SPIRIT IN MATTERS: Taking a Higher View of Life on Earth
By Dianne Eppler Adams

Vol. 2, No 9 – June 15, 2004
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Can be read online at - http://www.spiritinmatters.com/SIM-v2n9-61504.htm
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HOORAY!  This e-newsletter is one year old!  Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback, encouragement and readership over the past year!  Look for a survey soon to gather your ideas for updating and improving the format.

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FROM THIS VANTAGE POINT...

         Reflecting on Mirrors

How would our experience of the world be different if it didn’t contain mirrors?  I get up in the morning and go to the mirror to brush my teeth, to comb my hair, and to see how good or how bad I look.

I have mirrors in my bathroom, bedroom, and living room.  The living room mirror adds depth to the room and gives it a sense of a larger space. I find mirrors in public places such as hallways and corners that also add a broader perspective.

Who could argue that mirrors serve a useful purpose to provide us with an honest look at our self? Is our collar laying flat?  Is our hair out of place?

Just as useful and important are the people in our lives who act as mirrors for us. While the neighbor who remarks on your new haircut gives you a lift, you my just as well get negative feedback.  Mirrors do not only show the good about us.  They show us our reflection – what who  we really are and how we are seen.

So too, our most intimate relationships (spouse, significant other, boss etc.) act as mirrors. Since we are around them most, we show our most unguarded self.  We may find what they mirror back is often what we don’t like about ourselves. 

I find it useful, nevertheless, to consider what my husband mirrors to me.  Reflecting on what he mirrors with self honesty has provided me with powerful new awarenesses and encouraged many positive changes. I can do this because I also know he loves and honors me.

Like a mirror on the wall, intimate relationships can be important if we want to know how we are behaving, what we are expressing, and who we are being in the world.

I have learned to appreciate my husband, my friends and neighbors who form my personal relationships for their reflection, whatever it is, because I know it adds to my self-understanding.

Reflect on the mirrors in your life.  Are you happy with what they are reflecting?  Be grateful for what they show you. You have the power to change what you see.

(Your comments are always welcome at SpiritInMatters@aol.com.)
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HEALTY PARTNERSHIP THROUGH SELF-LOVE: One Couple's Story
Sunday, June 20, 2004, 2-5 PM, $25 singles/$35 for couples
Held in Alexandria, VA
Call 703-548-4552 to register

What is a healthy relationship?  How would I recognize it if I found it?  What can I do to prepare for it?  If in a relationship, how can I nurture it to become healthy?

For many the idea of a healthy relationship is an oxymoron.  For those who find themselves single, particularly later in life, the idea of happiness in a relationship seems impossible, yet the yearning for an "other" remains.

Dianne and Chuck Adams will share their personal journeys though a dialogue, weaving together individual stories, emphasizing lessons learned, and arriving at the commitment they hold now with a spirit of hope and possibility.  What brought them together began with their own personal journey to self-love and self-appreciation.

You may find clues for your own journey, reasons not to fear relationship, hope that healthy partnership is possible for you.

This is one couple's story.  Come listen and ask the questions that your heart yearns to understand.
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FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION...

10 WAYS YOU CAN CHANGE U.S. HISTORY
Yes! Magazine
http://www.yesmagazine.org/30goodlife/YESChangeHistory.pdf


NO COMMUNION FOR CONTRARY CATHOLICS: A GOOD IDEA?
By Jane Lampman, Staff writer, The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.christiansciencemonitor.com/2004/0528/p11s01-lire.htm

For practicing Roman Catholics, to be denied communion is the most grievous punishment possible short of excommunication from the church.

The readiness of a handful of US bishops to deny that central sacrament to presidential candidate John Kerry and other politicians who support abortion rights has stirred consternation among the faithful. Some accuse the hierarchy of inappropriately injecting itself into partisan politics, and in a way that could arouse anti-Catholic sentiment. To others, it just doesn't make sense as a way to treat believers.

"We haven't had situations in my lifetime where people have been identified as public sinners - presumably we've come some distance from the Middle Ages, when they used to do that," says Terry Carden, a doctor who is head of the Voice of the Faithful chapter in Tucson, Ariz. "And it's unbelievable that people are being [singled out] on the basis of their political positions, not on active behaviors of their own."


ONE OF EVERY 75 U.S. MEN BEHIND BARS
The Associated Press, May 28, 2004
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-uspris283821944may28,0,2781539,print.story

America's inmate population grew by 2.9 percent last year, to almost 2.1 million people, with one of every 75 men living in prison or jail.

The inmate population continued its rise despite a fall in the crime rate and many states' efforts to reduce some sentences, especially for low- level drug offenders.

The report issued yesterday by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics attributes much of the increase to get-tough policies enacted during the 1980s and '90s, such as mandatory drug sentences, "three-strikes-and-you're-out" laws for repeat offenders and "truth-in-sentencing" laws that restrict early releases.

... There were 715 inmates for every 100,000 U.S. residents at midyear last year, up from 703 a year earlier, the report found.

The nation's incarceration rate tops the world, according to The Sentencing Project, another group that promotes alternatives to prison. That compares with a rate of 169 per 100,000 residents in Mexico, 116 in Canada and 143 for England and Wales.

Russia's prison population, which once rivaled the United States', has dropped to 584 per 100,000, the group said.


FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION SHOWS SIGNS OF LOSING FAVOR IN AFRICA
By Mark Lacey, The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/international/africa/08cutt.html

Isnino Shuriye still remembers the pride she felt years ago when she leaned over each of her three daughters, knife in hand, and sliced into their genitals.

Each time, as the blood started to flow, she quickly dropped the knife and picked up a needle and thread. Quickly, expertly, she sewed her daughters' vaginas almost shut.

"I was full of pride," she recalled recently. "I felt like I was doing the right thing in the eyes of God. I was preparing them for marriage by sealing their vaginas."

Now she feels like a butcher, a sinner, a mother who harmed her own flesh and blood, not to mention the thousands of other girls she says she circumcised in the last quarter-century as part of a traditional rite still common in Africa.

Slowly, genital cutting is losing favor. Parliaments are passing laws forbidding the practice, which causes widespread death and disfigurement. Girls are fleeing their homes to keep their vaginas intact. And the women who have been carrying out the cutting, and who have been revered by their communities for doing so, are beginning to lay down their knives.


U.S. FACES A REALITY CHECK OVER OIL
By Steve Raabe, Denver Post Staff Writer, Sunday, June 13, 2004
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~33~2208230,00.html#