Free Market

I don't think there really is anything like "free" market economies.  There are so many things that control your freedom to do things.  If you make a product, you can only make as much of that product as you can find the materials, commodities, and workers to make the product.  Then you can only sell it at a price that someone is willing to pay.  Supplies, labor, and price limit what you can do and still stay in business with a reasonable profit. You are not free to live in San Francisco.  Too many people tried that and now the cost of housing has priced out most people.  Only the crazed and the self-centered think in terms of unlimited freedom.  When they act "freely" they end up in self-destruction and usually take others down with them.  In my life, I seem to be more free than before I became a priest.  I thought I was giving up a lot, but find that now I live in four wonderful places, get invited to interesting new places, seem to have no income and yet have what I need or even want.  It may be that when we try to get "more" freedom we end up constricted and when we give up things, life seems to expand our horizons.  I think there is some spiritual maxim here.  The one who loses their life will find it?

Advance Answers

Chiara Lubich gave me this one.  It is a jolt.  If you were about to take a test, would you not think it fortuitous to have the answers in advance?  I don't mean cheating.  That would be bad.  I mean, if the answers were readily and knowingly given to you with the permission of the teacher.  Easy test right?  Pass with 100%.  Go on to Harvard or the next grade level anyway.  Well, life is a test.  To get to eternal life we have to pass the exam.  But we have the answers.  They are given to us in the scriptures of whatever spiritual path we follow or say we believe in.  In Christianity it is Matthew, chapter 25.  I am sure it is in the Hebrew Scriptures, Koran, Upanishads, Sutras, Twelve Steps, and so on.  We have the answers.  But we don't follow them or answer correctly.  You would think yourself pretty stupid if you did this on a school test would you not?  Right now, I think I might get a rather low grade.  How about you?

Mercy Hirschboeck

Elizabeth Hirschboeck, known as Sister Mercy Hirschboeck, is one of these anonymous Holy people who should be less anonymous.  She fascinates me.  She was a Maryknoll doctor missionary from Marquette University.  She got a little press for her work in the Korea during the Korean War.  She started out at a clinic in Korea in 1931 when Japan occupied that country.  They she moves on in 1943 to the heat and snakes of a Bolivian Jungle.  Back to Korea in 1951 to Pusan clinic.  In two years, 200,000 patents were treated.  It was a big and busy clinic.  1954 she goes home to Kansas City to administer at a fully integrated hospital called Queen of the World.  An integrated hospital in 1954 is something considering that the Supreme Court finally decided that separate but equal schools were not so equal.  Then she runs the whole order for twelve years.  At seventy you would think she could kick back, but no.  She moves into a crime infested neighborhood in Manhattan with a a group of "contemplative" nuns and witnessed by her presence amidst crime, drugs and poverty.  Doctoring never stops for her.  She died in 1986, just as I was moving to San Francisco to take on some "soft" Paulist ministry.  Someone said her demeanor gave you the sense of her being holy.  Wow.  My demeanor gives you the sense of what?  Never mind.  Work on your own demeanor.

Ezra

The Hebrew scriptures have a book or two that remind me of the Hasids in Brooklyn.  The Book of Ezra speaks about the Israelites returning from their Persian exile to the land they had left years ago.  Ezra says the reason they were sent into exile is because they did not keep the law as purely as they should.  Ezra was against intermarriage with non-Jews.  He was for studying and keeping all the various laws.  He was for the separation of Jews of the Law from foreigners, pagans, goyim.  The Hasids of Brooklyn said they were destroyed by Hitler because they did not keep the law correctly.  We see in religions this desire to be apart from others as a way to preserve something.  We may not all agree with it.  Many Jews do not agree with Hasids or Ezra.  But at least we know why people set themselves apart at times.  As the "West" impinges on Islam in the Levant or Middle East, as we call it, maybe there is some of this same desire for pure separation.  Just as some Jews think other Jews are no better than pagans, so some Moslems feel the same way about other Moslems.  Come to think of it, some Catholics feel that way about me.  Gotta' go.

Tardy

I tend to "blame" someone or something for the reason I am late for an event or meeting. I rarely blame "me."  It is never my fault.  It is never about being self-absorbed.  I may tend to do that one more "so important" thing.  Or I choose to do, eat, get something that ate up time.  Then I blame the traffic, even though there is always traffic.  When I start out this way, it tends to bleed over into interactions with people.  Things are their fault when things do not work out according to my plan.  My plans are fine.  People are uncooperative.  Can not they read my mind?  Each day, there is always that one more thing to be done, that if I leave it undone at the moment, I will be on time, the world will go on with my undone thing, and only people like me with their plans, will be upset.  It is the domino effect.  So I try to begin each day by being on time for the first thing I have to do.  And if that happens to be prayer and meditation, so much the better.

Volunteer Anyone?

I prefer the AA model of organization as opposed to the operative one in the Catholic Church.  Why?  In AA everyone is in charge of making the organization, the local group function.  There are really no permanent givers and takers.  At first one is a taker because they are such a mess.  But if they stay, they begin to do some of the work.  If you just show up when it suits you, soon enough you will drop out and probably go back to your misery.  On the other hand, the Catholic model is to pray for vocations of priest and nuns so they can do the work while everyone else comes and goes as it suits them.  The hierarchical model suits this modus operandi.  The elderly who used to volunteer and take up positions of leadership are being replaced by people for whom volunteering is something, well, old people did.  Parishes hire lay people but the model stays the same.  The salaried and the ordained, or professed do the work.  AA is full of people who know they need AA and will do lots to make AA function.  There is no hierarchy around.  I am not so sure that Catholics have this same sense of urgency.  

Vocations

My church is beginning to show a growth in numbers of men who want to become priests, many of whom were born in this country.  Seems like a good thing, no?  Well maybe and maybe not.  There are two things that young people grow up with in their world.  One, there is little that seems permanent.  Technology changes.  Families move for jobs.  Divorce.  Different attitudes about God, church, belief and so on.  The second thing they grow up with is that they are not so important.  There may very well be no job for them in the secular world.  They don't count.  If there is a job it could be short term.  Profits trump personnel.  All this can bring a certain amount of anxiety and even fear.  Some seminaries give a solution.  Dress up in a lot of pomp and circumstance.  Always wear your clerical clothes, very upscale clerical clothes.  You are better than the laity.  This answers the fear of being unimportant.   The right clothes show importance, and that you are indeed different. They are taught that clothes will witness to their priesthood.   Then the seminaries teach a return to a church in which these men never grew up.  It is for the sake of tradition which means lots of focus on rules, how things are done, what is taught that mirrors a church before the 1960s, that decade of change and chaos.  These young men have a sense of self-importance and wisdom based upon neither experience or the gospel.  They like to live in the past and call it the present.  They encourage the pious to become more pious and the thinkers, innovators, to leave.  They endure Francis I.