A nice essay from http://yaygod-sagas.blogspot.com/

I really liked this essay from Cyndi @ http://YayGod-Sagas.Blogspot.com

I'm sure http://SaintsforSinners.com "forgiveness patrons" Saint Dismas and Saint Maria Goretti would too. Thanks, Cyndi! "YayGod!"

"Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, and what is soiled is made clean."  

Dag Hammarskjold

"By your capacity for forgiveness shall I recognize your God." 

 Meister Eckhart

     As the story goes, a frail elderly man went to live with his son, daughter-in-law, and four-year old grandson. The old man's hands trembled, his eyesight was blurred, making eating difficult. Peas rolled off his spoon, his milk spilled on the tablecloth, he broke a dish or two, and his place at the table was always a mess, irritating his son and wife. So they set a small table in the corner where Grandfather ate alone from a wooden bowl while the rest of the family enjoyed dinner. 

     The four-year-old watched it all in silence. One evening before supper, the father noticed his son playing with wood scraps on the floor.  He asked the child sweetly, "What are you making?"  Just as sweetly, the boy responded, "Oh I am making a little bowl for you and Mama to eat your food from when I grow up."

     Whether we know it or not, we are forever modeling to the children, grandchildren and the more impressionable hearts of each other how to enhance or diminish the Light in the world, by our actions and attitudes, regardless of the words we speak.  Earlier in the summer, Michael pressure-washed our patio, walkway and driveway,  oblivious to the fact that he was thereby destroying and drowning the garden and plants I had laboriously spent two days putting in just after we arrived. We were both snarky with each other, feeling under-appreciated, neither of us able or willing in the moment to acknowledge the role of ego in our stand-off.  Eknath Easwaran tells an amusing story about two people arguing, pretending to listen, when all they really needed were signs to hold up as the other spoke: "I'm right. You're wrong." The blessing of getting older is that these moments pass quickly, with grace and humor and, hopefully, lessons learned. (Note to self: do not plant garden until after the pressure-washing; also, plants are more easily replaced than husbands.)

     One blessing of getting older is that we find if we wait 24 hours or so before reacting and then tell a story about what happened, the feelings are usually universally shared, and more humorous than aggravating, one story begetting another as our life dramas unfold. My niece's mother, Donna, was caring for her mother with Alzheimer's. Donna went into the garage, and her mother locked her out of the house. The mother then kept telling Donna, who was banging on the door to get back in, that she had to go find Donna to unlock the door.  After a few days, the story could be told with laughter instead of frustration, fear and irritation.

     A friend, unaware that the answer machine on her neighbor's phone had not disconnected after she left her message, proceeded to complain to her husband in rather disparaging terms about the neighbor - until she heard the heart-stopping 'beep,' indicating the machine had recorded it all. When the friend called me in horror for advise, I was not much help because I couldn't stop laughing, even as we both recoiled at the thought of her innocent neighbor's eventual pain. They have since reconciled though not without difficult lessons.

    The thought occurs to me now that we are sending and receiving constantly in life; with every thought and every word, we leave messages of our choosing:  joy or despair, lightness or gloom, hope or cynisicm, acceptance or rejection.  How many of these would we want to be overheard or recorded? How much forgiveness and reconciliation are we open to in the relationships offered to us as gifts in our growing?

     "Engrave this upon my heart," Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB, writes: "There isn't anyone you couldn't love once you've heard their story."  I have a friend who, a few years ago, told me sometimes she just throws her hands up in exasperation and says, "This is for EVERYONE who has EVER asked me to pray for ANYTHING."  We could say the same prayer for forgiveness, in following Rumi's advise to be like the night in concealing the faults of others. For everyone who has ever harmed us, we offer forgiveness; for anyone who has suffered from our thoughts, words or actions, we ask forgiveness. We forgive ourselves and each other, because the tender grace that comes from being in such a place brings peace and well-being, until finally we remember who we are, and our place in the world.

     That act of forgiving those who trespass against us doesn't come out of fear of a higher power out there, but because we are connected to that deeper place within that tells us we are not so different from those who hurt us, reminds us that we have hurt others, and accepts the Love that masks itself behind the forgiving heart.

     We return in prayers of blessing and forgiveness, not once and for all, as the saying goes, but time and again. The Sufis say that reconciliation is simply remembering how far we've strayed from our original goodness, our feelings of remorse already a return to the Divine. I like to think that the grandfather in our story waited silently, knowing that his son would realize the goodness of his own heart and return his father to a proper place of respect, not out of guilt, but out of remembrance, in answer to the call to Love.

YAY GOD 

Saint Mark Announces Cure for Mosquito Bites!

Saint Mark, who works with http://www.SaintsforSinners.com and is often invoked and asked for help when flies and mosquitos are biting, has announced that he is helping to develop a pill that humans can take to ward off those pesky bites.

This will probably be very good news for athletes playing sports in the summer, like the "Geaux Cups," an accomplished team of softball players in New Orleans, Louisiana and pictured above. There are still a "few kinks in the line, however," Saint Mark said, adding "I'm trying to get the pill approved and used in Africa, because mosquito bites are sometimes lethal over there."

The medicine is called "ivermectin," or Mectizan, depending on who is talking about it. According to New York Times reporter Donald McNeil, Jr., scientists are "turning people into human time bombs for mosquitos." He writes that "when mosquitos bite people who have recently swallowed the drug, ... they die."   

Unfortunately, though, some people are dubious as to whether the medicine can really work effectively. A worm guy ( also known as a "parasitologist" ) is somewhat dubious: Dr. Frank O. Richards, from the Carter Center in Georgia, commented that "it's very difficult to say 'Let's treat a million people' - and then have to test each one." Apparently, for the medicine to be effective, all the people in the mosquito-ridden area have to take the pill at the same time." Saint Mark acknowledged that fact is troublesome, but he has asked Saint Matthew, the patron Saint of Accountants, to figure out a way to get millions of people to do something all at the same time and in the same area. Saint Matthew acknowledged the difficulty presented, but said he may be able to work the numbers, adding, "I've got a stellar abacus!"

Saint Catherine of Siena Promotes Palliative Medical Trend

There's a new trend taking place in America's Medical Schools and it aims to discourage superlatively high-achieving book smart students from getting into Medical School based solely on their excellent grades. Saint Catherine of Siena who was a highly communicative and expressive person, is working with Saints Luke and Cosmos and Damien, the 3 patron saints of Doctors, to make sure that future Medical School students learn the art of empathetic listening, before being allowed the privilege of entering Medical School.

Saint Catherine, the author of the classic, "The Dialog," has created the "Multiple Mini Interview,"  ("MMI") to be used in screening Medical School applicants. By using her Heavenly Powers, Catherine has been able to persuade 8 Medical Schools to have applicants go through several interviews before being accepted. Medical School applicants hoping to attend UCLA, Stanford, and Virginia Tech Carilon, along with other Medical Schools, will go through a procedure where they read a story about a fictional patient for 2 minutes. Then the applicant will walk through a door and be greeted by a team of people to discuss how to "treat" the patient. The interview lasts 8 minutes, and then is repeated approximately 10 times in a row.

The goal of the MMI, according to Saint Catherine and human beings, such as Dr. Stephen Workman, a Dean of Admissions at Virginia Tech, is to help usher in a new era of Health Care in America. The prospective Medical School students are not necessarily graded on whether they answer the questions correctly, which seems fair since these people have not even gone to Medical School yet! Instead, the interviews help weed out the arrogantly opinionated who, like most "know-it-alls," often fail to listen and also jump to conclusions, clinging to their notion of what is "right" and what is "wrong."  Gardiner Harris, a writer at The New York Times recently noted there are a lot of Doctors who are "insufferable know-it-alls who bully nurses and do not listen."

If Saint Catherine of Siena is successful with implementing the Multiple Mini Interview at more Medical Schools, it is estimated that the number of needless deaths and injuries in Hospitals will decline considerably. And it will be because channels of communication will be widened, not narrowed.  

SaintsforSinners Blog Gets a Facelift!

Hi everyone! Here's a short note to let you know we just updated and revised the SaintsforSinners Blog and eliminated all the SPAM posts. Here are our two commercials. Please share them with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, StumbedUpon, Diggit, and any other social network. We hope to be making posts regularly and soon we will be going to Europe to find more saint medals. We also added new retail stores in the Carolinas and Santa Barbara, California! Let us know about great retail shops in your area (or let them know about us!) and if you are looking for a particular saint medal we will try our best to find it during our medal hunting trip. Cheers! rob clemenz@ SaintsforSinners

P.S. Special thanks to Dimitrina, who helped make the Blog look much nicer! Soon we will be adding more saint stories and updating the http://SaintsforSinners.com web site too! :o)