Love, Reality, and the Rain.

Maybe I’m being over sentimental, but it’s been an odd and engaging evening.  My friend Eli is in from out of town and Emily and I have enjoyed her company very much.  Tonight we were suppose to try and introduce her to the idea of American football but a heavy rainstorm and a whole bunch of lightning put that idea on ice.  Well Eli and a whole bunch of our youth group came over and watched Pursuit of Happyness which turned out to be a pleasant surprise, during the movie one of the youth was close to exhaustion and I sent her home, which in and of itself isn’t that big of a deal except I never realized how much I care and love these kids.  This particular young lady is exceptionally bright and she lives a pretty tough situation for one so young and handles it magnificently most of the time, but recently she has begun to show the strain of her personal struggle.  I guess what surprised me was how much I care about what she is going through, don’t get me wrong I care to one degree or another about the going on’s of all the youth under my care but this is different my being is moved by her, to the point of sorrow that I can’t take away her pain, is this some sick foretaste of parenthood?

To further pull me into the realm of emotional thought I took a group of the youth (it’s a shitty choice of words I know, but somehow calling them kids minimizes how mature they really are) and one of them expressed concern over my being able to make it home ok due to the fact that it was late and I might fall asleep at the wheel.  I really she was just being sweet but it is nice to know that people really care about you.

I think this really struck me because there has been so much B.S. high school drama in my adult world that it seems funny that raw emotional reality would appear in the world I share with high school students.  Anyway these are the moments of grace that I had tonight in the rain.

Chris

I am really enjoying reading about E. F. Schumacher I feel like he’s a kindred soul.

E. F. Schumacher observed
Economist
(1911 - 1977)
E. F. Schumacher was a prophet in the guise of an economist. He spent a lifetime mastering the principles of growth, savings, and the “invisible hand” of the market. Yet ultimately he became one of its most effective critics, alerting the world to the catastrophic consequences of the Western experiment in materialism. He wrote, “In the excitement over the unfolding of his scientific and technical powers, modern man has built a system of production that ravishes nature and a type of society the mutilates man.” And yet he was not content to denounce. He inspired hope that it was not too late to fashion an alternative society modeled on the human scale and responsive to the moral, aesthetic, spiritual, as well as material needs of human beings.

Schumacher was born in Germany in 1911. In the 1930s he went to England as a Rhodes Scholar and was detained there as an enemy alien during World War II. He spent the war working on a farm in the north of England, an experience of common productive labor that played an important role in his formation. He also became a Roman Catholic. After the war he worked as an economic advisor to the British Control Commission in Germany. For twenty years he was the top economist and head of planning at the British Coal Board.

Through these experiences he came to believe that traditional economics, despite its scientific pretensions, was really a kind of religion, and an inferior one at that. It was based on a materialistic view of reality in which growth, efficiency, and production were the ultimate measures of value. In this fashion economists ignored the spiritual dimensions of human beings while promoting a civilization headed for catastrophe……….(more)

Trying to reconcile who I am with who I’m suppose to be.

I have a feeling that this will be the overwhelming theme of my blog.  Trying to be the person I was as a young man and fiery social justice wannbe with the older Catholic (I still can’t believe I converted) that I have become.  Anyway I feel as though the answer lies in between and I hope I find the real Chris in this world gone mad pretty soon or I might bust.

Distrbutionist

This is a great idea that really allows me to accept both my politics and faith as one in the same.