A priest friend of mine was the victim of a gay-bashing in Logan Circle so violent that he would almost certainly have died had not a horrified passerby made a 911 call that brought a police car quickly to the scene. I also think of a seminarian friend, who was so brutally smashed up by a homophobic assailant wielding a tire iron that five operations on his head and brain were required.
Thanksgiving is not a purely civic holiday like Independence Day, although we are, in part, celebrating the fortitude of our Pilgrim forebears. Nor, like Christmas or Passover, does it come freighted with the content of a particular faith. Rather, Thanksgiving straddles these two categories; it is civic and religious. To paraphrase Jesus, Thanksgiving gives both to Caesar and to God.
I have decided this year to thank God in another way. I propose to thank God not for all the things I have. I want to thank God, instead, for all the things I do not have. I want to thank God for all the things I do not need!
The need to blame others for my lapse as a churchgoer is palpable. If only, if only. But ultimately I’m responsible for my own stuff. That’s what we’re trying so hard and so rigorously to impress upon our young teenage sons. You don’t like that grade in math? Oh…maybe you should try harder. You want an I-tunes gift card? Oh…maybe you should mow a neighbor’s yard.
The reasons for homelessness among veterans are the same reasons that homelessness is widespread in this country. But like those who go before us to protect our nation and our freedoms, these vets go before us as a living sign that in the most affluent nation in the world there are far too many of us who have no place to live.
With surgery declined, St. Elizabeth’s discharged my mother to one of three fates: eat food and bleed; drink fluids and grow weak; have surgery and return to health. When I arrived at the front apartment, she was obviously happy to be home. Her choice was to drink fluids until she got her nerve up to have the surgery. She had a permanent IV line dangling from her black and blue arm.
I struggle with the issue of how to balance my desire for a good life with my neighbors’ rights for the same. To the extent that I can only spend my money once, this is a zero sum game. I either spend my money on myself or on others, whether directly or as a bequest at my death.
Before I began to cry in public I ducked out to sit on the front steps of Grace Cathedral to have a chat with God. I was angry. I was so mad that my jaw hurt from clenching and my eyes burned with tears. I don’t understand why these amazing young people die.
It occurred to me that the Bible is like a family album. Images, stories, clippings, and mementos of encounters with a common story are gathered into its books. The Bible tells of encounters with the Holy and tries to make sense of Divine-Human relationships. The stories are saved to show future generations the way to live as a people of faith.
The definitions of compromise include: “coming to terms, or arrangement of a dispute, by concession on both “and “adjustment for practical purposes of rival courses of action, systems or theories, conflicting opinions or principles, by the sacrifice or surrender of a part of each.” These sound a lot alike, don’t they? And yet they are different