Crazy Like Me

I sit in a room at 7:00 AM, meditating with a bunch of guys who have struggles with the everyday life of people, events, and places.  I feel very comfortable with these guys.  When I meditate with a bunch of priests, nuns, parish regulars, heavyweight searchers for spiritual depth, I find myself saying, "I am out of my league here."  If these people only knew what goes through my mind!  But with these guys, early in the morning, I feel at home.  They are all crazy like me.  I think it is a great blessing to find such people.  There is acceptance and hope.  We are all trying.  If you can find a group on a spiritual path, who accept you just as you are, this is a blessing.

Kearney Street

Here is San Francisco in my neighborhood there is a rather ugly street named "Kearney." For about three or four blocks if you look at the buildings from eye level, all is rather in need of some renewal if not facelifting.  BUT, if you walk along and look up, you see all the beautiful designs on the sides at the tops of these same buildings.  So ugly at one level and so beautiful at another.  Of course, it is much harder to walk along with your head tilted backhand eyes raised while not tripping or walking into something/someone.  I find looking up to be a metaphor for prayer.  Life has many easy to see distractions and run of the mill things.  Focus only on the easy to see and experience, and you will miss something more beautiful.  Prayer is the more beautiful, but it takes effort and a conscious decision to look in a particular direction.  Maybe all the builders of the Kearney Street stores, found God somewhere above the fourth floor, and that made all the difference.

A Guide

I recently ate food purchased at a Japanese supermarket.  My first time to buy food at such a place and eat it.  It is not the same experience as a Japanese restaurant, to which I have already gone in the past.  In the supermarket I get to see all the foods, not just a menu of them.  So many choices, so much variety.  I had a guide, a priest friend who was familiar with things in the store.  Yet I picked out something different than he did.  My choice was delicious, and inexpensive too.  A guide, a mentor, is most helpful when going to some place new and different.  For one, they can save you from mistakes that are commonly made.  This helps to have a good first experience.  Some people would rather just go it alone.  I will go back to this supermarket and Japanese food.  A bad first experience can make all the difference to many of us.  So why try to find God all by yourself?

Sean Fagan

Seems Fr. Sean Fagan, Irish, was silenced for his writings back in 2010.  Well, now, with a new pope, seems Fr. Fagan is being reinstated.  He had been threatened with being tossed out of the priesthood if he continued to publish.  He got silent after 2010 but never changed his writings.  So what changed?  Seems whomever is in power in Vatican circles calls the shots.  I foolishly thought it was all about dogma and doctrine.

Inequality

The Pope said that the root of all evil is inequality.  Capitalists circled the wagons.  A counterpoint to the Pope is that the old Soviet Union eliminated inequality, but things were a mess.  So much for socialism.  The Cold War regime of communism was hardly socialism.  The word socialism was the veneer for corrupt, greedy people, i.e. the party bosses, to get rich while not really producing much of anything.  The problem with inequality, be it capitalism or communism, is greed.  Greed makes for an unjust inequality.  There will always be inequality, but communism has no answer or antidote for it.  It has no religion.  It allows for no dissent.  The freedoms that come with capitalism, allow for some solution to greed.  There is greed that comes with not paying just wages, or firing people simply to get a better bottom line profit statement.  There is also the reward that comes to the entrepreneur, the risk-taker, and plain good luck.  I think spirituality is the only solution to greed.  In my country people are trying to kill religion while at the same time complaining about inequality.  Go figure.

Love Is Fleeting

For me, loving San Francisco is a fleeting emotion.  One day it is warm, sunny, no cold ocean breeze.  I never want to leave.  I will stay here forever.  Suddenly, everything changes.  Partly cloudy, cold, brisk wind off the water, dampness everywhere, bone chilling.  I can't wait to get out of here.  The house is cold and so on.  This town challenges me to love day in and day out, with some acceptance and some hope.  One grows spiritually living in the challenges of San Francisco weather.  To keep an even keel, one needs acceptance, hope, patience, and imagination to find indoor things to do.  And of course you get lots of days off from purgatory for all the suffering in bad weather.  This can be fun town for suffering…until the big one, of course.

Who Will Love Me

If you want to know what is was like to grow up Irish in NewYork City, read, Someone, by Alice McDermott.  It is a wonderful read.  Anyhow, Marie, the woman narrator in the book is dumped by her boyfriend.  She asks an important question.  "Who will love me?"  Marriage is where many people expect this question to be answered.  Is there someone out there with whom I can share my life and diminish my loneliness?  I think this is what many of us look for in a relationship.  When I wake up in the morning I try to say thank you to God for my being loved, not only by God, but by others.  To be loved by people who actually know me in all my faults is nothing less than a miracle.  It is a profound gift, totally unearned.  People come to church with this question: "Who will love me?"  To chastise them, criticize them, tell them they are a mess, is rather cruel.  But then some say that I am a rather church lite priest.  I am an Irishman who does not believe in kicking people when they are already down.  I rather pick on religious potentates.