Paczkis

Gerald Doran — Tue, 24 Feb 1998 08:50:00 +0000

Shrove Tuesday

Psalm 34:8 – O taste and see that the Lord is good; Happy are those who take refuge in God.

On Shrove Tuesday our whole town becomes Polish. We all enjoy then eating delicious paczkis (pronounced poonchkeys). Even my neighbourhood Italian bakery was taking orders for paczki for weeks before Lent.

As I bit into my tasty apple-filled Polish donut, I compared it with the ordinary hole-in-the-middle type. It seemed to speak to me of life. The life of many people is like your usual donut. Things just go round and round, centred on nothing at all, except emptiness.

For others, life is rich and enjoyable, just like my paczki. It has shape, solidity, and sweetness at the centre. In donuts, the difference is what is at the centre.

So in life. If there is nothing, we get by. If God is at the centre, our lives hang together, are sweet and satisfying. Perhaps next Shrove Tuesday you will join me in a paczki. No paczki? Try a jellied donut. It too has a sweet centre.

Between now and then, be sure to live fully in the presence of God who gives life its centre and its sweetness.

Prayer: Our God, we are tempted to centre our lives on puffs of smoke, nothingness, vanity of vanities. Help us to always centre our lives on you and your love. We know then that our lives will have shape and sweetness. This we pray through Jesus Christ who came bringing us life in all its abundance. Amen.

China Daily

Gerald Doran — Sat, 15 Feb 1997 08:50:00 +0000

Visiting China with other Canadian Christians last November was very interesting. Also interesting was reading the English-language China Daily. It was a different newspaper whose lead stories told of world leaders eagerly visiting China daily. Other pages told how the tourist service was taking care of visitors so much better this year. Almost all the news was positive. Then I came home. Television and newspapers were serving up their usual diet of murders, car crashes and disasters of all kinds. No wonder our society is so anxious. I began to suspect the media is trying to hook into our basic fears so we will anxiously pay attention to the news while their sponsors try to sell us something. In our anxious society we are in desperate need of good news. Thank God there is the good news of the Gospel . As St. Paul tells it:

"What we mean is that God was in Christ, offering peace and forgiveness to the people of the world" (2 Corinthians 5:19). That is good news! If this is the headline of our day, our day just has to be different. Receiving God's peace and forgiveness means our lives are based on God's presence and love, not on our anxious fears. This makes a big difference.

"Anyone who belongs to Christ is a new person" says St. Paul (2 Corinthians 5:17). Let's listen to the good news of the gospel, live it and share it with a world that is drowning in bad news. Let's be new persons shaped by the good news of Christ.

Prayer: Our God, you come to us in love, through Jesus Christ. Help us at this moment to accept again that love, to live by it, to rejoice in it ,to be buoyed up by it so that we may be your strong and useful people today, tomorrow and forever. Amen.

Gerald Doran – PresbyCan Daily Devotional

Paczkis

China Daily