Roomin' House Blues

It seems that I am tied into interlocking conversations with people on all sides of me and with my blog readership.  Yesterday I wrote Many Things I Have Been #2  ( http://roominhouseblues.blogspot.com/2011/04/many-things-i-have-been-2.html ) in the morning. .  I wrote other things and did the tasks and errands of my day, including job searches. then in the evening I went to a "Mercy Night" a communal penance service (with private confession of course) in my parish.  I came home near the end of my roommate Scott's Bible study. Scott goes to Mars Hill, a conservative evangelical youth oriented church, and his perspective on some aspects of the bible is very different than my Catholic one, yet we focus more on what we have in common.   After the bible study Scott and KJ, who stayed, got into a conversation on various things.  I told them a little of what happened at Mercy Night. Then KJ asked a question.  I guess he...

A few days ago I wrote a post that talked about various things I had done, primarily my time as a hermit. I cited a poem translated by J.P. Seaton in his "The Shambhala Anthology of Chinese Poetry, about the life or a hermit.  I found another poem by Shih Te, an 8th Century Chinese Zen monk that begins with "If you want to be happy, there is no way but to be a hermit," and a few lines later concludes, "And me? I ought to be at joyous ease, but I can't help thinking of the people in the world."    I thought about this poem, ironically, after I posted a couple of comments on my nephew Brenly's Facebook post. He commented on how people often feel more lonely after Facebook or social networking.  I wrote, "   Oh also, we always have a moving toward communion with someone and a move away into isolation. It just goes faster with the internet. But the real trick is interior change. To move from loneliness to solitude and from manipulat...

Yesterday I was waiting for the bus and saw graffiti on the curb.  It's author, perhaps in despair or in bitterness had written, "Love is not real" in twisted black letters. I began to think of the state of mind of this unpoet (by which I mean he had no poetry, he was a rejector,  not a maker of beauty). I speculated on his history and his intent. Was he unlucky in love, or had he been unlucky enough to confuse desire with love? Was he rejecting Eros, playful love alone, or was he rejecting the entire moral code of society and God in one single scrawl. Pope Benedict wrote in a letter to mankind, a papal encyclical of how love can begin with the erotic love and as a couple grows more deeply into that love, raising children and becoming friends and life partners, that love can grow into a generalized love for all mankind and for God.  So if Benedict is right, and I believe him to be so, then it does not matter at what point in the contin...

I have no finished solution, no absolutes for fixing societies problems, because I believe that man cannot do anything good without dependency on God.  But I do have views are similar to what Dorothy Day actually believed and experiences like her's. Dorothy, before she converted to the Catholic faith,  wrote for leftist and communist publications and thought that Marx had the answer.  While she was closer to an agnostic than an atheist, she definitely did not look to God for guidance.  After her conversion she stated categorically to a communist friend that she believed in all the church taught. She believed, as Aquinas taught, that there was a role for property in protecting people, a role for the State and a role for non-state actors.  She followed in her own fashion, G.K. Chesterton.   Chesterton sought a economic system of greater equality through the distribution to economic power.  More Capitalist not less he said, whe...