When I was growing up in Ireland, my father had an expression, just one simple phrase that summed up a person, and it was a compliment. He would see somebody that he thought well of, somebody that he thought was authentic, they were genuine, you could count on them. He would say, "Ah, that man is a salt of the earth man." It was a sort of a definitive statement.

In 2015, two great spiritual masters met for a week in India to try to uncover what led to true happiness of life, true joy of life. The Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu met and wrote a book called The Book of Joy, and you have heard me make reference
to it many times over the years. They spent this time trying to determine what are the key components about this deep happiness that can come in our life.

Pope Leo XIV, in his address on World Peace Day, which is January 1st, he called for peace throughout the world. The theme of the day and the year is, "Peace be with you all: Towards an unarmed and disarming peace." He was calling all nations to be men and women of peace. Not a peace through violence or threat, but a peace of unarmed violence, of negotiation, of conversation, of a peace that sees peace through nonviolence.

I recently reread a book I had read many, many years ago. It is a really powerful book called The Power of Myth, written by Joseph Campbell. He is the world's foremost specialist on mythology of every culture in the world. He has written ontologies of mythologies.
And they are fantastic insights to the power of story in culture and why myths are so important.

This passage from the Gospel of Matthew is consistent with all the different Gospels,as each one refers to John the Baptist baptizing Jesus. But it was a great scandal at the time of the Gospel, because why would Jesus, who is the Son of God, need to have a baptism of repentance?

Behavior scientists tell us that between 50 and 60 percent of our actions each day operate from routines. This is just what we operate on. Our physical system, our body, operates a whole system called our autonomic system. Our breathing, for example, our blinking, they are all automatically and naturally done. We do not think about it and there are up to 50 percent of this each and every day.