Today’s sermon from North Church:
“We know from experience
that we can survive without living
and still lose, even when we win.
What Christ the Good Shepherd reveals to us
is that there is also a way to live without surviving
and still win, even when we lose.”
Image from http://www.cruzblanca.org/hermanoleon/sem/a/pasq/4/06.jpg
Pop Quiz
It’s time for a pop quiz in honesty: Who here has ever been in an argument? I better not see a single person with both hands down right now. We’ve all been there.
Further question: Who here has ever won an argument?
For extra credit (points for honesty): Who here has ever won an argument and felt really bad about it?
Parenting Kids
Parents of small kids know exactly what I’m talking about here. My kids are really small, so I presently have the advantage of being both bigger and smarter than them (something that will not be true for very long), which means that I am pretty much able to win any argument, either by logic (which doesn’t always work with kids) or by physically picking them up and moving them to wherever I need them to be.
This arrangement works pretty well for…
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Hopping Hadrian's Wall 
I once worked for St. Gregory’s as a groundskeeper for a couple months in exchange for room & board but had to attend choir with the monks as part of a vocations program. I knew of them because one of the monks was a college buddy of mine. The participants in the summer program gradually came to realize that since the monks had no viable businesses to generate income they could not afford much hospitalization expense so very few candidates would be invited to join the order, since all monks must be insured under church polity. To me then, this was a fraudulent program in which the participants were being exploited for their free manual labor! I ended up joining a Catholic abbey after they invited the only gay candidate to join, and this just a couple of years after a split in the community where the more nerdy and repressed dominant faction ran off the out gay element , a couple of whom took refuge with the Cowley Fathers in Boston. Although I still donate books to them I wouldn’t go on retreat there anymore because it annoys me that they’ve ended up with so few members after being so absurdly fussy about who to receive into the order. I am now a Buddhist, anyway.