Lk 8:1-3 A Noble Prize“Jesus journeyed from one town and village to another, preaching and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God. Accompanying him were the Twelve and some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities, and many others who provided for them out of their resources.”
As I get older, I am starting to become more radical in my thoughts and in just about everything around me. When I visit a family and they have the television on, I can only watch it for a few minutes and I am disgusted by what I see. But it’s not just the typical disgusting things that disgust me; it is the simpleminded, hypocritical, nonsensical, propagandistic things that disgust me!
A few nights ago, I was watching the Miami Dolphins play against the New England Patriots on ESPN. At a certain point in the game, the announcer, while making a point, said a cuss word in the middle of his sentence. At first, I wasn’t sure I heard what I thought I heard. I looked around and everyone with me didn’t seem to have noticed. I thought I was losing it. But about an hour later, the announcer, without any preparation, simply apologized on TV for using an improper word. At that moment, I was much happier that I was right than that he apologized!
I was right! I did hear what I thought I heard! By the way, his apology was as interesting as it was fitting. He apologized one hour later…why? Because the lines went off the hook, that’s why! He had been caught. People were upset. Children were watching the game. One hour later, after a consultation with the higher ups, and after having replayed it over and over again, like a questionable touchdown, the company, after further review, couldn’t let the play stand. He needed to apologize.
Everything in our nation is for either personal gain or for company profits! Everything! Even our family members have this corporate fatal attraction. Someone must be pouring pheromones into the family orange juice pitcher. Divorce in the United States is running at around 70%. People in our nation are getting divorced not for safety reasons but for personal gain. And the losers are almost always the wife, the mother of four, which happens to be today’s largest group living in poverty. How sad, after twenty or thirty years of marriage, a man can easily leave his wife to hook up with a woman half his age. Divorce was supposed to be liberating for women, like contraceptives. Instead, it has become decimating to women and children, like contraceptives. Can we finally admit it? Can we finally say that we were all scammed by these false prophets and false “anointed ones” that promised heaven on earth! But the greatest tragedy is that we still allow ourselves to be scammed!
Johann Hari, a disgraced journalist and ferocious critic of the Catholic Church, released an apology yesterday. If you don’t know who he is, he is a English journalist that got caught in the cell phone hacking scandal in England and beyond. His fantastic scoops or his “first to report” articles were the result of criminal activity. He is in jail now. But in his apology he wrote, “Offering words of apology is not enough. If you don’t want to sound like the Pope, who apologizes for everything and for nothing, then your apology should cost you something.” So what did the disgraced and criminal journalist do? He returned his George Orwell Prize. Big deal! Instead of apologizing to his victims for considering himself holier than anything-else-out-there, he gives us a piece of rubbish! Instead of apologizing to the Catholic Church for calling them a broad of criminals, he should have asked a priest to personally lock the bars in his cage. Of course, the priest would have declined, saying, He who is without sin should step forward. I think he should have met with the victims of his crime as the Holy Father did for his priests. That would have been a noble prize, and not some Orwellian prize.
The Lord traveled from town to town. Accompanying him were women and men who lost everything and gained everything. What they lost were their sins. What they gained back was their dignity.
“Blessed are you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth; you have revealed to little ones the mysteries of the Kingdom.”
