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Text: CommunioSanctorum.txt:
- The Sharing of the Holy People
-
- While I was living outside Wausau in Rib Mountain, a friend of mine
- and a varying collection of other people formed a dispersed community
- for daily prayer. One member of the group would compose a guide for
- a two week period of shared prayer, typically including both morning
- and evening prayer time. Because the members of the group were living
- in different locations and had differing work schedules, and often
- were in multiple time zones, there was no set moment when all of us
- were in prayer together. Nevertheless, both my friend and I felt the
- common support of the group praying together -- when we all did. But
- when some of the group gave only lip service to our common prayer, we
- could feel the weight of their lack of sharing. This sense of the
- community was small and nebulous, hard to pin down. One could perhaps
-
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Text: Experiences in Human Dignity.txt:
-
-
- Maintaining Human Dignity in Real Life Situations
- -------------------------------------------------
-
-
- A home invasion; an 8-year-old kid manages to sleep through it.
-
- A teenaged criminal enters a home and commits several crimes,
- not least of which is shooting and injuring the father. The
- young son is asleep and doesn't wake up until the criminal is
- gone and the emergency services have been summoned. But later,
- when the chaos is under control, the police are working the
- crime scene. They are questioning everyone who was present, so
- they want to know what, if anything, the 8-year-old heard.
-
- Based on what you can imagine plus anything you've
- seen in police shows and crime movies, how can the
- detective in charge of the case preserve the human
-
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Text: GoingNative.txt:
- The Native Club
-
- I was walking the main hall in West High and I saw the hand-lettered
- sign for the West High Natives, every Tuesday after school. "Come join
- us", it said. At once I began to wonder whether I could come.
-
- There are some barriers. The first is that I am not a student at West.
- I am a volunteer and donor. I am a West High graduate and the son of
- two West High graduates. I was even a substitute teacher on three
- different days, back in 1974. But I'm clearly not a current student.
-
- Then, too, I'm not a Native American. Maybe the Native club wants to
- include non-natives in a dialog; maybe I'm not excluded on just that
- ground alone. Besides, there is an unsubstantiated tradition in some
- distant parts of my family that our French-Canadian ancestry is just
- euphemism for some unspecified and undocumented native heritage. But
-
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Text: Obviation.txt:
- The Obviation Marshal
-
- When I was still in high school, I got onto a sign painting binge. It
- likely started with making signs to protect our woods from undesired
- hunters, but rapidly branched out into a variety of messages, some of
- them interesting and others just silly. One sign is painted on both
- sides in white on a green ground, reminiscent of informational highway
- signs. One side says:
-
- -----------
- | FAILURE |
- | MARSHAL |
- -----------
-
- and the other side reads:
-
- -------------
- | OBVIATION |
- | MARSHAL |
- -------------
-
- Most of the signs from those days have long since disappeared, but I
- still keep that one. It is just too prescient to dismiss.
-
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Text: SoundTrack.txt:
- Life With a Soundtrack
-
- I've always wanted a soundtrack to my life, he said.
-
- That's kind of what I have, I replied.
-
- That was the first time it dawned on me that having music playing more
- or less incessantly may not be the norm for all modern humans. For me
- it is background music; I don't really listen to it most of the time.
- Sometimes I'll notice, sometimes I'll even sing along or tap out the
- rhythm. But usually not. It is simply a part of being conscious.
-
- I think maybe sometimes I even go without music for brief periods of
- time, but if I think about it the soundtrack will start up again.
-
- I probably should have realized this is not the universal experience
- when there was some discussion about "getting a song stuck in your
- head" and I thought, "How is that different from all the rest of the
-
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