Saying the family is the basic building block of society was once a “motherhood and apple pie” sentiment. Motherhood and apple pie, being, of course, a cliché alluding to all that is both normal and good. We need a new cliché. Today motherhood itself is no longer “motherhood and apple pie.” 

I have always been frustrated by moments, especially in political speeches, where half a well-known adage is presented as proof of concept, completely ignoring the original context and the fuller saying. We see this often when someone cherry-picks part of a saying to prove their point but leaves out significant context that might disprove their argument as a whole.

People are curious and beautiful and mysterious. One of the things I love most about humans is our capacity to make meaning. It is endlessly fascinating to me that many people can be in the same room, experiencing the same objective reality and come away with such beautifully different perspectives and subjective understandings of what has happened. We are all living in the stories of our lives, whether we acknowledge them or not. 

Ash Wednesday is on the horizon. While Catholics are getting ashes on our foreheads, much of the rest of the Western world will be buying chocolates and flowers. I don’t remember Ash Wednesday falling on Valentine’s Day previously. Google says the last time was in 1945, a little before my time.

Today we are faced with unbelievable violence in the Holy Land. We who follow the nonviolent Jesus can feel only deep pain, and an urgent call to bring an end to the violence both of Hamas and the Israeli government.

The director of the B.C. Aboriginal Network on Disability Society perfectly summarized last week’s delay in extending doctor-delivered death to the mentally ill. “It’s not like a win or anything,” Neil Belanger told Register reporter Anna Farrow.

An excerpt from Pope Francis’ message for Lent “Through the Desert God leads us to Freedom.”

In the Jan. 21 edition of The Catholic Register, Roderick ‘Rory’ Mckay published the article “Fiducia supplicans a blessing for the Church.” I wish to respond to him and others who assert something that is patently false.

The International Court of Justice has delivered its interim judgment. Even a political body appointed by the United Nations General Assembly, whose members are mainly non-democratic states, couldn’t bring itself to order Israel to ceasefire, but we should not be grateful for that. They had no moral right to order Israel to cease its just war of self-defense in the first place.

Each night when I was growing up, my mother would do “prayers & lullabies” with us. One prayer was to recite a simple passage from Scripture. I am quoting my “prayer-memory” here and not the actual Scripture: