Spirituality

I was sitting at my prayer desk the other night, two flickering candles in front of me, letting my mind wander as I looked at the small framed icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help that once belonged to my grandmother. It’s an inexpensive framed image, one that she must have had since the 1960s at least, but in the candlelight it shone like pure gold. And as I looked at it – a picture I see every single day -- I noticed something. For the first time, I realized that Mary and Jesus were holding hands.

That moved me.

One of Jesus’ favorite lines is “Peace be with you.” He says it again and again in scripture. Actually, this phrase is uttered 14 times by the Lord in the Gospels. We say it every Sunday to one another as we shake, hug or wave across the aisle. What does it mean?

Unless you have been living in absolute isolation for the past year, you know about the “fiscal cliff.” The term is popular shorthand for the financial conundrum that the U.S. government faced at the end of 2012, when the Budget Control Act of 2011 was scheduled to take effect. Hyped incessantly by the media, the so-called fiscal cliff was purported to be an economic Armageddon whose effects would be grave and far-reaching.