It's a beautiful day today…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

but I’m at home, tied to the couch by a stomach that has been aching for days and a fatigue that won’t seem to go away. What I feel is a symptom of my life.

So I will rest today, eat potatoes and bread, and hope things start to come back into line. This beautiful day with its temperatures just right will not be wasted, but not in the way I would like it to be. It would be good to be out in the sun, take a walk, or sleep with the breeze flowing over my blanket, but not today.

Today is for sitting and waiting and letting things fall back into their course. The misalignment of my body is a sign of something greater, of something that needs to be recovered with a day spent alone looking out the window and thinking. What matters? What needs to be untangled? What is good and needs to be celebrated? What is like wind blowing through the grass?

 Apparently if my heart won’t get me to stop, pause, and reflect my stomach will. Today its pain is mine and its queasiness a still small voice.

Wisdom…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

Four, the real forces of “intolerance” were unmasked here.  The caricature, of course, is that those defending traditional marriage were the right-wing bigots and bullies.  However, as one out-of-state journalist, who was following the debate closely, commented to me, “From my read of the columns, blogs, and rhetoric, it’s not your side that’s lobbing the grenades.”  A Catholic who wrote to criticize me for my defense of marriage still conceded, “But I must confess that I am sickened by the amount of anti-Catholic venom that has surfaced in this debate.”  As one respected columnist has observed, the problem is not homophobia but theophobia — a hatred by some of God, faith, religion, and the Church.

Read more here.

I know, I know…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

A recent study funded by Duke Divinity School found that, on average, ministers make up the chubbiest profession. But this is one of those good news/bad news deals: The good news is that a separate survey by the University of Chicago found that preachers also tend to be the most-satisfied workers.

Read more here.

Worth considering…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

… that kind of preparation is more important than ever before. We live in a complex and fast-changing world that will require a generation of leaders who are as well trained and educated as are the people in any other profession. It is a crime and miscarriage to require anything less. I often tell my students, “If you were laying in the operating room and some one bounded in and declared, ‘Hi, I’m Fred, and I don’t know a thing about anatomy or the practice of medicine, but I just love the idea of serving God through surgery,’ you would use your remaining moments of consciousness to roll off the gurney and claw your way down the hall. And yet it was Jesus who said, ‘Fear not those who can kill the body, but those who kill the soul.'” Churches that fearfully cast around for quick fixes to the training of clergy, give it scant attention, and then abandon their priests and pastors to the vagaries of forming themselves cannot expect to be a spiritual force in the world. Nor can they expect their clergy to be positive spiritual forces in the lives of others.

Read the rest here.

My own experience is that seminary talk me how to think and learn, which was good, but taught me nothing about being a pastor/priest. Very little of what was important in seminary, in my experience,  was also important in the parish.