It seems as if they can’t help themselves —
those who have been washed in the blood,
those who have been washed in the water,
those who have perfect attendance chains
down to their knees,
those who have made confession of faith,
those who have walked the sawdust trail,
those who have had holy hands laid on them,
those who gather regularly in bible study,
those who stopped thinking when they were
about ten,
those whose spirituality is in the bowels of
the church basement,
those who wax pious and then crucify
those who don’t fit in,
those who wouldn’t recognize Jesus if
he walked up to them and slapped them
upside the head.
Sometimes mother church is a bitch.
A priest said, “The church may be a whore,
but she’s still my mother.
The priest would have been better off an orphan.

Cour·te·sy
noun: courtesy;
the showing of politeness in one’s attitude and behavior
toward others.
A·nach·ro·nism
noun: anachronism;
a thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that
in which it exists, especially a thing that is conspicuously
old-fashioned.

And there you have it: courtesy, an anachronism,
he mumbled to himself as he stood in line
holding two items watching the young woman
in front of him glance at him holding two
items, put two week’s worth of
groceries on the belt and continue
straight on to check out only to
smile broadly and say, “Fine,” when
asked by the clerk how she was. It
was then he smiled at the young
woman and said, “Have a nice day,”
and that was the anachronism.

The dictionary gets it wrong
when it comes to the word
“denomination”:

1.
A recognized autonomous branch
of the Christian Church,
a group or branch of any religion:
“Jewish clergy of all denominations.”
2.
The face value of a banknote, coin,
or postage stamp:
“a hundred dollars or so, in small
denominations.”

One should be two and vice versa.
Money speaks louder than the church
every time — gun control, for instance?
Denominations of banknotes in ac-
counts of candidates speak louder than
any church denomination speaking out
for gun control. How about racism? A
college football team protesting racism
on campus was heard because of all the
“denominations” that would be lost to
the school’s coffers not because of the
moral integrity of the players, as won-
derful as that is. What if denomination-
al campus ministries protested? The
administration would be shaking in
its boots. Not. They would be listen-
ed to about as fast as if they were the
University chess club rising up in pro-
test. Some denominations speak out
and some denominations really talk.

What if all media world-
wide refused to cover
terrorism, but the acts
were known to those
who actually could do
something about them?
Would terrorism decline
or would it just take
over or would the silence
of reporting unleash a
fascist reaction? When,
if ever, should a free
press choose to remain
silent or at least tone
it down? When is silence
golden? In this age of
social media where every-
thing is up for grabs,
does everything need to
be reported or is it al-
ready out there? Probably,
and now what?

Because of a poem he just read
he thinks about the first house
he can remember and tumbling
down two sets of stairs — the
basement stairs which were
steep and hard to his malleable,
pliable body. His dad rushed
him to the hospital; no bones
were broken but his nose was a
little flat against his face
for awhile. On occasion, his
parents would try to pull it.
The other stairway was the one
from the first floor to the
second. It was carpeted so the
tumbles were less painful. They
would end with a thud as his
little body hit the wall just
before the turn into the living
room. Dizzy, he would look up
at the round, stained glass
window spinning above him. He
would giggle and his mother
would yell half out of fear
and half anger.

He sits in the library reading a magazine
article and the author writes that we must

look to the poets for truth and direction.
He is reminded of a meditation where the

priest/scholar writes for himself and quotes
others who say, said, have said that we must

look to the poets for truth and direction.
He notes that many write and say that we must

look to the poets for truth and direction.
Maybe someone should write and/or say that

we should actually read the poets to see
for ourselves if the poets offer truth and

direction, because, to the best of his know-
ledge, hardly anybody does. Maybe that’s

called “passing the poetic buck.”

Researching the first name of his fifth
grade teacher to dedicate a book to her
memory, he came across his eighth grade
graduation bulletin and saw that he had
been the treasurer of the class. He thought
to himself, thank heaven they never en-
trusted the checkbook to him. He was the
assistant treasurer of his junior class
in high school and no checks were signed,
that being the responsibility of the
treasurer, who, apparently had a tight-
fisted grip on the checkbook. His senior
year he experienced a double whammy, being
elected both treasurer of the class and
the National Honor Society and because he
had the checkbooks, both accounts came up
short, much to the chagrin of the school
counselor. He pleaded innocent, which he
was, with a decided deficit in the command
of elementary math, which he had. As an
adult he always tried to keep more in the
checking account than was listed in the
book so he would never have an over-draft,
a bit of clever planning, he thought. He
married an accountant and turned over the
books with a sigh of gratitude, vowing never
to be treasurer again.

When the physician almost shouted
through the phone, in answer to
the man’s question, “How much will

my knee heal?”: “I can pretty well
guarantee about 60 %. I’m not God,”
it was the “I’m not God” part that

brought back a distant memory of a
veterinarian who tended a severely
dehydrated Siamese cat the man was

watching for a friend when the man
asked, “Will it live?” and the
veterinarian shouted back at him,

“I don’t know; I’m not God!” The
cat lived and only three months
after the revolutionary stem cell

treatment the man’s knee feels at
least 60% better and, better yet,
the man gets to keep his knee when

two orthopedic surgeons in two dif-
ferent states had said to the man
in solemn, oracular tones, “I’ll

give you shots and pills and when
you can’t stand the pain anymore,
I’ll come to your rescue and take

out your knee,” like this was the
final, fatal, predestined verdict
coming straight from the mouth of

God. No, the man’s physician and
the cat’s veterinarian aren’t God,
but they did a good job of assisting.

Around six a.m. he heard the cricket or
grasshopper rub its legs together or a
leg against a wing whatever one or the
other does. It’s December; was the bug
in a rug hiding from September to Dec-
ember, quietly biding its time until it
felt perfectly safe to chirp and jump
for joy? Might there be more than one —
a mate and then in mid-summer there
would be lots of little chirpers all over
the family room? But what about all the
vacuuming and surely the dog’s nose
would have sensed the bug’s presence?
These things ran through the man’s mind
while he lie in bed. It was very quiet; he
heard the rhythmic breathing of his wife
next to him and the quiet snore of the dog
on the floor, and then he heard it again.
It seemed very systematic. He counted
the time between chirps — a constant
thirty count. And then he knew; the smoke
alarm battery was dying. Oh, such mundane
things, which happen at inconvenient times,
he thought as he rose to extricate the
battery before the chirping woke his wife
and the snoring dog. He didn’t think he
had any more of those little rectangular
batteries, just lots of double A’s, triple
A’s, C’s and several D’s for the lamps
they use while camping.

“I think my husband
is flirting with me,”
she said just before she died at
eighty-eight. Her husband
lived on for three
more years before he died of a
broken heart at ninety-three,
wishing every day
that she was back
in his arms and he was
flirting her death away.