We started by building an 8′ X 2′ box in our three-season room, and (with help of good persons at Growing Power and some worms) grew, with mixed results, salad greens and seedlings for the first summer’s garden. As the seasons change, our focus shifts back and forth between the sun-room and its evolving Growing Power Home Garden Project Box, and our Growing Power backyard garden, where we use the rich soil, worm castings and worms from the indoor box outdoors. Same system yet different.
Digging in the earth can uncover all kinds of things, and so can digging deep in ourselves. In my online journal, I have been recording daily reflections on the progress of our efforts in adapting the Growing Power model to our home and garden, mixed with my observations about life, peace, justice, faith, family, community and friends. Enjoy. Thank you! — Bob Graf
I was listening to the PBS radio program On Being while in the car today and heard a person talk about The Last Quiet Places. He was a silence activist concerned about how silence, not absence of sound but absence of noise, is an endangered species. Inspired by the sound of silence I wrote the following:
When you are down, when you know people are talking about your back about your past faults and holding on to your weaknesses and will not let go, when you work on something you believe in but seem to get nowhere, when people reject and insult you and you feel down, listen the silence around you and know you are the same person that you are, have been and will be, somebody precious, valued and love and this fact of being can never be taken away from you.
When you are up, when everything seems to be going the right way, when whatever decision you make seems to be the right decision, when friends and family show appreciation for you, when you feel a deep peace in your heart, listen to the silence around you and know you are the same person that you are, have been and will be, somebody precious, valued and love and this fact of being can never be taken away from you.
Be you down or up stay simple, grounded and bask in the sound of silence.
Today in our Faith Sharing group the question was “What Gives You Life?” One person in our group started to talk about how routine helped him get through life. Knowing how to get around, where he should be, where his cell phone is helps him get through daily life. Moving is difficult for him and he likes knowing his way home and where things are at home.
Another person in the group talked about just being present in life. How, if one had the basics of life, having more ‘stuff’ did not mean more happiness. If you acquire three times more stuff did not mean you were three times happier. When one had the fundamentals of life, food and shelter, more life was found in being present in the movement. Living simply was her goal.
After we each shared we had an open discussion. To my friend seeking routine and a defined way home I suggest he get a GPS (Global Positioning System) like the one on my phone. I told him the story how when once I misplaced my cell phone when it was on vibration. I went to my computer to find it. The GPS system in the phone knows where it is and sends out a signal. So going on my home computer and using a Google global position system I was able to locate my cell phone. It was in Milwaukee, on my block and in fact on the right side of my house. Looking around that part of the house I found my cell phone underneath the covers on my bed. He was impressed.
For my friend that found life in simply being I said more important than having stuff was being detached from stuff, places, habits and even people. Detachment to me seem the way to be to be home where we are, satisfied with whatever we have.
Suddenly I found myself putting the desire for routine at home and being home to our being together. I said what we all need in life is a GPS to find the home of our being. With such a device we could find our being wherever we are. Some say silence and meditation will get your there and I agree. Being completely silent releases a GPS to find the home of our being.
Young cows in the field I work up early this morning with a lot on my mind. We went to early Mass so we could head up north to be with my son and his family. My wife had volunteered her services with my son, his wife and our two grandsons at a 4-H food booth at a big flea sale in nearby fair grounds. With the five of them busy at the food both that left my seven year granddaughter to work around the market picking up honey candy and bracelet for her and sox, plants, garden ornaments for myself.
After roaming the flea market the two of us headed for my son’s house. After watching some of the Milwaukee Brewer’s baseball game on TV and resting we wandered over to the dairy farm across the road. There we found the young cows roaming the pasture, the milking cows in their barns, the very young in their pens, and the pregnant cows in another barn. Cows were everywhere on this dairy farm and a truck pulled up to take the fresh milk to a cheese factory.
In India the cows are sacred, some ‘wild’ cows are left alone to wander where they want and other cows are used for milk, medicine and the most precious gift of all cow dung. Cow dung has many purposes but the most useful one is to let it dry out, let worms eat it and make castings, worm poop from cow poop compost.
There is something about cows that slows one down and provides a more earthly view of the world.
After watching some more baseball on TV we started to take a walk back of my son’s house toward his ‘hops’ farm in the back. I had brought my son five bags of my own homemade castings to put around five of his poles on which the hops grow. I noticed he had a pile of matured cow poop mixed with straw on his land. While I was walking back there my wife called to say they were finished working and would meet us on a nearby restaurant. I asked her to put my son on the phone and told him that I had left the five bags of castings outside his door and if it was okay to take a few pales of cow dung back for compost pile. He said yes, we took some and headed for the restaurant.
As my granddaughter and I were driving over there we made up jokes about the ‘poop’ in the truck. I have found that young people from three to eighteen find the word ‘poop’ funny in almost all context. I joked with my granddaughter about not telling her grandmother, my wife, that we had pales of cow poop in the truck of her car. Although dried up poop mixed with straw did not smell she thought it was a funny secret to keep. I promised not to tell her mother about our ‘poop’ joke session, knowing she did not approve.
Naturally my granddaughter was itching to tell grandma about the cow dung in the trunk of her car. She kept asking me for permission. I said it was not good to talk about at a meal. After we were done eating she asked if now she could tell. I said yes and she did. My wife was not surprised because she knew my son had given me permission to take some manure but she acted surprised to the delight of my granddaughter.
The lesson of the day is that when you wake up with lots on your mind just have a slow mooving day with a child and all will be well. (Check out the Gandhi cow picture quote below.)
Front Yard Rain Garden
April 2012 After a day of making Home Visits it was good to have a day where I could spend some time in the gardens, planting, making castings, watering and pulling weeds. Of course there is always harvesting. For dinner I was able to pick herbs and lettuce for the salad and kale and collard greens for my ‘potato green’ vegetables. My wife suggested that I take monthly pictures of the gardens in the various stages. I have some pictures from March and April of a few of the gardens but can start next week on May through October.
Garden work might be endless but working in the garden easily shows visible results. Some work, especially in peace and resistance work, does not always show results. We need to work for something with or without results.
I took time out from working on my gardens to go across the street to my neighbors who is a pro in growing plants and who has an award winning garden in front of his house. (Picture to come). He grows plants from seeds and by splitting roots. Once a year, next Saturday, he has a major garden sale. This year he has a web page of all the garden plants he has to offer at Schuler Gardens.
Gardens in the front yard are become more common and to me seem, more natural, than grass. With Growing Power ways of growing, maximizing a small area for maximum growth yards, front and back are turning beautiful and fruitful. Yards are growing into Gardens.
My wife, Pat, and I are members of the St. Vincent De Paul Society, SVDP, the largest lay Catholic organization in the world. The mission of the Society is for “women and men to join together to grow spiritually by offering person-to-person service to those who are needy and suffering”. Simply said ‘home visits’ to people in need is what we are all about and were we find our ‘blessings’. Normally we make about 3 or 4 home visits in less than 2 hours. Today we made eight home visits to persons in need in 3 1/2 hours, an extra dose of blessings.
Each family had a story of why they suffer in poverty. There were some common themes like unemployment or lack of health insurance but each story was unique. We gave persons what we could, vouchers for appliances or beds, but the blessings came from listening to each story, seeing the smile on a child’s face and feeling the gratitude as we left a house. There were some light moments when a mother of nine with two grandchildren living in the house told us she received a lots of Mother Day cards from her children in school. There were some sad moments when a woman unemployed after suffering a major illness spoke of her adult son with a mental illness unable to get benefits for those who are disabled. There were prayerful moments when we prayed together at the end of some visits.
Since moving back to Milwaukee in 1995 I have been trying to get the Milwaukee SVDP to focus more on the main mission, home visits, than other supplementary endeavors like stores, social service work, meal programs etc. Also over the years many Catholic churches have closed, and thus their SVDP conferences, in the poorest and most segregated area of the fourth poorest city in the USA and the most segregated city in the USA. Where once there were 17 Catholic Churches helping those in need now there are only three and the three suffer from a lack of financial resources. All but one person we visited today were African American. The one white person we visited, who had recently moved to Milwaukee and was really outside of our conference area. There was a SVDP conference near her but by not making home visits, the heart of our mission had faded away. This woman had been told by her landlord in the almost all white neighborhood to stay out of the areas that were ‘dark’ as she called the African American neighbors nearby. We tried to assure her that African American neighborhoods were a result of racism and not to be feared. I do not think we were too successful since all she hears from people around and the white politicians and police chief is how terrible these neighborhoods are.
I, along with others, have made several attempts to restructure the St.Vincent De Paul Society in Milwaukee to more effectively serve those and need and to bring in more resources of people and money. For the most part we have not been successful as organizations do not want to change, even when they can serve their mission more effectively. At times, like recently I feel like giving up on the efforts to change and restructure our Milwaukee SVDP. However, after hearing stories like I did today I know we must keep up our efforts for change and to adapt to serve our mission, person to person home visits. Home visits are the mission of St. Vincent De Paul Society.
Stop and See - Thursday, May 10, 2012
Granddaughter taking pictures
at museum Today I was a chaperone for my granddaughter on her class trip to the Milwaukee Museum. I met the 2nd grade classes at the museum and found out there was lots of chaperones so the only person I was responsible for was my granddaughter.
She had told me that she was bringing her camera and planned to take plenty of pictures. This was very accurate as she took me from display to display taking pictures of everything she saw.
She reminded me when I was young, about her age, and my parents took me to the Chicago Museum of Arts and Sciences. I was so excited about being there I kept going from exhibit to exhibit saying ‘you need to see this’. Finally my mother told me to slow down and really take a look at the exhibit rather than jump to the next one. If I would have had a digital camera at the time I would have been just like my granddaughter today.
Her taking photos as soon as she saw something reminded me of a story that Father Anthony De Mello S.J. spoke about a family making plans for vacation, going on it, taking pictures and returning home without every been present to where they were.
I love my granddaughter. She is so honest and beautiful with her childlike view of the world. I kept saying to her look at the exhibit before taking a picture. I think she heard me and did some of that at the end. Really seeing is difficult for a child or adult but we must stop and see to be fully alive.
Granddaughter, Ordinary Soccer Kick? “[W]alking down a street, sweeping a floor, washing dishes, hoeing beans, reading a book, taking a stroll in the woods-all can be enriched with contemplation and with the obscure sense of the presence of God.” — Thomas Merton, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation, William H. Shannon, editor, Harper, San Francisco, 2003; p 66
Thomas Merton has a way of writing about ordinary things and making them extraordinary. Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker admired St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower for how she did ordinary everyday things and made them holy. Dorothy called it the “Little Way”.
Children, for me, are very good for reminding us how ordinary things can be exciting. While I was working on the front yard garden today my six year old neighborhood came home from school. Immediately he jumped on his scooter and went over to see if his friend, neighbor on the other side, was home. He was not so he came back and asked if could help in the garden. I had him use a pitchfork to dig up some weeds in the front raised garden area to prepare the ground for planting. He was fascinated by what he found in the ground, ‘rollies’ as he called them, little bugs that roll up in a ball. He told me that in school he was studying shadows and space. I thought he meant shadows in space and asked him about them. He pointed to his shadow on the ground and said that was what he meant by shadows and how space was something out there in the cosmos. He added that he did not want to be an astronaut but wanted to study space.
Last night my eight year old granddaughter called up to remind me that I was a chaperone for her third grade class that was coming to Milwaukee for a visit to the Milwaukee Museum. She was excited about the trip to the museum even though my wife and I with her and her two brothers recently visited the Milwaukee museum. She told me that I could wear bright clothes in the butterfly area since she was no longer afraid of butterflies. She told me each child was bringing their own lunch. I said I would bring lunch and a piece of fresh pita read I had just purchased, something I know she really likes. She was excited about my bringing the pita bread.
Ordinary things are exciting for children of all ages but for many with education they are just ordinary things.
Perennial Flower Vase
with Rhododendrons The weather was warm in the 60’s today and sunny. It was spring again. I say spring again because spring came early this year at the beginning of March and then went away and came back again a few times . Due to this spring on and off pattern spring flowers came early and then slowed down.
With the early March spring I decided to try to have a vase of fresh flowers on the kitchen table from March 1 thru October 31st. All started well with the daffodils and tulips but when the weather went cold and rainy again I started to wonder if I could make it to the next batch of blooming flowers.
But I was saved by the Rhododendrons in the corner of the backyard. I had not planted these exotic plants and since they do not come up every year had forgotten about them. When I was working on the trellis for the beans in the backyard I noticed the plants were blooming. It was just in time to keep the perennial flower vase on the kitchen table alive and well.
There are a number of plants ready to bloom in the rain garden. With the rhododendrons in the vase and in the backyard I should be safe to the new blooms. The weatherman says it will be cooler and rainy again tomorrow but I do not care. My perennial flower vase has been saved by the Rhododendrons.
“To blow the dynamite
of a message
is the only way
to make the message dynamic.” (Peter Maurin, Easy Essay, Blow the Dynamite)
When Catholic High schools Universities become military recruiting and training schools,
When the suicide rate of veterans rises over 80% in the last years,
When the former Prime Minister of Afghanistan accuses the US-led forces in Afghanistan of intentionally killing civilians in his country,
When the US neither confirms or denies a massacre of 41 civilians in Yemen in 2009,
When the USA government stops caring for the poorest and most vulnerable in society,
When USA CIA drone and covert action strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia are intensified under current President killing hundreds of civilians,
When health care is for profit and not for the poor and sick,
It is time to blow the dynamite of our message that all human life is sacred, to teach war no more and to spend money on people not on war.
How do we blow the dynamite on this message and make the message dynamic?
This is the question and requires us to think of new and creative ways to blow the dynamite.
Old methods of protest, signing petitions, voting, being on the defensive and divided and “doing our thing” will not work any longer.
We must come together with new ways of nonviolent warfare just as the military has come together with new ways of killing and teaching people how to kill reflexively..
It is starting to happen with new ways of communicating and awareness.
But it is like an arms race, while the society becomes more and more militarized,
While the Industrial/Military/Education complex rises to power,
We must strike back nonviolently with tools of conflict, civil disobedience and self sacrifice.
“To blow the dynamite of a message is the only way to make the message dynamic.”
Some ants give up reproduction
and take care of the queen ant’s
young. Being in a sports season with the NBA basketball finals and Brewers baseball going on I am thinking of accepting injury. In the NBA finals and with the Brewers baseball team there has been a rash of significant injuries in the last week. Accepting injury and making the best of it is something a sport’s team and the individual player need to learn and do. Once the injury happens there is not much an individual or team can do but to learn from it, rehabilitate and go on.
Nature takes injury, like a wildfire, and does it best to recover. Consistent injury to nature and environment, as we are now finding out, can have some serious consequences.
In battle or dangerous situations a person will put themselves in harm’s way to save someone else from injury. Parents, friends, soldiers will risk life for love or duty. In modern biological evolutionary science they say that creatures that will sacrifice for the others, like bees, ants or humans have reached a higher level on the evolutionary scale.
The injury that I find it hard to take is insults, rejections, stigmas and wrongs directed to me. St. Ignatius of Loyola prays to God in the Spiritual Exercises (#98) for the “desire to be with you in accepting all wrongs and all rejections and all poverty, both actual and spiritual — and I deliberately choose this, if it is for your greater service and praise.” I find it hard not only to pray for this kind of marginalization but find it hard to accept. My instinct is to react, which only reinforces the wrongs of the accusers.
I need to be like a professional player, nature or one who sacrifices, take the blow to self, learn from it, rehab and comes back on offense. Taking one for the team or for self is the way to overcome wrongs and rejections and stay on the offense.
Middle Time - Saturday, May 05, 2012
Middle Time is Okay in the Rain
Garden June 26, 2011 Today I went to warehouse sale at SHARE, a nonprofit, volunteer-run food buying club. The sale was from 9am – 11am. I got there about 15 minutes after 9. There was a long line waiting outside to get in. I was too late in line to get in at the beginning at the sale. When after nearly an hour of waiting, when I finally went through the line, many food items were sold out. I came early for the sale but half way through the sale it was too late.
There is a monthly plant sale at a commercial company near when I used to live. When the store first opens there is a long line waiting to get in the store for best interior plants on sale. At the end of the day, in mid afternoon the remaining plant prices are drastically cut in price. When I got there it was too early to catch the best plants on sale and yet it was not late enough for the plants to be drastically cut in price.
Observing these two experiences I thought that sometimes coming early or late to events has some benefits. But going to an event in the time in the middle usually does not. Middle Time is not early or late enough.
“Whatever you do for the poor
you do for me” (Matt: 25) Yesterday I read in the local newspaper that the Gov. Walker’s ® State government administration had received permission from President Obama’s( D) USA administration to cut health coverage to poor persons in Wisconsin. Today a friend called to say how in the beginning of the year health care coverage had been cut to people on disability, including dental care for her son who had lost his teeth in an assault.
Another Wisconsin politician Rep. Ryan ® is not well known for his budget that calls for drastic cuts in aide for persons in need. As a Catholic he even had the guts to justify his budget on Catholic Social Teaching. As many others pointed out his proposal for tax cuts to rich and to cut services for the old, poor and sick is just the opposite of Catholic Social Justice that states the main purpose of government is for the common good and to serve the needs of the poor.
The poor are easy targets for the rich and poor. Republicans and Democrats want to serve the wealth and declining middle class, where now they estimate that half the person in the US are poor or ‘near poor’.
I sent a letter to the editor of the local newspaper about this budget proposal of Rep. Ryan but it applies to the President’s approval health care cuts for the poor that Wisconsin Governor is making. I do not think the newspaper will publish it since I had a letter in recently. But here it is, below. I guess God’s politics are not Republican or Democrat.
I had planned to work on the garden this afternoon but around noon got a call from a friend who needed a ride to a Doctor’s appointment. Due the lack of good public transportation in the city I was his only hope to make the appointment. Right after his call I got a call from another friend who needed a ride home for his daughter. I said I would call back and see what I could do.
Driving my friend to his doctor’s appointment I noticed I was low on gas. So after dropping him off I went seeking a gas station. The closest one I could find was a Mobile gas station. I just had heard about a new book about how powerful Exxon Mobile was, just like an independent nation. But after getting some gas there I headed back to the medical clinic. When I got there I got a call from my friend that he had discovered his doctor’s appointment was in two weeks and was on the road waiting for me.
I picked him up and as I was driving him home he started to tell how ‘people’ were angry and so ‘pissed off’ at him. He often makes general statements like this so I said “Wait a minute, if anyone is angry with you it should be me and I am not.” He agreed and admitted it was Mr. Paranoid that was telling him this. I said “Tell Mr. P to go piss in his pants” and we proceeded to talk about this phenomena. I will spare you the rest of the discussion.
Since there was no Doctor’s appointment I had time to drive my other friend to pick up his daughter at school. As I parked nearby he went over to get his daughter. She came out but then remembered that it was book sale and ran back in to purchase books. I did not think that would take long but then my friend told me how much time she took at book sales and she had “more than enough money” for this one. Eventually he went back in and got her. Fortunately she had purchased her books.
As I was coming back from this appointment a ‘hard rain’ started to fall and I was not able to get to the garden until after dinner for only a brief period.
I make these observations today since it is another proof that with the best lay plans, like working on the garden, Mother Nature and the needs of friends really can determine what you do and do not do. I would have been frustrated in the old days but now I realize that to take what is given me each day is the best plan yet.
Andre Charles painted this mural
on Houston Street the day that
Tupac was shot in 1996 Today after our second prayer vigil for a homicide victim, Russell Sedum 24 years old, I stayed to talk with a friend and neighbor about the young man that was killed. This neighborhood, near the 3rd district police station, had once been a white neighborhood with a heavy Jewish population. As African Americans moved in the whites move out. However, the neighbor I talked to after the vigil told me how they were had become, until recently, a tight knit neighborhood where everyone knew each other and the children grew up together. That was changing now, as people moved away, the crime went up. This lady’s daughter was raped in the house during a robbery and she herself was almost a victim of carjacking.
In fact a carjacking was how Russell was killed and his mother shot. Russell had got his life together and was in process of becoming a popular tattoo artist. With his fame and money he had purchased some nice items, like his car. He, his mother and friends were glad for his success. However, as the neighbor said, his success made him a target for the robbery and carjacking. His mother had two sons, but one that was sick and handicapped had died a few years ago. There is a banner on the house to honor him, Nicholas. When the mother saw what was happening to her other son she ran out of the house to plea with the carjackers not to kill her son. They shot at her hitting her in the foot and then killed her son.
Before the vigil I had talked with a 26 year old African American male who was walking his two dogs. He told me he had just moved into the neighborhood a few weeks ago right before the other homicide close to the police station nearby. He had been surprised to hear shots ring out each night in this neighborhood. He told me he had lost 10 friends and family the last year, aged 18–26 to homicides. I could see from a page that he was a security guard. He told me that he was getting gun training and soon would be getting a concealed gun permit.
The neighbor had told me that she too was now going to apply for a permit to carry a concealed weapon. The other young lady in the conversation after the prayer vigil was family friend whose brother lived down the block and was the first to discover the bodies. At the end of the conversation her brother pulled up with his car to take her back home.
We are seeing an increase in homicides in Milwaukee this year, see Mothers Against Gun Violence and I fear that with the new gun laws, Castle doctrine law and conceal and carry law. More guns might be good for a gun dealers business but simply results in more shootings and homicides.
Today I read an article how suicides of military veterans have gone up 80% the last five years. I heard on the news tonight about more shootings in our city and about a famous football who committed suicide with a gun today. With our endless wars it seems like USA had decided to live by the gun and as they say: ”If you live by the gun you will die the gun.”
May 1, 1933 Union Square, NYC May 1 is a day of celebration around the world, Feast of St. Joseph, beginning of month to honor Mary, the Mother of God, Worker rights day around the world, a day for marches and parades, especially military parades around the world.
May 1, 1933 the first issues of the Catholic Worker, was sold for a ‘penny a copy’ at the rally in Union Square. On May 1, 1965 Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement gave a speech at a antiwar rally in Union Square in New York. The names of the countries might have changed but her words ring true for this May Day. A research article about this speech can be found at DOROTHY DAY, UNION SQUARE SPEECH. I will let the cry of this May Day speech speak for itself.
“It is not just Vietnam, it is South Africa, it is Nigeria, the Congo, Indonesia, all of Latin America. It is not just the pictures of all the women and children who have been burnt alive in Vietnam, or the men who have been tortured, and died. It is not just the headless victims of the war in Colombia. It is not just the words of Cardinal Spellman and Archbishop Hannan. It is the fact that whether we like it or not, we are Americans. It is indeed our country, right or wrong, as the Cardinal said in another context. We are warm and fed and secure (aside from occasional muggings and murders amongst us). We are the nation the most powerful, the most armed and we are supplying arms and money to the rest of the world where we are not ourselves fighting. We are eating while there is famine in the world. Scripture tells us that the picture of judgment presented to us by Jesus is of Dives sitting and feasting with his friends while Lazarus sat hungry at the gate, the dogs, the scavengers of the East, licking his sores. We are the Dives. Woe to the rich! We are the rich. The works of mercy are the opposite of the works of war, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, nursing the sick, visiting the prisoner. But we are destroying crops, setting fire to entire villages and to the people in them. We are not performing the works of mercy but the works of war. We cannot repeat this enough.”
Gardens are forgiving. You can make mistakes, learn from them and go on doing the right thing. Gardens like nature do not hold your past mistakes against you or care what you did in the past. After working in the garden today I came in to find a series of email from a friend reminding me how mistakes in the past can come back to haunt you and intensify a stigma that you carry from the past.
Stigma Stains the Soul and contains a partial truth but does not define who you are unless you let it. As I said in the posting March 3, 2009 Persons who ‘talk too much’ are usually very vocal. ‘Terrorists’ often do promote terror.” However, a stigma does not define a person. A person with cancer is not cancerous as a person with a mental illness is not mentally ill.
I was thinking about this today since I often find myself speaking a message that people do not want to hear and thus find it easier to focus on the faults of the messenger than deal with the message, like teaching war and violence in a Catholic school. Being a person with lots of faults I make an easy target for those ignoring the message by attacking the messenger.
Often I think being so sensitive to what I consider injustice or violating conscience is a curse. But then I realize the paradox that curses are often blessings. My deceased son Peter and my gardens have helped me learn that mistakes of the past and stigma, deserved or not, can hurt but with forgiveness, even be it self-forgiveness, can become a blessings.
Emmanual receives his First
Holy CommunionThis morning my friend Emmanuel Komba, 8 years old, made what is called in the Catholic Church, his First Holy Communion. He received what looked like a thin wafer more than the bread it was and drank from a cup of wine. We believe the bread and wine are the body and blood of Jesus Christ. How this could be is a mystery and matter of faith but is that not like our scientific belief that in every breathe we take it we are taking in a bit of the whole cosmos.
Science is racing to find the beginning of the universe and where the universe is going. Is this not like faith that dwells within us and is always searching for more? St. Augustine said about God: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
Faith and science are not found for us in the past or future but in the present moment. The deeper we go in the present moment the more we find that place where science and faith are one.
I forgot my camera this morning but with my phone camera tried to capture the present moment, however unclear, when Emmanuel received the Bread and Wine of Life. Someday we will understand this mystery. The beginning, end and present will be one, when science and faith become one,
May 1, 1933 rally in
Union Square, NYC I love moments of life where various aspect of my life seems to intersect. Today a friend in Holland send me an article in the New York Times called A Different Intersection of Church and Politics were many parts of my life came together. First the person who sent me the article was Jim Forest a writer who had been a member of the Catholic Worker New Your city and has written books about Dorothy Day, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. Also, like me he was a member of the Milwaukee 14 nonviolent action in 1968. The article itself is about the intersection of the Catholic Worker in NYC and the Occupy Wall Street movement, both of great interest to me.
Also tomorrow is the big May Day march in Milwaukee for Immigration Rights, something close to the hearts and minds of Catholic Workers. In fact the first issue of the Catholic Worker was distributed, for a penny a copy, at the May 1, 1933 rally in Union Square in New Your City.
Thinking about this intersection of life I saw how other parts of my life have intersected today and every day. But this is enough for now. Read the article, A Different Intersection of Church and Politics and enjoy this intercession of life
Pray for Rep. Ryan (WI) The other day in the local newspaper I read how faculty members and priest of Georgetown University, a Jesuit school in Washington D.C., wrote Rep. Paul Ryan (WI), chairman of the House Budget Committee how his budget plan did Not reflect the teachings of the Catholic Church as he claimed.
Rep. Ryan, a Catholic, claimed that his budget proposal reflects the social teaching of the Catholic faith while the faculty members and the Jesuit say “it decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few.” Rep. Ryan does not understand, it seems, that in Catholic social teaching the main role of the government is to exist for the ‘common good.’
Rep. Ryan does not understand that the ‘preferential option for the poor’ in the Catholic Church is based on Jesus’ parable about the Judgment of Nation where he talks how feeding the poor, visiting those in prisons, visiting the sick as how we treat God and nations be judged and rewarded and how when a nation does not do the works of mercy it is condemning itself to ‘eternal punishment’. Americans tend to read Matthew 25 as individual acts. In the time of Jesus there was no individualism like we now have in the USA. Jesus was talking about nations and governments in the parable. Pray for government leaders, like Rep. Ryan, who do not get this basic understanding of faith that government’s major role is to serve the common good, especially to the poor and least amongst us. Pray that Rep. Ryan hears the voice of God and does not harden his heart.
Pat with Peter and David
in younger days of our marriageToday is our 43rd wedding anniversary. Some of my friends say that Pat, my wife, is a Saint since she put up with me all these years. Maybe so, I respond, but if she is a saint I must be at least a blessed.
One friend wished us another 43 years of marriage. I had the same thought writing a message on a card to my wife. But then I thought again and thought that would make me 112 years old at our 86th wedding anniversary, something I do not think will happen.
My deceased son, Peter, and I would at times talk about life in parables. His parable had a common thread that there was someone that was a scapegoat and being blamed for actions beyond his or her control. My parables were like Jesus’ Good Samaritan story, someone coming to rescue and saving someone else. If you put together a scapegoat and a savior I guess you get a person of nonviolence, like Jesus, Gandhi, King or Mandela saving people by taking suffering about them. Our marriage is like a parable, sometimes we scapegoat each other but it is really about blaming ourselves and we both want to save and rescue each other from all harm and injury.
Peter and I also talked some about how life is a paradox. For example, some say I do not care much about money, which is true, but at the same time I have made at times lots of money and am concerned about spending money. My wife loves me deeply and admires my strength of conviction but often is embarrassed by my words and actions.
My older son David is married and has given us three wonderful grandchildren. David is serious, thoughtful and a quiet but a real caring son, husband and father. My grandchildren all have good senses of humor. One of my grandsons knowing how I do not like Wal-Mart keeps writing on his facebook page how he ‘likes’ Wal-Mart. Today, my younger brother got in on the conversation asking me what’s up with my grandson and if he was adopted. Our marriage has been a serious business but humor has kept our relationship in perspective. I think we both wish there was more humor and thus more perspective.
So to sum it up our marriage is the story of one saint and one blessed, is a parable and a paradox with a little bit of humor thrown in.
