Fr. Ron Culmer's blog

Finding the Face of the Church Becoming

Here's a link to my Bearings Magazine Article about the church becoming:

 

https://www.thebtscenter.org/bearings/2018-april/finding-the-face-of-the-church-becoming/

Sick and Crazy

Being sick is one thing. Being sick and crazy is another. Here's California columnist Michael Ventura's take on a "sick and crazy" culture:

"The statistics are overwhelming: We're sick. It's not just that we have the most overweight population in the West, nor that we have the highest infant mortality rate of any industrial- ized country in the world. It's not that heart disease is the worst epidemic since the Plague, not that one in three Americans will get cancer, not that it's been documented beyond quibbling that most of this pain could be prevented by more naturally grown food, fewer chemicals in the environment, less rat-racing and more exer- cise. It's not even that our young people, in addition to being the most ignorant, are also the fattest, the wheeziest, the least physically active and the most neglected (13 million latchkey children under the age of 14) of any developed country on Earth. No, the sickest thing about us is:

"That we hear these facts over and over again (the data are undeniable and have been broadcast for years), yet as a people, we do nothing. And we tolerate elected representatives who do worse than nothing, who collaborate in causing these conditions. Their reelection coffers bulge with dollars contributed by the same corporations that, in effect, sell ill health in pretty packages.

"So we're not just sick - we're crazy. Because it's crazy to have had the information for years and to have done next to nothing."
--Michael Ventura, Letters at 3 AM: Reports on Endarkenment (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1994), 102-103.

A Place In This World

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting---

over and over announcing your place

in the family of all things.

From Dream Work by Mary Oliver

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press

Copyright Mary Oliver