Gifts You Receive Are Not for You In referring to the bee, the Bible says, “The bee is small among flying creatures, but what it produces is the best of sweet things” (Sirach 11:3). The inference is that good things can be produced from a relatively insignificant instrument. The Israelites depended on the ever-active “busy” [...]
Loving Makes You Lovable The ennobling pattern of love fascinated the probing mind of a great Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset. Love, he said, “consists in the constant beaming forth of a favorable atmosphere … a light in which we envelop the beloved, so that all his or her good qualities can reveal themselves. [...]
There’s an inspirational vignette about a man who asked God for the two most beautiful things he could think of—a flower and a colorful butterfly. God sent him instead a thorny cactus and a caterpillar. Somewhat disappointed and bewildered, he put them in his garden. One day he noticed that an exquisite cactus flower had [...]
Crocodile Tears A”laughing hyena” doesn’t really laugh, of course: its yelp is a sound that resembles strident laughter. Nor does a crocodile shed tears of grief while consuming its prey, though this ancient belief has spawned the phrase that connotes insincerity. Nature is replete with such counterfeit behavior patterns, but so is super- nature-the supernatural [...]
“M” Is for Mother —and the start of many a trite and schmaltzy poem, with countless variations that range from fourth-graders’ homework assignment before Mother’s Day, to Hallmark cards, flowery or facetious, fingered on every drugstore greeting card rack. But on a more sublime note, relevant for any season of the year, a more worthy [...]
