feel a facebook break coming on again

I held off for a long while because my brother's wife was expecting their only son, and as any good 21st-century parent would, the new dad shared video and pics of the new arrival. I was not about to miss that!

However, Facebook's been a monkey on my back. I could take it or leave it before the games.

I had an insight this morning: if we are spiritual beings having a human experience, and if we have even a faint light within us, it's a divine light, and fellow spiritual beings should be able to recognize that light. I've spent eight months gradually getting that light to shine. Maybe three of my relatives can see it. That's not good, when twenty of them are on Facebook. I'm thinking maybe Facebook isn't where the divine light of love can find full expression. I know I've been very careful about sharing all-ages-appropriate, nonsexist, apolitical, nonreligious content, and wishing people happy birthdays, congratulations, happy holidays but I still lose people or they are not satisfied with my personal expression toward others: they want me to express things the way they would.

I imagined this morning going to confession and instead of claiming my sins, talking about how my campaign to win back my relations has largely failed, and asking why fellow Catholics who are also kin, and go on about how family is so important cannot or do not recognize or appreciate my efforts to awaken my long-comatose soul and get it moving through acts of love.

And when I look at the rising crime statistics, I'm not seeing how our communities are fully expressing love and compassion. I need to be more invested in the world, to be more courageous. This week I have had "easy wins" expressing the divine light and wisdom within, and a lot of that is just listening too, and accepting the other person, but they've all been at my door, or at a coffeehouse.

My "flip to any page" New Testament readings this week have gravitated to 1 Thessalonians 5:17-31, and the last chapter of Luke, when the risen Christ followed some men on Easter on the road to Emmaus. Jesus chides them for being foolish and slow of heart, and gives them a rundown of Scripture and prophesy concerning the Messiah. When he was invited to dinner with these men, he took bread, gave thanks, and their eyes "were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. They asked each other, 'Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures for us'?" I also get Luke 24:50-53 on occasion, which inspires me to listen to Talk Talk's "Ascension Day."

My brain needs to be retrained to find the miraculous outside myself in daily living. I can feel the miracles within, physically and spiritually. I need to rise above scoffing at bus riders who don't use effective noise-cancelling earbuds on their mp3 players. They're losing their hearing. I know as a fogey I'm more sensitive to noises, and the young like the sounds loud and at high frequencies, but I don't want to be sixty or seventy and still end up going into places where the volume is cranked up because the forty- and fifty-year-olds are hard of hearing.