Introduction

This is my first blog page. Hello!

You can find me on:
Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/angela_sheard
Facebook http://en-gb.facebook.com/shearda
Google+ https://plus.google.com/108871563642276999039/posts

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Week of Guided Prayer: Day 2

Sorry these posts are so late! I'll try to write them up as quickly as I can. It's the second day (well, evening) of this week, and so far, the experiences have been really quite intense. Spending two 15 minute sessions a day in prayer or quiet contemplation has been surprisingly difficult to do, and even more challenging has been getting into the right mindset  - stopping endlessly worrying about the next thing I have do, setting no demands on myself and asking for nothing from God, achieving nothing of note in a period of time and being OK with that. I never thought of myself as someone 'caught up in the rat race' and yet this week has taught me that I am far more driven and competitive than I realized. When I'm not feeling awkward, bored or like I should be doing something else, I've been able to feel things coming at me, I assume from God. I've learnt a great number of important things this week, but today I was focused on my desire to be more tender...
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I've been mostly-vegan (in reality, flexitarian) for several months now, and I think it's time for me to post a long-term update, to track how my attitudes to the diet and related social issues have changed over time. A number of significant issues have come up from what I've thought and what I've read. I guess the first thing that's been on my mind is how much my relationship with animals has changed since I began what was very much an experiment in vegan eating. At the time, I was far less concerned with the emotional aspects of animal ethics than I was about the potential health benefits of eating a vegan diet, and the logical arguments behind it (these include the fact that the intelligence of many animal species puts them on a par with severely mentally retarded human beings, which I for one would never consider killing and eating, and the fact that the suffering which we cause animals is frankly unnecessary for people like me, who can freely choose what we e...
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Today (as I was embarassingly reminded by Twitter), we remember St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Fransiscan friar who gave his life in exchange for that of a fellow prisoner at the death camp Auschwitz during the Second World War. Over the summer, I went (along with my college choir) to Auschwitz and saw for myself the cell he was detained in and the shrine which had been subsequently placed there. The story of Br. Kolbe was among the most moving of the many important stories which I heard that day, and I have since meditated on its importance and the sheer strength of mind needed to achieve such an action. I have thought long and hard about ways in which I might make similar sacrifices in my own life, and how I would ever find the personal strength to behave with such generosity. Today on Twitter I read the following: "St. Max Kolbe was able to say yes in such a way because he practiced saying yes to God every day of his life." Suddenly, the underlying source of Kolbe's stren...
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