Hoping to be the Millionth Post on Mosque-gate

I understand if this the one millionth post I'll win an all expenses paid trip to Mecca where I'll be allowed to install a Padre Pio shrine. Just so you'll know that is why I'm posting on such a controversial topic.

Personally I'd like to hear someone say in response to "how far is far enough from GZ" some determinative answer like, 3.5 blocks. It might quiet Chris Matthews for a few seconds.

Another thought: This Imam Rauf may well be a moderate Muslim in the circles he frequents. Like Hillary Clinton at a Netroots convention.

Really it seems bad form for the builders not to be magnanimously withdrawing their plan, but then they ain't English and the world isn't a cricket match. And it does allow the developers to play victim and Lord knows that's a successful strategy.

Don't Try This at Home (unless you're Betty Duffy or Bill Luse)

Years ago I decided to try my hand at painting, and so went out and bought some art supplies and went to work, sans instruction. This idea was born of the fact that modern art was so pitiful that it looked like many works were painted by a chimp. And some were. The barriers to entry seemed low.

I have the results of those efforts, prompted by Betty Duffy's real art.

(This, btw, is proof this blog has jumped the shark!)

* * *

I call this "someone left the cake out in the rain". It was painted using only the best oil paints available at Kroger's Grocery store. Circa 1999.

"The Diamond" is a retrospective in the folk art vein asking the question: "What if someone who knew nuthin' about paintin' were to paint a baseball diamond?" Your answer appeareth. It evokes all the playfulness of America's game.

"The Battle of the Sexes" was inspired by the anniversary of the Bobby Riggs v. Billy Jean King match of 1973. It speaks to primal urges using a primary color.

No model was used in the production of this work, believe it or not.

"Risin' Sun, Indiana" looks better in person. Honestly.

Teachout's Tweets

I wonder what Terry Teachout means by "coping". I hope he's not ill....

Coping gets old. I'm a bit tired of it this evening. about 9 hours ago via web

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Right now I'm listening to the second movement of Beethoven's Op. 111. No music--perhaps no work of art--is more consoling. about 9 hours ago via web

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Why does music have this power? I know no greater mystery. about 9 hours ago via web

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Thank God for music, which makes most things tolerable, or at least endurable. about 9 hours ago via web

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From Beethoven to the blues: now I'm listening to Joe Turner and Pete Johnson doing "Piney Brown Blues." about 8 hours ago via web

Poetry Tuesday

Hope
by Lee Ann Roripaugh

There are nights I dream of goldfish,
and in my dreams they sing to me in
fluted, piercing sopranos like the Vienna
Boys Choir. Althought in the daylight
they are mostly silent and ravenous—
the suction-cup grip of their mouths
on my fingertip like tiny rubber bath-
room plungers when they rise to strike
at an offering of chopped green peas.
Sometimes a frenetic clicking of marbles
nosed and nudged across the aquarium
floor during scavenging sessions for food,
sounding like the rack and crack of a game
of pool. Such hunger. Such extravagance.

Their ovoid bodies are like Faberge eggs
filigreed with flakes of hammered gold,
a glittering armor of polished gill
plates, their dorsal fins elegant ribbed
silk fans that open when in motion,
and fold themselves shut in repose.
Clever pectoral fins maneuver and oscillate
like small propellers, and the circling
tails flare and twirl with the hypnotic
flourish of the toreador's cape. All
is endless metaphor here. All of it.

I once read the goldfish memory span
was three seconds, and does this mean
each moment is an astonishment
in a series of quick incarnations spiraling
outward the way water ripples away
from a disturbance, so that, in the end,
each brief flicker of awareness
is long enough to learn to simply be,
and isn't this really, after all, enough?

One morning I woke to find the red-capped
oranda in distress—fins clamped sadly
down, listless tail, gasping on the back
corner floor of the aquarium. I netted
her and put her in a glass bowl sugared
with a quarter cup of sea salt crystals—
the way my Japanese grandfather once
showed my mother, and the way my mother,
years later in America, once showed me.

And several hours later, the sheer veils
of tail and fin began to bloom, to resume
their arabesques and veronicas around
the sleek shimmer of her white satin body—
the scandal of her scarlet cap dipping
coquettishly, onyx beads of eyes swiveling
in their turquoise socket rings. She swam
around and around the clear glass bowl,
until my heart swung left and followed her
around and around from above the way
red-throated loons on the Island of Seto
circle and follow the fishing boats, tamed
by the fishermen, and calling out
with their strange and mournful cries.

* * *

Wild Heart
by Gregory Orr (b. 1947?)

Where would I be if not for your wild heart?
I ask this not from love, but selfishly--
how could I live? How could I make my art?

Questions I wouldn't ask if I was smart.
Take the whole thing on faith. Blind eyes can see
where I would be if not for your wild heart.

Love or need--who can tell the two apart?
Nor does it matter much, since both agree
that I need you to live and make my art.

Are you the target; am I the bow and dart?
Are you the deer that doesn't want to flee
and turns to give the hunter her wild heart?

I bite the apple and the apple's tart
but that's the complex taste of destiny.
How could I live? How could I make my art

in some bland place like Eden, set apart
from the world's tumult and its agony?
Where would I be if not for your wild heart?
How could I live? How could I make my art?

Le Great Twitter Controversy

I tweeted something yesterday:

TS O'Rama (@tsorama) 8/23/10 6:23 PM RT @alaindebotton The difference between hope and despair boils down to an ability to spin different stories from the same facts.

Or rather that's what I re-tweeted last night, a quote from author Alain de Botton, and no sooner was it posted than someone called me out on it.  "You don't really believe that, do you?" said Cowpi. 

I knew the statement would be provocative and was ready for a defense. 

Weren't judas's and peter's sins roughly equal, and didn't one hope and one despair? Aren't the facts the same for all of us, that we are sinners and in light of that we either hope or despair?

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant of Variety of Posts

While I'm skeptical that any moral claim can be made in entirely secular terms all the way down--in other words, eventually you do have to discuss your fundamental metaphysical beliefs and deepest loves/loyalties--I think the case against gay marriage is about as secular as the cases against, say, torture or the death penalty. In other words, I think we can talk for a while before you get to God, and that's what I try to do. - Eve Tushnet

He became acutely conscious of “the danger of allowing others—not just friends and colleagues but the masses—to exert too much influence on one’s thinking.” The more connected a society becomes, the greater the chance an individual can become a creature, or even slave, of that connectedness. - Peggy Noonan on author of "Hamlet's Blackberry"

The answer that people thought [Obama] was a Muslim is of course what made the headlines because of course trying to broadcast the stupidity of people is what makes headlines, especially if you are trying to make a specific segment look dumb.  But of course there were all those people who believed 9/11 was an inside job — so finding people who believe things such as this is no difficulty. - Curt Jester

On Reading Chinese Poetry
In translation the words
are the same. The moon
shines the same on Brooklyn
and Xi'an, and boats at night
on lakes are much the same.

But the spirit of the Chinese moon
is world away from New York.
The sound of boats on water
changed when it is played against
Chinese and southern moon.
- Steven Riddle of "...recollected in tranquility…"

Pope Pius XII had the experience of seeing the Fatima “miracle of the sun” on three successive days at four p.m.—October 30, 1950; October 31, 1950; and November 1, 1950—while praying the Holy Rosary in the Vatican Gardens…This announcement at Fatima marked the first time in the history of the Roman Catholic Church that a papal vision was announced during the pontiff's lifetime. - Janice Connell

We have Robert Burns’ “My love is like a red,red, rose.” We have Wordsworth’s “Thy soul was like a Star.” But for my money--today anyway--the prize goes to brother Californian/fellow Angeleno/noir genius Raymond Chandler who, in Farewell, My Lovely, wrote: “He was about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.” - Heather King's on greatest simile of all time

I, who have always been resolutely anti-blog (cause doncha know, I’m a purist, I’m a professional), have started (obviously) a blog. I’m interested to see how it unfolds, what I’ll learn. In two weeks, I’ve already realized: Oh okay, this is like everything else. It’s not going to make you famous. It’s not going to gain you a big “following.” It’s work and if you look at it in any other way than that it’s a gift then the blog won’t be any good, it won’t be you, and you’re going to be burdened by the fact that it’s work and pissed that no-one’s paying attention. In fact, one of the main reasons I started a blog at all was because I have so many unpublished essays, reflections, and snippets of ideas I figured: Why not start just giving them away! - Heather King of "Shirt of Flame"

St. Pius X

Saturday marked the feast of St. Pope Pius X, Apostle of Hope; see quotes here and here as examples thereof. “You, Lord, gave St. Pius X the strength of an Apostle….” goes the Divine Office. Indeed. An apostle of our time. And I thought about how his heart was so broken by the advent of WWI that he seemingly died of it. And that was BEFORE all the bloodshed that wasn’t predicted to come, had come. St. Pius, pray for us!

This & That

Listening to some Keith Jarrett jazz, cool for a hot summer day. It’s funny how the same music can seem slightly mournful in the cold, dark recesses of winter but can seem cheerful in the blaze of summer. It’s like the Mona Lisa, some see a smile, some see something else. How we experience things seems so subjective on the margins.

And so the weekend wanes; 5pm on a Sunday. What joy to read a physical book again after a significant absence. Could feel the pages “fall and rise…in all their raging glory,” to paraphrase that tune of yore, arguably the greatest song ever written. Could also smell the brine of the pages, that sea-worthy smell of print and ink.

Stopped off for a quarter-hour at that fast-dying institution: the brick and mortar (almost said 'brick and mortal') bookstore. And lo and behold found something I wouldn't have otherwise - a memoir called The Haygoods of Columbus, an enjoyable read with a lot about Columbus. The author went to Miami U. too and describes that experience. A really cool find, and an absolute steal at $4.99.

So why hasn't the world produced the Great Columbus novel? Or poem or essay? Perhaps Wil Haygood has the answer:

Essayists and poets haven't written much about my Columbus by way of explaining its texture and mood. Perhaps it's a little too elusive. Maybe it's thought of too much as just a football-mad town. Maybe it's because sometimes it can seem otherworldly. A couple years back, [then] Gov.George Voinovich fired Billy Ray Inmon as manager of the Ohio State Fair. Being manager of the Ohio State Fair is a pretty powerful job in Columbus. Inmon didn't take the dismissal lightly. He fought back, staging a hunger strike on the statehouse lawn. One night a homeless man came into the tent and peed on him. That story made the news wires.

At the bookstore happened across Hamlet & His Blackberry about the ill-effects of being too-plugged in, too connected, too addicted to screens.. It's one of those books I want to have read more than to read. Peg Noonan recommended it in a recent column.

So spent the early afternoon weighing down the hammock and observing the fine fettle of leaves arranged artistically around it. There were a lot of clouds in the sky, which lent a certain atmosphere. Clouds, sun, don't matter too terribly much as long as it's warm. I lushed it up Saturday with a squadron of beers in the late afternoon, early evening. Definitely like the spreading out of the hops & barley instead of the concentrated Friday nacht.

Yesterday, like most mornings, I spent a hare of time outside admiring the cut of the day’s gib. I ambled out to the black bench looking at the dry grass and fall-like slant of the sun on the horizon beyond the hammock. Facts are facts, and if I were smarter I would welcome them instead of resisting them, and revel in the truth rather than pine for some fool fiction like eternal summer. And so the autumn comes, full of delights of its own, but also harsh harbinger of cold and ruin, of decimating temperatures killing leaves of green and sending song birds south.

Room with a View

Another trip to ye olde Ohio State University aerie:

Looking south, towards downtown

The Grand Reading Room at OSU


Unfortunate sign found in restaurant window on OSU campus

A fine aperitif of light

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Excerpt of poem

Satire V from The Scourge of Vacuity
This poem first appeared in the June 2, 1970, issue of NATIONAL REVIEW.

By L. J. Fattoroski

The liberal I sing, thrice blessed sage —
Presiding spirit of this gaudy age.
No prejudice has he, but, Argus-eyed,
He sees of every question every side.
At Berkeley he was trained to keep his mind
Wide open — at both ends. He’s not the kind
To hasten to a rash decision; no,
Enlightened men act seldom and think slow.

____

The first hint of fall in the air occurred yesterday morning, August 19th. There is something so definable about each season and yet the boundaries are fluid. I drove out to campus and the weather was admirable to the point of award-winning, the sun warm but not overly so, the sights crystalline. I was tempted to stop in Italian village at an empty bench in the shade and set up camp there. Instead I did so in the aerie in Thompson Library and even now I overlook the statue of Mr. Thompson as well as a myriad of trees. The best view, I’ve decided, faces south but there’s little chance of acquiring that one short of being there when the joint opens. These college kids know what they’re doing. UPDATE: It opened up!
___

It still lingers, I can still feel the ocean fall & rise and “hear its raging glory”. I remember those golden moments on the balcony with a tip of the cup to Mr. Java as the ocean tipped the horizon line. I relish and read a bit of Pat Conroy’s “South of Broad” about Charleston, in South Carolina, which is where Hilton Head is.

I remember taking in a full nostril of sea ale, that salty concoction of water and minerals that make up the ocean. It was accidental of course - the unexpected wave combined with a planned breath.

Bike-rides were not overdone - just enough along the way to give me a taste of the live oaks and Spanish moss before the one long ride that last day to the far reaches where I met up, again, with the sea oats of the Empty Quarter and lo and behold the sea captivated me again, freshly, even this my sixth day down there.

I recall the good strong dollops of reading balanced against the totally different activities of swimming and drinking. There was the feel of the thick sand making me run in slow motion but my heart in fast. There was the sky, so present to me in a way it’s rarely is elsewhere, it making such a big impression, literally.

Oh how necessary, it seems, to connect such pleasurable activities to the Source!
____

Not too much time before Labor Day. The wistful songs are already playing on the radio, like Kenny Chesney’s “The Boys of Fall”. Please, no wistful songs before Labor Day, even if the weather this morning screamed “wistful”. All in good time.
____

I head from one grand reading room to another, from the 11th floor of Thompson to 2nd floor’s to the outside patio seating. Just now I’m looking at shiny-gilt bindings with incomprehensible Chinese characters adorning the spines. It feels like an art museum in here, made more so by the winged Nike, armless and headless as if the Romans had intended that when it was actually just that those appendages fell off over time, and yet we expect, in our hazy art nostalgia, to see headless and armless statues. They say “Greek” or “Roman” more than actual Greek or Roman statues as they existed at the time.

Turf This!

I don't get how Nancy Pelosi, who famously called the tea party movement "astroturf" rather than acknowledging it as a real grass-roots movement, now wants to "investigate" the people opposed to the mosque two blocks from Ground Zero. In both cases she appears to believe that anyone who disagrees with her must be funded by a shady right-wing organization. She must not have gotten/believed that polls that show close to 70% of Americans think the mosque shouldn't be built there. Her reaction smells of Jonah Goldberg's book "Liberal Fascism".

So It's Really Not the Heat After All...

It is the humidity. And the lack thereof yesterday was a fine accompaniment for a bike ride.

  Sign proclaims Cedarville, Oh birthplace of Labor Day

Inside a rusty caboose at "Caboose Graveyard"

Yesterday there was wall-to-wall sun despite ten days of errant forecasts, and weather wasn't the only bad 'cast. Mark, our fellow rider, had forecasted a flat bike course and my mother's super-duper slope detector went off like the bells and whistles of a Vegas jackpot. There was an slight upgrade for the first few miles and while we consoled ourselves that this meant we'd be going downhill at the end, with bike rides, like life, the downhills are less appreciated than the uphills bemoaned.

Weather forecasts are normally about as accurate as Chinese fortune cookies, yet we fall for them every time. In this weathermen and my friendly neighbor are alike since with both you think THIS time it will be different. This time she'll have a real emergency or this time it'll rain. With my neighbor the latest 5-call fire alarm WAS an emergency of the nasal sort (she being nosy). She wanted to know what happened to my car. I was happy to oblige her with the news that it was at the shop being worked on.

We started at Xenia, a town whose water tower states that it's "the bicycle hub of the world," only I got that wrong, noting on the trip back that it actually said - more modestly - "bicycle hub of the Midwest". No false braggadocio there, a very Midwestern trait.

We shared the path with more butterflies than one would've thought lived in all the Midwest, and some of the little yellow ones were named "Sulpher", which seemed a bit fire and brimstone-ish for such a fine flier. Our midway point was the homespun metropolis of Cedarville, a clean little town with friendly librarians who must be accustomed to bikers using their facilities. On the very outskirts of the business district we found a Mom & Pop dairy shop called "Mom and Pop Dairy". We had the delicious sundaes in a tiny place festooned with bumper stickers like "Read the Bible" on the walls. There's something special and cozy about small towns.

We continued the ride despite the croaking protestations of Mom's bike, which was functional but had some sort of complaint that oil didn't address. We soon came to the famous "Caboose Graveyard," a term Mark made up on the fly to describe the collection of rusting train cars found along the route. Before sighting it, it was thought Mark referred to an actual graveyard starring a Mr. Caboose, but the alternative seemed no less interesting. He hopped up and read something inside one of the cabs, nicely printed: "If you are smart enough to be able to read this, then you best get the f--- out of here". Something like that.

Mosque-Gate

Jonah Goldberg puts the blame on Mayor Bloomberg, but I think what's lost in the shuffle is that the mosque instigators themselves share some responsibility. As Dennis Miller suggested on O'Reilly last night, what a publicity coup if the mosque developer offered to move the location! That's assuming a publicity coup is desired, which if this is truly about healing and hospitality and moderate Islam then it is. I wonder if we have a condescending bigotry of low expectations concerning the developers of the mosque?

Another interesting thing is O'Reilly said point-blank that the mosque will never get built because no construction workers in NYC would life a finger to build it. Haven't heard that anywhere else. Be interesting to see if that proved true.

It's also interesting to me to note which media figures change their language in response to valid points made by the opposition. For example, some on the right now say, more accurately, "mosque near Ground Zero" rather than "mosque at Ground Zero".

You can see something similar going on on the left when they refer not to "tea baggers" but "tea partiers".

It's a small mark of integrity - but about all we have left! - when a media person is honest enough to concede that the other side has a point and reflects that in their language.

McMurtry's Books

Oh how I love to read about things bookish, such as Books by Larry McMurtry. His shop in Texas contains some 400,000 volumes, which is my library multiplied by a couple hundred. I can't imagine having two hundred books for every book I have now...

Read rapturously of McMurtry's stray thoughts and wished he was a believer. He may be my latest favorite author, at least based on how quickly I snapped up his Walker Benjamin at the Dairy Queen quasi-autobiography after finishing Books. Just $5.00. A steal, and acquired after my other steal, a $4.75 copy of his literary memoirs. Between his fiction (the expansive "Lonesome Dove") and his memoir-ish non-fiction, I'm pretty well stocked. I can't even get too upset about what looks like an obvious way to pad a book: pen 80 chapters, some only a page long and the longest about four. Sometimes he broke for a new chapter where others might not start a new paragraph. I guess he's got a lot of sway with his editor/publisher.

He writes vivid little portraits with few words. Of the American aristocrat/diplomat David Bruce he writes that Bruce shouldn't have had his WWII diaries published because it painted his estrangement from the war and humans. It made me want to look up the diaries just to see if what he saw came through to me too.

McMurtry's love of books comes through in spades, as does his love of re-reading. The only thing he could read during his year and a half depression was the twelve-volume set of the diaries of James Lees-Milne. There's something satisfying obscure in that. I sense McMurtry may be the middle-brow equivalent to Shelby Foote, who read all of Proust nine times. I love the idea that someone getting on in years would not suffer from the sickness of wanting to read everything but content to re-read particular personal treasures. There is something romantic, I think, in re-reading something so many times.

I also bought, on his recommendation, what is sometimes touted as the greatest travel book of all-time, "Arabian Sands". I was hypmotized by the early lines in it, similar in tone to Karen Blixon's "Out of Africa" opening. I was transfixed by the author's (masochistic?) love of the desert, despite the surreal hardships he encountered. I'm fascinated by those who say 'Yes' to the Cross, even crosses of their own making.

I googled for info about his grand bookstore down there in Middle-Of-Nowhere, Texas and dreamed of visiting someday. He still lives in his hometown of ranchers and rural folk even though the author of a column on him said he doesn't really fit in. But then given the eccentricities of most authors that's hardly surprising.

Food Has Been Very, Very Good to Me

So it was Assumption Sunday, a double-day of obligation, and I sang the familiar Marian hymns ("constant was the love she gave Him / though He went forth from her side") and heard a sermon given by an aged priest serving the Franciscan missions in faraway Zambia. He said that he'd bet anyone $10 that every prayer they'd ever said has been answered. The bet will be paid off in Heaven, when he says to us, "see, I told you so!"

Heard on EWTN radio where another priest, author of a cookbook of sorts, said that "food is love," or at least is associated with love. We give food to those we love, we eat with those we love and it's no coincidence that Jesus comes to us in the form of food. Food is good, and God thus appropriates this imagery.

So how to explain those poor souls without food? I checked out St. Augustine's commentary on Matt 6:31:

Aug., Serm. in Mont., ii, 17: But when we read that the Apostle suffered hunger and thirst, let us not think that God's promises failed him; for these things are rather aids. That Physician to whom we have entirely entrusted ourselves, knows when He will give and when He will withhold, as He judges most for our advantage. So that should these things ever be lacking to us, (as God to exercise us often permits,) it will not weaken our fixed purpose, but rather confirm it when wavering.

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

It was the noonday hour, under a man-eating Charleston sun, the air so full of humidity it made me wish for a set of gills beneath my earlobes. - from a Pat Conroy novel

Once upon a time in Texas, men and women did things. Blood feuds were enacted, brooding Gothic novels were written, railroads were built, ranches were fenced off. The men fought, drank, swung hammers, sang. The women bore children, sewed quilts, slaved over hot stoves, and glowed (not sweated). And they did it all without air conditioning. Man, those guys were tough. - Mrs. Darwin of "Darwin Catholic"

Miss Irwin engaged another kind of mystery, The Mystery, which is not a puzzle, for the answer is provided to all those who have faith in divine providence. - Fr. George Rutler

Christ, with his infinite knowledge of the human heart, knew that we tend to be blocked, and then act badly, out of shame and guilt. Kafka's The Trial rings so true because on some level we sense that we are always being judged for an unknown offense that we're not sure we committed. The Misfit, in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" voices this same dilemma in a different way: our existential loneliness is so excruciatingly painful that we can't help feeling we're being punished to an extent that goes far beyond our "crimes"--no matter how bad they were. So even after our track record starts to improve, we tend to think the painful things that happen in life are somehow our fault. Over and over again, because it seems to make sense, we upload the old image. I think the function of prayer is to very slowly change that. After a long, and seemingly unrewarded, and more or less unswerving, doggedly persistent effort we get a tiny glimpse of the possibility of starting to upload a new image. We start to see that we actually have some control over the image of ourselves and the world that we carry secretly around, and mull over, and harbor, and base our decisions and lives upon. We start to dare to believe that we are loved, and have been all along, in spite of our brokenness. - Heather King of "Shirt of Flame"

Almost everything about Los Angeles seemed wrong but we came anyway. Maybe it was the birds-of-paradise and Mexican sage and bougainvillea, maybe it was that we both knew there weren’t that many more years in which we might have the energy and impetus to make a major move, maybe in the end it was the light: so seductive, so beckoning, so full of hope. When we first moved, to a rented house in the Culver City neighborhood of Palms, I got a load of the cars shining in the driveways, the shady green lawns, and the first night propped my bike against an angel-pink oleander in the side yard and went to bed. The bike was gone in the morning, of course, a perfect introduction to the trompe l’oeil contradictions with which every Los Angeleno resides, and that even now keep me wondering from second to second whether I am living in heaven or hell. This sense that appearances are deceiving, that a level of reality exists beyond anything my senses could observe, turned out to be a recurring theme. The woman with jungle-red nails and stiletto heels turned out to sing in the church choir, the teenager on the bus bench with a serpent tattooed on her neck was bringing soup to her grandmother, the black guy who looked like a pimp was a hospice nurse, the Vietnamese guy who looked like a hospice nurse was a crack dealer. - - Heather King of "A Shirt of Flame"

I need a new image for contemplation, a new soul transporting, sensory enlivening image that helps me love this life and this mess and all these unlovely people with whom I share this bit of earth a little more. The image would have to be darker than the halogen lights at Wal-mart, more painful than brushing up against my fellow consumers, more odiferous than my van. It might have to have some blood in it, death even, to remind me that I’m not actually hurting. And for location, someplace I’d never want to go, a place so hideous it could only be called The Skull. - Betty Duffy

I chose the Cross. I'd choose it again. And I'm trying to make amends with the fact that by some odd series of historical events (the industrial revolution, the commercialization of farming, capitalism, and my having five children) that means Wal-mart is going to have ME by the balls. - Betty Duffy

She [Mother Theresa] would kiss the hands of the priest who had given her Communion in thanks for having brought Jesus, but she had no illusions: More than once did I hear her say how people wherever she went felt betrayed by priests. Nonetheless she asked them to remember her as the drop of water mingled with the wine in the preparation of the chalice. - Fr. George Rutler