There’s an old Medieval rabbinical tale that says that before we were born, we each had a light that shined above us.  This light looked backwards into our origins and forwards into our destiny.  But just before we took birth, an angel named Lailah, who had been looking after us during our pre-birth development, came...Read More

In the movie Ikiru, directed by Akira Kurosawa, an aging bureaucrat discovers he has stomach cancer and is propelled into an existential crisis by the realization that he has wasted his life engaged in a meaningless job.  This revelation opens him up, however, to a constructive act:  he sets to work transforming a stagnant pond...Read More

During the Middle Ages, a popular image of the stages of life in Roman Catholicism was of a mandala with Christ in the center and the different ages of man represented as spokes around that hub (see my post on The Stages of Life and the Liturgy of the Hours).  With the dawning of the...Read More

In Roman Catholicism there exists a daily pattern of prayer, where specific prayers are linked to particular times of the day, a practice which dates from Medieval times. This cycle of prayer is typically undertaken by those in a monastic order. Some adherents believe that this Divine Office, as it is also called, reflects not...Read More

Hesiod was a Greek poet who lived and wrote during the time of Homer (between 750 and 650 B.C.E).  From his writings we have one of the first developmental theories, not about the individual stages of life, but rather about how humanity develops over time.  He believed there were five ages of humankind, four of...Read More