Soul’s Code

All Souls’ Day

Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics this week celebrate the “Commemoration of the Faithful Departed” or “All Souls’ Day” (November 2). Prayerful attention is paid to the souls of the departed going through a purification (or purging) of past sins in Purgatory. Popular in Mexico as El Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead), families gather in cemeteries to pray for deceased friends and families.  A more macabre remembrance of the dead occurred last week: a member of 1 Mind Ministries has refused to plea guilty to starving a one year old boy to death because he refused to say “amen” after his meals.

Love is the answer for transforming all pain into unconditional love

SMADAR DE LANGE — I meditate on this day on the worth of life. 9/11 is an exhibit of the way some in the body of humanity do not believe in the worth of individual human life.

It’s easy to call people like this “terrorists.” But let’s drill deeper into the thing in their value system that devalues. They believe that human lives do not have a meaning in their individuality, but only as a collective.

Belonging to a certain ethnicity, religion, nationality, geographical location is all that a human presence is to this group-think mentality.

In these times, it seems that we are on a pendulum between being a spark of dust to being it all  . . .

Watching our thoughts from a place of awareness, before they become action, is the path to peace — and highest way to honor fallen service men and women

DATELINE: Memorial Day service at the Presidio Interfaith Chapel, San Francisco. A sermon by Fr. DAVID RICKEY — On this Memorial Day 2009, we gather again to honor and remember those who have served and sacrificed for freedom in this country and around the world. Here and at national cemeteries throughout this land, row upon row of white markers pay silent but eloquent testimony to the thousands upon thousands of women and men who have lost their lives so that others may live in peace.

But they have not lost their lives so much as they have spent their lives, spent for a cause that was much deeper than themselves. It is not because they were killed or served in battle that we honor them, but because they lived in distinction. Not only did these heroic individuals fight for freedom and justice. So many of them lived in witness to the values they held with such deep respect.

From Plymouth to John Wayne westerns, white Americans have put Native Indians between a rock and a hard place. This Thanksgiving I’m joining a festival to honor what they’ve given, and lost

GUEST COLUMN: DANNY KENNY — In the twilight slumber of Thanksgiving morning, the first boat moors at “The Rock” and the “tired and weary” passengers disembark. But this is Alcatraz not Plymouth, and we’re not here to celebrate or give thanks for our survival. We, so-called “civilized” folks, have much to be thankful for, and I’m not talking turkey here.

On the day when the majority of white Americans give thanks for the American dream . . .

A Scandinavian tradition on Christmas Eve is to illuminate the graves — and spirits — of departed loved ones with candles (left). We dedicate this series to those who have recently suffered the loss of a loved one — especially during the holiday season.

When others around you are in a partying mood, it’s the most glaring time to take a loss.

We share the following guidance for dealing with loss from first-hand experience, not from a distance. We felt called because of the striking synchronicity of so many recent deaths in the friends-and-family network of Soul’s Code itself.

The penultimate loss is a death in your immediate household — a being who lives with you, or whom you have lived with.

But these steps can also help those who are feeling down after a break-up, divorce, job loss — or even literally losing part of yourself due to surgery, illness or an accident.

We begin this series on a personal note . . .

Can you guess the source of these lines of sacred text?

That it may please thee to make wars to cease in all the world; to give to all nations unity, peace and concord; and to bestow freedom upon all peoples,

That it may please thee to visit the lonely; to strengthen all who suffer in mind, body, and spirit; and to comfort with presence those who are failing and infirm,

That it may please thee to forgive our enemies, persecutors and slanderers, and to turn their hearts,

You could be forgiven for thinking they’re from some kind of meditation on loving kindness in the Upanishads or the Tibetan Book of the Dead. But this excerpt is a Christian prayer called The Great Litany that runs for six pages.

Acutely Buddhist in its appeal for universal compassion, The Great Litany was performed in procession by thousands of churches around the world to mark the First Sunday of Advent — the official beginning of the Christmas season for all of you chocolate fiends with Advent calendars, and Day One of a new church year.

Thanks be to Mom. Peace, love and gratitude for the carcinogens?

Sunday is Mother’s Day. Give thanks and praise for the one who birthed you. Thanks to Anglo-Libyan for the image.

Sofie Leon writes about Mother’s Day as a call for peace. She recalls the Mother’s Day Proclamation, a document written by Julia Ward Howe. Howe writes: From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.” It’s particularly salient with so many sons and husbands in Iraq.

Tgaw offers this great mother’s day cartoon on her site. It’s boosted her traffic in the last week as people search