Spotlight Picture Quotes

Your job then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity. The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship—just so long as those prayers are sincere. I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. I think you are free to search for any metaphor whatsoever which will take you across the worldly divide whenever you need to be transported or comforted. It's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's the history of mankind's search for holiness. If humanity never evolved in its exploration of the divine, a lot of us would still be worshipping golden Egyptian statues of cats. And this evolution of religious thinking does involve a fair bit of cherry-picking. You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light. The Hopi Indians thought that the world's religions each contained one spiritual thread, and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads are finally woven together they will form a rope that will pull us out of this dark cycle of history and into the next realm. More contemporarily, the Dalai Lama has repeated the same idea, assuring his Western students repeatedly that they needn't become Tibetan Buddhists in order to be his pupils. He welcomes them to take whatever ideas they like out of Tibetan Buddhism and integrate these ideas into their own religious practices. Even in the most unlikely and conservative of places, you can find sometimes this glimmering idea that God might be bigger than our limited religious doctrines have taught us. In 1954, Pope Pius XI, of all people, sent some Vatican delegates on a trip to Libya with these written instructions: "Do NOT think that you are going among Infidels. Muslims attain salvation, too. The ways of Providence are infinite." But doesn't that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed ... infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pieces of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and compare them, a story about God would begin to emerge that resembles and includes everyone? And isn't our individual longing for transcendence all just part of this larger human search for divinity? Don't we each have the right to not stop seeking until we get as close to the source of wonder as possible? Even if it means coming to India and kissing trees in the moonlight for a while? That's me in the corner, in other words. That's me in the spotlight. Choosing my religion.

Church paid more than $3 billion to settle abuse complaints between 1950 and 2015. In Boston, the archdiocese paid $154 million to settle with 1,230 victims from 2002 through June 30, 2014, the most recent figures available. Between 2004 and 2015, twelve dioceses nationwide filed for bankruptcy protection.

That betrayal may not be a chargeable offense in a court of law. But there is no statute of limitations on its impact. And there should be no forgetting.

When the spotlight is on its too late to prepare. You'll only have two options: Sink or Swim

But with assimilation, with the educational and financial success of successive generations, the average Catholic’s need of the Church is not social or political, it’s moral and spiritual.

Irish and Italian kids were taught in Catholic schools that the Jews killed Jesus Christ. Such teachings encouraged anti-Semitism. Gangs of Catholic boys would seek revenge on Jewish kids.

... [O]ne of the most influential approaches to thinking about memory in recent years, known as connectionism, has abandoned the idea that a memory is an activated picture of a past event. Connectionist or neural network models are based on the principle that the brain stores engrams by increasing the strength of connections between different neurons that participate in encoding an experience. When we encode an experience, connections between active neurons become stronger, and this specific pattern of brain activity constitutes the engram. Later, as we try to remember the experience, a retrieval cue will induce another pattern of activity in the brain. If this pattern is similar enough to a previously encoded pattern, remembering will occur. The "memory" in a neural network model is not simply an activated engram, however. It is a unique pattern that emerges from the pooled contributions of the cue and the engram. A neural network combines information in the present environment with patterns that have been stored in the past, and the resulting mixture of the two is what the network remembers... When we remember, we complete a pattern with the best match available in memory; we do not shine a spotlight on a stored picture.

There needs to be a process of reintegration, whereby we return to the experiential world again. The parts, once seen, are subsumed again in the whole, as the musician's painful, conscious, fragmentation of the piece in practice is lost once again in the (now improved) performance. The part that has been under the spotlight is seen as part of a broader picture; what had to be conscious for a while becomes unconscious again; what needs to be implicit once again retires; the represented entity becomes once more present, and ‘lives’; and even language is given its final meaning by the right hemisphere's holistic pragmatics. So what begins in the right hemisphere's world is ‘sent’ to the left hemisphere's world for processing, but must be ‘returned’ to the world of the right hemisphere where a new synthesis can be made.

Of the allegations leveled at hundreds of living priests across the country, only a handful were liable for prosecution because the statute of limitations had expired in so many cases. But the inability of prosecutors to bring charges was hardly a vindication of the Church. Norfolk

Sipe called the priesthood a “homosocial culture. All the values within the culture are male, and the reason there has been such a tolerance across the board of sexual activity by priests or bishops is that there is a boys-will-be-boys atmosphere. It’s kind of a spiritual fraternity—like a college fraternity, but with a spiritual aura around it.

Cognitive tunneling and reactive thinking occur when our mental spotlights go from dim to bright in a split second. But if we are constantly telling ourselves stories and creating mental pictures, that beam never fully powers down. It’s always jumping around inside our heads. And, as a result, when it has to flare to life in the real world, we’re not blinded by its glare.

There’s no Martin Luther here,” he said, “and whether the Vatican pays attention, who knows?” It wouldn’t be easy. “We’re dealing with a medieval organization, an organization that represented authority to my grandparents and other immigrants. It was an organization that was respected because it educated them, it gave them a place in the New World, it gave them an identity.

If they were to eliminate all those who were homosexually oriented, the number would be so staggering that it would be like an atomic bomb. It would do the same damage to the Church’s operation,” Sipe said. “And it’s very much against the tradition of the Church. Many saints had a gay orientation. And many popes had gay orientations. Discriminating against orientation is not going to solve the problem.

Many pointed out that celibacy, although valued from the earliest days of Christianity and first mandated in the fourth century, was widely enforced only starting in the twelfth century. Defenders of celibacy have described it as a gift, a charism, a witness to sanctity. But critics have noted that celibacy was legislated to avoid the problem of Church property being passed along from a priest to his children.

But after Cardinal J. Francis Stafford, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Laity, told the New York Times that he expected celibacy to be discussed at the gathering of U.S. cardinals in Rome, the Pope quickly shot down that possibility. “The value of celibacy as a complete gift of self to the Lord and his Church must be carefully safeguarded,” the Pope told a group of visiting Nigerian bishops.

the proscription against married Roman Catholic priests is not doctrinal and could be changed if a pope were so inclined. “I have no problems with celibacy withering away,” said Archbishop Keith O’Brien, president of the Scottish Bishops’ Conference. “There is no theological problem with it ending. The loss of celibacy would give liberty to priests to exercise their God-given gift of love and sex rather than feeling they must be celibate all their lives.

I’ll never forget when I was a vocation director, and a college student asked me, ‘What do you do when you get an urge?’ as if no one else would control it but a priest,” Burns said. “Everyone is called to holiness, particularly in their sexual life. How do we manage our sexual desires? By being people of integrity, with respect for other people’s sexuality, and for our own sexuality. Celibacy is a gift we give, in order to live out a service of life for others. It is a call from God. We are meant to be celibate men, working to build a Kingdom, here and now.

Medeiros managed to alienate the heart of the archdiocese, the mostly Irish and Italian working class of Boston, by ordering that any student suspected of being part of the “white flight” to avoid court-ordered desegregation of the city’s public schools was not to be allowed into Catholic schools. Medeiros’s directive was largely ignored. The archdiocese’s schools swelled in numbers, and many Boston Catholics swelled in resentment, seeing Medeiros as unfairly judging them as racist when many simply wanted to avoid the chaos of busing that no one in the wealthy suburbs had to endure. Thomas

priestly requirement for celibacy—a life without sexual activity of any kind, including masturbation—is not an ancillary part of the job. “The message pretty much is that celibacy is an absolute requirement,” said King. “Everyone has urges. Married people have the same struggles fundamentally. They get to have sex, but they don’t get to have sex with everybody else and still be faithful to their commitment. There isn’t a person alive who isn’t a sexual human being. But we have to manage it in healthy ways. In many ways, married people struggle with this as much as we do. Celibacy is a gift, but it’s not something that most people are cut out for.

When Italians and then Poles and other Eastern Europeans followed the Irish, they became part of an American Catholic Church that was, in essence, an Irish church. As Boston Globe reporter Maureen Dezell noted in her book Irish America: Coming into Clover, 90 percent of men enrolled in American seminaries in the latter half of the nineteenth century had Irish names, while by 1900 three quarters of the American Catholic hierarchy was Irish. (Even by the 1990s, when Hispanics emerged as the biggest ethnic group in the American Catholic Church, and the Irish made up only 15 percent of the laity, a third of the priests and half of the American bishops were of Irish descent.)

The deference that politicians, police, and prosecutors showed the Catholic Church (to which most of them belonged) mirrored a deference shown in the wider society. But the extent of the sexual abuse that spilled out after the Geoghan case, especially the Church’s efforts to buy the silence of the victims, shook to the core even the most devout Catholics in law enforcement and politics. A culture of deference that had taken more than a century to evolve seemed to erode in a matter of weeks. In other parts of the United States, there was a similar change in the way secular power viewed Church authorities. On Long Island, in Cincinnati, and in Philadelphia, district attorneys convened grand juries to investigate the role Church officials may have played in the scandal. Many

the setting in the rectory was stunning. We sat down to a fully set table, with fine china and crisp, white linen. Whenever the monsignor wanted anything, he would ring a little silver bell and this old housekeeper would come shuffling in, like a servant. Every time I tried to engage the monsignor in some serious discussion, he would pick up that bell and ring it, and the little old woman would come in to deal with his every whim. And so I’m sitting there, not only stunned at the level, the position in life, that they held themselves at, but how we in the Church allowed them to do this, that no one was saying, ‘Hey, this is wrong. These guys shouldn’t be living like this while the nuns don’t have health insurance.’ But what I realized that day, as the monsignor kept ringing that bell, was how distant, how aloof, how detached the hierarchy of the Church had become. They lived separate lives, completely disconnected from the lives of the laity, and we had allowed it to happen.” Eventually,

As the scandal spread and gained momentum, Cardinal Law found himself on the cover of Newsweek, and the Church in crisis became grist for the echo chamber of talk radio and all-news cable stations. The image of TV reporters doing live shots from outside klieg-lit churches and rectories became a staple of the eleven o’clock news. Confidentiality deals, designed to contain the Church’s scandal and maintain privacy for embarrassed victims, began to evaporate as those who had been attacked learned that the priests who had assaulted them had been put in positions where they could attack others too. There were stories about clergy sex abuse in virtually every state in the Union. The scandal reached Ireland, Mexico, Austria, France, Chile, Australia, and Poland, the homeland of the Pope. A poll done for the Washington Post, ABC News, and Beliefnet.com showed that a growing majority of Catholics were critical of the way their Church was handling the crisis. Seven in ten called it a major problem that demanded immediate attention. Hidden for so long, the financial price of the Church’s negligence was astonishing. At least two dioceses said they had been pushed to the brink of bankruptcy after being abandoned by their insurance companies. In the past twenty years, according to some estimates, the cost to pay legal settlements to those victimized by the clergy was as much as $1.3 billion. Now the meter was running faster. Hundreds of people with fresh charges of abuse began to contact lawyers. By April 2002, Cardinal Law was under siege and in seclusion in his mansion in Boston, where he was heckled by protesters, satirized by cartoonists, lampooned by late-night comics, and marginalized by a wide majority of his congregation that simply wanted him out. In mid-April, Law secretly flew to Rome, where he discussed resigning with the Pope.

You were taught that even when the charism of celibacy and chastity is present and embraced, the attractions, the impulses, the desires will still be present. So the first thing you need to do is be aware that you are a human being, and no matter how saintly or holy you are, you will never remove yourself from those passions. But the idea was making prudent choices. You just walk away. Celibacy is a radical call, and you’ve made a decision not to act on your desire.” Today, seminaries say they screen applicants rigorously. In Boston, for example, a young man must begin conversations with the vocations director a year before applying for admissions, and then the application process takes at least four months. Most seminaries require that applicants be celibate for as long as five years before starting the program, just to test out the practice, and students are expected to remain celibate throughout seminary as they continue to discern whether they are cut out to lead the sexless life of an ordained priest. Some seminaries screen out applicants who say they are sexually attracted to other men, but most do not, arguing that there is no evidence linking sexual orientation to one’s ability to lead a celibate life. The seminaries attempt to weed out potential child abusers, running federal and local criminal background checks, but there is currently no psychological test that can accurately predict whether a man who has never sexually abused a child is likely to do so in the future. So seminary officials say that in the screening process, and throughout seminary training, they are alert to any sign that a man is not forming normal relationships with adults, or seems abnormally interested in children. Many potential applicants are turned away from seminaries, and every year some students are forced out. “Just because there’s a shortage doesn’t mean we should lessen our standards,” said Rev. Edward J. Burns,

First off, demon, let’s get one thing straight. I. Am. Not. Weak. What you saw last night was another fucking subclause of Lucifer’s that makes me of the same strength physically and magically as when I died, but only when on the mortal plane in the presence of the souls I damned. Any other time, I am not to be messed with.” “If you’re so bad ass, how come I never heard of you?” “I prefer to stay out of the spotlight, unlike some sorceress’s I know,” she said with a smile as she came to stop in front of him. “But I do have a nickname.” “Hot on a stick?” “No.” “Spanks with magic?” “Most definitely not.” “I know, you must be the famous BJ Swallows.” “I am going to hurt you.” “I was right?” “No. And your made up names are just pissing me off.” “Made up? I’ll have you know those monikers are just a few of the more famous witch ones I know. Of course, I don’t know if their magical abilities extend beyond the pole they dance on, but still, they’re very well known in my circles.” “Why am I not surprised?” “Are you going to tell what your name is then? ‘Cause I’m gonna wager it isn’t Magical Pie.” He really needed to learn how to keep certain thoughts to himself, an easy thing to promise with the iron grip she had on his balls. Not exactly how he pictured their first time touching. She twisted. He winced. “Let this be a reminder not to fuck with me. And just so you know, while my nickname is the Blood Witch, my true title is Satan’s Assistant.” She was the one who had all the damned souls trembling? Hot damn. “I have heard of you.” “Good, then you know what I can do. And might I add it hurts.” She leaned up on tiptoe as she said it, her lips so close to his. But Ysabel wasn’t the only one with surprises. And truly, she’d pushed the boundaries of temptation too far. He snapped her magic binding and wrapped his arms around her, bringing her flush against his chest. “Did I mention, apart from ability with fire, I can unravel several forms of magic?” Then he kissed her, and by all the coals in the furnace of Hell, he’d never burned hotter.

People like Darlene who are particularly good at managing their attention tend to share certain characteristics. One is a propensity to create pictures in their minds of what they expect to see. These people tell themselves stories about what’s going on as it occurs. They narrate their own experiences within their heads. They are more likely to answer questions with anecdotes rather than simple responses. They say when they daydream, they’re often imagining future conversations. They visualize their days with more specificity than the rest of us do. Psychologists have a phrase for this kind of habitual forecasting: “creating mental models.” Understanding how people build mental models has become one of the most important topics in cognitive psychology. All people rely on mental models to some degree. We all tell ourselves stories about how the world works, whether we realize we’re doing it or not. But some of us build more robust models than others. We envision the conversations we’re going to have with more specificity, and imagine what we are going to do later that day in greater detail. As a result, we’re better at choosing where to focus and what to ignore. The secret of people like Darlene is that they are in the habit of telling themselves stories all the time. They engage in constant forecasting. They daydream about the future and then, when life clashes with their imagination, their attention gets snagged. That helps explain why Darlene noticed the sick baby. She was in the habit of imagining what the babies in her unit ought to look like. Then, when she glanced over and the bloody Band-Aid, distended belly, and mottled skin didn’t match the image in her mind, the spotlight in her head swung toward the child’s bassinet. Cognitive tunneling and reactive thinking occur when our mental spotlights go from dim to bright in a split second. But if we are constantly telling ourselves stories and creating mental pictures, that beam never fully powers down. It’s always jumping around inside our heads. And, as a result, when it has to flare to life in the real world, we’re not blinded by its glare.

Some raised a more practical concern, arguing that if Rome really wanted to empty seminaries of gay men—a proposal under consideration at the Vatican—it would face more empty rectories and more barren altars. Some Church experts estimate that from 30 percent to fully one half of the forty-five thousand U.S. priests are gay. “If they were to eliminate all those who were homosexually oriented, the number would be so staggering that it would be like an atomic bomb. It would do the same damage to the Church’s operation,” Sipe said. “And it’s very much against the tradition of the Church. Many saints had a gay orientation. And many popes had gay orientations. Discriminating against orientation is not going to solve the problem.” But the issue was now on the table. At the Vatican meeting, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory of Belleville, Illinois, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told reporters that he was concerned about the increasing number of gays in the priesthood. “One of the difficulties we do face in seminary life or recruitment is when there does exist a homosexual atmosphere or dynamic that makes heterosexual men think twice” about joining the priesthood for fear that they’ll be harassed. “It is an ongoing struggle. It is most importantly a struggle to make sure that the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men [and] that the candidates that we receive are healthy in every possible way—psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually.” And Cardinal Adam J. Maida of Detroit argued that clergy sexual abuse is “not truly a pedophilia-type problem but a homosexual-type problem.… We have to look at this homosexual element as it exists, to what extent it is operative in our seminaries and our priesthood and how to address it.” Bishops need to “cope with and address” the extent of a homosexual presence in Catholic seminaries, he said. Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua of Philadelphia said he wouldn’t let gay men become priests. “We feel that a person who is homosexually oriented is not a suitable candidate for the priesthood even if he has never committed any homosexual act,” he said.

What you did to us—and to me specifically—was wrong, and you had no right to do that.’” The priest stared unblinkingly into Blanchette’s eyes, waiting but unprepared for what came next. “‘Having said that, it brings me to the real reason I’ve come here. The real reason I’ve come here is to ask you to forgive me for the hatred and resentment that I have felt toward you for the last twenty-five years.’ When I said that, he stood up, and in what I would describe as a demonic voice, he said, ‘Why are you asking me to forgive you?’ And through tears I said, ‘Because the Bible tells me to love my enemies and to pray for those who persecute me.’” Blanchette said Birmingham collapsed as if he’d been punched in the chest. The priest dissolved into tears, and soon Blanchette too was crying. Blanchette began to take his leave but asked Birmingham if he could visit again. The priest explained that he was under tight restrictions at the rectory. He said he had been to a residential treatment center in Connecticut, and he returned there once a month. He was not allowed to leave the grounds except in the company of an adult. Blanchette would not see the priest again until Tuesday, April 18, 1989, just hours before his death. Blanchette found his molester at Symmes Hospital in Arlington and discovered the priest—once robust and 215 pounds—was now an eighty-pound skeleton with skin. Morphine dripped into an IV in his arm. Oxygen was fed by a tube into his nostrils. His hair had been claimed by chemotherapy. The priest sat in a padded chair by his bed. His breathing was labored. “I knelt down next to him and held his hand and began to pray. And as I did, he opened his eyes. I said, ‘Father Birmingham, it’s Tommy Blanchette from Sudbury.’” He greeted Blanchette with a raspy and barely audible, “Hi. How are ya?” “I said, ‘Is it all right if I pray for you?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And I began to pray, ‘Dear Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, I ask you to heal Father Birmingham’s body, mind, and soul.’ I put my hand over his heart and said, ‘Father, forgive him all his sins.’” Blanchette helped Birmingham into bed. It was about 10 P.M. He died the next morning.

I looked around and realized we were headed down a different road than Marlboro Man would normally take. “I have to give you your wedding present,” Marlboro Man said before I could ask where we were going. “I can’t wait a month before I give it to you.” Butterflies fluttered in my stomach. “But…,” I stammered. “I haven’t gotten yours yet.” Marlboro Man clasped my hand, continuing to look forward at the road. “Yes you have,” he said, bringing my hand to his lips and turning me to a pool of melted butter right in his big Ford truck. We wound through several curves in the road, and I tried to discern whether I’d been there before. My sense of direction was lousy; everything looked the same to me. Finally, just as the sun was dipping below the horizon, we came upon an old barn. Marlboro Man pulled up beside it and parked. Confused, I looked around. He got me a barn? “What…what are we doing here?” I asked. Marlboro Man didn’t answer. Instead, he just turned off the pickup, turned to me…and smiled. “What is it?” I asked as Marlboro Man and I exited the pickup and walked toward the barn. “You’ll see,” he replied. He definitely had something up his sleeve. I was nervous. I always hated opening gifts in front of the person who gave them to me. It made me uncomfortable, as if I were sitting in a dark room with a huge spotlight shining on my head. I squirmed with discomfort. I wanted to turn and run away. Hide in his pickup. Hide in the pasture. Lie low for a few weeks. I didn’t want a wedding present. I was weird that way. “But…but…,” I said, trying to back out. “But I don’t have your wedding present yet.” As if anything would have derailed him at that point. “Don’t worry about that,” Marlboro Man replied, hugging me around the waist as we walked. He smelled so good, and I inhaled deeply. “Besides, we can share this one.” That’s strange, I thought. Any fleeting ideas I’d had that he’d be giving me a shiny bracelet or sparkly necklace or other bauble suddenly seemed far-fetched. How could he and I share the same tennis bracelet? Maybe he got me one of those two-necklace sets, the ones with the halved hearts, I thought, and he’ll wear one half and I’ll wear the other. I couldn’t exactly picture it, but Marlboro Man had never been above surprising me. Then again, we were walking toward a barn.

Ava rolled onto her side to get a better view of Luke. He stood at the dresser, his back to her, his lower half wrapped in a towel. The only light came from the cracked bathroom door, a thin spotlight splitting his shoulder blades. "I'm watching you," she teased. She couldn't see his face, but she could picture it breaking into a lazy grin. Luke smiled a lot. And she like making him smile. could it really be that easy--that simple and straightforward, just as he'd promised her? "In that case, let me give you something to look at." The towel dropped to his feet, pooling without a sound.

Idling the dinghy, bringing it quietly in closer and closer to the croc, Steve would finally make his move. He’d creep to the front of the boat and hold the spotlight until the last moment. Then he would leap into the water. Grabbing the crocodile around the scruff of the neck, he would secure its tail between his legs and wrap his body around the thrashing creature. Crocodiles are amazingly strong in the water. Even a six-foot-long subadult would easily take Steve to the bottom of the river, rolling and fighting, trying to dislodge him by scraping against the rocks and snags at the bottom of the river. But Steve would hang on. He knew he could push off the bottom, reach the surface for air, flip the crocodile into his dinghy, and pin the snapping animal down. “Piece of cake,” he said. That was the most incredible story I had ever heard. And Steve was the most incredible man I had ever seen--catching crocodiles by hand to save their lives? This was just unreal. I had an overwhelming sensation. I wanted to build a big campfire, sit down with Steve next to it, and hear his stories all night long. I didn’t want them to ever end. But eventually the tour was over, and I felt I just had to talk to this man. Steve had a broad, easy smile and the biggest hands I had ever seen. I could tell by his stature and stride that he was accustomed to hard work. I saw a series of small scars on the sides of his face and down his arms. He came up and, with a broad Australian accent, said, “G’day, mate.” Uh-oh, I thought. I’m in trouble. I’d never, ever believed in love at first sight. But I had the strangest, most overwhelming feeling that it was destiny that took me into that little wildlife park that day. Steve started talking to me as if we’d known each other all our lives. I interrupted only to have my friend Lori take a picture of us, and the moment I first met Steve was forever captured. I told him about my wildlife rescue work with cougars in Oregon. He told me about his work with crocodiles. The tour was long over, and the zoo was about to close, but we kept talking. Finally I could hear Lori honking her horn in the car park. “I have to go,” I said to Steve, managing a grim smile. I felt a connection as I never had before, and I was about to leave, never to see him again. “Why do you love cougars so much?” he asked, walking me toward the park’s front gate. I had to think for a beat. There were many reasons. “I think it’s how they can actually kill with their mouths,” I finally said. “They can conquer an animal several times their size, grab it in their jaws, and kill it instantly by snapping its neck.” Steve grinned. I hadn’t realized how similar we really were. “That’s what I love about crocodiles,” he said. “They are the most powerful apex predators.” Apex predators. Meaning both cougars and crocs were at the top of the food chain. On opposite sides of the world, this man and I had somehow formed the same interest, the same passion. At the zoo entrance I could see Lori and her friends in the car, anxious to get going back to Brisbane. “Call the zoo if you’re ever here again,” Steve said. “I’d really like to see you again.” Could it be that he felt the same way I did? As we drove back to Brisbane, I was quiet, contemplative. I had no idea how I would accomplish it, but I was determined to figure out a way to see him. The next weekend, Lori was going diving with a friend, and I took a chance and called Steve. “What do you reckon, could I come back for the weekend?” I asked. “Absolutely. I’ll take care of everything,” came Steve’s reply.

guests of the Palace, almost all of them Hollywood actors, European royalty, music greats, or the superrich and powerful. He found it all of only mild interest, although he did note that novelist Anne Rice’s picture was above and in a much more prominent position than Brigitte Bardot’s. The doctor entered a ballroom set up for a banquet and continued along with the throng out onto a terrace that overlooked Avenida Atlântica, the beach, and the ocean. Night had fallen. Across the street, under spotlights, men were playing beach volleyball. There

Now, the tourists clustered in groups, whispering over well-worn copies of A Tradition of Tragedy. The recent bestseller had exposed the death tournament and Ilvernath’s surviving vein of high magick…and had catapulted their remote city into the international spotlight. “I didn’t believe the Blood Moon was actually scarlet,” Alistair overheard one of them whispering. “I thought it was just a name.” “The tournament is a high magick curse. High magick is always red,” another answered. “Or maybe,” drawled a third voice. “It’s called the Blood Moon because a bunch of kids spend three months murdering each other under it. Ever think of that?” Alistair and Hendry avoided the tourists as they shuffled through the pub. “Do you think Grandma will start getting fan mail?” asked Hendry, snickering. “I heard there’s a photograph of our whole family in the first chapter. I hope I look good.” “Sorry to break it to you, but that picture is from ten years ago,” Alistair said flatly. Hendry looked momentarily disappointed, then delighted. “So the entire world knows you had a bowl cut?” Alistair rolled his eyes and headed to the bar.

Dreambeast If you have a dream that won’t go away that gnaws at your toes with each waking day That sings beneath notes and swirls between stars From lines in great books it thrashes and gnarls From cinema screens it leaps along light and twists your insides and stalks you at night Then give it attention Tame that wild dream It’s there for a reason yet to be seen A beast of the future only you own Don't let it escape into the unknown Train it with care and boost its esteem Spotlight it brightly so it can be seen Or dreams can turn nasty tire and groan Diminishing creatures if left all alone The beast never dies just shrinks and goes cold A lone, solemn dream growing weary and old Fight the dream-bruisers wish-batterers too and splatterers of hope who'll be waiting for you Feel the roar rumble Hear every shout It’s your beast of a dream just dying to get out

he would single out his prey, the needy children of poor, single mothers—struggling women who were thrilled to have a man in their sons’ lives, especially a priest.

to protect the Church’s reputation at the expense of children.” Pirro

Some Church experts estimate that from 30 percent to fully one half of the forty-five thousand U.S. priests are gay.

So how could Walter Brennan possibly dominate Gary Cooper? It would be virtually unheard of in Hollywood to reverse the natural order of things and have a character actor outshine the star. Who would want to do that? What director or producer would take such a risk? It just wasn’t done, unless that character actor possessed that rare quality that could translate to leading roles. Even then, why build a picture around Brennan? As Walter Brennan told columnist Sheilah Graham, “My part is such that it cannot help but steal the spotlight.

I remember reading the first Spotlight reports and just getting furious,” recalled Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly, the state’s top prosecutor. “I found myself yelling out loud, ‘My God, this is about children!

For the investigative staff of the Globe, however, Law’s 2001 court filing was a turning point: a story about a priest who was accused of molesting children was now a story about a bishop who protected that priest.

today married men can be ordained as Eastern Catholic priests and that there are even a handful of married men serving as Roman Catholic priests—those who were ordained as priests by the Anglican Church but then chose to enter the Catholic Church.

unhappy Catholics should just become Protestants.

People expect the guy to be drooling, lurking around in a trench coat. But when I started doing these cases, it became obvious that most abusers are caretakers, respectable people who use that respectability as a cover to carry out their abuse.

more than fifteen hundred priests sexually abused many thousands of minors who had been entrusted to their care.

You have single men, moving from parish to parish, with no family of their own. It was a formula for disaster.” Like

a despicable human being.” Judge

It focused on those unexpected details and triggered Darlene’s sense of alarm. The other nurse, in contrast, didn’t have a strong picture in her head of what she expected to see, and so her spotlight focused on the most obvious details: The baby was eating. Her heartbeat was strong. She wasn’t crying. The other nurse was distracted by the information that was easiest to grasp. People

As described in Jason Berry’s richly detailed 1992 book, Lead Us Not into Temptation, what they learned from Church leaders left them stunned:

I cannot imagine what is going through the mind of a cardinal who lets priests who change wine and bread into the Eucharist use those same hands to molest children,

It isn’t just the cardinal; it’s the way we operate,” Bullock said. “There are structural issues. What is it that has made us priests be so supine, and unwilling to stand up and take risks? To speak out when something awful is happening, and not to cover up? To name things for what they are? The leadership has not protected children, and we have not protected children.

In the past fifteen years, an estimated fifteen hundred American priests have faced allegations of sexual abuse, according to Jason Berry, the reporter who documented Gilbert Gauthé’s abuses and the author of Lead Us Not into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children, an authoritative early examination of the issue.

The Vatican largely rejected the findings of the UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child, arguing that while it had ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child it was responsible for enforcement only within Vatican City, not among its denominations globally.

Financial settlements with victims of abuse have put an increasing strain on Church finances. Nationally, the Church paid more than $3 billion to settle abuse complaints between 1950 and 2015. In Boston, the archdiocese paid $154 million to settle with 1,230 victims from 2002 through June 30, 2014, the most recent figures available. Between 2004 and 2015, twelve dioceses nationwide filed for bankruptcy protection.

All over the country, bishops broomed out of churches those priests who had once been accused of misconduct. Numerous bishops, including Cardinal Law, began voluntarily turning over to prosecutors the names of dozens of priests accused of abuse. In many states, such a step was already mandatory; others, including Massachusetts and Colorado, were poised to make it so. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops agreed to devote its June 2002 meeting, in Dallas, to the issue of clergy sexual abuse and was ready for the first time to approve mandatory rules for all 194 dioceses in the United States, a step the bishops’ conference had resisted for nearly two decades. The new requirements would likely insist that all priests who sexually abuse minors be removed from ministry and be reported to prosecutors, that dioceses reach out to victims, and that Church workers be trained to recognize and report indications that a child might have been harmed.

As Boston Globe reporter Maureen Dezell noted in her book Irish America: Coming into Clover, 90 percent of men enrolled in American seminaries in the latter half of the nineteenth century had Irish names, while by 1900 three quarters of the American Catholic hierarchy was Irish.

celibacy was legislated to avoid the problem of Church property being passed along from a priest to his children.

Rev. Robert J. Carr, parochial vicar of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, where Law says Mass whenever he is in town, reported getting catcalls from construction workers as he walked back to his rectory after celebrating Mass for prisoners at the Nashua Street Jail. Rev. Robert Bowers, the Charlestown pastor, recalled a Halloween party at which someone came dressed as a pedophile priest. “Now, when you look out at an audience, it crosses your mind, ‘What do they think of me?’” said Monsignor Peter V. Conley, pastor of St. Jude’s Church in Norfolk, a suburb southwest of Boston. “I know a priest who stood outside of his rectory and a car slowed down and a guy yelled out, ‘Hey, pedophile!’ He was in a funk for days.

In May, another UN panel, the Committee against Torture, criticized the Vatican anew—for failing to report accused priests to police, and for not ensuring compensation for victims. The committee, monitoring Rome’s compliance with an international treaty prohibiting torture, found that the sexual abuse of victims by priests itself amounted to torture. It praised the guidelines adopted by the Church in 2011 instructing its hierarchy to cooperate with civil authorities, but said it was concerned that the Vatican continued to “resist the principle of mandatory reporting.

They failed to contact victims. They left responsibility for follow-up to the priest’s diocese. In short, the psychiatrists saw the Church as their boss. And, Schoener concluded, they wanted the boss to like them.

They include only those complaints that the conference deemed “not implausible” or “credible,” and none for 2003, the year after the scandal exploded in Boston and throughout the country. In Boston, during the same period, 249 priests were accused of sexual abuse by 1,476 people, according to BishopAccountability.org.

Pope John Paul II, in his Easter 2002 letter, decried “the sins of some of our brothers.” In April he summoned the U.S. cardinals to the Vatican for an emergency meeting, where he called the sexual abuse of children by priests a “crime.” AFP

For many Catholics, the apparent coddling of priests who had molested minors stood in sharp contrast with the way they themselves had been treated as kids, threatened with eternal damnation for minor sins.

Even worse, many saw evidence of astonishing hypocrisy. A Church that kept paychecks flowing to priests who raped children but cut off benefits to priests who married adult women. A Church that in many cases failed to oust priests who touched the genitals of little boys, violating their bodies and their souls, but that in 2000 fired and evicted the seventy-two-year-old baptizing nun, Jeannette Normandin, for touching water to the forehead of a baby.

How can I be ? Proud of my struggle, but having nothing to show. Guns , petrol, tires , gas, everything blows Now I am standing on top of Museum building burned into ashes. It Is smoke in the mirrors. Look at our Repercussions. Our legacy, our reputation. Canvas and portraits of arrogance Lies, deception, fractions results of politicians Insurrection results of a failed mission Blood used to paint our image Poor quality in this fotos, because nothing changed. You might think it is the 80’s, because you can see tribalism and racism. A perfect black and white picture. Sound of freedom turned into sound of violence, Ambulance, Police siren , people crying and dying Hunger and poverty used as tourists attraction They say look more poorer, so we can get more donation. I am getting global media coverage, Because I am queuing and walking long distance for food, Not because we are getting killed , abused and treated unfairly. They look at me and say Africa is starving Took my pics , post them on social media. Now they are laughing. Being born with a price tag, that says you not worth it, because your black. Government looted everything from the poor Now the poor are looting the government. It is like a stolen movie. Those who started it all and who are behind it, are not getting their credit and spotlight . If we change looting to colonization , then they would be heroes. Not sure whether to say goodbye or good night Because when you're in Phoenix , this might be your last night. 

Attention is a yin to the yang in focus. Attention (mindfulness) and attention (focus) work together to provide a true, rounded experience of both being centered on the task at hand (whatever it may be), as well as being fully aware of, and responsive to, the many facets of the moment in which you are. In most forms of meditation you must demonstrate a certain level of concentration as well as free mind. What You’ll Get Out of It You must expand your mind and embrace the fullness of the moment in which you are. We might compare our sensitivity to light: When we concentrate on something, we could say we're "shining a spotlight" about it. Instead of shining a spotlight on one particular thing, as we exercise transparent consciousness, we may suggest that we encourage our awareness to "shine" in every direction around us, like the glow of a candle flame. This light of consciousness surrounding us will be referred to as our area of knowledge. The response area is the total sum of all the sensory input. The practice of open consciousness is an experiment of encouraging the senses to feel the fullness of the present moment, being mindful of even the subtleties you would usually forget, neglect or completely miss, such as the warmth of the air around you or the occasional crackling of floorboards. When we just accept and allow things to be as they are, we disengage instinctively from the urges that would try to control or change things. In passivity or indifference, this isn't a custom–quite the contrary. This is an exercise of opening your mind and encouraging you to obtain all the knowledge you can potentially before you make any moves or take any action. Remember that the term makes. We don't push ourselves to pick up on sensory input; perception simply grows from a state of quiet, comfortable allowing. We have a biological tendency to "brace for impact" when we are resistant to something that is happening, which means we withdraw and tighten up the muscles in our body. The subconscious then automatically begins to think all the way things could or ought to be different from what they are. When we're open to something, we seem to be more enthusiastic about the unexpected, and even more willing to embrace, leaving the body more at ease. It helps us to be more open to learning what we're doing and to learn. With an open mind we strive to see more options on issues and multiple perspectives. Open Awareness Meditation will strengthen the ability to see things as they really are and embrace them for what they are. By practicing Open Awareness Meditation, you will cultivate: Discernment Open Awareness Meditation allows us to better appreciate the moment we are at. The more we know the more educated our choices can be in any situation. Through cultivating conscious awareness, we develop discernment by being more sensitive to the larger picture, and how it is connected to the present moment.

Later that morning, Irena's official Instagram posted a picture of Irena onstage, wearing a red dress, strappy heels, and an orange shawl that she spread out like wings. She was standing in front of a spotlight, and her outline glowed, and in its fineness, the image of her shawl was made up almost exclusively of light.

In a world becoming ever more complex with each new geographic and scientific discovery, the ideal cabinet of curiosities constituted an attempt to produce an overall picture of this world, the cosmos. Within its limited space, the cabinet represented a microcosm, reproducing the general picture, the macrocosm, on a reduced scale. The early cabinets of curiosities thereby spotlighted areas on the fringes of the known world.

General lighting / cleaning lighting: A ceiling lamp or light fixture that spreads ambient light over the whole room. Work lighting / task lighting: A reading lamp by the armchair or sofa; lighting over work surfaces in the kitchen; a desk lamp. Spot lighting: Accent lighting or spotlights directed at a wall of pictures, a work of art, a bookcase, or shadow play on the wall. Atmospheric lighting / decorative lighting: Mood lighting, dimmable small lamps, string lights, candles.

Fowl Ceiling lights Flush lights Track lighting Recessed lighting Pendant lamps Something in Between Floor and reading lamps Table lamps on taller bureaus and sideboards Clamp spotlights on the bookcase Picture lights Spotlights with the light directed at walls or works of art Pendant window lamps Fish Low lamps standing on the windowsill Candles and votives on the side tables Low floor lamps Spotlights inset in the floor LED strings on the baseboards or in window recesses

They will watch how you treat other employees; who gets the "good" schedule and who goes on break first. They will watch how you handle yourself in times of stress. They will evaluate your character when the rules are disobeyed. They will wait to see what you do when they feel they are deserving of recognition or when they have screwed up. They will see if you jump in and help when it's busy or if you hide in the office? So yeah, they are watching. This is why acting with integrity, building trust, doing the right thing, being honest, and accepting the role of role model is critical. When you know people are watching, you tend to be more aware of what you are doing. If you need just one more reason to do the right things, think about this. Picture yourself on the witness stand in a courtroom. A lawyer is asking you to defend some specific actions you took as a leader. Can you defend yourself? Can you justify what you did and convince a jury of your peers, beyond a reasonable doubt, that what you did was right and just? If the lawyer brought up other witnesses to corroborate your story, would they? Are you confident that your actions were observed and judged by others as right and just? It's one thing for you to say it, even to believe it. It's quite another for someone else to back you up. That's a pretty high standard to hold yourself to, but that's the job of a leader. You no longer get to wallow in anonymity. You are front and center, in the spotlight, and it's showtime.

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