The Caring Catalyst http://thecaringcatalyst.com Who Cares - What Matters Sat, 22 Jul 2023 23:48:14 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2.2 52309807 BEANNACHT http://thecaringcatalyst.com/beannacht/ http://thecaringcatalyst.com/beannacht/#respond Mon, 24 Jul 2023 11:00:02 +0000 http://thecaringcatalyst.com/?p=5980

Tracey Schmidt’s poetic reading of a Blessing for Our Death reminds us of the complexities of life – how we can be gatekeepers and entrance points, light filled and vulnerable, lonely and loved, all at the same time. She praises life and exhorts us to do the same, to “sing as if tomorrow will not come because one day it will not.” This singing of life’s praises enables us to live fully, “as if home were everywhere and you are no longer a guest but a loved and welcome member.”

L   I   V   E
L         I          V          E
W   E   L   L

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ETHICAL WHISPERINGS http://thecaringcatalyst.com/ethically-whisperings/ http://thecaringcatalyst.com/ethically-whisperings/#respond Wed, 19 Jul 2023 11:00:04 +0000 http://thecaringcatalyst.com/?p=5975

When it comes to our ETHICS these days sometimes it’s less speaking and more hushed whispering or worse.        .        .a shushing

Are People Really Becoming Less Ethical?

A new study questions the common view that people are less kind, honest, and moral than they used to be.  .  .

Jill Suttie from Greater Good Magazine took a look behind the not so transparent ethical curtain to give us a different look at our ethics, or lack thereof.       .        .

When we read the news, it’s hard not to get depressed about the state of the world. Stories of vitriolic politicians, unethical CEOs, and indifference to the suffering of others fill its pages, leaving us feeling like goodness and morality are nowhere to be found.

According to a recent Gallup poll, people in the United States think that morality is at an all-time low. But, according to a new study, this belief is likely an illusion, based on the way our minds work—not a conclusion based on evidence.

In the study, recently published in Nature, researchers looked at several surveys of hundreds of thousands of Americans and people from 59 other nations around the world. In the surveys, participants had shared their views on whether honesty, ethical behavior, and moral values had been increasing or decreasing in their society or country.

In every country polled, people tended to think moral, ethical behavior was on the decline. This belief held steady no matter when the survey was given, too (whether 1949 or 2019)—suggesting that people always tend to see morality as waning in their lifetime. This perception seems unlikely to be true, says lead researcher Adam Mastroianni, formerly a postdoctoral student at Columbia University.

“You might think that people are sensitive to things happening around them or in their country, and that dictates what they think about people getting better or worse (from a moral conduct standpoint),” he says. “But it doesn’t seem that way, because pretty much whomever you ask, and wherever and whenever you ask them, people give you the same answer—people are less kind today than they used to be.”

To further study this, he and his coauthor, Daniel Gilbert, conducted their own surveys polling Americans about their views of present versus past morality. They asked people to rate how “kind, honest, nice, and good” people were then compared to past years (2, 4, 10, or 20 years earlier) or compared to when the participant was born or turned 20 years old. The researchers also considered the age, political orientation, gender, race, education, and parental status of the participants, to see how that affected their answers.

In all cases, people believed that morality was in steady decline. It didn’t matter if the comparison was made between now and two years ago or now and 20 or more years ago.

“It’s not just that people think the 1950s were great, and then it got worse in the ’60s, and it’s been bad ever since then,” says Mastroianni. “People think, even in the recent past, that people treated one another with more kindness and respect.”

Some people saw more moral decay than others, though. Politically conservative participants thought morality was dropping more precipitously than liberal participants did (though liberals also saw morality in steady decline). Older people tended to see more decline in morality than younger people, too. But it didn’t seem to be because of their age, but rather because they were considering longer stretches of time (for example, comparing current morality to when they were born).

“Older people do say over the course of their lives that there’s been more decline than younger people do; but, of course, their lives have been longer,” says Mastroianni. “Young people are basically on track to look like older people when they get older—which suggests that this isn’t about the idiosyncratic experiences of individuals, but about the way that human minds work.”

Is it all in our heads?

None of this proves that morality isn’t in decline, though. Perhaps people’s perceptions are accurate, and we really are becoming less kind and ethical over time.

But past evidence suggests otherwise. As psychologist Steven Pinker notes in his books, based on hundreds of studies and surveys on societal trends over time, there is less violence and fewer wars in the world than there used to be (despite what people think), and crime is generally down. At least some research finds that people tend to be less selfish these days than in the past, and common myths about generational character differences—that Boomers are selfish or millennials are more entitled—appear to be unfounded.

Adding to that evidence, Mastroianni and Gilbert analyzed some other available surveys: Between 1965 and 2020, over 4 million respondents around the world had reported on their own and others’ moral behavior, in response to questions like “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?” and “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful, or that they are mostly just looking out for themselves?” and “During the past 12 months, how often have you carried a stranger’s belongings, like groceries, a suitcase, or shopping bag?”

After analyzing these responses, Mastroianni and Gilbert found that, no matter the year, people saw their own behavior and the behavior of people around them as generally good, with little personal experience of immoral behavior to back up their belief that morality was slipping. This was true 90% of the time, says Mastroianni, and was true for both Americans and people from other countries.

This is why Mastroianni thinks that people’s views around moral decline are an illusion.

“If people are far less kind today than they used to be even just a couple years ago, it should be easy to find some evidence of that shift. So, if you ask people how they were treated today, fewer people should say ‘yes’ today than they did five years ago,” he says. “But we find no evidence of that going on. In fact, we find pretty strong evidence that it’s not going on.”

So, if morality isn’t going down the tubes, where does this misperception come from? There could be many reasons, but two stick out for Mastroianni: our tendency to focus more on the negative than the positive in life, which media exploit by emphasizing negative news; and our tendency to remember good things more fondly, while the badness of bad memories fades with time. When we are constantly bombarded with stories of unethical, immoral behavior from a handful of bad actors, we give them more weight than our own personal experience. Similarly, if we try to remember what the world was like in the past, we may look at it with rose-colored glasses.

“If you put these two phenomena together . . . you can produce an illusion where every day the world looks bad, but every day you also remember yesterday being better,” says Mastroianni.

Why we need to check our biases

Why does this matter? Mastroianni says that it’s important to know if society is actually in moral decline or not. We need goodness and kindness to function as a society, and if those are missing, we’ll need to focus on changing that.

On the other hand, if it’s an illusion, we could be spending time trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. He points to Gallup polls in which a majority of Americans say they think government should address the moral breakdown of the country—which might be a waste of time and money and take away from other important priorities.

Unfortunately, our biases, while leading us astray in some ways, are also fairly hard-wired—and for some good reasons. Being alert to negative news can make us more cautious and keep us safer, and looking at the past more benignly can help us feel good and move on from bad events in our lives that might otherwise keep us stuck.

Still, Mastroianni worries that if we have an overall pessimistic view about people’s morality, it may interfere with trusting others, which could lead to social problems. It might make it harder for people to do business with each other or have the courage to go on dates or form loving relationships.

While he wishes our daily news diet was less sensationalist and provided more context, he doesn’t see that happening anytime soon. But one thing people could do to lessen this warped view is to try practicing a bit more humility. When comparing the present to the past or past generations to younger generations, we should be a lot more cautious about making judgments about their morality or any other character trait.

“Just because a feeling comes to mind easily—like people are less moral than they used to be—doesn’t mean that you’re actually right,” he says. “The ease of thinking something is not an indication of its accuracy.”
BE CAREFUL OF THE LENSES YOU VIEW OTHERS.        .         .
Just SEE them in a way
that they feel
R     E     C     O     G     N     I     Z     E     D

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More Than A LISTENING http://thecaringcatalyst.com/more-than-a-listening/ http://thecaringcatalyst.com/more-than-a-listening/#respond Fri, 14 Jul 2023 11:00:41 +0000 http://thecaringcatalyst.com/?p=5969

Viktor Frankl, one of the great psychiatrists of the twentieth century, survived the death camps of Nazi Germany. His little book, Man’s Search for Meaning, is one of those life-changing books that everyone should read, SEVERAL TIMES

Frankl once told the story of a woman who called him in the middle of the night to calmly inform him she was about to commit suicide. Frankl kept her on the phone and talked her through her depression, giving her reason after reason to carry on living. Finally she promised she would not take her life, and she kept her word.

When they later met, Frankl asked which reason had persuaded her to live?

“None of them”, she told him.

What then influenced her to go on living, he pressed?

Her answer was simple, it was Frankl’s willingness to listen to her in the middle of the night. A world in which there was someone ready to listen to another’s pain seemed to her a world in which it was worthwhile to live.

Often, it is not the brilliant argument that makes the difference. Sometimes the small act of listening is the greatest gift we can give.

WHEN YOU HOLD SOMEONE’S SPACE; when you unconditionally accept, listen, hear, validate, affirm, you just don’t hold their space, you hold something even more sacred: THEIR SOUL.           .            .
THEY have trusted you with their whole, wounded, vulnerable Soul for the price of your offering to A LISTENING they never before had but desperately needed.        .        .

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THE MEANING OF LIFE IN TWO MINUTES http://thecaringcatalyst.com/the-meaning-of-life-in-two-minutes/ http://thecaringcatalyst.com/the-meaning-of-life-in-two-minutes/#respond Mon, 10 Jul 2023 11:00:54 +0000 http://thecaringcatalyst.com/?p=5967

S  O
do you agree
disagree
or do you have a better
two minute spiel.          .          .
Maybe what the World has been trying to tell us
not just NOW, but especially NOW
is that I really don’t care what you think
or what words you use
or how you arrange them
so much as
HOW DO YOU LIVE
how have you Verb’d them up for
O T H E R S
or maybe
N         O        T
Pssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst
I don’t think you can tell the meaning of life in two minutes
IT JUST TAKES A SECOND
of your Caring Catalyst Self
to a Caring Catalyst Other.          .          .

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THE KINDNESS COST http://thecaringcatalyst.com/the-kindness-cost/ http://thecaringcatalyst.com/the-kindness-cost/#respond Fri, 07 Jul 2023 11:00:30 +0000 http://thecaringcatalyst.com/?p=5960

A Lady asked an old street vendor: “How much do you sell your eggs for?” The old man replied“0.50¢ an egg, madam.” The Lady responded, “I’ll take 6 eggs for $2.00 or I’m leaving.” The old salesman replied, “Buy them at the price you want, Madam. This is a good start for me because I haven’t sold a single egg today and I need this to live.”

main-qimg-75fc9c51507193f830419e1ac42592d1.jpeg

She bought her eggs at a bargain price and left with the feeling that she had won. She got into her fancy car and went to a fancy restaurant with her friend. She and her friend ordered what they wanted. They ate a little and left a lot of what they had asked for. So they paid the bill, which was $150. The ladies gave $200 and told the fancy restaurant owner to keep the change as a tip.

This story might seem quite normal to the owner of the fancy restaurant, but very unfair to the egg seller. The question it raises is;

Why do we always need to show that we have power when we buy from the needy?

And why are we generous to those who don’t even need our generosity?

I once read somewhere that a father used to buy goods from poor people at a high price, even though he didn’t need the things. Sometimes he paid more for them. His children were amazed. One day they asked him “why are you doing this dad?” The father replied: “It’s charity wrapped in dignity.”

Being A Caring Catalyst won’t cost you anything but it’ll make you richer than any lottery winning. Invest in what compounds by one kind moment to the next one and it’ll no longer be about mere facts and figures, because it’ll figure much more than any known fact.      .      .     .
MAKE SURE YOUR CUP OF KINDNESS
IS ALWAYS FULL ENOUGH 
FOR ANOTHER GULP
SO THAT OTHERS
MAY DRINK DEEPLY
WITH A QUENCHING
THAT’LL NEVER KNOW
ANY OTHER THIRST.          .          .

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LIGHTING EACH OTHER HOME http://thecaringcatalyst.com/lighting-each-other-home/ http://thecaringcatalyst.com/lighting-each-other-home/#respond Fri, 26 May 2023 11:00:35 +0000 http://thecaringcatalyst.com/?p=5903 This is a story I first heard from the gifted storyteller Laura Packer. I can’t say where it originated. I keep retelling it in my own way, because the world keeps needing to hear it.

In the beginning, there was only light and dark. During the day, the sky was bright white. No clouds, no blue. Just white. At night, the sky was completely black. No stars, no moon. Just black. And because this was the way the world was, you always stayed home. If you were ever caught far from your village when the sky went dark, you were never heard from again.

So, folks lived their entire lives in the same place, with the same people. And while they said they were happy living this way, in their heart of hearts they longed to see what they couldn’t see, to meet the people they suspected were out there but couldn’t meet. Yet they accepted that this was how the world was and would always be.

Then a certain girl came into the world. And this girl loved the world so much! During the white-sky hours, she’d explore and play as she wandered with her mother, gathering food for the family. In the black-sky hours, she’d listen to her father’s stories about the sights he saw while hunting around the village.

Each night, before she fell asleep, she’d say to her mother, “Mama, I want to visit other places. Please, will you take me? Can we go?”

And every night, her mother would say, “Oh, honey—we can’t! It isn’t safe. The world’s too dark. We’d get lost and never return!”

But you know how children are—how their dreams can creep into your heart and become your dreams too. So one night, when the girl asked, for the gazillionth time, “Mama, can we go? Please?” the woman said, “I’ll think about it.”

And she did. She thought for days as she gathered grasses and roots and berries to eat. She thought as she sat talking with the other women and as she listened to her husband’s stories. She thought as she wove reeds into baskets and thatched the roof of their house.

Then one night, while sitting with her family, gazing into the fire, she had an idea.

She got up and mixed water and clay. She made a pot from the mud. Then she made a lid for the pot. She placed these things in the fire and baked them until they were as hard as stone.

When the fire began to die out, she scooped up a potful of embers and covered it with the lid. She then lay down beside her daughter.

“Mama, can we go? Can we go?” the girl asked.

“I’m still thinking,” the mother said.

In the morning, the woman lifted the lid to look inside the pot. The embers were still glowing red. So that night when her daughter said, “Please, Mama, please—are you done thinking? Can we go?” the woman said, “Yes, in the morning we will go.”

As soon as the sky was white again, the mother and daughter packed up as much food and water as they could carry. They said their goodbyes. Then the woman took up her pot full of embers, and the two of them started walking.

They walked and they walked until the sky started to turn black. They stopped then and collected a pile of twigs and sticks. The mother poured out her embers on them. Soon they had a blazing fire. And when the sky was black-black, they sat around their fire, huddled as close as they could. From the darkness beyond their little ring of light came the growls and the howls of prowling animals. Just before they fell asleep, the mother put some live coals from the fire into her pot.

They woke up when the sky was white again. The woman dropped a few twigs into the pot to feed the embers. Then she and her daughter began to walk under the white-white sky. They sang and they told stories.

Just before the world went black-black again, they built another fire. They huddled close, listening to the night sounds and watching the sparks fly up.

Then the woman had an idea.

With the pot lid, she scooped up some coals from the fire. Then she flung them toward the sky, as far as she could. She was very strong, and those embers flew higher and higher until they stuck fast in the black.

And it was very good.

So the woman tossed up another lid-full of embers, this time back in the direction of their village. And those embers also stuck to the black.

Now her daughter wanted to try. Even she could send those embers flying. Before long, the way home was twinkling over half the sky.

Morning after morning, the mother and daughter continued their journey. And every night, they would cast more embers up into the sky, which was still black-black yet now sparkling as it never had before. The mother and daughter knew they’d never get lost.

After weeks of walking, they reached a village. The people there were astonished to see them.

“How did you get here?” they asked. “How did you not vanish in the dark nights?”

And the woman and her daughter showed the villagers the pot of coals. As soon as the world went black, they pointed out the path they had taken across the night sky.

“Throw some embers from your fires into the sky,” the woman told the villagers.

“Here,” her daughter said, “use the lid of our pot.”

And the villagers did.

The next day, the mother and daughter moved on. As they went, they always painted a shimmering path above them. And everywhere they went, they taught the people they met how to toss embers from their fires into the night sky.

So it is that we learned to light the way home for one another.

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PANDEMIC’D http://thecaringcatalyst.com/5895-2/ http://thecaringcatalyst.com/5895-2/#respond Wed, 17 May 2023 11:00:29 +0000 http://thecaringcatalyst.com/?p=5895
Getty Images

Thomas McDade, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University, still remembers an advertisement for cold medicine he saw in late 2019. The ad showed a visibly sick businessman walking through an airport, “and the message was, ‘You can solider through this. You can make it,’” McDade says.

That message didn’t age well. Only a few months later, the virus that causes COVID-19 began spreading across the globe, prompting health officials to beg people to stay home no matter what—but especially if they felt sick. Suddenly, soldiering through an illness wasn’t seen as admirable, but irresponsible, selfish, and dangerous.

Since then, countless op-eds and articles have argued that the pandemic would usher in a “new normal” where people were more thoughtful about disease, companies were more generous with sick time, and everyone stayed home when unwell. It looked like it was happening, at least for a while. Millions of people worked and learned from home, many for the first time; comparing symptoms became a national pastime; and photos of at-home test strips crowded out vacation shots on social media.

But now, with the pandemic effectively over—at least in terms of the federal response, if not epidemiologically—it seems that the promised new normal never fully materialized.

Eric Shattuck, an assistant professor of research at the University of Texas at San Antonio, studies “sickness behavior:” the constellation of behavioral changes that people adopt when they’re ill, like lethargy, social withdrawal, and decreased appetite. Much of sickness behavior is biological, driven largely by inflammation in the body. But the extent to which people perform these behaviors is informed by cultural norms about how we’re “supposed” to act when sick, Shattuck says.

Though pushes to stay home and “flatten the curve” changed behavior early in the pandemic, they weren’t enough to enduringly alter dominant cultural messages about sucking it up and soldiering through, Shattuck says—in large part because they weren’t backed up by supportive policy changes, like expanded access to paid sick leave and affordable child care.

“We may see that people are paying more attention and listening to their bodies more,” Shattuck says, “but if the conditions aren’t there for them to be able to stay home or work from home…it may not actually change the large-scale behaviors.”

The start of the pandemic brought a flurry of new sick- and family-leave policies, but many were temporary or didn’t apply equally to all workers. As of March 2022, 77% of private-industry workers had access to paid sick time, only slightly more than the 75% who did in March 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). But that top-line statistic doesn’t tell the whole story.

While 96% of people working in the management, business, and financial sectors had access to paid sick time in 2022 (along with the option to work remotely in many cases), only 62% of service-industry workers did—up slightly from 59% in 2020. Only about 40% of the lowest-paid private-industry workers had paid sick time in 2022, versus nearly all of the highest earners, BLS data show.

Overall, during the first two years of the pandemic, only 42% of work absences related to illness, child care, or personal obligations were compensated, according to a report from the Urban Institute, an economic and policy research institute. Many workers, especially those least able to afford it, still have to choose between getting well and getting paid. It’s hard to fault people for choosing the latter.

Even people who have paid sick time often work through their illnesses, and that didn’t change during the pandemic. In some respects, says Kai Ruggeri, an assistant professor at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health who studies population behavior, the rise of remote work actually made it harder for people to justify taking sick time. Lots of people seemed to think, “‘What’s the difference, if you get some things done from your laptop in bed?’” Ruggeri says.

In 2020, researchers surveyed people with COVID-like symptoms about whether they worked while sick. (About a quarter of them ended up testing positive for COVID-19, while the rest had other respiratory illnesses.) About 42% of people with COVID-19 worked either remotely or in-person while sick, and 63% of people sick with another respiratory illness did so. One 2023 study even found that, within a group of about 250 health care workers with symptomatic COVID-19, half worked at least part of a day anyway.

That may be because many workers still feel pressure—spoken or unspoken—from their employers to show up no matter their health status, says Terri Rhodes, CEO of the Disability Management Employer Coalition, which provides employers with guidance on workplace absences. The pandemic didn’t change that. “The general feeling that I get from employers is, ‘We just want to be done with [the pandemic],’” Rhodes says. “There’s a big push right now for productivity and earnings and ‘just get back to work,’ as opposed to mental health, well-being, taking sick days.”

The old normal—the one valuing stoicism, productivity, not stopping for a second—has proven hard to uproot. But there have been changes around the way we think about illness: the fact that people are even talking about sick-leave policies and forming opinions about the merits of vaccinations and masks (for better or for worse) suggests there’s been a culture shift around health and sickness, Ruggeri says.

As director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, Kathleen Hall Jamieson oversees research projects that assess how much the U.S. population knows about health and science. Over the course of the pandemic, Jamieson says, she’s seen two contradictory things happen in parallel: overall scientific literacy grew, even as more people began to believe conspiracy theories and misinformation.

The fact that most of the U.S. population got vaccinated and wore masks at the height of the pandemic suggests most people generally understood how the virus spreads and how to slow transmission, Jamieson says. In a survey fielded around the time COVID-19 vaccines became available to the general public, around three-quarters of respondents correctly answered questions about the safety and efficacy of the shots. Results like those show “an astonishing level of public literacy about a topic that we knew nothing about in January 2020,” Jamieson says.

Concepts once foreign to most of the general public—like incubation periods and airborne transmission—also became part of regular conversation. “Nobody knew what an R value was” before, Ruggeri says. “I had people calling me, asking me to explain it to them.”

For many people, the pandemic was a first introduction to a “blind spot” in the medical world, as a 2022 research review put it: post-acute illness. Viruses ranging from influenza to Epstein-Barr can cause potentially debilitating long-term complications, but that reality went mostly unnoticed until scores of people developed Long COVID symptoms—ranging from brain fog and memory loss to chronic fatigue and pain—within roughly the same period of time. For some people in both the medical field and the general public, these long-term symptoms reframed what a seemingly “mild” illness could do.

In addition to increased scientific literacy, Dr. Yuka Manabe, a professor at Johns Hopkins Medicine who specializes in infectious disease, has noticed a stronger desire for “diagnostic certainty” among patients. In 2019, someone with a respiratory illness might have been content to say they were sick and leave it at that, but many patients now want to know exactly what they have and where they caught it. “I hear a lot of people say, ‘I have a cold, but don’t worry because it’s not COVID—I tested myself,’” Manabe says.

The unprecedented availability of at-home tests likely contributed to that desire for certainty—and consumer demand for COVID-19 diagnostics seems to have carried over to other conditions, too. In a 2022 survey, 82% of adults ages 50 to 80 said they were at least somewhat interested in using at-home tests in the future. And they may indeed get the chance. In February 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the first combined at-home influenza and COVID-19 test.

But while COVID-19 turned some people into amateur disease detectives, many others—about 40% of U.S. adults, according to federal data—delayed or avoided health care during the pandemic. One 2022 study found that lower-income people and those with preexisting conditions were likely to delay care in 2021, which suggests that financial stress and fear of the virus played a role. Another study from 2022 found that people were more likely to skip doctors’ visits during the pandemic if they’d previously had bad experiences with medical care.

It makes sense that people who’d had previous bad experiences—a group that tends to include people of color, lower-income people, those without insurance—may have shied away from the medical establishment during the crisis, even as others literally trusted it with their lives. Throw in partisan polarization, which made even basic practices like masking and vaccination feel like political statements, and it’s no wonder that people responded very differently to the same health threat. How could there be a single new normal when the old normal varied so much by race, class, gender, and age?

Despite the divisions, however, Jamieson says she’s optimistic that at least some of the knowledge gained during the pandemic will stick around, ready to be deployed if and when there’s a similar threat in the future. For many people, behaviors like masking and handwashing became habitual during the pandemic, and “you don’t unlearn habitual behaviors,” Jamieson says.

Although far fewer people wear masks now than at the height of the pandemic, Manabe says she’s noticed that people are now quicker to wear one when they have respiratory symptoms—a sign, she thinks, that people understand how pathogens spread and want to protect others.

“This kind of social altruism is really welcome, from my point of view,” Manabe says. “We’re trying to move forward as a society in the post-COVID era.”
We know where we have come these past some 36 months but like always we’re not all that clear to just exactly where we are as if it’s still yet to be determined.  

It seems like the World has not just turned upside down but actually changed its Shape.  The Caring Catalyst in us has either become more Caring or less of a Catalyst for a loving change.          .           .

D
id this pandemic actually really change us.        .        . Was it for the better;
was it for the worse or really, is it just business back to usual once again?  It all really not only determines how we normally become, but hopefully continue to be as a Caring Catalyst, that we always were, and still are, and always hope to be.    .    .
Or maybe that’s the real Pandemic, One with no vaccine or protected by the safest of Masks; The One that separates us; keeps us apart; sheltering out of place, forever out of place.          .           .

 

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KING OF A LAND http://thecaringcatalyst.com/king-of-a-land/ http://thecaringcatalyst.com/king-of-a-land/#comments Mon, 08 May 2023 11:00:40 +0000 http://thecaringcatalyst.com/?p=5888

I love this new song and video by Yusuf, formerly known as Cat Stevens.  .  .

If I was a king of a land I’d free every woman and man I’d let them go I’d set them free, to serve You

If I knew every fish in the sea And every bird in the tree I’d hear their call I’d hear them speak Your name

If I ran the schools of this world I’d teach every boy and girl I’d let them learn the truth I’d let them know Your glory

If I had stairs to the sky I’d raise my voice up there high I’d want the world to hear Your perfect words and thank You

If I had a mountain of gold I’d try to feed every poor soul And give them hope again And let them taste Your bounty

If I could reach every dream I still would search the unseen To find a way That leads us to Your mercy

If I was a king of a land I’d free every woman and man I’d let them go I’d set them free to serve You

The lyrics and the tune, well, it’s not the only thing
and maybe not as important as this
one single question:

IF YOU WERE A KING OF A LAND.     .     .
WHAT WOULD IT LOOK LIKE?
Psssssssssssssssssst:
It’s more in your HANDS
to choose
than you might ever imagine
.          .         .MAKE IT COUNT

(I don’t know how long you have been following and supporting THE CARING CATALYST BLOG; but I’m humbly grateful and congratulations to you; this is my 1100th post)

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ONE OUT OF ONE OF US http://thecaringcatalyst.com/one-out-of-one-of-us/ http://thecaringcatalyst.com/one-out-of-one-of-us/#respond Fri, 05 May 2023 11:00:10 +0000 http://thecaringcatalyst.com/?p=5886

Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, Reassuring

Best-Selling Author, Dies at 88

With a wide-reaching spiritual message in books like “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” he drew on his own experience with grief and doubt.

A black and white photo of a middle-aged Rabbi Kushner wearing thick-framed eye glasses and a suit and necktie. He holds a copy of his book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.”
Rabbi Harold S. Kushner in 1981, the year “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” was published. He wrote it after the death of his 14-year-old son. “Like a lot of children who feel they’re going to die soon, he was afraid he would be forgotten because he didn’t live long enough,” he said, adding, “I promised I’d tell his story.Credit…Neal Boenzi/The New York Times

Rabbi Harold Kushner, a practical public theologian whose best-selling books assured readers that bad things happen to good people because God is endowed with unlimited love and justice but exercises only finite power to prevent evil, died on Friday in Canton, Mass. He was 88.

His death, in hospice care, was confirmed by his daughter, Ariel Kushner Haber.

Several of Rabbi Kushner’s 14 books became best-sellers, resonating well beyond his Conservative Jewish congregation outside Boston and across religious boundaries in part because they had been inspired by his own experiences with grief, doubt and faith. One reviewer called his book “When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough” a “useful spiritual survival manual.”

Rabbi Kushner wrote “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” (1981) after the death of his son, Aaron. At age 3, just hours after the birth of the Kushners’ daughter, Aaron was diagnosed with a rare disease, progeria, in which the body ages rapidly.

When Aaron was 10 years old, he was in his 60s physiologically. He weighed only 25 pounds and was as tall as a three-year-old when he died in 1977 two days after his 14th birthday.

“Like a lot of children who feel they’re going to die soon, he was afraid he would be forgotten because he didn’t live long enough, not knowing parents never forget,” Rabbi Kushner told the alumni magazine Columbia College Today in 2008. “I promised I’d tell his story.”

The book was rejected by two publishers before it was accepted by Schocken Books. It catapulted to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list and transformed Rabbi Kushner into a popular author and commentator.

“It was my very first inkling of how much suffering was out there, all over the world, that religion was not coping with,” he told The Times in 1996.

His thesis, as he wrote in the book, was straightforward: “It becomes much easier to take God seriously as the source of moral values if we don’t hold Him responsible for all the unfair things that happen in the world.”

Rabbi Kushner also wrote:

“I don’t know why one person gets sick, and another does not, but I can only assume that some natural laws which we don’t understand are at work. I cannot believe that God ‘sends’ illness to a specific person for a specific reason. I don’t believe in a God who has a weekly quota of malignant tumors to distribute, and consults His computer to find out who deserves one most or who could handle it best

i“‘What did I do to deserve this?’ is an understandable outcry from a sick and suffering person, but it is really the wrong question. Being sick or being healthy is not a matter of what God decides that we deserve. The better question is, ‘If this has happened to me, what do I do now, and who is there to help me do it?’”

He was making the case that dark corners of the universe endure where God has not yet succeeded in making order out of chaos. “And chaos is evil; not wrong, not malevolent, but evil nonetheless,” he wrote, “because by causing tragedies at random, it prevents people from believing in God’s goodness.”

Unpersuaded, the journalist, critic and novelist Ron Rosenbaum, writing in The New York Times Magazine in 1995, reduced Rabbi Kushner’s thesis more dialectically: “diminishing God to something less than an Omnipotent Being — to something more like an eager cheerleader for good, but one decidedly on the sidelines in the struggle against evil.”

“In effect,” he wrote, “we need to join Him in rooting for good — our job is to help cheer Him up.”

Rabbi Kushner argued, however, that God was omnipotent as a wellspring of empathy and love.

Image

A color photo of an older Rabbi Kushner wearing wire-frame glasses, a light-gray shirt and a dark necktie. The altar of his synagogue and a colorful stained-glass window can be seen behind him.
Rabbi Kushner in 2012 in the sanctuary of Temple Israel in Natick, Mass., outside Boston. He led the congregation for 24 years while writing many of his books. Credit…Art Illman/Metro West Daily News, via Associated Press

Harold Samuel Kushner was born on April 3, 1935, to Julius and Sarah (Hartman) Kushner in the East New York section of Brooklyn. His mother was a homemaker. His father owned Playmore Publishing, which sold toys and children’s books, especially Bible stories, from a shop at Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street that he hoped his son would take over. Harold felt he lacked his father’s business sense.

He was raised in Brooklyn (the family moved to the Crown Heights section when he started elementary school), where he was a passionate Brooklyn Dodgers fan. After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in 1955 and a master’s there in 1960.

He had planned to major in psychology but switched to literature after studying under Prof. Mark Van Doren, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. On a lark, but armed with a solid religious upbringing, he enrolled in an evening program at the Jewish Theological Seminary. By his junior year at Columbia he had decided to become a rabbi.

After Columbia, he enrolled full-time at the seminary where he was ordained, graduated in 1960 and received his doctorate in 1972. He studied later at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He volunteered for two years in the Army’s Chaplain Corps at Fort Sill, Okla., where he became a first lieutenant. Returning to New York after his discharge, he served for four years as an assistant rabbi at Temple Israel in Great Neck, N.Y., on Long Island.

Rabbi Kushner married Suzette Estrada in 1960 and moved to Massachusetts, where he became rabbi of Temple Israel in Natick, a suburb of Boston, in 1966. He served as the congregational rabbi there for 24 years and remained a member of the congregation until he moved into a senior living residence in Canton in 2017.

His wife died in 2022. His brother, Paul, a rabbi in Bellmore and Merrick on Long Island, died in 2019. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by two grandchildren.

Among Rabbi Kushner’s other books are “How Good Do We Have to Be? A New Understanding of Guilt and Forgiveness” (1997), “Living a Life That Matters” (2001) and “The Lord Is My Shepherd: Healing Wisdom of the 23rd Psalm” (2003).

He also collaborated with the novelist Chaim Potok in editing “Etz Hayim: A Torah Commentary,” the official commentary of Conservative Jewish congregations, which was published by the Rabbinical Assembly and the Jewish Publication Society in 2001.

Rabbi Kushner often said he was amazed at the breadth of his readership across theological lines. In 1999, he was named clergyman of the year by the organization Religion in American Life. In 2007, the Jewish Book Council gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award.

In his books, other writings and on-air commentary, often as a radio and television talk show guest, he became a font of aphorisms embraced by clergy of all denominations. Among them were: “Forgiveness is a favor we do for ourselves, not a favor we do to the other party,” and, “If we hold our friends to a standard of perfection, or if they do that to us, we will end up far lonelier than we want to be.”

“People who pray for miracles usually don’t get miracles, any more than children who pray for bicycles, good grades, or good boyfriends get them as a result of praying,” he wrote. “  But people who pray for courage, for strength to bear the unbearable, for the grace to remember what they have left instead of what they have lost, very often find their prayer answered.”

He explained that his book “When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough” was intended to be “an examination of the question of why successful people don’t feel more satisfied with their lives.”

“Drawing on the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, it suggests that people need to feel that their lives make a difference to the world,” he wrote. “We are not afraid of dying so much as of not having lived.”

Psssssssssssssssssssssssssssst:

One out of One of us dies. . .even Rabbi’s  I first fell in love with this book even before I opened up the cover to the first page just by the Title: WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE  Did you catch it?  W H E N not IF   We live in a world today that not only defies DEATH, it actually believes it doesn’t exist; that a drug, a therapy, an intervention, even a prayer, eliminates the possibility of it in our lives.

Rabbi Kushner showed us that DEATH and GRIEF are real; they are not to be cured, but HEALING is more than possible.          .          .
NOW THAT IS A LITTLE HARSH.         .          .
T        R        U        T        H
SOLUTION TO LIFE AND DEATH:
LOVE
THE
DEEPEST

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A RESURRECTION MANIFESTO http://thecaringcatalyst.com/a-resurrection-manifesto/ http://thecaringcatalyst.com/a-resurrection-manifesto/#respond Fri, 21 Apr 2023 11:00:47 +0000 http://thecaringcatalyst.com/?p=5873

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

DEATH AWAKENINGS

I went to sleep
and never woke up
A-lay-me-down-to-sleep-can’t-stay-
awake-anymoreness-kind-of-sleep
To a not all-that-well-to-known-
kind-of-Hereness
And it wasn’t an Okaynessability
or an Alrightynessity
but an Is-ie-ness
A never-not-to-be be-unknowability
that makes any new day
A Death Awakening
An Infinity
not a new Reality
sleeplessly Forevernity 



DO MORE THAN LOOK.        .         .
SEE
NOTICE
RECOGNIZE
R  E  S  U  R  R  E  C  T

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