Statistics of human trafficking throughout the world overwhelm my imagining. Reliable estimates put the figure at 30 million. These tragically unfortunate people have fallen victim to various forms of enforced degradation that violate their dignity and their human rights.
Category Archives: Blog
Dreamscape
I found myself at the Eucharistic liturgy in an Episcopalian church. Somehow, the pew I was sitting in was uncomfortable so I crossed over the aisle and awkwardly climbed over a lady sitting at the end of the row. In doing so I missed what was going on at the altar. As a result I failed to receive Communion.
Later, I went to the sacristy in order to complain to the celebrant about the length of the service. I wanted to persuade him that it should have been considerably shorter. But he hardly paid any attention to me; instead he was caught up in conversation with a woman.
This vivid dream brings back traces of my ecclesiastical career. It also gives expression to my current impatience with long ceremonies, speeches, movies, and other such events. For me at this stage of life I prefer shorter rather than longer in almost everything. Even this blog.
Turmoil
Sudan, Yemen, Bahrein, Kuwait – These are places formerly not in my consciousness. Now part of our global community, they occupy my rapt attention. Virtually every day, I read about the turmoil that has engulfed them and hope for populist forces to win out. But the possibilities for other outcomes, some of them awful, loom in the background. What is going to happen to these vulnerable communities? And what will be the impacts on our mighty, but troubled, nation?
Mantra
My late life mantra: The Mystery Deepens
Sharing Something
“Self-publishing has an illustrious history. Milton published Areopagitica himself and Whitman self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. When he could not find a publisher for his first novel, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane published it himself. James Joyce in similar circumstances published Ulysses with the help of Sylvia Beach and her Shakespeare and Company bookshop. The Joy of Cooking was first published by its author and so were such recent best sellers as Richard Evans’s Christmas Box and Tom Peters’s In Search of Excellence.”
Jason Epstein in The New York Review of Books, February 10, 2011, p. 30.
Bad Taste
As the Academy Awards come near, the film “The Black Swan” reportedly stands a good chance of winning Best Picture. Or, at least, its star, Natalie Portman, may be in the running for best actress.
Lured, in part by these reports I recently went to see the film. Much in it I found easy to admire. The beauty and grace of the ballet sequences in particular gratified my desire for aesthetic pleasure. So did some of the interplay among those actors who had leading roles.
Theological Encounter
Kristen Mulvihill and David Rohde had been married for only two months when David, a New York Times reporter on location in Afghanistan, was kidnapped by the Taliban. During the seven months of his captivity, Kristen, an active Catholic, prayed every day for her husband’s safe return.
David, though not himself especially religious, also prayed daily. He did so, not because of a deep belief in God, but rather to pass the oppressive time of being held prisoner.