Among the things that amaze me about God is His ability to both see clearly and love truly. Those who love me, even those who love me best, only love a shadow, an image, a bit of the substance with enough smoke and mirrors to hide the darkest things. God sees me in a total exposure, a way I don’t even see myself, something beyond what ever cloaks of skin or soul or intellect I can produce. With God I am totally exposed, there is no hiding, no little white lies to keep others from seeing my illnesses. Yet I am totally loved even when those things, those deep pockets in my soul which repel me and would destroy the illusion others have grown to love, are open to the blinding sun. Unfathomable.

Spring is starting to break out and as my car carried me over the miles in western Wisconsin I saw the signs of its coming feast.

Throughout the winter as the deer and the animals cross the roads they can fall prey to passing cars and trucks. Thrown violently into pieces they die and freeze and often get covered with snow. In the woods beyond others follow their natural course and pass away. The God who sees sparrows falling remembers but we care little and soon forget; until spring. As the snow retreats all the places where these animals were entombed are revealed again, deer with lifeless eyes peering from shrinking snowbanks, raccoons resting places uncovered by the growing sun.

And it is at this point, when winter has come to the end of its course and those animals who have endured are gaunt with it’s scarcity that the feast is revealed. In the course of things fresh meals emerge with the lengthening daylight and between the harshness of winter and the renewal of spring there is enough to make the final push through to the thaw. Coyotes and crows, eagles and weasels and anything from bear to bug are fed by an invisible hand as death gives life in its timeless way.

Such is the way of things along the bluffs and in a hundred hidden coulees where the roads and the land and the river intersect. Such is the way of things, death giving life, in a more profound and heavenly understanding, as Lent blankets the world.

This is post 500 in the Traveling Priest Chronicles, a landmark of sorts I suppose.

I started this blog not knowing for sure what I was attempting to do and only certain there were things I’d like to say and perhaps it would be of some value to record life on the road and whatever thoughts came to me along the journey. I wondered if it were perhaps a bit pompous to think that what I had to say even mattered.

Along the way the blog has been kind of a diary that I share with whoever drops in, the book I intended to write but never quite got around to doing, and a log of the miles and people and miscellanea encountered on the road from St. Paul, Minnesota to LaCrosse, Wisconsin. It’s rapidly approaching three years now of travels to St. Elias Church, three years of seven day weeks, three years of motels and its been an adventure. When I get older people make think I’m making it all up, some kind of “Fr John story” they can politely dismiss as an old man’s fancy.

I’ve wondered, sometimes, what I will do if and when I ever actually live in the same vicinity of the parish I serve. What will I call the blog when there are no more travels? But right now its Monday night, I’m a bit road weary and getting ready for the First Sunday in Lent. Home seems like a long way off and I might have to make the run for who knows how long until I finally find it.

Until then I’ll just keep traveling and writing and hoping that it blesses whoever comes along to read.

A story on the continued inability of the FBI to properly protect citizen’s privacy in its investigations and another on the creation of a nationwide computer data system linking investigative organizations. Both beg the question, “Who’s watching the watchers?”

Privacy matters, the ability to know that your life is free from undue scrutiny is a bedrock of a free society. Quite frankly this current administration has, in my opinion, significantly eroded the protections that ordinary citizens have from government and corporate interests having access to all kinds of details of our lives whether there is just cause or not. The current strategy of protecting against “terrorism” by leaving borders undefended and large parts of our commercial infrastructure uninspected while increasingly invading the privacy of people just trying to go about their lives seems to have left sense behind.

Someone once said that those who choose to give up their freedoms for security will end up with neither and government, with corporate cooperation, is in the process of making that nightmare come true. Sadly very few in the political class seem to care about this and the issue still hasn’t made it above the horizon in the current campaigns. Too many people are focused on the details while the foundations are slowly being hacked away. What ‘s actually more important, that people have some help with a mortgage or have the freedom to live their lives without some government hack taking a cruise through your private life whenever they feel like it? Do the math.

It was a beautiful Sunday morning, the air was clear, the sun was bright and Fr. Peter really just wanted to skip Liturgy and go golfing. So he hatched a plan.

He called the Council President and in his best hacking, sneezing, sick, voice told him that he was sorry but he was just so ill and although he really wished he could be there he just needed to rest and so he couldn’t serve that day. When the call was over he got into his clothes, slung the bag over his shoulder, and headed to the golf course.

Meanwhile in heaven the angels were watching the whole thing and reported the matter to God questioning Him as to what he was going to do about Fr. Peter. God calmly replied, “Don’t worry, it’s handled.”

Arriving at the golf course Fr. Peter stepped to the first tee, placed his ball, and swung. The ball exploded off the tee, straight and true over the entire length of the fairway, took three hops and plopped into the cup, the shot of a lifetime. At this point the angels were deeply puzzled. Didn’t God see what had happened and had He forgotten about what Fr. Peter had done? Sputtering and incoherent they asked God why he allowed a hole in one as a reward for such deeds.

God replied “So who’s he going to tell?”

A soldier is claiming he was punished and denied promotion because he’s an atheist.

It’s important to remember that whenever you read about a lawsuit the coverage will be about the initial charges, the claims of the plaintiff packaged to make the most emotional impact possible. It’s a strategy to gain publicity, sympathy, and in effect make the opening arguments of the case long before it actually comes to court. This effort is enhanced by the fact that many defendants, unlike plaintiffs, are bound by privacy laws which don’t allow them to divulge information that would exonerate them before trial or the simple fact that a news story can come into play before a defendant has even read through the first documents of the case.

My guess is that in a couple of years when both sides have been heard the claims, as they often are, will be much less dramatic, hammered down to size by the cool process of law.

Give your loyalty to your job, a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay with a little extra in remembrance that in working well we, in a mystical way, also serve our Lord. But never give your job or your company your soul. There is no treasure of earth that is pay sufficient for even a fragment of it.

Had a co-worker bring out the old “more people have been killed in wars over religion…” chestnut today and having grown tired of hearing stuff like this over time from folks who’ve combined over confidence and under thinking into the toxic soup of slogan I decided to answer back.

First, in the matter of sheer body count its probable the officially secular and athiestic regimes of the 20th century probably have the honors. The mechanized and systematic killing of the century past simply has no counterpart in human history and resembles something more like an epidemic illness in its gross killing power then the battlefields of even the prior century and certainly less then the supposed “dark ages”.

Second, one needs to do some critical thinking and analyze the actual causes of war. There are many cases where religious belief was used by the prevailing authorities as one way to legitimize a particular war, and certainly people who were personally devout have fought in wars and perhaps even seen their involvement as a form of devotion, but not nearly as many cases where religion itself was the actual cause of the conflict. It is probably a fair criticism to say that too often religious groups have lent uncritical support to governments as they embark on wars but even that support does not mean a given war’s source is religion, just that religion has allowed itself to become a tool of the larger effort to support a war. A small bit of rational investigation yields the conclusion that war is the sad result of many causes and effects and rarely is it so simple to say that “religion” is the single source of any conflict and often its not even a contributing cause.

The point in this is to help a person think beyond the sound bite and if you can they usually see the complexities of history and discover that a phrase like “More people have died in wars caused by religion…” is simplistic and functionally useless. It’s also good for Christians to not be afraid of people making such claims because many who make them are simply regurgitating something they’ve heard over and over and assume that the repetition of an idea is related to its veracity. A little information beyond the sound bite can sometimes make all the difference.

As for the antagonist who just like to throw things like that in your face to justify whatever it is they’re thinking at the moment just remember pearls before swine and such and walk away. That they feel this is some kind of conclusive argument against religion indicates a kind of shallowness of thought that should only be encountered if there is some reasonable hope of growth. If not, you just argue in circles and time and energy go to waste. Let your life do the debating and the Holy Spirit do His work. The harshest critics of our faith often make the best proponents when grace comes calling.

An Israeli academic suggests that Moses was high on drugs when he saw God.

And, oh by the way, he bases this in part on his own chemically induced experiences. Are you suprised?

I remember when IPods first came out there were articles where famous people were asked about what was on theirs. The music they chose, it was presumed, was a kind of window into their life, the unguarded place behind the public persona. There’s a truth to that.

This past evening I was reformatting and loading my own IPod, a 30gb U2 signature edition I purchased because it had a last generation price. A quick look at the playlist shows I have a lot of Mozart, a whole bunch of Orthodox chant, and then anything goes from the Ramones to Janis Joplin, the Allman Brothers, and Nat King Cole. What does that say about me? Maybe I’m a bluesy sort of classical chant guy who every once in a while likes to rip it up with best punk band ever. Who knows?

Some things, though, are certain. I find the playlists on most commercial radio to be garbage, whiney pop singers or rap music, country singers who haven’t a clue and millionaire rockers complaining about the darkness in their lives. So I like the ability to pick and choose, to not have to take what they think is best for me and like it. Perhaps its that, and not the songs per se, which reveals the most about me. Somewhere in all the craziness of the world I want at least some little world where I call the shots and control the switches. Maybe that’s why IPod s are everywhere.