So I woke in the morning after my run of four intense shifts, from the end of Restaurant Week Sunday night with Ivan, and on through, tense days with coworkers, coughing, aching, with heartburn, but you get through it.  Assess tiredness with a sleep cycle disrupted...  make some green tea, wash the dishes while the tea cools in the tub in the sink.


Ancient wisdom.  I've always been drawn to it.  To unwind from the week I put on Father Barron's Catholicism DVD part one..  And it works on me.  You can't expect to be happy all the time, you learn in life.  And so I wake, feeling this.

Voice in head:  I work hard, throw my body under a train most every night, and what do I get from my co-workers...  At least the boss shook my hand politely before he and his wife departed.

I'm tired, but awake.  I make an attempt to call mom.

To tend bar is to wash away all smugness, along with any desire to write.  The whole thing is a spiritual lesson, a teaching.  It brings to the fore one's own sin, and that of others.  It brings to one all the lies of the the myth of happiness strived for and gained, as that will just dissolve away.  And yet there is always something of the true Christian life.  If one sits around and listens long enough, some good things might come out.

Kathy talks about working for the Shrivers, Special Olympics.  Taking the Shriver kids to McDonalds in the family Cadillac, reaching into her own pocket to pay for burgers and shakes because McDonalds does not take credit cards, spending five dollars.  She is called up to the house later, to the office, up in the elevator, down the hall, Eunice, giving her a twenty.  "But it was only..."  Take and give the rest where you think it might be needed, she is told.  "I remember that," she tells me at the end of a long night, after telling me of how as a nursing student at Maryland she'd be working in Baltimore, going into bars to find diabetics for their treatment...

Such sweat and unhappiness with the job in general proved it to be work, proved it to be tilling in the fields as monks do...

And I even came to see Kerouac as such a worker.

Maybe you better see humanity in libraries or in the classroom, where they are quiet, and open, studious...



St Bernard finds all this symbolized and prefigured in the Marriage Feast of Cana, which typifies the Christian life, and especially the life of monks.  We fill the waterpots with water, for "purification," when we are faithful to the austere observances of the Order--silence, fasting, vigils, psalmody, manual labor and ascetic purity of heart.  Then Christ himself comes, and by the action of His Holy Spirit transforms the water of our observance into the wine of charity.   We share the wine of charity with one another, our hearts burning with compassion and transported with spiritual joy, as we begin to discover Christ in one another.

Thomas Merton, The Silent Life, II The Cenobitic Life, Chapter Three, page 115...