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.
Verbatim: Excerpt from Pope Francis’ message for Lent
An excerpt from Pope Francis’ message for Lent “Through the Desert God leads us to Freedom.”
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 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.
The hard part was sitting down properly on the T-bar ski lift, or rather not sitting down. If you sat down, the whole vertical pipe would swoop forward violently and dump you on your back in the middle of the track for the skier behind you to pierce you with their long skis. The object of the T-bar was to brace your knees in a slight crouching position, hang on to the pipe with your hands, and let the seat drag you to the upper altitudes by the back of your thighs. Whoever designed this lift deserved a sadistic engineer of the year award.