As a man is...

As a man is, so he prays. We make ourselves what we are by the way we address God. The man who never prays is one who has tried to run away from himself because he has run away from God. But unreal though he be, he is more real than the man who prays to God with a false and lying heart.
-Thomas Merton

The Frozen Chango

Serving size: 1 glass

• 1/2 cup frozen mango
• 1/2 cup frozen cherries
• 2 tbsp flaxseed
• 2-3 prunes
• 2 tbsp real coconut flakes (unsweetened)
• 1/2 cup vanilla kefir   
• Water to get the desired consistency 

Blend all until smooth. This one's nice and tart.

Fig, Prosciutto, and Mixed Greens Pizza

Serving Size: 1 big pizza

Ingredients:

• 1 prepared multigrain dough ball (from Whole Foods)
• ~3 cups Mixed greens (such as spinach, arugula, swiss chard, kale.....)
• 6 large figs, sliced in 1/4 inch pieces
• 1 oz package of prosciutto, thinly sliced.
• 8 oz fontina cheese, sliced or shredded into small pieces
• 1 red onion
• Balsamic Vinegar
• olive oil
• black pepper
• salt
• 1-2 tbsp butter
• cornmeal

Preheat oven to 450. Place pizza stone in oven to preheat.

Melt butter in skillet over medium heat. Thinly slice red onion and add to skillet. Cook slow and steady until onion caramelizes (about 10-15 minutes). Reserve on the side.

Put sliced figs in a small bowl. Add 1 tbsp of balsamic vinegar and toss well to combine. Let sit on the side.

Sprinkle counter top with flour and roll out dough to desire shape. Sprinkle fontina cheese all over it. Then sprinkle crushed black pepper all over it. Take pizza stone out of the oven. Sprinkle cornmeal over pizza stone, then immediately transfer pizza to the stone. Place in oven and bake around 10 minutes...or until edges brown and cheese is bubbly. You should be able to smell it really good!

Meanwhile, place mixed greens in a bowl and toss with 1 tbsp olive oil, 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper. Reserve on the side.

Take pizza out of the oven and immediately arrange prosciutto slices, figs, and caramelized onions evenly over the top of the oven. Put entire pizza back in the oven for 1-2 minutes, just until the figs/prosciutto/onions get hot. Remove pizza from oven and top with tossed mixed greens. Some might be a little confused...is it a salad or a pizza??  (i.e. Paul Sprehe) Taste and see.

Let cool for about 5 minutes and then slice and serve. Unbelievable.

The "Too Good to Be True" Smoothie

Serving size: 1 glass

• 1 cup frozen mango
• 1 generous handful of super greens (spinach, kale, swiss chard, collards...whatever you have)
• 5-7 prunes
• 1 generous splash of vanilla kefir
• enough water to give it a smoothie consistency

Add all to a blender or magic bullet and voila. It is too good to be true.

When I taste your Goodness, I shall not want.

Choose Life

No job, no plans, no possessions, no idea of "freedom" can take the place of love. So anything that destroys God's gift of motherhood destroys his most precious gift to women -- the ability to love as a woman."

Mother Teresa

The Hidden Power in Our Suffering

Making Sense out of Bioethics: June 7, 2012

In a 1999 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, patients with serious illness were asked to identify what was most important to them during the dying process.

Many indicated they wanted to achieve a “sense of control.” This is understandable. Most of us fear our powerlessness in the face of illness and death.

We would like to retain an element of control, even though we realize that dying often involves the very opposite: a total loss of control, over our muscles, our emotions, our minds, our bowels, and our very lives, as our human framework succumbs to powerful disintegrative forces.

Important spiritual journey

Even when those disintegrative forces become extreme and our suffering may seem overwhelming, however, a singularly important spiritual journey always remains open for us. This path is a “road less traveled,” a path that, unexpectedly, enables us to achieve genuine control in the face of death.

The hallmark of this path is the personal decision to accept our sufferings, actively laying down our life on behalf of others by embracing the particular kind of death God has ordained for us, patterning our choice on the choice consciously made by Jesus Christ.

Sharing in Christ’s giving of Himself

When asked about the “why” of human suffering, Pope John Paul II once stated, with piercing simplicity, that the answer has “been given by God to man in the cross of Jesus Christ.” He stressed that Jesus went toward his own suffering, “aware of its saving power.”

The pope also observed that in some way, each of us is called to “share in that suffering through which the Redemption was accomplished.” He concluded that through his only-begotten Son, God “has confirmed His desire to act especially through suffering, which is man’s weakness and emptying of self, and He wishes to make His power known precisely in this weakness and emptying of self.”

The Holy Father echoes St. Paul’s famous passage: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Love-driven sacrifice

The greatest possibility we have for achieving control, then, is to align ourselves in our suffering and weakness with God and his redemptive designs. This oblation of radically embracing our particular path to death, actively offered on behalf of others and in union with Christ, manifests our concern for the spiritual welfare of others, especially our friends and those closest to us. We are inwardly marked by a profound need to sacrifice and give of ourselves, a need that manifests our inner capacity to love and be loved.

As no one had ever done before, Jesus charted the path of love-driven sacrifice, choosing to lay down his life for his friends. He was no mere victim in the sense of being a passive and unwilling participant in his own suffering and death. He was in control. He emphasized, with otherworldly authority, that, “nobody takes my life from me: I lay it down, and I take it up again.”

Yet we see that his life was, in fact, taken from him by those various individuals and groups who plotted his death and sought his execution. His life was taken from him by evil men, even though, paradoxically, nobody took his life from him, because nobody had power over his being, unless granted from above.

Freedom elevated to new heights

We experience a similar paradox in our own deaths: while it may seem that our life is being taken from us through the evil of a particular ailment or the ravages of a particular disease, we can reply that nothing takes away our life, because nothing has power over our being, except what is ordained from above.

In his providence and omniscience, years before the fact, God already knows and foresees that unique confluence of events that will constitute our death, whether it be by stroke or cardiac arrest, liver failure or Alzheimers, or any other means. By spiritually embracing in God that specific path to death, our freedom is elevated to new heights; indeed, we “achieve control” in the most important way possible, through willed surrender and radical gift in our innermost depths.

Immersing ourselves in hope

Jesus foresaw that his greatest work lay ahead as he ascended Calvary to embrace his own powerlessness and self-emptying. Although we may feel condemned to our powerlessness as we receive help from others in our sickness, and although we may feel supremely useless as we are “nailed” to our hospital bed, our active, inward embrace of the cross unleashes important graces for ourselves and others, and reveals a refulgent light beyond the obscurity of every suffering.

Jesus’ radical embracing of his Passion — and our radical embracing of our own — marks the supreme moment of a person who achieves control over his or her destiny through immersion into the hope-filled and redemptive designs of God.

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Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk earned his doctorate in neuroscience from Yale and did post-doctoral work at Harvard. He is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Mass., and serves as the director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia.