I discovered this site and though it was a good way to help friends and family pray with and for me.

Pray for Suzanne

Today Joses, Rich, Charles and I brainstormed... Looking for learning strategies to serve.

They'll be leading an "English Club" for 300 students in a nearby village, Andong. Ages 5 to 25 possibly.

Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. for six weeks. 18 hours in total.

3 Rooms which hold about 50 each... and a playing field and a covered stage.

This is a vulnerable community as it is made up largely of families who were moved away from the valuable riverfront properties and out to the countryside. Displaced about a 3 hour walk from everything familiar. They are one of the many under-served groups in Cambodia.

Yet Action Cambodia is looking for ways to serve and this English Club is one of them. A head start in English can make a difference for a young learner.

It's my prayer that English might be the language of problem-solving in Cambodia.

Larry Ferlazzo has some of the more innovative ways to server English Language Learners. His NYT article is brilliant for so many reasons... but I keenly appreciate how "story-telling" is featured.

I believe we each bring aspects of Truth to the Table of the Common Good. Our stories are what holds this Truth. I have so much to learn from others and much to share. Together we can make positive changes for many.

We looked at ways of leveling/teaching the students:
100 younger - ABCs, pronunciation, vocabulary
100 mid - commands, Q&A, sequencing
100 older students - conversations: likes/dislikes, hopes/dreams

and then at a Event Format:
Welcome - 5 min
Review - 15 min
Lesson - 20 min
Activity/Songs - 15 min
Farewell - 5 min

We discussed having a Community Presentation at the end. With songs/dance, poems/rhymes, dialogue/drama. Possible theme: Telling My Story

I think this will be a challenging yet meaningful experience.

Free

The Richness of the Mystery of God by Ron Rolheiser

G.K. Chesterton once said that one of the reasons he believed in Christianity was because of its belief in the trinity. If Christianity had been made up by human person, it would not have at its very center a concept that is impossible to grasp or explain: the idea that God exists as one but within in three persons.

How do we understand the trinity? We don't! God, by definition, is ineffable, beyond conceptualization, beyond imagination, beyond language. The Christian belief that God is a trinity helps underscore how rich the mystery of God is and how our experience of God is always richer than our concepts and language about God.

This is already evident in the history of religion. From the very beginning, humans have always had an experience of God and have worshipped God. However, from the very beginning too, humans have also had the sense that God is too rich and too-beyond any one set of categories to be captured in any human conception. Hence most ancient peoples were polytheistic. They believed in many gods and goddess. They experienced divine energy and the need to celebrate divine energy in many different areas of their lives and had gods and goddesses to accommodate that. Thus they had gods and goddesses for every longing and every circumstance, from war, through growing crops, through sex, through understanding why your father wouldn't bless you, there was a god or goddess to whom you could turn.

Sometimes they believed in one supreme god who ultimately ruled over lesser gods and goddesses, but they sensed that divine energy was too rich a reality to be contained in a single being. They believed too that sometimes the gods were at war with each other. As well, their gods and goddesses often times messed around within human lives, making special deals with humans, having affairs with them, and sometimes even having children with them.

Many of the most powerful myths ever told arose out of the experience of God's overwhelming richness and the ancient peoples' incapacity to conceptualize God and God's activity in any singular way. Whatever else might be said about polytheism and ancient myths about the gods and goddesses, ancient religious practices and the incredible canon of mythology that these produced speak of how rich, untamed, and beyond simplistic imagination and language is the human experience of God. The ancients believed that their experience pointed to the existence of many deities.

And then a massive shift took place: Judaism, soon followed by Christianity and Islam, introduced the strong, clear, doctrinaire idea that there is only one God. Now all divine power and energy was seen as coming from a single source, monotheism, YHWH, the Father of Jesus, Allah. There were no other gods or goddesses.

But from the time of Jesus' resurrection onwards, Christians began to struggle with simple monotheism. They believed that there is still only one God, but their experience of God demanded that they believe that this God was somehow "three". Stated simply, when Jesus rose from the dead Christians immediately began to attribute divinity to him, yet without identifying him as God the Father. Jesus was understood to be God, but somehow different from God the Father. Moreover, inside of their experience, they sensed still a third divine energy which they couldn't fully identify with either Jesus or God the Father, the Holy Spirit.

This experience left them in a curious and sometimes perplexed state: They were monotheists, God alone was God. Yet, Jesus too was God, as was the Holy Spirit. Their experience of grace and God's action in the world was at odds with their simplistic conception of monotheism.

God was one and yet God was somehow three. How to fit this together? It took Christianity three hundred years to finally arrive at a formula that somehow honored the richness of the Christian experience of God. The Council of Nicea in 325 gave us the creedal formula we profess today: There is one God in three persons; except they wrote that formula in Greek and the words there state literally that God is one substance in three subsistent relations.

That formula isn't meant to give us perfect clarity. No formula can ever capture the reality of God because God is too rich to ever be captured, even half adequately, in imagination, thought, and word. The God that atheism rejects is precisely a conceptualized God, a God captured in a picture. In the end, atheism is less faithful to human experience than was polytheism which more rightly sensed deity, gods and goddesses, hidden under every rock.

To what does this call us?

To humility. All of us, believers and atheists, need to be more humble in our language about God. The idea of God needs to stretch, not shrink, the human imagination. Our actual experience of God, just as for ancient polytheism, is forever eating away at all simplistic conceptions of God. Thank God, for the complexity of the doctrine of the Trinity!

by Ron Rolheiser

"Reverse Mission" by Richard Rohr

from Why Be Catholic? by Richard Rohr

Losers or Transformers?

In our competitive societies, which put so much emphasis on power and strength, those with intellectual disabilities have great difficulty in finding their place; they are losers in every competition. But in their thirst and their gift for friendship and for communion, the weaker people in society can touch and transform the strong, if the strong are only prepared to listen to them.

- Jean Vanier, Our Journey Home, Introduction xi

I was thinking of this in the context of Cambodia where extreme poverty exists alongside extreme wealth...

Lord,
Help... help me hear the vulnerable other rather than inner fear...
Amen.

The Place Where We Are Safe

Home is where we are safe. It is no longer a question of competition, for home is a place of communion. 'Going home' is a journey to the heart of who we are, a place where we can be ourselves and welcome the reality of our beauty and our pain. From this acceptance of ourselves, we can accept others as they are and we can see our common humanity.

- Jean Vanier, Our Journey Home, Introduction xi

I hope when I return to Canada for July and August I will take time to savour the communion of community...

"A Humbling Experience" by Richard Rohr

from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction by Richard Rohr

There have been a couple of times when I've been struggling with the "no air conditioning" thing... brown outs have been quite a test of character. This spoke to my mind and heart, loudly!!! Happily I've had house guests who have kept me laughing at the "best of the worst weather in Cambodia". Thanks Allison and Sara!

On a blessed side, we had lunch at the CCC (Cambodian Country Club) today. It was the year-end and farewell party for the teaching staff at Logos. What a sweet time... the Event Planner and the Chef asked me why so many were in tears... I said it may have been because the French food helped us get in touch with our emotions... kidding... it's hard to say good bye! The food there is the best foreign food I've tasted in Cambodia!

Listening to our Hearts  - Jean Vanier

Let us simply stop and start listening to our own hearts. There we will touch a lot of pain. We will possibly touch a lot of anger. We will probably touch a lot of loneliness and anguish. Then we will hear something deeper. We will hear the voice of God... We will hear, "You are precious in my eyes and I love you."

- - "Jean Vanier: Essential Writings" ed. C. Whitney-Brown, extracted from "Images of Love, Words of Hope."

Dear One,

I care for you.
I care about you.

You are to me a universe of possibility and promise.

You are more than the dust of stars, the breath of Spirit calls your whole being heaven-ward, beyond mortality into eternity.

The bounds of time and space are brief.
The freedoms of glory are eternal.

Take courage...
Find hope...
Embrace, with faith, my goodness.

Weeping only last the night, yet with the dawn Joy arrives.

In the retinue of Joy every desire is fulfilled,
every hunger satisfied and every longing quenched.

amen

The following slide show is of "Jackfruit" tastes deliciously like bubblegum... DoubleBubble anyone???