“Sometimes we overlook life’s small joys while searching for the big ones.”  Unknown

The recent March break was a low-key one for our family — very unstructured for a change.

Editor’s note: The following is excerpted from a brief presented to the Ontario Legislature’s standing committee on finance and economic affairs last month by Catholic Charities. The next provincial budget is expected to be revealed March 22.

There is a crisis that continues to grow in our midst. It is one that affects the poor and marginalized and the most vulnerable in our society.

World Water Day, March 22, affords us the opportunity to stand up, speak out and act to ensure our earth’s fresh water is protected as a public trust. Water is a right for the common good of all life forms, not a commodity for buying and selling to the rich by the rich.

One of the problems of war is that its casualties are not limited to combatants; they include what military strategists euphemistically call “collateral damage” inflicted by “friendly fire.”

When I first read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in 1960, this ironic novel from 1932 about the distant future had been around for a little over 25 years. But already its predictions seemed to be coming true, at least in the affluent North American society in which I lived as a young man.

There was an interesting contrast in the news last month between the attitudes of today’s youth toward politics and the way it is practised at the highest levels in this country. Among Canada’s young, there was inspiring idealism and belief in the nobility of political life. Among our politicians, not so much.

This is my brand new day starting now
Letting go of the ways that I fall down
The old can be made new, the lost can be found.
Superchick, Christian band
 
There’s a wealth of contemporary Christian music being produced these days, and I tune in to it whenever I can. Often, too, I hear it wafting (or blasting) out of my daughter’s bedroom stereo. Lately these lyrics by one of her favourite bands, Skillet, have been stuck in my head: “Rebirthing now/I wanna live my life, wanna give you everything/Breathe for the first time now/I come alive somehow.” The song, “Rebirthing,” is about finding meaning and purpose in Christ and feeling fully alive as a result.

There are whole generations alive who were born too late to remember this, but back in the late 1960s, there were grand predictions that within a decade or two we would all enjoy the Leisure Society, a time when we’d spend far less time working and far more time doing all those things we truly wanted to do.

Like many Register readers, I read the news of Msgr. Tom Raby’s retirement from The Little World column with sadness. Unlike most Register readers though, for me Msgr. Raby is not only a byline and a photo; he is a brother priest in the archdiocese of Kingston, an occasional advisor and confessor, and a model of priestly evangelization in the newspaper world.

At the recent meeting of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities in Washington, discussion was rife in the corridors and around the dining table on the relationship of reason and faith. The times demand it.