Psychic.  The realization that within events, meaning...  a pattern, the opportunity for reflection...

Rejection, reconciliation.  Joseph, sold by his brothers...  If the pattern is embraced, it is liberating, freeing...  The Mass of March the Second, this year, 2018, EWTN.  Fr. John Paul, the homilies, (available YouTube.)

Old Testament read with eyes illumined by faith in the New.  Typology.

Jesus Christ comes to fulfill every prophecy, every last encounter and figure...

God's vineyard... (especially Isiah.)  bountiful blessings sent to the people of Israel, the image....

Vineyards all around Galilee.  The owner not necessarily the tender, tenants entrusted to take care of that vineyard...

God, the vineyard owner, is patient;  justice with his mercy...

And the prophecy, now by Jesus saying these words, is fulfilled, the story complete, reconciled, a just ending.

Free us from preoccupation with our needs in this Lenten time.  Jesus sustains us.


How could you not be sad in this world, in this life, in this broken state of physics.  Physical existence, such that one day must somehow come to an incomprehensible end, each and all of us.

What did he not say yesterday, he wondered.  Another blizzard up in New York State.  Where people are nice.  Not concerned with style, not with the presentation of their own selfish identity, look at me, look at me, childish music played loud...

An expiation of our sins, did God send us his son.  Then what are we?  We too participate in that,




When I was immature, I dated an older woman, pleasant, giving, a good sense of humor.  We drank French wine, travelled once to Maine, put together dinner from time to time.  She was a professional explicator of Old World culture, and I felt pleased by her knowledge, and wished to learn more.  Wine, food, perfume, art, old customs, history (focussed on France), her interpretation in the editorial introduction to each issue was good and excellent writing.

But on the dark side, and who can blame her, she would raise her doubts about my future, such as it was, or would be.  Go to law school, get a Ph.D.  Who can blame her for her maternal concern, as she had aging parents to cope with and aid, and was not a mother, nor now a wife, as she had been once married.  Once in the video store in the old neighborhood I wished to break free from, she quipped to me that I looked like someone they'd just let out of a home, a home for certain types of people ill in the head, or going through something.  And I did not take it as any particular insult, because, yes, I get broken people, I get Christ's people.  Blockbuster Video did not offer any recessional hymn, after you'd picked out your entertainment for the evening.

Eventually, the rejection aspects mounted, and one grew tired, simply, worn out.  She began to take issue with my manner of speaking, as when I would use the phrase "cooking up," which she did not like, a phrase for the unsophisticated, but which the good Father Leo Patalinghug uses, here cooking and sharing in Ohio, on EWTN television, Savoring Our Faith.

And now, yes, one does look for reconciliation, and, as with people by and large, really, one looks toward marriage as a form of that, redemption, a coming back to home and family.

And if one were to reach maturity, what would one look for, in a spouse, a comely woman with good heart and a sense of the spiritual, a sense of how we all are not perfect, no, not really at all, but broken and in need of love and forgiveness.  She would accept you as you were, a poor man, stepped over by the rich man, by people with good haircuts and nice shoes, people with hands not roughed by manual labors, sophisticates with excellent taste beyond the simple function of things that are nutritional and good for us and easing of our burdens and our own little disasters.

She would radiate to you a kindness, a forgiveness, a gentle touch, and she would take you in the way ...  in the way the women of note in the Gospels take Jesus Christ.  Not telling you, "you're an asshole, grow up," like a big brother might, rejecting you, but kind, very much so, kind to the body of your soul in the way rest is, sustaining you in your work, such as it, misinterpreted often enough, the easy case to make, the degenerate bartender stooping to the crass level, harassment, ribald joking, the lowest common denominator.

No, you are a prince, a prophet, for who you are in your real form of existence, as you were baptized, somewhat reluctantly by a certain Father Lane, who was not perfectly pleased with my parent's Catholic attendance record, as the story goes...




It started out as a long day ahead of me, and as a detail, to get down to my therapist, Dr. H.W., down at 19th and L, I had to make it out the front door and across the freshly laid concrete of the sidewalk there before me.  The men, with reflective yellow vests, hard hats, thick work pants, boots, knee pads, were just then smoothing it out and putting the final groves into the wet concrete.  The hour was such that I needed my bicycle to get there in time, and the only bike handy was the red one, the top end road bike, and the fellow who helped me by reaching out for it to take it the curb, commented in Spanish English that it was nice (and light.)  And then they laid out a dark grey two by four and I Wallenda-ed over it to the other side, thanking them all.  And then I was on the bike.

There were something to go over with my professional friend and listener, after she explained that her office policies had changed slightly to insure she would be recouped should anyone be more than ten minutes late, and I was not an offender, a just so you know sort of thing.

So I had somethings to talk over, feeling the clock ticking, and so I got to work, laying it out, quickly and efficiently.  Feeling better, a lot better, actually, now that I'm drinking electrolyte water, taking magnesium... A death in the family, a bridge to lost histories of Irish arrivals upon this land, in Lynn, of third floor walk-ups, and grandmothers who did what they had to do, with wisdom of home cures and such and such, unable to afford the doctor...  An attempt on my part to sort out an old issue within the community of my Facebook friends from the old days of my restaurant work...  My sense that there is a home cure for everything, and that I didn't need the Lexapro, indeed had quit it cold turkey without any brain flashes of the unpleasant kind they warn you of...  Mom's vulnerability up there by her lonesome self...  There was lots to talk about.

She looked at me, "sounds pretty chaotic."  We'd skipped the last session two weeks before on account of my having to go in early for goddamn Valentine's Day, a good call actually.   She looks at me and mentions, as I'm reeling all this off, that I seem a bit more keyed up than usual.  The word she used, I forget, something that implied...  Hmm, well, I'm just trying to get my money's worth, this stuff going on, and I'm trying to have the energy to get it out there, after this running the modern city gauntlet, construction, traffic lights, more construction, pedestrians crossing against the light, the weather cold again, in an unpredictable way, and then there will be Jazz Night to cope with before the week is over and we are already pretty tired, but hanging in there...


But you wonder it yourself, "how could anybody like me," given the way I am, given the way things are...sort of as the logical and practical and wise elder side of the family is telling me.

The days of one's firing, we talk about that, the same old embarrassing thing, but of how really it was just rejection.  Rejection as people will simply do, who knows why, out of a wish to protect some business interest, some law of legality less than real morality overseeing our situations...

One brings up such things, because there is a point, a typology to them, and unto us.  The stone is rejected.  That's the way it goes.  Even the cornerstone, even the best one, as Jesus himself is, will be, rejected, quite severely.

And rejection preys upon our minds, doesn't it.  Good material.  And rejection simply and finally is not the case, not the whole story.  Or, how to see it?  If rejection comes, there will be its better counterpart, lovely, not painful, accepting, valuing, nurturing...

And perhaps I do not need my kind therapist anymore, but, as they say, have Moses and the Prophets to listen to, even when I am Job, even when I am Jonah, even when I am Lazarus, covered with ulcering sores, untouchable, despicable to human eyes...

It's a funny thing.  Finding your own salvation, or at least the hopes thereof, sinner that I am, through act and through inaction, all of that, in finding your own salvation you are doing that good thing, which is finding the light, the way, for others to follow and do the same.  And you are even yourself not at all original in all this, how could you be?  You are merely a reader, therefore a scholar, of much of what needs truly to be known.

How does the media, by the way, how does big data track you when you write about such things as salvation?  Will an ad pop up somewhere on a device, partially disguised, 'get thee down to Mass at 12:05 at Saint Matthew's Cathedral,' 'Peter, father of the church, the real story... get it here.'  Someone's probably willing to sell you a picture of Jesus, and I hope, that if I were to spend money so, it would go to a good cause anyway...

Prophecy, typology... where do you fit in?


Perhaps one cannot be "psychic"/able to foresee future events and circumstances without looking backward, without having read what comes before...


Earlier on, earlier on...  there was the princess.  Who wouldn't want a pretty girl, a sophisticate, a New York City actress type...  My footing remained in the country, at the stage of life, God's country, rolling hills, Central New York, the forests and the streams, the small college, the fields with dairy cattle, my parents...  (My brother had gone off to make his fortune in the city.)

But about such people, advanced, assured, extremely intelligent, well schooled, verbally precocious, argumentative, a lover of issues and sides, there was a put-down side, a side with its hatred of natural things, of male ways.  I wanted to, I suppose, awaken her from all that, the kind of selfish spiritual deadness...  These are not the days of the heights of your powers, though, when you're receiving your rejections from the powers that be, the scribes, the Pharisee system of meritocracy, such that you come to expect rejections on all fronts, not just one, as if they too were written in stone, the rejections.

The bird, the tree, the blade of grass, the water in the stream, they would never reject you though, so as long as they all seemed reasonably healthy and steady, well, you could deal with things.

I could not awaken her.  I failed, as I deserved to, being full of sin, not so certain I would ever amount to much, the way forward highly obscure and scary, unhappy, disheartening.  I tried.  But by the inner Jesus nature of the spiritual being inside, you're a meek sort, not one to push people.  You have your parables, waiting for you somewhere, but they are not quite there yet.  Parables come when there is rejection in the air, and this was secretly, without you even knowing, where you future would lie.

In that odd old thing called the Parable.

The Parable teller seems to know certain things.  He will be familiar with phrases such as "and then it came to pass..."  That sort of not-quite-mastery of time and the things that will come, that even a fool can see coming, almost a fool.

Parables are fun, a good literary exercise.  Gentle little proofs;  you're not beating people over the head with anything.  People will taste the correctness within them, without having a negative psychological reaction (for the most part), without getting huffy because they didn't come up it with themselves.  And there's a secret quality to them, like an old Zen saying, of correcting people, guiding them, without them seeing it but that they came to the conclusion themselves under their very own powers of thought.  And the parables also have a way of showing, of bringing out, the goodness of things, things we might put-down and dismiss, as if we blew life back into them, as if we accepted again the beauty of their real presence in life in this world, the sparrow, the poor man, the lily...  the wheat and the chaff.

The modern publishing industry would not even wish to bother with the parables.  They are too self-evident, too self-realizing, too powerful, too subtle.  Can't really make a buck off of such things.  Which again leaves the teller of the parables safe and sound, no one really wanting to come and steal something from him.  Want my job here in the vineyard tending the vines?  Here, take it... Try it out and tell me you want to keep at it.

At the beginning of March a cough had gotten somewhere established within.  There was a sort of cold tiredness hanging over you each day.  You felt hungry.  Not enough energy to go out food shopping though.  A strong wind came.  Your reserves were low.  You knew again the work week of four nights was sufficient to put you down for at least two days, a third day necessary just to care of yourself...


But one day, perhaps the teller of the parables would see something that no one else had.  Hear something fresh.  Remarkable.  The seeming idiot speaks, and with a sense of what might even be called prophecy, or something rather interesting, at least.  Powers of sight opened by eliminating a sort of inner resistance, inner interference, such that seeing out further, clearer, whatever it is that is to be seen would come closer, less obscure, as if for its own part to match...  The light shining out now, no longer hidden, then the light shining back.

It would require a special sort of person, yes and no, to be able to see so clearly.  First, a very front row seat on sinful behavior.  He could not be, say, a college professor, nor a banker.  A recognized pillar of society,   He would not be of the professionally high ranks, so that he could not really be taken down and disgraced with much to lose.  He would be an oddity.  A puzzle of an educated young man but without the seemingly appropriate profession.  Seeing with perfect clarity the faults, the hiccups, the marginal, the not quite shameful, the whole range of gluttony, idle laziness, envy, passion...  And calm would he be, more or less, in the midst of all that, those storms of human nature.  A sense of humor.

A princess, upwardly mobile, educated, for her you'd be just about the last thing she'd want to have anything to do with.  Even your own patience with yourself would be pretty much worn out by the time you really started gaining on understanding.  So it is.