The Toughest Assignment

 QUOTE:  

"Try your best to make goodness attractive.  That's one of the toughest assignments you'll ever be given." 

-- Fred Rogers

Civilization and a Broken Bone

SOURCE:  "How A 15,000-Year-Old Human Bone Could Help You Through The Coronacrisis" by Remy Blumenfeld. March 21, 2020.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/remyblumenfeld/2020/03/21/how-a-15000-year-old-human-bone-could-help-you-through-the--coronavirus/#e55e38437e9b

KEYWORDS:  compassion, love, care, do unto others, neighbor, mission, fellowship, koinonia

Years ago, the anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about clay pots, tools for hunting, grinding-stones, or religious artifacts.

But no. Mead said that the first evidence of civilization was a 15,000 years old fractured femur found in an archaeological site. A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. This particular bone had been broken and had healed.

Mead explained that in the animal kingdom if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, you cannot drink or hunt for food. Wounded in this way, you are meat for your predators. No creature survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. You are eaten first.

A broken femur that has healed is evidence that another person has taken time to stay with the fallen, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended them through recovery. A healed femur indicates that someone has helped a fellow human, rather than abandoning them to save their own life.

Shaft of Light in the Darkness

SOURCE:  "Maximillian Kolbe: A Subversive Priest" by Elizabeth Scalia. Word on Fire. August 14, 2020. 

https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/blog/maxmillian-kolbe-a-most-subversive-priest/28125/

KEYWORDS:  Courage, Faith, Substitution, Redemption, Witness, Love

Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest who died as prisoner 16770 in Auschwitz, on August 14, 1941. When a prisoner escaped from the camp, the Nazis selected 10 others to be killed by starvation in reprisal for the escape. One of the 10 selected to die, Franciszek Gajowniczek, began to cry: My wife! My children! I will never see them again! At this Maximilian Kolbe stepped forward and asked to die in his place. His request was granted.

A survivor,  Jerzy Bielecki, called Kolbe’s action “a shock filled with hope, bringing new life and strength. . . . It was like a powerful shaft of light in the darkness of the camp.”

Read the whole article.

Saint Damien of Molaki

SOURCE:  "What Do Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Donald Trump Have in Common?" by Kathryn Jean Lopez, NRO, August 10, 2020.  

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-donald-trump-what-they-have-in-common/

KEYWORDS:  Compassion, love, charity, suffering

Meanwhile, we should all aspire to love with the kind of selfless love Father Damien [Saint Damien of Molaki] did. Writing to his brother about six months into his arrival in Hawaii, he said: “This may give you some idea of my daily work. Picture to yourself a collection of huts with eight hundred lepers. No doctor; in fact, as there is no cure, there seems no place for a doctor’s skill.” He would go to the homes of people — half of them were Catholic. He would offer them spiritual and temporal aid (the temporal not being contingent on the acceptance of the spiritual). They would have wounds full of maggots, some of them. Sometimes he wasn’t quite sure how to administer the final sacrament “when both hands and feet are nothing but raw wounds.”

Other Links:

https://catholicstand.com/god-helps-the-outcast-st-damien-of-molokai/

https://www.crisismagazine.com/2020/in-search-of-father-damien

https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/07/31/the-suffering-and-faith-of-saint-damien-of-molokai/

The Power to Forgive

SOURCE:  https://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=8611

KEYWORDS:  Forgiveness, mercy, grace, freedom

"In this beautifully animated film, Holocaust survivor Eva Kor tells the powerful story of her time in Auschwitz, where she, along with her twin sister Miriam, were used as human guinea pigs, subjected to horrific experiments. Years later, feeling the need to free herself from the horrors of the past, Eva wrote a letter of forgiveness to a Nazi doctor, who agreed to accompany her to Auschwitz. When she realized she had the power to forgive, she finally felt free. "You can never change what happened in the past, all you can do is change how you react to it.""