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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Fr Dermot Preston

Good morning.

The Swedish inventor, Alfred Nobel, was reading the morning newspaper at his home in Paris. It was 1888 and his older brother, Ludvig, had just died and Alfred wanted to see what the papers had to say.

Alfred opened the newspaper only to realise that they were mistakenly announcing his death, not Ludvig鈥檚.

It was an easy mistake 鈥� there were four Nobel brothers and all were businessmen and inventors. Ludvig, had made a vast amount of money revolutionising the European oil industry; Alfred, however, had moved into chemistry and had made a pot of cash inventing both dynamite and gelignite.

So Alfred, started to read his own obituary. The headline: 鈥淭he Merchant of Death is Dead鈥�.

It was a sobering piece; the obit railed against the immorality of the man whose inventions had not just revolutionised engineering and construction, but had industrialised war and death.

Alfred was shocked to realise this was his ambiguous legacy. In the remaining 8 years of his life, his focus changed and he eventually signed-over 95% of his fortune to the establishment of the Nobel prizes for science, literature and peace.

The founder of the Jesuits, St Ignatius of Loyola, suggests a meditation for anyone who finds themselves at a crossroads of a big life-decision with no clear way forward. Ignatius says, imagine yourself on your deathbed: look back at the crossroads and ask yourself the question 鈥� what decision would you have liked to have made?

Lord, sometimes we sleepwalk through life with a narrow view of reality and a distorted understanding of good and bad. Help me this day to broaden my horizons, to minimise the bad and enhance the good.

Amen.

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