* Blue = Sex * Red = Love * Green = Faith *

[Jassmine(SO)]

Hey Darlene

The part of the situation as I see it, is the danger one can fall into by believing that if things do not turn out the way they think they should, they then think there faith was not good enough, and miss the blessing that was intended for them, simply because there focus had been misdirected.

Mick Jagger sums this up oh so well, "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes.... You just might find......You get what you need"

However the solution that has been provided for me is one that I would not be willing to exchange for what I once thought was the ultimate solution. It just came packaged in a different box.

I too, didn't find exactly what I was seeking, but I did find exactly what I needed. And I wouldn't change a thing, either

*Hugs & Love*

[Marda]

~
copy from ...
www_cbc_ca/story/world/national/2004/08/12/austria_church_porn040812.html Written by CBC News Online staff Thu, 12 Aug 2004 14:29:47 EDT
" Austrian seminary rocked by porn scandal closed

VIENNA - The Vatican on Thursday shut down a seminary in Austria where investigators found thousands of pictures of students and instructors kissing and fondling.

Authorities reported finding about 40,000 photos and a large number of videos on computers at the seminary in the diocese of St. Poelten, about 80 kilometres west of Vienna. Some of the material included child pornography.

When some of the pictures appeared in Austrian media, Pope John Paul II responded to the public uproar by sending in Bishop Klaus Kueng three weeks ago as an "apostolic visitor" to contain the scandal.

Kueng told reporters on Thursday that he was closing the seminary immediately to make way for "a new beginning." He has said he would restore credibility to the church.

The evidence of "active homosexual relationships" he found at the seminary was "very painful," said Kueng.

The church ordered local Bishop Kurt Krenn to stop speaking to the media after he tried to play down the scandal by describing the photos of priests kissing and fondling as "childish pranks."

Prosecutors have charged a 27-year-old Polish seminary student with possessing and distributing child pornography, which could bring two years in prison.

Kueng said church leaders hadn't paid enough attention to the procedures for selecting seminary students.

There were 36 students at the seminary at the start of the summer. Two have left. If the others wish to return when it opens again, they will have to undergo a new screening process.

Kueng gave no indication how long the seminary would be shut.

The last time a Pope sent an emissary to Austria was in 1998, when Austrian cardinal Hans Hermann
Groer was accused of molesting young boys.

The findings of the investigation were never made public, but Groer gave up all his church duties and left the country."

~
""In the last times there will be scoffers who will follow their own ungodly desires." These are men who
divide you, who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit." Jude (1): 18, 19
~

/Marda

[Marda]

So ... you say you have to hide ...
~
copy from CBC News Viewpoint August 26, 2004
"The myth of liberation" by Don Murray
"Paris! Paris outragé! Paris brisé! Paris martyrisé, mais Paris libéré, libéré par lui même, libéré par son peuple avec le concours des armées de la France..."

Paris! Paris violated, Paris broken, Paris martyred, but Paris liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the armies of France...

It was a short speech, only 376 words – that's just a little longer than Lincoln's Gettysburg Address – but each one of them was designed to drive home a message: that France, once again, stood among the victorious nations by virtue of its own efforts to seize back its capital.
France had redeemed itself.

The man who spoke on that day 60 years ago at the Paris City Hall
was General Charles de Gaulle. In the debacle of the Nazi invasion of
France four years earlier, in 1940, he had retreated to London. Unlike
his former boss and mentor, Marshal Pétain, he refused any deal with
the Nazi enemy.

De Gaulle became the man of the 18th of June. On that day he made
a speech in a BBC studio that was broadcast to France. It was breathtaking in its sublime refusal to accept defeat and, seemingly, to
accept reality.

France, he said, had been not so much defeated by a human army as
"submerged by mechanical force." But this was only a battle in a world war. Eventually the power of mechanical force would reside with
those fighting the Germans and then they, and the French, would be
victorious.

It was prescient but, in the ashes of retreat and defeat, it seemed
merely quixotic. Even more quixotic was the invitation from "me, General de Gaulle, to French officers and soldiers, to French
engineers and specialized workers now in England to make contact
with me." It was quixotic because almost no one heard the broadcast.
It was equally quixotic because de Gaulle was relatively unknown,
having been appointed deputy minister of defence just weeks before the military catastrophe.

Yet the speech led to the creation of the Free French Forces. Four
years later they entered Paris to liberate it.

History and French textbooks have consecrated the words and the events; seen from 60 years on they have an aura of inevitability.
There was no sense of inevitability at the time.

In 1944, de Gaulle had to fight a bitter battle, not against the
Germans, but against the Americans and the British simply to get to
France after the great Allied landing on D-Day. He had to fight to get his forces into action in France. Almost none were on D-Day itself.

And then he had to fight to stop the imposition of an American-British occupation authority in France. He outflanked the British and the Americans by a series of faits accomplis. His prefects and mayors, named in conjunction with local resistance cells, simply took power in newly-liberated areas. The Anglo-Saxons could do little but accept the obvious.

Finally he had to fight to convince the Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, to send troops, French troops, to liberate Paris.
The Allied plan was to push straight past Paris towards the Rhine River. Paris itself could wait a few weeks, possibly until September.

But on Aug. 19, an uprising began in Paris itself. De Gaulle pointed
out to Eisenhower that he could not afford to let the uprising fail. Or
succeed. If it failed, there would be bloody reprisals by the Germans,
recalling the failed Warsaw uprising just a few weeks earlier. It would be a stain on the Allies.

Success would be equally problematic. For the uprising was launched and led by French Communists, the strongest component of the French resistance. If it succeeded, they would take credit and possibly power in Paris.

Eisenhower was convinced. On Aug. 25 tanks and jeeps of the Deuxième DB, the French Second Armoured Division led by General Philippe Leclerc, entered Paris from the south. By the end of the day de Gaulle had made his speech of liberation.

Not one of the 376 words referred to anyone but the French. This
speech was to be a cornerstone of the Gaullist myth that France had
liberated itself. But de Gaulle, as he walked down the Champs Élysées the next day to the acclamation of hundreds of thousands of joyous Parisians, was acutely aware that many of these people had lived placidly without contesting the Vichy régime of Marshal Pétain,
which had done the Germans' bidding.

And so his speech specified that Paris had been liberated by "the
France that fights, the only France, the eternal France."

And France, if not the rest of the world, understood that there were
'two Frances' – those who resisted, and those who did not.

For almost 50 years, thanks to the creation of the Fifth French
Republic under de Gaulle himself, that division remained. Those who
had fought became Companions of the Liberation and were rewarded, frequently with high government office. The others had to work much harder for their rewards.

De Gaulle had built a political career out of rhetoric. He was a general who was also a fervent Christian. And so he understood that in the beginning was not the action but the word.

The action of the Allies helped push the Germans out of France. The
words of de Gaulle gave the French a myth they could cling to in the
next 50 years.
~

/ Marda

[Marda]

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65066,00.html

/Marda

[Marda]

Reuters News On Yahoo

"Pope Says Troubled World Needs Message of Jesus
Fri Dec 24, 7:17 PM ET
By Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope John Paul led the world's one billion Roman Catholics into Christmas Day and said the troubled world needed the message of Jesus more than ever, braving Parkinson's Disease to deliver his sermon.

The Pope celebrated Christmas midnight mass in St Peter's Basilica attended by some 10,000 people and watched by tens of millions live on television in more than 70 countries, including several predominantly Muslim nations.

The 84-year-old Pope, who has difficulty speaking because of his illness, lessened the strain this year, limiting his sermon to a mere eight paragraphs -- the shortest of his 27 Christmas seasons as Pontiff.

No longer able to walk, he sat slightly bent on his wheeled throne in festive gold vestments and appeared very pensive at times.

"Look upon us, eternal Son of God, who took flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary. All humanity, with its burden of trials and troubles, stands in need of you," he said, breathing deeply between his words.

The short sermon recounted the Christmas story of the child Jesus born of the Virgin Mary in a manger and lying helpless in swaddling clothes.

"You are born on this night, our divine Redeemer, and, in our journey along the paths of time, you become for us the food of eternal life," the Pope said.

During the solemn mass, attended by representatives of some 150 governments, the Pope also read a prayer so that "peace, announced by the angels on this holy night is enjoyed by all the humanity that God loves."

CONCERN FOR HOLY LAND

Christ's birthplace of Bethlehem was not far the Pope's mind or that of the worshippers inside Christendom's largest church.

One of the prayers was for the Middle East.

"May the Holy Land, dear to the faithful of the three great monotheistic religions, be able to see times of prosperity and peaceful co-existence and reciprocal respect among all those who live there," urged the prayer, read by a German man.

In the run-up to the holiday season, the Pope and the Church urged the faithful to keep Christ in Christmas and to shun the rampant materialism that has gripped Italy and many other wealthy countries.

Several times in past weeks the Pope praised the significance of the traditional nativity scene, which some Italian schools discontinued so as not to offend a growing Muslim population.

It has been a long and tiring year for the Pope, although his illness appears to have stabilized in the past few months.

Earlier this week he told aides he would need their help more than ever to run the Church.

"As the years pass, I feel more than ever the need for the help of God and the help of men," he told them in Christmas greetings on Tuesday.

The midnight mass was just the start of a hectic Christmas season that could test his health.

Later on Christmas Day he is due to deliver his twice yearly "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) blessing and message.

He is also due to say a year-end mass of thanksgiving on Dec. 31, celebrate the Church's World Day of Peace on Jan. 1, and the Feast of the Epiphany on Jan. 6.

Despite all the tradition, there were some novelties at the Vatican this Christmas.

For the first time, the most trendy and high-tech conscious Catholics did not have to sit at home to watch the Christmas midnight mass on television.

Italian state broadcaster RAI sent footage to video mobile phone operators."
~

Merry Christmas
Love / Marda

[Marda]

quote randomly selected to incoming Email msg ...
============ ( by Pegasus Mailer)

I detest life-insurance agents; they always argue that I shall
some day die, which is not so. - Stephen Leacock (1869-1944)


/ Marda

[Marda]

" A story from the Native American tradition, as told by Doug Boyd in the book "Rolling Thunder", published in 1974. Rolling Thunder is a well known Cherokee medicine man that Doug Boyd spent time with in the early 1970's."

"Alice came down the path toward me, walking very fast.

"I want to tell you something," she puffed. "I had the most interesting experience gathering herbs up there," she said, "and I'm so anxious to tell you about it. It couldn't have happened without Rolling Thunder, I know, but I actually communicated with the bees. I actually talked to them and they understood."
...
"... Anyway, we went to get horehound plants up there near the old ranch. Rolling Thunder knew right where they were. He agreed to show me because he knew I needed horehounds. As soon as we got there Rolling Thunder made his prayer and his offering. Then I saw that the plants were absolutely covered with bees. I'm deathly afraid of bees; it frightens me just to look at them and they always sting me. So I just didn't know what to do. I was just ready to leave. Well, Rolling Thunder talked to me; he was so kind and gentle. He sensed what I was feeling, without my saying anything. He told me I was really not afraid of animals or any living thing. I only thought I was. And he reminded me how I had always loved animals and had taken care of them on a farm in my childhood.

"He told me that the fear of any living thing is based on misunderstanding. He said, 'Now, Alice, I want you to talk to those bees. I saw how you talked to the dogs just a little while ago. You talked to the babies and to the mother and you said the right things in the right way. If you can talk to dogs that way, you can talk to bees, and they will understand. They won't understand the English language, but they'll understand your meaning as you say it.'

"So he told me what to say to the bees. I was supposed to ask the bees to share the plants with me, to tell them I wouldn't harm them, and to explain that I needed the plants for good medicine, but I would leave enough for the bees and for seeds for the coming year. He told me to say it loud and clear. He said he would be sitting behind me, and he wanted to be able to hear my voice. I did as he said, and, do you know, the bees actually understood me, and they moved! I just can't describe how I felt. All the bees on the plant I was looking at moved. They all moved together to the back of the plant. I took only the front half of the plant which they had left me, and then I moved to another plant covered with bees, and the same thing happened again! On one of the plants, when the bees moved back and I started to cut, they all made the strangest buzzing sound. It felt as though they were somehow speaking, telling me to stop, and I was understanding. I looked at Rolling Thunder and he said, 'There now, you see? You and the bees have agreed to share and now you're cutting back too far. They'll expect you, now, to do as you said.' So I cut only the front half very carefully. Then Rolling Thunder came up to me." She paused and she appeared to be filled with emotion. "And he said that this was a gift of the Great Spirit!"

Taken from the book, Rolling Thunder: A personal exploration into the secret healing powers of an American Indian medicine man, by Doug Boyd."

"wovoca.com/prophecy-rolling-thunder-people."

/Marda