Thoughts and ideas float around within us, coursing through us, little ships in the body's vessels, making their long voyages, rising up from the body to the new world of the mind, a port to connect to.  Sometimes lost going around the dark rocky tips of continents where oceanic tides violently meet.  Their voyages are long, as in Moby Dick.  They come bearing riches from the sea and faraway lands not consciously understood, with nature's offerings, oil to light our lamps.  The barks are tiny, but strong and steady, curraghs off the West Coast, seemingly fragile, but able at sea, a part of the elements themselves.


I would suppose that Jesus had a way of dealing with people.  He himself had pondered, what would Jesus do?  Like all of us, he would have had to deal with people, but how, we might well wonder.  What could we learn from him.

 Jesus had a different way with people.  Non-conventional, his approach to friendship and brotherhood.  Is it as if he almost prefers certain types, sinful people, people excluded from the religious authority, lower people, the less prominent members of society, people at random.  There's a detachment, a secondary nature to what we might normally take as personal preference.

He was not a school teacher, nor an investment banker.  The authoritative view of the day was that he kept company with publicans and sinners, those of company less desirable.  Until you got to know them as people, without judging them.  Was anyone his friend?  In a way, all were, but it seems like he took each as a specimen, worth reading, worth saving.

It's not unlike he was a barman, as much as a minister, meeting people, attending to them, putting up with them.  And no so much a rebuking kind of guy, hardly any directing of them beyond asking them to come with him, fishers of men.  His sheep.  God's sheep, really.  What can you do?

He would have known the landscaping guy, the college professor, the hedge fund guy, the lawyer, the doctor, the government worker, the hairdresser, the real estate management person, the beer delivery guy, the busboy and the dishwasher and the waiter, the librarian, the computer programmer, the scientific, the engineer.  And while no longer hiding his own light, considerable, obviously, under a basket, how forward was he, how dominant, how bent on winning friends and influencing people?

It seems he was fairly nondescript, before it all happened.  His elders, indignantly surprised when he took it up, wanting to throw him off a cliff, the boy, gone mad, blasphemous as far as they could tell.



Ain't much point in writing.  Therapeutic.  That's about it.  Figuring your psyche, how crazy you might be, relieving the pressure of life, pondering your own seeming inability to fit in neatly, or all the gut reactions to things, such as you cannot control.  Blasphemous.  Lonely, without profession, but with some vague sense of the work to do, or what not to do.  The awkwardness of self-acceptance.



It's not him so much, who is not accepted, but the things he does, which are off-beat, off-putting.  Out of the ordinary, so much, a bit too revolutionary.

He's not this, nor is he that, it just seems he's sad with the world the way it is, the comprehension of deeper reality greatly lacking...  It's a lot even for him to comprehend, no wonder he takes naps.

But the thoughts come to him sweetly, like a friendly dog or cat coming up to you, or a bird.  What can you do?  You're not going to turn them away.  You've already done that, too often, not communed enough in the busy busy world.

His work is to proclaim the Gospel, as Fr. James Martin, SJ, might tell us, explicating MK 3:22-33.  Other work is secondary.  Indeed, his own family would have a hard time understanding him, as would the general authority overlooking society.  He might have a hard time understanding himself.  He might even see his own situation with some lack of comprehension, hard to support the lack of direction.  The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.

Conventional conversations, conventional people, would they not have bored him, in a way, beyond providing him with character sketches, tales of experience.  He talks to angels, and the disciple can only look on, in wonder.


Seemingly clueless with women.

What is mental health?  Was he healthy?  What can we even begin to say about that?