What we teach, and what we don't teach

Recently, at Mass, I was a lot of questions; the words, the silence, the people, the gestures, you, were not a lot of answers.

"When I lived with the roots / I liked them more than the flowers / and when I talked with a stone, / it rang like a bell," Neruda once wrote.

And Mary Oliver, the way she said: "I don't know exactly what a prayer is. / I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down / into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, / how to be idle and blessed."

I have been thinking we teach our children too much that a job will fulfill them, teach them too much to seek this perfect ideal of what they will "be" when they grow up, teach them too much that they have failed if they are dissatisfied or their job seems like work instead of play. Capitalism needs workers to make money and spend money, to continue the system and to protect our power, and we worship the god of job identity.

We don't teach our kids they can love people and know God in any job. We create a generation of disengaged or dissatisfied people. We teach them that in their job, therein is their end and identity, when we know and have forgotten that it lies in God.

Teach me what a prayer is a little less, so that I might pray more. Surely my sitting here wearing this flannel shirt is a prayer. Danny gave the homeless man the second loaf of buy-one-get-one-free bread, the loaf without the mold. Missy sat there with me, all the time, whenever, if I was crying or laughing or just somewhere in-between. Last night I wrote a 1,900-word paper, a penance, an offering, and when it rains, the ground opens up and receives. On the bus the man smelled like urine, and there was his prayer, but where was mine? I did not sit next to him.

There is a young couple who lives above me. I have never seen them, but I hear them. They are weird together, like me and my sister, like me and my deepest friend, like me and my family, and as I hear their goofy noises and funny words and silly singing, it makes me happy. There are other people who love in this world.

This is what you said as the people sang, at the end of Mass, as I walked up to receive communion, and this, I know, is all that matters: "I have loved you with an everlasting love. I have called you, and you are mine."

You know and you love me, you always have. Thank you.