A couple people asked me to repost this on Olyblog, so here it is.  Originally posted on the Canaanite's Call as "Holy Eucharist, Catholic Worker Style".

People often come by the Bread & Roses house with food donations.  As they drop their beautiful gifts into my hands, they frequently thank me for my “hard work feeding all the hungry people.”

Aside from the fact that the thanking ought to go the other direction (I live on the same charity as our guests), I regularly find myself inviting the donors to stay and eat.  The invitation is awkward, with an exchange of funny looks and the unspoken question, “But why am I invited if I don’t need food?”

No one goes hungry in Olympia.  If someone does, they probably need some kind of help other than food (like someone to guide them to the local soup kitchen), because there is an extraordinary amount of food here.  This is one of the reasons why Bread & Roses no longer operates a soup kitchen.

Yet we still need gifts of food at our home, but not to feed our bellies.  We need food because we do something special here at B&R: we eat together.  Worker and guest, donor and recipient join together at the table in a spirit of fellowship, violating the social and economic “forces” that separate the rich from the poor.

It has often been noted that the poor in America live better than the middle class in developing countries.  Yet Mahatma Gandhi and Blessed Theresa of Calcutta, looking westward, both found that we have our own unique kind of poverty, a kind of poverty that may even be more horrible than that found in India.  The name of our poverty is “loneliness”.

We have great discussions here on OlyBlog and sometimes the most amazing treasures reside in comment threads. I don't always catch sight of them. When I do, I am momentarily stunned. And I'm not sayin' here that I necessarily agree with what is said in the comment, the stance taken. What might get me is the generous spirit, the word coined, the turn of phrase, the window flung open into another word.

So read enpen's comment hey Mike in the Docents thread. What I'm talkin' about, right there.

I've been a natural missionary of sorts for many causes through out my life. Ultimately I had to learn to tend my own garden, to walk my talk, and leave the rest to the universe. Because every time I was certain that XYZ had to be done, I was actually beating myself up and then others for not holding to my impossible standards of perfection, and I wasn't that fun to be around. Fortunately, I tend to be a quiet soul, so very few folks suffered my missionary zeal.

Narrowed blinkered vision causes a poisonous suspicious environment. Because if we are always looking for something to be wrong, something not meeting our specific standards, we will always find it. There is always something wrong. The trick is, there is always also eventually something somewhere that is damn funny.

Humor. Where would we be without it?

Yet another example of a private citizen giving money on his own terms, versus a middle man stealing it.

AP: "Wisconsin employer hands out hefty bonuses":

81-year-old Robert Kern recently retired from the company he founded, Generac Power Systems. He sold his share of the ownership and stepped down as chairman to focus on philanthropy.

The gifts from Kern and his wife vary according to length of employment. Some topped $40,000.

As one person who received $10,000 put it, "the gifts will change a lot of people's lives."

And perhaps speaking to the nature of Kern, "The total amount given to workers isn’t known because the Kerns aren’t talking about it." There's no need to beat your chest about donating time or money to another individual(s). If you need glory and atta-boys in this life, you're not going to get it in the next.

I find this rather disturbing:

http://www.theolympian.com/101/story/57157.html

I took this picture in Priest Point Park, June 2005.

December is the darkest month of the year. June, as a month, has the most light.

I have been suffering with SAD (seasonal affective disorder) recently. Looking at this photo seems to help. It reminds me of the beauty of light, of the green forest, of the trees and the way they filter the light...

Brighter days are on the way.