Have you found the Lord…was a popular question when I was a younger man. Some would ask about the premise of the question while others would answer that they did not know he had been lost. We have heard so much religious talk that it often sounds like a ringing in the ears akin to tinnitus. It is possible to be a member of a church where the minister brags about the choice cut of steak that he had for dinner last night…while you are eating Cremora out of the jar. My blog yesterday regarding church hit a cord with some of my friends and I realized that dissatisfaction with what church has become as compared with what its ideals are…is vast.

God’s children…human beings…suffer in silence and in the open for all to see. Indeed the problem of food insecurity and hunger and sleeping rough…homelessness…is worse than it has ever been. The Plague of Mass Shootings has grown to the extent that the argument could be made that perhaps we are already in Dantes’s Inferno…and have only to awaken from our slumber to realize our dire predicament.

Sanctuary is. beautiful concept. ‘In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Quasimodo saves Esmeralda from execution, rushes her to the cathedral, and cries, ‘Sanctuary!’ Many cries today for similar relief.

Bombs or butter we say…we do not have money for both. We do not want our homeless on our streets as they are unsightly and have an odor and they upset the tourists and residents of our shining city on a hill. We do not have shelter for them to go…unless it is very cold. Our society made them addicts and the price of living simply outpaced the poor a long long time ago. We decided that we could not afford to care for the disabled and the mentally ill and the widow and the orphan. ‘Have they no refuge or resource?’ cried Scrooge. Are there no prisons?’ said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. ‘Are there no workhouses?’ A Christmas Carol