I've heard from so many who are deeply and rightly blown away by the current state of affairs in our world right now. No surprise today's headlines on my ISP read:

Terror Attacks, War, Flu Fears Compete With Disasters for Headlines Around the World in 2005

In these jaw dropping times of overwhelming challenges and turbulent change it is easy to fall into resignation and hopelessness or turn away into abject denial seeking to turn back the hands of time to what we suppose was a gentler era.

But this year during our holiday season it is important to remember that both Chanukah and Christmas, (both of which coincide on the evening of December 25th this year, and Kwanzaa on December 26th,) share a universal spiritual message: that it is possible to bring light and hope in a world of darkness, oppression and despair. Chanukah is about a struggle for freedom by an entire people who sought to remake their world through struggle with an oppressive political and social order. Christmas, on the other hand, focuses on the birth of a single individual whose life and mission was itself to bring freedom to us all.

Read complete feature: Gifted with the Template: A New World of Our Making

PANKAJ MISHRA
December 16, 2005
New York Times

When in 1989 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran sentenced Salman Rushdie to death, saying he had blasphemed the Prophet Muhammad in his novel "The Satanic Verses," it was seen even in the Islamic world as an act of political opportunism, intended to boost Iran over its rival Saudi Arabia as the beacon of global Islam. It garnered little support among the clergy outside Iran, or among Muslims in general; and Iran itself seemed to acknowledge public revulsion in 1998 when it stated it would no longer carry out the death sentence.

The ayatollah's fatwa however created what, in retrospect, seems an extraordinary ideological consensus among the largely secularized Western intelligentsia. Writing in Mr. Rushdie's defense, novelists, poets, newspaper editors and columnists painted themselves as defenders of the European Enlightenment battling the dark atavism of religion.

This view of an unreformed Islam prone to anti-Western extremism re-emerged, of course, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Many conservative intellectuals in the United States and Britain declared their resolve to fight to the bitter end against "Islamo-fascism"; and even the more liberal intellectuals demanded an immediate Islamic Reformation.

1. For your holiday gatherings of family and friends:
   Create a special time to acknowledge gratitude and appreciation. Many of us ritualize this time by passing around candles and lighting one as your turn comes while you speak out:
   1. What's mattered most to you in the past year.
   2. Share what you are grateful for.
   3. Let go of the past year... welcome in/be open to new... lead us into our future...
   Read complete Greatness Tools: Emergence During a Time of Heightened Crisis-into the new year

Sign up for my blog debuting 2006. Also, please don't forget to send Stories of Greatness for our upcoming issues. I'll be sending you a separate mailing announcing NEW for YOU offerings: forums, both in-person and by telephone.

Send your comments, thoughts and questions to Karen!

Wishing you a gentle winter!