Chris de Burgh - Carry me like a fire in your heart

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Leona Lewis- Footprints In The Sand+lyrics+letra en español-(Live At Dan...

Life

BALANCE SHEET OF LIFE
BORN                                                                                         DEAD	Awaiting God's Judgment.
Our Birth is our Opening Balance! Our Death is our Closing Balance! Our Prejudiced Views are our Liabilities. Our Creative Ideas are our Assets. Heart is our Current Asset. Soul is our Fixed Asset. Brain is our Fixed Deposit. Thinking is our Current Account. Achievements are our Capital. Character & Morals, our Stock-in-Trade. Friends are our General Reserves. Values & Behaviour are our Goodwill. Patience is our Interest Earned. Love is our Dividend. Children are our Bonus Issues.. Education is Brands / Patents. Knowledge is our Investment. Experience is our Premium Account. The Aim is to Tally the Balance Sheet Accurately. The Goal is to get the Best Presented Accounts Award. Some very Good and Very bad things ...... The most destructive habit........................Worry The greatest Joy.......................................Giving The greatest loss..................Loss of self-respect The most satisfying work............Helping others The ugliest personality trait.............Selfishness The most endangered species.........Dedicated leaders Our greatest natural resource....................Our youth The greatest "shot in the arm"..........Encouragement The greatest problem to overcome.....................Fear The most effective sleeping pill..........Peace of mind The most crippling failure disease...............Excuses The most powerful force in life.........................Love The most dangerous pariah.....................A gossiper The world's most incredible computer......The brain The worst thing to be without....................Hope The deadliest weapon.......................The tongue The two most power-filled words..........."I Can" The greatest asset......................................Faith The most worthless emotion..................Self-pity The most beautiful attire.......................SMILE! The most prized possession.................Integrity The most powerful channel of communication.....Prayer The most contagious spirit..................Enthusiasm The most important thing in life..................GOD Chinese Proverb: "When someone shares something of value with you and you benefit from it, you have a moral obligation to share it with others"

Crocodile Tears and The Mercy of God

The Comedy of Grief: How they preserve the power of desperation

Among impoverished communities in my native Africa there are times when the logic of commerce or economics, justice or Maslow's basic needs requires that a person appeals to the effect of the primal cry of desperation. This primal cry comes from an evolutionary instinct within all of us to rise up and protect the desperate and the infirm. This is the ancient cry of old that gets the Samaritan to stop by the roadside to assist the injured Jew, a thing unheard of. This is the same cry that makes judges stop thinking of the just punishment under the law for a convicted criminal and think in terms of mercy, and of ways to justify the release of the prisoner on compassionate grounds. This is the same desperate cry that a mother hears in the voice of her son who justly ought to be punished but pleads not his innocence, but his vulnerability, such that the mother drops the switch or the belt and instead hugs her son, and herself crying, tells her son never to do it again while smothering him with kisses on the forehead.
This cry of appeal for mercy based on humbly succumbing to deep emotion and breaking down all barriers of shame has helped many people survive difficult challenges and emerge unscathed. This is what people mean when they say "She was desperate, and she was even crying." People can not handle the emotion that pours out of the desperate soul.

The art of desperation has been perfected by some species to create a whole new way of life. Ever wondered why we always feel pity for a cat when it meeows at us? Why do you think the dog, which usually barks and growls all of a sudden starts cooing and yelping when you have food in your hands, all the while wagging its tail? Why does a grown man go down to his knees and while holding his hands together like a praying mantis, looks up to his creditor, and sobbing, asks to be forgiven his debt? The primal cry of desperation is an art form that has defined the evolution of certain species and significantly improved their survival.  There are some species that even go the extent of playing dead in the desperate effort to look harmless or to be left alone.

The conservation of energy principle

            The funeral cry for Jangatu has been sounded all over the neighbouring villages and everyone is shocked to hear of the demise of the great hunter and spiritual leader of Shokwe Village. Those who live nearby have already arrived and getting on with the practical business of lighting a bonefire, getting water for the people to drink and for cooking, and if there is money, getting some of the provisions for feeding the many who are expected to arrive.

            Meanwhile, three kilometres away the women of the Zamani Sewing Club have closed their doors to business and gathered in the front yard to start the walk towards Jangatu's homestead. Jangatu's wife was one of them until a year ago when she died leaving hiw widowed, taking care of two children of school going age. They are gathered waiting for Sophia to return whom they have sent to the shops to get for them two bottles of Vodka and some lime and lemonade for sharing among themselves at the funeral, for it will be a long night of singing. They are chatting animatedly and sharing stories about neighbors and politics and relatives as they start off on their way to the funeral. Every kilometre covered gets them closer to the Jangatu homestead and their animated discussions, the jocosity and cacophony in their voices, carries all the way round the forrested path. As they get within two hundred metres of the Jangatu home, they suddenly get into a bussinesslike mood and the leading lady pointedly looks at Frastina and says: "Ndiwe une Soprano, titungamire ngatitangeyi kuchema." This is Shona language of Zimbabwe, and the interpretation is: "You are the one with a soprano voice, lead us and let us start crying."

            At that time, with the spontaneity of a garden sprinkler, the entire troupe starts wailing following the lead of the soprano lady, some in contralto and some in alto. The wailing voices reach all the way to the funeral and people at the Jangatu homestead can hear the arrival of the group of ladies from the Zamani Sewing Club. The wailing voices echo through with crescendos and diminuendos of agony and ecstasy, and soon are joined by a few who had already arrived and carry the sense and meaning of grief and bereavement to its logical toll of desperate loss.

            As soon as they have made their usual and expected condolences the sewing club women settle down, ask the expected questions and use the expected uuuuuhs and aaaaahs of sympathy, and then get down to the serious businesss of gossipping, getting some food, drinking vodka secretly and chatting animatedly among each other.  Thus they will have fulfilled their role and conserved energy all the way till it was absolutely necessary to use that energy. This is the conservation of energy principle.

            The important thing is to know exactly when to start using energy and when to stop because energy is of the essence. In impoverished communities energy is a desperately rationed commodity and there is none of it to waste. Most people survive on only one depauperate meal a day and work their knuckles to the bone just to scratch a living. Therefore desperation is utilized as a survival mode that has clear energetic costs that must not exceed its benefits.

When Trubina requests an audience with the loan shark she prepares herself for the meeting. When she gets to his offices,  she does not break down and cry in front of the doorman. He does not have the influence that is required to ameliorate her situation. When she gets to the Loan shark's secretary, she does not break down and cry either because it would be a waste of 'desperation energy'. Now when she enters the door of the Loan shark's office, she starts mourning and weeping, and telling her desperate story in between sobs, to convince the loan shark to give her a further moratorium on debt repayment, just another month and she will pay it off. She has conserved her energy for full effect in front of the only person who really matters.

Crocodile Tears and The Mercy of God

All the incidences described above can be categorized as 'crocodile tears' based on the underlying deception that defines the motive of the desperate acts described. These crocodile tears appear like tears, look genuine and appeal to the primal instinct of protection that is difficult to resist. Indeed they often earn the desired prize of mercy from the unsuspecting audience.
The question is whether this can appeal to God's sense of mercy as well. God grants us mercy not based on the perfection of our art of playing desperate and vulnerable, but on our genuine show of contrition and humility and a pledge of restitution for the things we have caused to be lost. The distinction here between man and God is the word genuine. God can tell when you are playing at desperation as a ruse and does not fall for that primal cry of compassion if it is not genuine because he is all compassion. God does not fall for the deceptive pleas for mercy because he is all merciful. God only responds to the person who sets asides pride, deception and arrogance and genuinely pleads from a humble and contrite heart for God's mercy while fully acknowledging his or her own guilt in its full extent and with its full consequences under the law. In the absence of the acknowledgement of guilt followed by contrition there is little scope for forgiveness and mercy.

How can I ask you to forgive me for stealing your car when you did not own a car? Or if you do own a car, it has not  been stolen? Or if indeed it was stolen, it was notstolen by me? Guilt must be established through the requirements of justice under the law as a precondition for contrition. In the absence of guilt one must always try to defend themselves to the full extent allowed by the decrees of justice. Never suffer for any crime you did not commit for that is unjustifiable.

Acknowledgement of guilt must always precede a plea for mercy. This presumes setting aside any further arguments in self defense. It means that all the weight of the law and the consequences of the actions are acknowledged and you are placing your entire fate at the mercy of the judge, in this case the judge is God. It carries with it the risk that there is a possibility your plea for mercy will be rejected, and this after you have already pleaded guilty to the full extent of the crime. The plea for mercy therefore is a genuine show of vulnerability because it presupposes that you have confessed fully, a priori to the granting of pardon. Therefore it lays you fully exposed to the consequences of punishment even before being guranteed any pardon on the basis of mercy. 

Specimen Number 50000

A Celebration of Life, Death and Continuance

by

Albert Kumirai

A Child is Born

          I still remember one bright and sunny day more than twenty two years ago in Texas, in a College City called Lubbock, home of the Red Raiders for those who relate to American College Football.  I had just received the picture of my new born son, whom I had not seen yet as he had been born on the first of January 1988, four and a half months after I had left my native Zimbabwe to pursue higher education in America. I had had to leave behind a pregnant wife at a critical time in her second trimester because of the imperative of compliance to the starting dates for my scholarship-funded higher degree, courtesy of the United Nations Development Program's Agency for International Development.

          The picture was of a six month old baby, it was a black and white picture of a baby boy swaddled in a woolen blanket with only the fisticuffed right hand and the face showing. I could not believe that I was beholding my second son and for the first time putting his image next to the imagination and feeling of fatherhood I had nursed since New Year's day some six months back when I had been informed of his advent. The picture made it seem as if it was the first time I had heard of him as I was seeing his face for the first time. It escaped me that the child was already six months old. It crossed my mind to enquire why it had taken so long to get a picture to me, but I immediately checked myself. The mother had been ill for a while after delivering the baby. The baby had been out of sorts from many afflictions that trouble little babies from birth to six months, including colic, diarrhoea, fevers, and having to be taken for immunization against diptheria, pertusis, tetanus, and also immunized against BCG better known as Tuberculosis, as well as immunization against polio, and all sorts of other medical complications not least among which was marasmus, arising from improper feeding. With the intervention of nurses and a few words of advice the feeding regimen was straightened up and the baby was back on track with a growth chart that resumed normal trends.

          So it had been six months before it was even possible for the baby to be taken to the studio for pictures. Pictures only came from photo studios those days from Kodak film wound in a still camera, usually a single reflex camera with no zoom or wide angle lens. A third world tropical country like Zimbabwe could ill afford such luxuries as expedited photo processing, expedited mail delivery, and E-mail was not yet available even in America. So things proceeded by snail mail, and things took their time, and things happened eventually at their own sweet time.

Specimen Number 50000

          I went to the Natural Science Research Laboratory (NSRL) at the Museum of Texas Tech University, an excellent research facility for the study of the evolutionary biology and biogeographic radiation of recent mammals. I proceeded as usual to the minus-seventy degrees Celcius ultra-cold freezer and the liquid nitrogen canisters to continue with my task which was to accession tissue samples into the Museum's frozen tissue register. This we did by extracting, recording and storing heart, liver, kidney and muscle tissues of mammal specimens for molecular biology research, chromosome karyotyping, protein allozyme electrophoresis, DNA restriction fragment length polymorphisms, DNA hybridization and polymerase chain reaction augmentation of small sized samples for use in DNA sequencing studies.

          The Director of the Laboratory came in and after the usual greetings and the updates on progress we got to talking about the accession progress and he was delighted to note that the Museum had reached a landmark number of specimens accessioned and catalogued in its register. This landmark needed to be celebrated for all to see and note. It required that a small ceremony and a few speeches be made. The announcement of the landmark accession of the 50000th voucher specimen was a joyous occasion and well attended, including the graceful presence of his Honor the Mayor of Lubbock who set aside time in his busy schedule shuttling between Dallas, Houston, Amarillo and Lubbock to come and celebrate the achievement that The Museum, Texas Tech University had acquired a landmark 50000th specimen. This specimen was a Bobcat. So it is that, twenty two years after the fact, I still recall that specimen number 50000 in the catalogue of the NSRL, the Museum, Texas Tech University, Lubbock is a bobcat.

Cytoplasm

          While we were talking and laughing and being merry, the subject of my child's picture came up and congratulations were aired all round. I even had occasion to joke about his appearance when asked who he resembled by immediately comparing my son to a lump of cytoplasm, still to develop phenotypic characteristics robust enough to be used as diagnostic comparative attributes! This brought the house down with laughter. Still it was all merriment and joyful chatter. The comparison of my son to cytoplasm was apt within the context of the tissue samples being catalogued. Without a label on the vial one would not be able to identify what tissue it was, and let alone from what animal it was.

Continuance

          I got thinking and the fact that I was celebrating life in the form of the birth of my son, and celebrating the accession of a dead bobcat on the same level of cheer meant that there must be a unifying theme for such apparently diametric opposites to be placed on the same platform of celebration. I immediately recognized the unifying concept here was continuance. The purpose of a collection of specimens in a Museum as vouchers is to maintain a physical record of the existence at a certain point in time of a representative of a species of animal that can be touched, measured, examined, analyzed and photographed as part of research into the evolution, taxonomy, systematics and radiation of the population to which that animal belongs. Many years after the species is extinct, the only reference to that species in terms of phenotype, genotype, location and relationship to other such species will be the Museum specimen. The specimen is a physical voucher for the existence in physical space at a point in time of that species. The voucher specimen and the data that are appended to it provide the provenance for that species. It provides concrete and irrefutable evidence of the existence in physical space at a point in time of the species to which the specimen belongs. Without specimens to vouch for the existence of species there will be too much conjecture in the description of species to the extent that Roman and Greek mythology would be a better pastime in identifying the gods and godesses of ancient times than trying to sort out the taxonomic relations between animal species for which there is no physical evidence. That is the premise upon which our celebration of specimen number 50000 was predicated. The physical-ness of a specimen has extended to the level of DNA. Long ago the Museums of the world could only collect and record measurements on whole specimens and stuff the skins to make them lifelike, and dispose of all the flesh and blood. With the advent of new technology, it became possible to collect tissues, including blood, and to cryogenically arrest the enzymatic processes that would normally lead to the destruction of the tissues, and make these soft tissues available for use in research many years after the specimens were collected by simply defrosting them to take them out of suspended animation and using them again as if they had just been collected.

          So is also with my sons, they are continuation of my blood line, so that when I too am long gone, my sons will continue my identity into posterity and they remain as living physical entities to vouch for my existence in a distant time past in physical space. So also is the evolution of the praying mantis or the black widow spider and many other arthropod species whose female eats the male after fertilization to use the protein of the father as nourishment for the unborn offspring. Continuance is the main theme in evolutionary biology and its imperative goes down all the way to the level of the subcellular infrastructure. The genes that we see in chromosomes are each paired as alleles to exert influence on the outcome of the animal that eventually shows up at birth. The survival of that new born is determined by a multiplicity of combinations of genes and the chromosomes on which those genes are located, as well as the environment in which the animal is born and the characteristics of the population and ecosystem to which the animal belongs.

Selfishness versus Neighborliness

          Is this survival driven by selfish motives? Is there such a thing as the selfish gene? Richard Dawkins seemed to be strongly pursuaded that such a phenomenon exists. Does nature select for those gene combinations that fit the environment? Charles Darwin seemed quite convinced of the matter. What happens when natural fitness is influenced by social policy and religion, in such a way as affirm the naturally unfit and give them undue advantage in a competition where they were doomed to failure by loading the bases in their favor? What if government opened a manufacturing firm that employed only paraplegics, or only women, or only blacks, or only homosexuals, or only whites, or only albinos, or only single mothers, or only members of ZANUPF party? Social Darwinism came into dangerous play more than seventy years ago with disastrous consequences for the whole world and played out with no less than ten million people dead. It may be called positive discrimination, affirmative action, black economic empowerment, indigenization, gender support, special interest group support, gays and lesbians interests awareness. The primal play between genes and the environment has a new player called man who can now easily and casually change the environment at will, and can determine which players get to compete for what, and can exclude from competition which population he chooses. One species on earth now holds the keys to the survival of the biosphere, but is evidently steering the world towards environmental catastrophe with nuclear weapons in the hands of mad people, industrial development hell-bent towards destroying the ozone layer and accellerating global warming, governments refusing to follow the agreements of the Kyoto Accord on sustainable development and ignoring the recommendations of the Rio Summit on biodiversity conservation. The world is hurtling at high speed towards a certain end and the architect of that demise is none other than man, the custodian of nature.

          Life is a cycle of birth, death and rebirth. A grassland pasture has to be deliberately burnt so as to catalyze the birth of new pasture to graze the farm animals. A grain of wheat has to die in the soil in order to give rise to a head of wheat with much more wheat on it, so too does a grain of corn or maize die to give rise to a cob with much more grain. This cycle of continuance looks at posterity and values survival over time rather than individual survival. Those who kill other people in the same way venom from a serpent would kill a human with no intention of eating him go against the very grain of the survival motive of nature.

Traditional Catholic Latin Songs with English Translations

Here is where you can find Gregorian Chants of Traditional Catholic Latin Songs with English Translations, and download Catholic Latin Songs and English Translations

You can purchase the Compendium of Gregorian Chants HERE...and enjoy privately!

My favourite is Gloria in excelsis Deo!  

 Gloria in excelsis Deo!                                      Glory to God in the highest!
Et in terra pax hominibus                                   and on earth peace to men
bonae voluntatis.                                              of good will.
Laudamus te.                                                   We praise You
Benedicimus te.                                               We bless You,
Adoramus te.                                                  We adore You,
Glorificamus te.                                               We glorify You,
Gratias agimus tibi                                          We give thanks to You
propter magnam gloriam tuam.                       For your great glory.
Domine Deus,                                               Lord God,
Rex caelestis,                                                Heavenly King,                                      
Deus Pater omnipotens.                                God the Almighty Father.

Domine Fili unigenite,                                   Lord Only-begotten Son,
Jesu Christe.                                                Jesus Christ,
Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris,         Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father,
Qui tollis peccata mundi,                              You Who take away the sins of the world,
miserere nobis.                                            have mercy on us.
Qui tollis peccata mundi,                              You Who take away the sins of the world,
suscipe deprecationem nostram.                   hear our prayer.
Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris,               You Who sit at the right hand of the Father,
miserere nobis.                                            have mercy on us.
Quoniam tu solus Sanctus.                           For You alone are holy,
Tu solus Dominus.                                      You alone are the Lord,
Tu solus Altissimus, Jesu Christe.                You alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ,
Cum Sancto Spiritu                                    With the Holy Spirit
in gloria Dei Patris. Amen.                          in the glory of God the Father. Amen.

Veni Creator Spiritus Holy Gifts