A Positively Poetic Priest

One of the awkward things about social media  is that it classifies all our relationships as the same thing: friends. Facebook has developed over the years some ability to separate out groups  or individuals with which we have different kinds of relationships other than as friends. We are all friends, yes, but we are also acquaintances , family, colleagues, co-workers, frienemies, slightly awkward friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends, we are in groups of people we know well and some we don't know very well. We all have lots of different kinds of relationships throughout our lives.  This is part of what makes so many of Jesus' parables easy to understand. We have the same kinds of relationships with people now as they had back then, even if so much of the rest of our culture is different.  Today, from the gospel of Luke we hear a parable with some pretty interesting relationship dynamics going on.  There ar...

If you have Netflix, you know a few months ago "Tidying up with Marie Kondo" became a huge hit. So much so, people started using her name as a verb on Facebook. People reported their adventures cleaning out their homes, I saw posts such as this: "I'm Marie Kondo-ing my closet and found this!" with a picture of them holding up some long lost ridiculous Halloween costume they still had or something similar. Of course, my Facebook feed also immediately erupted  with scores of priests, ministers, and pastors  saying they would never be able to only own 30 books at a time. The whole idea which Marie Kondo proposes  is that cleaning up,  and cleaning out, paring down the possessions you have, leads to a more joy-filled life. This idea is not a new one. Or really a surprising one. When our lives start to feel too cluttered, when we have too many possessions we have to take care of, we start to lose our joy in living, our...

Human relationships are complicated. We can leave that statement as fact just the way it is. Most human relationships fall into one of three categories, though even these broad categories don't always catch everyone in our lives. We have acquaintances, we have friends, and we have "family". Acquaintances are those people we know through social events,  through work, through groups and we only talk to them in those contexts. We don't usually go out of our way for acquaintances the way we would for friends or family, but we could chit chat with them in some capacity. Our relationships with them are characterized by the social laws and rules of the context in which we know them. Friends are those people we spend time together with on a mutual basis. We like them, we know something more about them. We might share funny emails with them or call them occasionally, We would know if they became ill or lost their dog. Our relationships ...

"He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours." Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: "Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offense." This is a portion of Robert Frost's poem, Mending Wall.  The poem talks about mending a wall in the spring with the neighbor on the other side.  It goes through how the wall fell apart, and as we heard, we hear him wonder about why there is a wall in the first place. The only thing the neighbor says in the poem is "Good fences make good neighbours." But Frost brings up a good question in these lines why do good fences make good neighbors why build a wall is it because you're walling something in or walling something out? It seems that there are good walls,...