Of course, now it is raining.

[hermionesviolin]

I went to church. I thought about vowing to attend church every Sunday for the duration of Lent, but then i remembered that two of those Sundays include Spring Break, and really i make it to church almost every Sunday anyway.

I am really interested in this, though:

LENTEN STUDY GROUP: This year’s Lenten Study Group with Edwards Church will meet on Monday evenings, March 10 - April 14, 7:00 - 8:30 p.m., at Edwards. We will read a new book by Rita Nakishima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Proverbs of Ashes. These women reflect and critique the theology of atonement, suggesting that through emphasizing sacrifice on the cross we sanction violence, exacerbate its effects, bless silence about the abuse of human beings and hinder the process of recovery., We will read, reflect and discuss this book together. All are welcome to join. See Kelly or Peter to borrow or purchase one of the books.

I have decided that when Angel is a repeat i am indeed going to Radical Catholic Feminists.

In my brilliance i realized that the NYTimes Magazine probably had an article on keeping the Sabbath because Lent is coming up. There were some really nice lines in it (emphases mine).

The story told by the Sabbath is that of creation: we rest because God rested on the seventh day. What leads from God to humankind is the notion of imitatio Dei: the imitation of God. In other words, we rest in order to honor the divine in us, to remind ourselves that there is more to us than just what we do during the week.

Talk of God may disturb the secular, so they might prefer to frame the Sabbath in the more neutral context of aesthetics. The Sabbath provides two things essential to anyone who wishes to lift himself out of the banality of mercantile culture: time to contemplate and distance from everyday demands. The Sabbath is to the week what the line break is to poetic language. It is the silence that forces you to return to what came before to find its meaning.

...

Whenever I dream of living in a society with a greater respect for its Sabbatarian past -- a fantasy I entertain only with anxiety, since Sabbatarians have a long history of going too far -- I think of something two rabbis said. Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, best known for his tales of the golem, pointed out that the story of Creation was written in such a way that each day, each new creation, is seen as a step toward a completion that occurred on the Sabbath. What was Creation's climactic culmination? The act of stopping. Why should God have considered it so important to stop? Rabbi Elijah of Vilna put it this way: God stopped to show us that what we create becomes meaningful to us only once we stop creating it and start to think about why we did so. The implication is clear. We could let the world wind us up and set us to marching, like mechanical dolls that go and go until they fall over, because they don't have a mechanism that allows them to pause. But that would make us less than human. We have to remember to stop because we have to stop to remember.

Today’s New Moon in watery Pisces fills you with a quiet sense of wonder and beauty.
-BeliefNet

Life isn't a matter of milestones, but moments.
-Rose Kennedy