Word: gifts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Through history, even the great and famous have found trouble with the choice of gifts. Queen Victoria was clearly desperate when, as the story goes, she presented Mount Kilimanjaro to Kaiser Wilhelm for his birthday. Yet, the grandly useless gift can be endearing, and while most Americans cannot give mountains, there are other possibilities. Among them is the sauna built for one, developed by New York's Hammacher Schlemmer as an alternative to the standard size ("because it isn't easy to find the right five people to take a sauna together"). The Dauphin of France...
Emerson said that the only true gift is a gift of self. All the greatest presents bear him out, whether it is Cleopatra offering herself to Caesar wrapped in a rug, or-on a more spiritual plane-the Juggler of Our Lady giving all he has: his little art. Not everyone can offer his own composition, as Richard Wagner did when he gave the Siegfried Idyll to his wife. But the art of giving would be immensely enhanced if more people today took whatever skill and time they had to make gifts themselves...
Today, the gift of time is perhaps the most important, even if it is ritualized: any society needs rituals. The true gift of the Magi was not the myrrh, frankincense and gold but the time and trouble they took to bring them. The effort -and its modern-day equivalent of hours at crowded counters-can also be a testimony of concern, also a gift of self...
...about recently: The Pleasure of His Company, a warm, highly personal reminiscence of Jack Kennedy by Paul ("Red") Fay, a longtime family friend. In Dallas last week, Fay reported that Jackie had rejected his donation of $3,000 to the Kennedy Memorial Library at Harvard because she thought the gift "hypocritical." Said Fay: "She couldn't have found anything in the book that was unkind to Jack, but I believe she felt it was an invasion of privacy...
Secularization - the historical process by which man increasingly controls the universe, thereby seeming to diminish God's dominion - sounds by definition like a threat to Christianity; in fact, it is a divine gift to man that has its roots in Biblical revelation. Such is the in sight of one of the century's greatest and least known Protestant thinkers...