When people wanted to kill a bear in the ancient times, they hung a heavy log over a bowl of honey. The bear would push the log away in order to eat the honey.I resolved then and there to write this tribute to Phillip Hughes.
I want to use the occasion of this, his 26th birthday, to shine a bit more light onto Phillip — the man he was and the life he led — which will help explain the extraordinary outpouring of support from inside, and outside, the world cricket family.
His cricketing achievements — of which there were many — really play second fiddle to the human qualities that he exhibited.
Loyal to a fault, eternally optimistic, kind hearted, wicked sense of humour, a child like verve for life … I really could go on and on.
Sitting with his parents Greg and Virginia, sister Megan and brother Jason over the past few days it struck me that above all, he was a family man.
Clarke and Hughes at the SCG
Clarke pictured with Hughes
Our over-intellectualized modern culture has tended to forget connections between mind and body. We are nevertheless more likely to believe what we feel as a physical experience than what we think. And when we are in danger, or under pressure, or anxious, we often experience what Daniel Goleman calls an “amygdala hi-jack” where suddenly our emotions tend to crowd out rational thought.
Tagore said: “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”
This is the purpose of the religious life to awaken joy through service to and for one another.
Continue reading
“…even as we serve others we are working on ourselves; every act, every word, every gesture of genuine compassion naturally nourishes our own hearts as well. It is not a question of who is healed first. When we attend to ourselves with compassion and mercy, more healing is made available for others. And when we serve others with an open and generous heart, great healing comes to us.”Think back to January 2011 and the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at a ‘meet the people’ event outside a supermarket in Tuscan. The attack, in which six people died and Giffords was seriously injured, shocked America.
Some saw it as the inevitable outcome of a politics become intolerant and ‘uncivil.’ The Republican politician Sarah Palin, then widely seen as contemplating a Presidential bid herself, was vilified for having shown Giffords caught in the crosshairs of a rifle sight as a campaign ‘target.’ She attempted to address the damage with a speech mourning the dead, but vigorously defending free speech and forthright debate as key American virtues. It fell to Obama in his public role to address the memorial service for the dead. With the eyes of the world and of a shattered local community watching, how would he respond? Continue reading
All spiritualities worthy of the name, stress the need to make a certain ascent, to grow beyond our immaturities, our laziness, our wounds, and the perennial hedonism and shallowness of our culture. The emphasis here is always to reach upward, beyond, towards the heavens, and towards all that is more noble, altruistic, compassionate, loving, admirable, and saintly. Much of classical Christian spirituality is a spirituality of the ascent, an invitation to something higher, an invitation to be true to what is deepest inside of us, namely, the Image and Likeness of God. Much of Jesus’ preaching invites us precisely to something higher. Confucius, one of the great moral teachers of all time, had a similar pedagogy, inviting people to look to beauty and goodness and to forever reach in that direction. In our own time, John Paul II used this very effectively in his appeal to young people, challenging them always to not settle for compromise or second-best, but to look always for something higher and more noble to give their lives to.
But the challenge to growth also needs a spirituality of descent, a vision and a set of disciplines that point us not just towards the rising sun, but also towards the setting sun. Continue reading
There is a brokenness
out of which comes the unbroken,
a shatteredness
out of which blooms the unshatterable. Continue reading
ONE TUSK 