A few words and another cuppa, let’s talk a while

+JMJ+ Come on in and pull up a chair. If it’s too hot in here, just give it a second and I’ll be turning on the A.C. That’s how it is with sarcoidosis and Prednisone. It’s like going through the change every minute of your life: freezing one moment, burning up the next. Ah, well, enough about me. How do take your tea? Let’s sit and talk a while.

I wanted to say something about the Thursday evening posts (okay, a lot of them have ended up being Friday wee morning hours posts, but I digress) that are part of the weekly series on the soul. It’s not that I am a know-it-all about the soul or spiritual theology or any aspect of Catholic teaching. It’s just that I get interested in a particular subject and the first thing I wanna do is run show somebody what I’ve found, like a little kid.

I’m sure I used to drive my mother crazy with all the stuff I found and shared with her non-stop, whether she wanted to hear it or not. Luckily for you, this is a blog and you can ignore anything and everything I put on here, unlike my poor mom who was rather a more captive audience, God rest her soul.

This fact that I am a student and not a teacher is one I take seriously. I have no license to teach anything, no degree of any sort. I did attend college—briefly, before the money ran out. My parents offered to pay the rest of my way through college if only I would return home from the university. In my utter foolishness I said no. I had found “freedom” (such an abused word in our culture) and I refused to give it up.

What. An. Idiot.

I have paid for that freedom a million times over by now and there’s no end in sight. My life could have been very different. But I probably wouldn’t have had my beloved Abby or Lucy and that makes up for it. At least some of it. I do love them both, and even if Abby is gone now, I still think of mself as having dawgs not dawg.

So when I talk about what the Church teaches, I do not fancy myself as any kind of expert and there is absolutely no reason you should either. I am merely someone who enjoys studying, for one thing, and I especially enjoy studying the teachings of the Church, for another. All my life I’ve wanted to understand the world and the deeper things. I’ve searched for answers and I found them, lots of them. But nowhere else have I found the depth and truth that I’ve found in the Church. It caught my attention right away and it never has let it go.

The reason I’ve been posting the series on the soul is that I’ve been interested in the subject since I first heard the word and I have that insatiable desire to share stuff with others. That desire to share stood me well when I worked in the Catholic bookstore. We had a customer, a doctor, who would come in with his family to get recommendations of good new books or tapes (yes, tapes, it was a few years ago). After we’d known each other for a while, he would stop by my desk at the counter on the way in and ask me to get him an empty box from the backroom. I’d hand it to him and he would hand it back and say, “Oh, just fill it up.” And I would. And he’d buy everything I put in the box. Now that’s the kind of customer a bookstore buyer-manager likes!

We had a few customers like that who would drop a few hundred dollars every time they came into the store. And they took me up on my recommendations generally. But that is a far cry from any of them thinking I was an expert on what I was recommending. I had a feel for what people would like based on what they told me they were reading or what I saw them pick up or through general conversation. But that is not the same thing at all as having deep knowledge of the subjects in which they were interested. I had some knowledge, not a lot, especially back then when I wasn’t even Catholic yet but only beginning to explore and learn.

And now, these many years later? Still not an expert, no way. I’m not even a catechist. (Good Lord, no, I cannot imagine trying to teach in person these days, I’d cough all the way through each and every session.) I remain someone who enjoys exploring and discovering and studying and learning and sharing what I’ve discovered with anyone who will listen.

That said, I do spend time studying it what I find to make sure it is kosher, as it were. I don’t want to lead anyone astray, I don’t want to mislead anyone. This is not a trivia site and it’s all too important to not be careful with what I put here on the blog. I have a theologian friend who I run things by when I run into something I’m not sure about, even after researching it a while. He’s not to blame if I make any errors but I try very hard not to make them.

So why should you listen to me? I haven’t the fog. But if you do, then thank you. I try to pass on to you what interests me. I hope at least some of it interests you, too. You’ll notice that, unlike many other blogs out there, I do not focus on current events as a rule, though sometimes I do. But generally speaking it’s not my bag. I write about what I wanna write about when I wanna write it and that’s the way it is.

Thank you for visiting and reading. I hope you’re staying safe and well. I’m such a hermit by nature (and by what nature has done to me!) that I almost can’t tell any difference between these days and the last few years anyway. But I know that’s not the case for most people. I hope the world returns to something resembling normalcy soon. Until next time, whoever and wherever you are, may the Lord bless you and keep you, and may the peace of Christ be always with you. +JMJ+

Join me on Fridays Live on Twitter at 8pm ET, 7pm CT to pray for all those affected by the Coronavirus, to cultivate a culture of Life and Love, and to end the culture of death. “The Rosary is the ‘weapon’ for these times.” — Padre Pio