Waiting for Godot to Leave

My wife Karen has me read to her the daily Mass readings, followed by commentaries from two different books.  The one book, as I've pointed out earlier , sometimes has dreadful commentaries.  Today's was pretty bad, for example.  Taking "you knit me together in my mother's womb" from Psalm 139, the commentary has the reader imagine his own birthday party, with God stepping up to the microphone to tell the reader how good the reader is and how God thinks about him all the time and can't take His eyes off him and thinks he's just grand, and so forth.  Yes, I know, I'm thinking what you're thinking.  Why does God need a microphone? The other book is not so bad.  But today it went a bit wrong. Today's gospel is Martha and Mary, with Mary worshipping Our Lord at His feet and Martha doing all the grunt work in the kitchen.  When Martha complains, Jesus quite clearly tells her, "Don't be jealous.  Mary is doing the one thing necessary....

Yes, he was the most important person in my life, but I had had enough of him. You couldn't fake your way through a rehearsal with Jiman.  He was the most exacting and challenging director I had ever had.  He was the first person who showed me that acting required the engagement of the whole self - physical, spiritual, intellectual and emotional.  He was my mentor, but I was getting a bit tired of him.  After all, he was not the most balanced of men, and his psychological insight and charisma gave him the makings of a cult leader, a role he would have latched on to with gusto, particularly when it came to the attention the women in the cast gave him.  In fact, if we had been rehearsing in rural Guyana and not suburban Missouri, I have no doubt he would have been sleeping with all of us - at least with the ladies - and sooner or later we'd be drinking the Kool-Aid and worshipping little carved wooden mini-Jimans in our spare time. And so, while he had brought...

Sunset near Sunset Hills, Missouri - October 2, 2012 Presley and a rainbow Double rainbow This morning - a view of St. Joseph from the Blessed Sacrament Chapel, St. Joseph Parish, Imperial, MO Smiley-face made at random by water dripping on my notebook - after last night's bath

About this time last year, I wrote about folks who Can't Care, Don't Care, or Won't Care, and I bragged about how I take my business ventures less personally than I used to. Well, that was a hollow boast. I take everything personally. I don't think there's any other way to be an artist, a poet, an actor, a writer - or to live life in an engaged and engaging way.  I really don't think there's any other way to be an authentic Christian and to avoid the trap of Unreality in our daily lives and in our worship. Thus, life usually hurts.  And anything to do with the Church - or even with my fellow Catholics - really really hurts, because hypocrisy abounds, in my heart and in theirs.  For part of the sting is realizing how many people fit into the aforementioned DON'T CARE category - even when it comes to loving God and their neighbor.  And so, it's the same old story.  There are lots of folks around who make a show of their faith, but who ...

Today, I spent lunch with my friend and Theater of the Word actor Dave Treadway of Steward Media  and I was on a tear, complaining about many things, especially this.  "Dave," I said, "I used to think the liberals in the Church caused all the trouble, until I met the conservatives in the Church.  Now I'm getting used to rampant hypocrisy on both sides of the spectrum, from left to right - Catholics who are as bad as I am and worse, regardless of the number of devotions or novenas they pray.  I am hurt by, but used to, leftist Catholics who ignore Church teaching and right-wing Catholics who despise the Catechism.  I am used to, but hurt by, bad liberal bishops and bad conservative bishops.  I am used to, but hurt by, my own infernal sinfulness, which keeps rearing its ugly head again and again. "But what really bothers me at a fundamental level is how many conservative Catholics there are who are making excuses for rape and child abuse...

From the combox at my post Making Room for Evil  ... Anonymous said... [Quoting me] "pederasty is a sub-set of pedophilia" No, it's not. And I notice in your example of "comparing" child abuse, you couldn't actually bring yourself to present a true comparison between pederasty and pedophilia. Were you afraid they'd agree one was worse than the other? September 12, 2012 8:43 PM Kevin O'Brien said... ... of course pederasty is a subset of pedophilia. They are equally evil. What the hell is the matter with you? September 13, 2012 4:43 AM Anonymous said... Statutory rape isn't necessarily the same thing [as " legitimate rape "], even if it's bad. Put it this way: A guy in his 20s wants to have sex with a 16-year-old girl who is physically an adult in every possible way. A guy in his 20s wants to have sex with a 7-year-old boy. Those are both the same thing to you? Surely not. September 13, 2012 12:...

Father Z. has written a rather lame post in defense of Kansas City Bishop Finn , (more accurately, a post attacking Finn's critics).  Bishop Finn, for those who haven't been following, enabled a child pornographer priest to continue to victimize children by taking pornographic pictures of them, refused to call police, helped destroy evidence in the case, and spent $1.4 million of money from Catholic Schools and Parishes to defend himself from related misdemeanor charges that carried no serious chance of jail time and no real financial fines.   Read my many posts in which I go into detail on this .  Or read the facts of the case, unfiltered by the "liberal anti-Catholic media" (which, apparently, includes orthodox pro-life anti-contraception anti-Obama Catholics like me) - read the documented facts of the case  here or here . Mistaken as Fr. Z's post is, it gets worse: Father Z. is censoring out commenters who disagree with him...