Where two or three are gathered in my name...

As a lapsed Roman Catholic, lapsed for reasons I will not get into here on Good Friday, the election of Francisco as pontiff has energized me spiritually. With all the nihlism in pop culture, the vacuous leaders who provide no leadership that doesn't lead to some sort of financial or electoral reward, Jorge Mario Bergoglio who patterns himself after St. Francis of Assisi, a saint who eschewed material things as a measure of success and took special care of people and animals on the street, is a breath of fresh air. I have always appreciated High Mass in Latin as a part of living history. I imagine that if time travel were possible, if you visited a Cathedral after Constantine declared Christianity State Religion, you would be able to follow along. That is comforting in a work that changes dramatically each hour at literally the speed of light, as information circled the globe and our brains. But lately, perhaps before the Vatican II watershed or after John Paul, mass, to me, became less of a celebration and more of a wrote exercise that took place while I would have rather been sleeping, relaxing or maybe even knocking back a beer. The same people appear each Sunday, drone on through the same liturgy and fight like hell to get out of the parking lot at the end of the prescribed hour - not a minute more or the building fund will fail after the Bishop takes his cut. Money, politics and Big Religion are very ugly things. We need them, but they tarnish quickly. Perhaps the Humility of Francisco will be short lived. Sometimes the best intentions burn out too quickly because they fall on rocky ground or get smothered by weeds. You don't need to wash feet. There are so many ways I cannot go into all of them in a thousand pages so I am going to concentrate on two things we can all do - smile more and think before you speak ill of anything unnecessarily. Just remember, as I pledge to do myself, where there area two or three of you gathered in my name, I am there....