Good Morning Friends & Digital Neighbors! The simplest things are often the best. Went to a birthday party last night for one of our parishioners. It was a great gathering of members of our daily Mass crowd, friends & neighbors. It is so good to celebrate life and the bonds that unite us when the main cultural current is one of division and obsession with self.
I hope you find community in real life and/or on-line which enrich your life, cause you to laugh, invite you to think, inspire growth and reassure you of the potential goodness in humanity. No community is perfect, everyone has their own cocktail of bad judgements and selfish justifications. If those judgements & justifications are never examined, occasionally questioned or changed we run the risk of personal stagnation and all the ill it brings to our life. Boredom will be the least of your problems but the most present of background noises. Worse will be the spiritual poisons that work to separate you from others and even yourself.
No one need be a prisoner to such things. There are more self made prisons in our lives than most of us realize. Yeah there are jerks that get scripted into our lives knowingly & unknowingly by bad judgement and happenstance but they receive more of their power/authority from our willingness than we realize. The behaviors you accept are often the ones you get.
Good friends in community encourage us to be our better selves. Good friends in community can help us know our strengths and work on overcoming our weaknesses. Good friends in community celebrate the goodness of life. Good friends in community overcome the temptation to endlessly complain about life, culture or the world. (Some complain about real life neighbors but that can be self-defeating since ones wonders when they complain about you?)
The simplest things are often the best. Happy Birthday!!! It sure is good to celebrate life, even better to celebrate the life of a friend. It is the icing on the cake to do that in community. On to the quote and photo! Happy Friday friends!
“There is no joy without gratitude.” – Brene Brown
AUTUMN BY THE LAKE IN STANLEY, IDAHO
Today marks the three hundred and thirtieth birthday of the Frenchman François-Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire (1694-1778).
Born into a bourgeois family during the reign of Louis XIV, the “Sun King” (r. 1643-1715), Voltaire suffered tragedy at a young age when his mother died. Never close with his father or brother, Voltaire exhibited a rebellious attitude toward authority from his youth. His brilliant mind was fostered in the care of the Society of Jesus, who introduced him to the joys of literature and theater. Despite his later criticisms against the Church, Voltaire, throughout his life, fondly recalled his dedicated Jesuit teachers.
Although he spent time as a civil servant in the French embassy to the Hague, Voltaire’s main love was writing—an endeavor where he excelled in various genres, including poetry, which led to his appointment as the royal court poet for King Louis XV. Widely recognized as one of the greatest French writers, and even hyperbolically referred to by ...
Padre - Tom Miller invites you to a Coffee Talk, Speakeasies, Schmoozes, Tea Times, Afterhours and other gatherings.
https://teams.live.com/meet/93792382189049?p=DiBHsYfuECPgDrG7vO
2026 Coffee Talk with the ADD Irregulars
Thursday, January 1, 2026
6:00 AM - 8:00 AM (CST)
Occurs every day starting 1/1 until 12/31/2027
Coffee Talk - Daily beginning at 6:00 AM Central Time Zone - USA
White Pilled Wednesday - A break from the heaviness of news and current events to focus upon things more personal & positive for the first hour of Coffee Talk.
Afternoon Chats - Most Tuesday, Friday & Sundays 2:00 PM Central
Other chats as posted in the community.
The Beautiful
Said the Disciple to the Lover, “Sir, before I left the world I heard certain men who were held in high esteem and thought to know the will of the Beloved say that those who loved the Beautiful did not love the Beloved but loved idols, yet in the Garden of the Beloved we are ever striving to create beauty for the pleasure of the Beloved. Were they then speaking the truth?”
The Lover answered, “Those who said this had never glimpsed the form of the Beloved nor ever truly sought Him, for all beauty is but the reflection of the beauty of the Beloved, although seen very dimly as in a dark and faulty mirror, even as all goodness is a dim reflection of the goodness of the Beloved. So it is that those who love beauty and goodness recognize dimly in them the form of the Beloved and though often in ignorance those who are seeking the Beautiful and the Good are seeking after the Beloved.”
