Association Of Catholic Bloggers

Because of you, the world is a better place. Through you, people see the love of God in your eyes. People learn that violence is not the way to truth. They learn that truth is always truth and cannot be anything else. Read more at Prayerfully Yours

(from The Breadbox Letters)

Week 4 (Part B) - Honesty and Counsel This week forced me to take a very long hard look at my mindset towards what I admit and will share about my personal finances and what is really happening.  Although my name Allison means "truthful one" and I do feel sometimes I am honest to fault; this week's teachings and ponderings on the topic of honesty made clear, there was some areas I saw okay to paint  gray .  There really is no legal or honest gray areas with regards to money, especially if those finances are shared.   This week also challenged my filing system (or lack there of) and how pride had (and probably still does) hinder my seeking and accepting counsel.  Let's evaluate these struggles & triumphs more closely ...     FILING, HONESTY AND COUNSEL  All Rights Reserved, Allison Gingras 2016

Holy Week is here ... Lent 2016 will soon be done But am I any different than when it all began 40 plus days ago? Did my Lenten sacrifices - prayers, almsgiving and fasting - transform me? Did they prepare me for the coming Triduum s(Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday) services? Most importantly have the readied my heart to rise again with Jesus on Easter -- a new creation in Christ ? Lent and the expectation of the coming of Spring, maybe because I live in a seasonal location, have always co-existed in my heart. Lent starts often in the harshness of winter - cold, long, dark nights. Easter arrives after daylight savings and (usually) the last snow fall. Flowers and trees are budding, maybe even flowering, and there is an emerging from the cocoon like feel to the world. But have I changed? Has this time of no television, extra prayer and attention to participating in the Sacraments, awoken something in my heart.   What will my spiritual practices look like goi

What is the purpose of your Lent? Is it to test your self-control? Is it to challenge yourself to a duel of fuel limits? Is it just a game between you and sugar, or you and grains, or caffeine, or butter?  Is it a wound, or just a bloody finger (#gross?) ? Or is it more? Does it affect your prayer life? Lately, I've been thinking that Lent is whole lot like sheep shearing. The sheep go into the shearer's hands, and they are probably a bit of a mess. They may have spots of dried mud, some briars or burrs, and definitely some mats in their lovely white wool.  They get into spots of trouble, when, all is interrupted, like little drunk lambs happily playing on a spring green pasture on a lovely, warm, sunny day.  But all it takes is some shears, and they emerge from the hands of the shearer, their wool is shorter, with a freshness and sheen that's enviable. .... read the rest at Picture a  Skyline 

Brilliantly simple! A letter from Seattle contains practical wisdom for praying through Holy Week and the Easter Season. Click over to Praying with Grace to read the letter.

As the Morning Rising: Beauty and The Cross : Beauty and the Cross Perhaps when you hear the bell ring out across the valley you will think about what it is to pray. Where will you f...

It has been a long time since I have posted on either of my blogs. I have missed it, but life has brought great busyness, with a move in the fall, followed by my oldest daughters wedding, a few days before Christmas. My hope for January was to find our groove again, getting back to a normal routine. Sadly, I lost my dad at the end of the month. Winter has been all about trying to find a new normal. I haven't felt up to doing much of anything but really wanted to get this post out about our scavenger hunt from last Easter, before Holy Week flies by. This was the second time we "found the Alleluia" and it was such a nice twist on an Easter egg hunt. Much more meaningful and engaging. So click on over and see how we did our hunt last year!

Let it Be Done to Me According to Your Word… Joining with the Sacred Heart of Jesus during Lent (Taken from my prayer journal on 3/7/16) I submit myself to Your Most Holy Will. Whatever happens, will happen.  Read more at Prayerfully Yours

There is obviously one thing wrong with this picture.The text is incomplete. It fails to convey the full truth that not merely do I  Like  Mary but I “ LOVE  her!”  However, it wasn’t always this way, as for so many years I did not really know my heavenly mother. For loss of better words, I was an estranged daughter.  I more or less  assumed who Mary was  and dare I say..had taken her for granted.What was it then that led me to rediscover my mother’s love? First there was my conversion to the Catholic faith. Like a newborn baby I needed to grow in understanding who I was in light of a mother’s love. Still, I grappled a bit with the new found love I felt for my heavenly mother and the ever present closeness I had always had with my earthly mother.     Read More...

It was just another day of the week, or was it? Jesus knew, as God, that before the week would end, He will have given His life, for many, to conquer death. What must Jesus have been thinking? He arrived in Jerusalem the day before; greeted with fanfare; literally, with palms waving in the springtime breeze. Jesus knew, only too well, how fickle man can be; how in the blink of an eye, they would turn on Him. He would be turned over to the authorities and would be put to death. Jesus only had a few more days to... Read more...  

The Letters - Available March 22, 2016 Maybe I should have expected groans when I asked my boys if they wanted to watch the preview of the movie,  The Letters,  with me. I hadn't actually told them what movie it was just that it was a movie I'd picked out. Their groans might be related to the fact that I'd recently made them watch part of a  PureFlix movie, Captivated , about the affect of screen time on children and they expected more of the same, but finally they stopped complaining long enough to ask what movie I'd chosen. I hadn't expected the dramatic change that came about when I told them. My 12 year old's face lit up, "The Letters?" He sat up straight from where he'd been slouched, sulking on the couch. "Wow, you got The Letters to preview Mom? That's cool!" To read the rest of how The Letters relates to the divorced, the abandoned, and the lonely, please join me at SingleMomSmiling.com  God Bless...

Pope Francis'  favorite painting , Chagall's White Crucifixion, returns to  The Art Institute of Chicago .  I learned all this through social media so I planned my visit to the museum. You can read the article and view the photo gallery at Being Catholic ... Really .

As the Morning Rising: God's Love : Love A crown of thorns rendered torn The flesh of the sinless one Born to save us. The hand of Abraham was stayed No b...

"Let us spread before His feet, not garments of soulless olive branches, which delight the eye for a few hours and then wither, but ourselves clothed in His grace, or rather, clothed completely in Him.  We who have been baptized into Christ must ourselves be the garments that we spread before Him...."   (continue...)

Since this coming week is Holy Week, I thought I would offer for your reflection this excerpt from my book The Fisherman’s Wife: The next morning Esther and I help Lydia clear breakfast. Tobiah and Seth are out for a walk. Then seated on pillows with the two women and Leah, I tell them about last night’s strange meal. I’m interrupted when the two men enter the house out of breath. Tobiah says frantically with a stricken face, “They’re going to crucify Jesus. Pilate condemned him to death. They have him carrying a cross out to Golgotha right now.” My heart stops. “Why are they doing this?” Click to continue

Tiberius was Rome's absentee emperor around the time the Han Dynasty was getting back to business-as-usual, after Wang Mang 's brief takeover. I mentioned him before: Wang Mang, I mean. ( December 27, 2015 ) Meanwhile, Phaedrus was retelling Aesop's Fables in Latin, and Pontius Pīlātus was prefect of the Roman Province of Judea . That part of the world had been under Roman control since the Battle of Philippi , Armenia wasn't a Roman province yet, but it wasn't the force it had been during Tigranes ' reign, and that's another topic. Tigranes, Tiberius, and Wang Mang, were well-known folks in their day; 1 at least in their homelands. Two millennia later, not so much. Pontius Pīlātus is another matter. He's mentioned each year around this time, when something like 2,000,000,000 folks pay at least fleeting attention to a Nazarene's progress from top-of-the-polls celebrity to executed corpse. More at A Catholic Citizen in America .

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…and he said to them, “Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not come into the time of trial."  Luke 22:46 I once watched  a National Geographic  documentary on Jerusalem's annual Palm Sunday procession.  How thrilled was I to recognize myself, along with a group of fellow travellers, right in the thick of the crowd! A number of  years ago, I travelled to the Holy Land, with a group of young friends, to celebrate the events of Easter. The Palm Sunday procession heralded the beginning of an amazing pilgrimage experience.  On Good   Friday   we joined hundreds of Christians processing along the path believed to be that of Jesus’ final steps, the  Via_Dolorosa .  read on:  http://susannetimpani.blogspot.com.au/

Christ's Entry into Jerusalem , Melozzo da Forli, 1477-82  Basilica della Santa Casa, Loreto, Italy Gospel for the Procession   Luke 19:28-40   ( NRSV, Catholic Ed. , Can)  After Jesus had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. As he approached Bethphage and Bethany   at the hill called the Mount of Olives,   he sent two of his disciples, saying to them,     “Go to the village ahead of you, and as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here.    If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ say, ‘The Lord needs it.’” Those who were sent ahead went and found it just as he had told them.   As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?” They replied, “The Lord needs it.” They brought it to Jesus, threw their cloaks on the colt and put Jesus on it.   As he went along, people spread their cloaks   on the road. When he came near the place where the r

And that’s a good thing! Laughter heals. Laughter brings people together. Laughter distracts. Lately, I’ve been laughing a lot! I think about the Holy Family often. What was their life like in those ancient days? Did they laugh a lot? Did they have fun? I’m assuming that, contrary to the paintings, statues and drawings that depict the members of Holy Family as solemn and serious, there must have been great joy! Joseph and Mary were raising the Son of God who came to be the Messiah. Read more at Prayerfully Yours .

Four years ago, when I tried to write on a computer, I could not translate the same creative energy that I experienced telling a story verbally to the keyboard. My intuitive, imaginative side stayed buried and my logical intellect wrote boring drivel. God used blogging to heal my frozen gift of writing.  I snapped to attention when I stumbled on blogs.  Suddenly, I was thinking up a username,  a title for a blog,  looking at templates and design and layout. All these activities loosened up my creativity while I sat typing. It was like an invisible barrier slowly melted, allowing my imagination to bubble up in a stream of written words that felt just as exhilarating as my oral tradition. I was  excited to start sharing written stories with other people, people who would read them,  respond, comment and give me feedback on what I had written.  Within weeks, I was no longer an island but part of a community of other writers who had the very same insecurities and problems as I

Some scientists say they've learned that a 300,000,000-year-old whatsit was a very early version of lampreys. That, Neanderthal DNA, and a newly-analyzed Tyrannosaur, gave me something to talk about today.... ...I'll do my usual explanation of why God's design choices don't offend me: but first, a recap of why I don't miss the 'good old days.'... More at A Catholic Citizen in America .

As the Morning Rising: Passiontide : Passiontide A father and child were Seated in the pew in front of me The child's head turned and tilted As she, panorama-st...

As the Morning Rising: Cavehill Belfast : Cavehill, Belfast Sometimes we realise just how fortunate we are When through...

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Blessed are the Stressed: Secrets to a Happy Heart from a Crabby Mystic, by Mary Lea Hill, FSP Feeling stressed, but not necessarily blessed? Do you want to feel better about the direction of your life? Well, Blessed are the Stressed: Secrets to a Happy Heart from a Crabby Mystic , by Sister Mary Lea Hill, FSP focuses on reducing your stress by embracing the tenets of the Beatitudes. Specifically, this book addresses the importance the Beatitudes play in your life, especially in a culture that tells us that happiness can be found in a slick new car, or a fancy new house. According to Sister Mary Lea, true happiness, or blessedness, is found in... Read more...

As the Morning Rising: St Patrick on Slemish Mountain : I've always been fascinated when thinking of St Patrick and of how his life took on a whole new turn after he dev...

After attending the exhibit of  Van Gogh's Bedrooms  at  The Art Institute of Chicago , I've become a bit obsessed with the museum itself and Van Gogh's works.  As a life-long Chicago resident, the exhibit prompted me to become a  member  of the museum and I'm so glad I did! You can read the article and view the photo gallery at Being Catholic ... Really .

Working with children (and raising a batch with my husband), I've picked up a few critical pieces of information about how children learn. For example, children require simple explanations in terms they can understand instinctively. Children also have little patience for information or activities that seem irrelevant to their concerns; they learn new concepts best when they can relate to the topic personally. Pope Francis knows this well, which is why he hopes families, in this Year of Mercy, will provide children with an experience of mercy. In his book-length interview, The Name of God Is Mercy, Pope Francis helps us all understand mercy by defining it in theological terms and then also giving us concrete, practical examples of what mercy feels like in daily life. Parents, grandparents, and teachers who want to share the Year of Mercy with children in their lives will find a wealth of wisdom in Pope Francis. Join me at Praying with Grace for the rest of the story. . . .