The origins of the prayer ‘Hail Mary’

we see these days that many are changing the wordings of this beautiful prayer to suite their ‘private revelations’…
whatsoever may it be, I hold firm in my opinion that the wordings Must Not be changed in any way, for it is the wisdom and grace of the Holy Catholic Church, evolved through the times with due divine interventions.

The history:

The early history of the Hail Mary is not clear, as the words are taken from Scripture and it is difficult to ascertain when the greeting/prayer was distinctly used. One source attributes the distinct use of the first half to St. Idlefonsus of Toledo in the 7th century. Its use as a salutation and prayer begin to appear from frequently in the 11th and 12th centuries, though the first half only was regarded as the 'Hail Mary'.

Here are the parts of the prayer:

· Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee (Luke 1:28 with 'Mary' gradually added by the Church)

· Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus ( Luke 1:42 with 'Jesus' being added by Pope Urban IV in 1261)

· Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen (based on the declaration of the Council of Ephesus (ie. Mary the Mother of God) in 431, this part of the prayer appeared in the mid-15th century, being codified by the Council of Trent in 1568)

http://www.memorare.com/mary/marianprayershistory.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hail_Mary

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosary

Pass through the Neutral

How do you beat your despair?

It is an often asked, often answered, but seldom satisfying, a question.
Well! My way should be simple, I suppose.

I believe I have a right to be desperate, just as I have a right to be hopeful.
To be desperate is not the final option but just a mid-place just as the neutral gear in the car. We have to pass through the neutral gear to reach one gear from the other.

The game is to keep on the movement.
The beginner may have some initial troubles with the neutral.
But when accustomed, we shift between higher and lower gears effortlessly
Without much bothering about the ‘Naughty Neutral’.

Despair is such a Neutral state.
It means nothing, neither the positive nor the negative.
It is an absence of hope, the force behind our wheels.
It all matters where you go from this state of decisive Neutrality.

You can’t stay long in despair (if so it becomes Melancholy, a not so normal condition)
You have to move on. It all matters to where do you move.
To up or to down?

Fishing Lessons: Graces should be Manageable!

It was a bright sunny morning. There were many people on the pier sitting almost still as in a meditation, waiting to feel the pull on their specially designed fishing lines with multiple hooks.

I stood there watching them in all expectation.

Suddenly the man next to me surprised us all with a great catch.
There were more than fifteen; practically each hook had a medium sized silver coloured booty on it.
I was excited to see it, but the man was a bit desperate.
“It’s all gone” he muttered in low voice, looking at me, with an apparent hesitation to lift the line up.
I felt even more surprised at the way he behaved so odd to this morning grace. But things became clear, when he began to draw the line back. It snapped the mid-way!!! He lost everything, the fish and the fishing line. I felt sad, but he was not. He had anticipated it already.

It is not enough that we are successful but is also must be manageable. For a success to benefit us, it should be in our control. Most of the times certain huge successes surprise us all unaware, but they never result any standing transformation.

That is why we are cursed to find many ‘lucky people’ falling back to their previous state of impoverishment, even though the heavens tried to lift them up through some really mind-blowing lottery prizes. Sadly and oddly enough those instances of glory literally blow their minds out of them, and they fail to mind their luck/success

Learning to manage our graces is of equal importance as that of attaining them.
We should learn how to manage our graces.

The curious Misunderstandings

Today it is about understandings and misunderstandings.

“You are such a lucky soul. Wherever you may go, there the people misunderstand you to be a good man.” This interesting observation was made by another about one of my friends. Quite often we struggle to understand the misunderstandings, because they are so vital to our social life.

Often I have thought that we understand ourselves and misunderstand others. But now it proves the other way around. In most of our personal lives, it is in the reverse. We misunderstand ourselves but read others with better and finer accuracy. We surprise them with our ‘Inner Wisdom’ by discovering even their hidden giftedness and blessedness.
We prove ourselves to be the successful mentor for their inner journey.

Here the bet is how well you grasp the width and the breadth of your own blessedness. It is not work of knowledge, but an act of discernment. When it is the matter of the other people, knowledge helps us to be factual and true; but to deal our own inner process we need the grace of discernment.

I am not to be like the biblical servant with a single talent. I am rich in graces, so too I am rich in responsibilities. (“Much will be required of the person entrusted with much,
and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more” Lk 12:48).

I should learn to count my own blessedness.
I should learn to grow out of my own misunderstandings about myself.

No nonsense Malayalam software: deshavani

at last it took me this much time
to discover this free and easy malayalam software:

www.deshavani.com

When A frog jumps....

“Into the ancient pond
A frog jumps
Water’s sound!”

What happens when a frog jumps into a pool….
I chanced upon this insightful Matsuo Bashô’s Frog Haiku.
It has over 100 translations and commentaries….(Wow!)

(http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/basho-frog.htm)

http://no-sword.jp/blog/2007/10/types_of_frogs.html

http://www.zencommunity.org/html/articles/frog.html

Have a great Read....

art by Anne Hughes

The Inverted Grace:

At times it takes a lot of courage and a miraculous sense of patience, to look at life gracefully. We struggle hard with our words and concepts to get even the smaller and seemingly insignificant things right. Most of the times the knowledge of our limits becomes not a boon (which it supposed to be), but a bane that cuts us short of what we should would have to be. This is a real situation we all face, and it needs no further illustrations or examples to aid clarity. Do the Boundaries help us to surpass? It is often asked, sometimes in words, but mostly in silence of deep sighs.

I swear by four johari regions.There are It seems to me, all the boundaries I am aware of are not grace but indeed they are also not curses. They are in actuality, INVERTED GRACES. I have seen many limitations turn into great Possibilities. Boundaries helping people to abound in life.

Yes, I am in all my rights to turn all those limitations into expectations., boundaries into abounding streams of Gracefulness. Inverted Graces are to inverted into Invited graces…

This week busy with a library automation process............

Last week i was away for a retreat....

Chant Gregorian..the Lost Song of Gregory

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7468225911563224908

Fighting it over a psalm…(silly people and reasons)

The other day, I chanced upon a curious dispute: It was all about a set of Psalms to be used in a private prayer service. I found it to be totally unnecessary and a sort of ostentatious arrogance. I told them “Whatever Psalm you may recite, it is enough you are able to pray a prayer.”

But now it seems to me, that it has been an inherent nature of humanity to wage war over a broken mud-pot, in such situations wherein there is no any chance that you can jump out to conquer the continents. We always find reasons to fight each other, somehow. When you are not blessed with serious ones, you can make many little unnecessary ones…

Believe me, the worst destructive storms that the humanity have seen, never originated from the God’s skies, but from little tea-pots. However, the fight must go on and on…

philosophy of life: Brother Dennis

"God puts you where you need to be and later you see why "

I read about Rev. Dennis J. Klemash OFM cap in Charleston Daily Mail.
Pls read the article here.

peals from elsewhere...: Innovation and Acceptance

"Resistance is futile. Acceptance is the only way forward. Is it? "
(asks DK Matai a global risk specialist)

Robert Tucker on innovation:

'If you don't innovate, someone else will'

innovation is the process of coming up with ideas and bringing them to life. Any time you come up with an idea and implement it, you have essentially innovated. Not all ideas are commercially viable but, nevertheless, they are innovations.In business, the commercial viability of an innovation is of supreme importance.

in a corporate scenario, innovation is essentially of three types:

1. Product innovations, like the i-Pod or Post-It notes
2. Process innovation, when you come up with a new process that reduces time or cost or makes you reach from point A to point B faster: Toyota and Tata are continuously making process innovations.
3. Strategy innovation: Air Deccan, for instance. A couple of years ago it looked at low-cost airlines across the world, picked some of the best practices, and then made itself.

People by nature are creative, but you as an organization need to be able to tap it. Employees are either being creative at their work place or are going home to their sports, passions, interests and spending their creativity there.

the time between your implementing an idea and it being copied by competitors is the real life span of an innovation.

The story of Kevlar

Ideas can be implemented badly or they may be not be commercially viable, but there is nothing called "bad" innovation. Many times, an idea may be just ahead of its time.For instance, DuPont invented Kevlar, which is 10 times stronger than steel, many, many years ago. At the time tyre manufacturers, who were approached with the product, were not very keen. The product was not used for many years, until the company found new uses for it. Today, Kevlar is used by people who work with glass, oyster-opening gloves are made of Kevlar, armies and police personnel around the world use Kevlar vests, embassies of many nations have Kevlar curtains draped on their walls... So Kevlar was not a bad innovation. It was just not used correctly.

A company is the result of its ideas. When the leadership shows serious intent for innovation, it percolates to all levels and you build a culture of innovation. Behaviour that gets rewarded gets repeated.

Turning Wine into Water

Graham Brown sings:
.....................
And once upon a time you turned the water into wine
Now on my knees I'm turning to you father
Could you help me turn the wine back into water
............................

It is an earnest prayer of an alcoholic desiring to break out of that gripping habit...