Roomin' House Blues

 Striking at Bourgeois Values with "Free Stuff"  Why is it that in middle class neighborhoods no one would think anything of it if you are having a "yard sale"  or a "moving sale", spending your entire day selling your possessions at pennies on the dollar, a tenth of what you could get on E-Bay, making less than the federal minimum wage for your efforts, but they would shrink in horror from a "free stuff pile".  What is the world coming from that  they place so little value on material possessions that they would give it away for nothing.  Someone will surely complain that you are doing "illegal dumping", even if you tend the pile and fold things back up.  Fortunately for me, I live in a neighborhood with a heavy student population, north of Seattle's University of Washington campus, and such a pile is welcome.  Having purged the house of unneeded things that aren't worth my time trying to sell (unlike my art, which I will find ...

“If you cannot find Christ in the beggar at the church door, you will not find Him in the chalice.” St. John Chrysostom Not to share our own wealth with the poor is theft from the poor and deprivation of their means of life; we do not possess our own wealth, but theirs.  St. John Chrysostom " The original 42 bishops who signed that day in 1965, and the more than 500 who eventually added their names, pledged to “try to live according to the ordinary manner of our people in all that concerns housing, food, [and] means of transport…. We renounce forever the appearance and the substance of wealth, especially in clothing … and symbols made of precious metals.”" https://cruxnow.com/news-analysis/2019/10/20/vatican-iis-forgotten-apostle-of-the-poor-stages-comeback-at-amazon-synod/?fbclid=IwAR0j0oA7f7UMwy4R_W-5wjC0Zp2VjGx5oESSUMxOjge26URzb0TnDY5dEik " In the document signed on Sunday, the participants of the Synod on the Amazon recall that they share the joy of livi...

My Political Biography  For various reasons, dear reader, I need to post my political biography before further political activities,  This is not intended as a monument to my ego, but for the edification of others I will be working with politically, and my other readers as they can benefit from it. The latter part of my post will deliberately read like a resume, the beginning more literary.  Aristotle says that man is a political animal and I have been very much a political animal in my life, starting from a childhood infatuation with JFK, my burst of tears on his assassination, an early addiction to newspaper reading, and my rapt attention to the 1964 party conventions. My first practical political activity in the conventional sense was to canvass for a school bond at age 15 to better fund my public school. But I learned I could use leverage  at age 14 when I told an unfriendly parish priest that I could resolve the matter at hand by calling a priest I kne...

The fall of the human being into distance from God was the fall from what it truly means to be human. We do not sin because we are human, but because we start to become more and more inhuman.   And just as we cannot love God whom we have not seen unless we love our neighbor whom we have seen, the more inhuman we become, the more we hate God, the less we love him.  When we detach ourselves from the value and dignity of human life and become anti-life, disguised as pro-some "choice" , instead of pro-life, we truly disfigure our humanity.  through this our whole culture is becoming inhuman.  And that inhumanity is eating, destroying the human from inside. Two news stories that touch on this have come to my attention in the last few days.  I have chosen to comment on both of them as a temper of our times.  The first story I found on a blog post on Patheos, and it has been confirmed as a real story.  According to the post, under the Netherlan...

One of the greatest looming crisis in the world today is the global water shortage. Both secular and religious social justice advocates are concerned with this and Catholics in particular are applying CST (Catholic Social Teaching for my non-Catholic friends) to this. I have always been concerned with inequality and it's savage effects, as a Catholic child, as a fallen away Catholic, and as a returned Catholic. But returning late in adulthood, and studying CST I have gained a entirely new set of tools to use on this problem. I thank my old Santa Cruz friend Kim MacKay for this article and here is my take: Water is becoming a a point of conflict between global capitalism and the poor of the world. It is being treated as private property of investors. Catholic social teaching starts with certain simple premises: the dignity and right to survive of every human being, The "universal destination of goods" (that the good things of the earth are ultimately everyone's, ...

My rosary meditations may sometimes lead  me down strange paths.  My meditations one the nativity has led me deeper into the relationship between Jesus and Mary.  In Rosary meditations my practice, as that of many others is to imaginatively model the behavior and thoughts of a character in the rosary mystery.  For those who don't know, the prayers of the rosary are organized into decades of ten Hail Mary's and an Our Father, each with a "mystery" of biblical origin, such as the "Nativity of Jesus" to meditate on while praying.  For me, meditating on the nativity leads naturally to the closeness of Mary and Jesus. There is no closer moment between a mother and child than the moment of breast feeding  Since the Virgin became the subject of painting, the depiction of Mary nursing Jesus has been the way to show there intimacy and union. In the Gospel of Luke the good doctor records that Mary remembered and contemplated all the moment of the nativity and...