I like Anthony Bourdain. He travels the world for me. He experiences it on street level, without imposing too many screens upon it. Yes, it's talk about food and wining/dining, but it's at a human level, life as it is. It's about good stuff, but also street food. Is he Mother Theresa? No. And his 'snarky' self would be more than happy to admit it. He is very good at the banter and the repartee, comfortable in his own skin. As you need for television, he's got a good line, a quip that doesn't seem overly rehearsed or done too many times so as to be stale. He brings the viewer some serious stuff along the way, the decency of a food worker in a hot dog joint, the real back story of Cuban exiles in Miami, old ways of life disappearing before the bulldozers of modernity. Behind his cynicism there is, at least sometimes, the hint of a spiritual A minus fairly earned, though of course he wouldn't let on, preferring to tell you to bring your own toilet paper when you go traveling and leave it at that. He does miss some things, through that attitude, but then he wouldn't be being himself, to go fawning over Keats' grave.

But, as a real-life barman, as apparently I am, through the strange twists of fate, where do you go with it, what do you do? There must have been sins of excess, or else you wouldn't be stuck where you are fending people off by waiting on them in some form of professional politeness. Jesus was a glutton and a wine-bibber, we are told, through the lens of people who were suspicious of him. He allowed himself to associate with publicans, harlots, sinners. Does that make tending bar okay, I ask, thinking aloud. Well, we all need to make a living somehow, and, like the oil business, it's not always pretty.

There is something besmirching, belittling about the job, though. I like good wine, I like wine that goes well with what you're eating, I can appreciate wine and bring that to other people, but I really don't care about it all that much. In fact, I think it brings the whole thing down sometimes. Life is tough, for everyone. So there's nothing wrong with a little euphoric substance to grease the wheels of relaxation and creativity and opening up. But wine alone misses the point.

The point is compassion. The point is sharing the human condition and all its truth. And a church far far outdoes, in the right circumstances, done appropriately, what a bar or a pub can ever do. A bar can only offer the weary body of Christ, the physical work of the intellectual being rather than the intellectual itself. The bar, it seems, can only offer talk about basic physical things, travels, who did what when and where, nice weather we're having. A bar should be able to talk about books and learning, but most often it avoids such talk. It ends up being about matters of this world rather than being about the beauty that is not of this world. It is limited to the expectations of the masses, about economic survival or comfort, about politics, about things practical to life in this world.

And so is it very draining. People sit around mutely, as if waiting for something, as if waiting to be awoken. Such things aren't found in menus. There comes a time not for amusement, not for merriment, nor for pleasure, but for austerity, and truth, and quiet, for intelligent things, rather than dumb things.

Love is enduring. It beareth all things. Love vaunteth not up itself. It is not proud or boastful. Love is the real life, and eventually we all come around to it.

Christ finally got disgusted with what had happened to the Temple, physically repulsed by what they had done to it with the money and the burnt sacrificial offerings. This is not it, he would have said to himself. Maybe he went about it with as much sadness as anger, with a sense of disappointment along with a vow to make a point. Joining in wasn't something he could do anymore. He saw that it would be a self-betrayal to put up with it, as his words to Peter reveal a personal awareness of betrayal of high-minded things.

Indeed, what would Jesus do? What would he do if you put him into a cultural milieu in which innate holiness was something to be deeply, scientifically and rationally doubted, in which all questions of the meaning of life were to be pushed aside as something 'we'll never be able to know about, so why bother.'

He would, of course, forgive people for being so. He would know himself that people have faults. He would sense that he had to humble himself and even wash feet so as to make a point, and that still, they might not get it.

The presence of spirituality in our life, the necessity to follow intuitions for understanding the nature of reality, comes upon us as it did for Job, against our will, without the intention. And then we find ourselves needing to follow the answers of questions.