Furthermore…

Sign outside church:

NEXT WEEK’S TOPIC

A SINNER WHO NEEDS FORGIVENESS

NO - NOT THE OTHER GUY

I happened to see one of Bishop Sheen’s TV talks about what constitutes a proper liberal education. Although this talk was given many years ago, through the miracle of truth always remaining the same, this talk would make an excellent orientation film for young students today just starting out in their college careers. Most kids today probably haven’t heard anything even resembling the sagacity and grasp of the meaning of life and its purposes that is contained in Bishop Sheen’s short presentation. It would be a simple matter to preface it or follow it up with a few remarks refocusing it on the way we see things in the present day (and why we might be better off seeing things the way the Bishop saw them many moons ago!) to make sure it is received according to the mode (mod) of the receiver (adolescent).

Sign by assembled crowd  of kids : DERVISH BOYS AND GIRLS  INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION
One observer to another: “It’s a kind of Whirled Youth Day!”

It is easy to understand the model of sin wherein a person’s conscience tells him that doing Action X is a sin, but he is so drawn by some promise of pleasure or gain that he chooses to do it anyway.  After a few repetitions, it becomes a habit, so it is no longer the same kind of clear-cut act of the will. The habit constitutes a kind of ‘weakness’. What about weaknesses? Some individuals may have such  weaknesses as being highly sexed, stressed by poverty, prone to anger, or of a phlegmatic constitution tending to sloth.

Beyond weakness, I wonder if there isn’t such a thing as a generalized distaste for “the way things are,” acquired at an early age. A parent might say “That’s the way life is” but the child may have become what we call ’spoiled,’ so that nothing seems to measure up to some imaginary realm where all is pure bliss. While not sin as such, it seems that this sort of mentality would lead to and underlie sin, as an outgrowth of an inchoate sense of alienation and disaffection from the strictures of everyday life.

Pastor to music director:

“The Bishop told me to preach against sin, but the people hate that, so I’m scheduling my message right after your loudest Praise & Worship music,  when they aren’t able to hear anything!”

We talked quite a bit about last Sunday’s Jeremiah reading today, and the discussion spilled over to his similarities to Jonah and Job. One of the men asked me, what is the meaning of the word “transgress?”.   After I answered, another of the men said I sounded like an English professor, which I welcomed as a compliment, and I hadn’t even gone into my remarks about the word “Jeremiad,’ one of the few trivia I remember from college theology, which seemed terribly abstruse. One of my preparatory readings about last Sunday’s Gospel, wherein Jesus says  “Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed,
nor secret that will not be known“ contained a conjecture that He was speaking in relation to the contemporary Jewish preoccupation with secrecy which served as a protective measure lest the larger community find out too many things that might be used  to find faults and defame one, but I also let the opportunity to work this in pass unexploited.

Kid whispers to Mom in church:

“Ask Daddy when the Fisheaters start eating the fish!”

Study them as they talk and you will notice:

Clerics are honest, but slow.

(Poets are sincere, simple and swift.)

They listen intently, and are, you can tell,

Referring each fact, each happening or word

You tell them or show them in acting

To a plan or a scheme, to the Heaven you might earn,

A Hell which you fear (it’s assumed),

To sin and to shame, to good, bad,

Ethics and love, praise, blame, happiness and hope.

These efforts cost them time.

Frowning medieval knight to companion:

“I wish they’d hurry and make Latin the official language of the fiefdom. Why, only yesterday, I had to tell some knave that whatever he was saying, it was all Greek to me!”

Talk radio annoys me because someone feels it is necessary to have nondescript musical sounds playing along at the same time that they are playing a cut of someone’s statement. I guess this is supposed to give it a professional or “finished” sound. Trouble is, when it is a Pope w/acccent, Brit, or  cleric who swallows his words it doesn’t add to the efficacy of communicating a message.

Now I am still reeling from trying to follow the proceedings of the Quebec conference, where some well-intentioned fellow simultaneously translated into English the words of the official speakers of other tongues. Trouble was, the speakers and the translator were talking at the same time at about the same volume, so what arrived at  listeners’ ears was a garbled bilingual simultaneity.

Isn’t there a bright high school kid somewhere who can put together better audio, you know, the kind that is intelligible?