Labor Day

September 5, 2010

Next Saturday is 9/11. I will be at St. Joseph's in Haworth New Jersey giving a mission for the eventing mass at 5PM. The next day I will deliver a mission at St. Mary's in Closter at the morning mass. The rupture of the sense of distance from the world's travails, which 9/11 commemorates, comes with its mournful blessings: attending to our American legacy of healing victimized humanity. Sympathy for the victim is an ethos with a christian origin. It is significant that it is so much a part of our secular identity that it is unnoticed. I would like to clothe our American ethos in a skin of social fabric™

Wearing the social fabric™ is a sensual experience. The cloth is soft and flawed in a glorious way. After wearing social fabric™ regularly for over five years I get so used to it that machine made fabrics feel impersonal. It is because I know who made the cloth and the clothing? I want parish communities to be a part of the experience in order to create a more humane "relational" economy. I am hoping I can do a better job of promoting it in parishes, the closest point between the private experience and the universal.