying the teeth. "They fit perfectly. Your brother must be a very clever dentist."

"Oh he's not a dentist," replied the Scotsman. "He's an undertaker."

By Antoine de Saint-Exupery

'Men have forgotten this truth,' said the fox.
'But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.'

You risk tears if you let yourself be tamed.

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other,
but in looking outward in the same direction.

It is only with one's heart that one can see clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.