One of those days, you just sleep.  Even though it's the crowning day of your weekend, and the sun is out, you sleep.  Feeling poorly.  You don't even know why.


Raoul Julia is playing Father Oscar Romero on EWTN.  A random thing?  Or the kind of awakening you need, some distant note of music speaking about sacrifice.  The timing of which and the message and even the people depicted seems on key.  What has this to do with me, you say, rationally.  But, of course, I like it though, very much, and it is comforting.  It gives me reason to live.  It is beautiful.  That, my friends, is love, and a life well lived.  To be such as the good Father.

Sacrifice...  Yes.  That's what it's about.  I didn't even know.  I'd spent the night alone, not deserving to go out.   A fresh copy of Fulton J. Sheen, The Priest Is Not His Own.  Who am I to read this... I've had the skepticism, the modern liberal arts distance.  I go to bed..  only to wake up hours later.  I have a beer, and start reading, and, you know, it all begins to make sense.

In the old days the priests attended sacrifices.  But then, in Jesus, the priest becomes the sacrifice.  How true.

Where was I sort of mildly crucified...  When was I rejected the third time, a homecoming college reunion...  Leave her alone, the friend of hers said, and I didn't have a leg to stand on.   And so I had to leave the town, and leave my attempt, so that it would, in the distance of time unknown and unhappy, fade away, to be a thing petty and earthly.

That's how I took up work in the world, by being miserable.  And the job of tending bar is a sacrifice and a burden and thing of service with little in return.  It would have been wiser if I'd gone straight into priesthood, but, of course, I didn't.

A good shepherd lays down his life for the flock.  John 20: 19-31

I've always seen the writer has having something direct, a study of Jacob's Ladder, perhaps.

But the world of power and the city, that world does not get it, that we are as sacrificial lamb here in order to be who we must be on high....

The sacrificial lamb knows how miserable things are.



The good Lord wakes me without my wanting to, and prepares me for work.  Green tea, brewed yesterday.  Make a chicken salad from what's left of the rotisserie white meat.  Bone broth.  The tree pollen is listed as very again.

The truth, it seems, is harder than you want it to be.  Stunningly so.  The priest's life is a sacrifice, heart breaking, in order to join up with that greater truth...