I lay my life bare. I say this is who I am. This is what I believe. This is my face, my full name, the place where I live. These are my friends, my struggles, my wounds, my daily life, my inconsistencies, my faults, my omissions, my faith. My ego wants me to be more or other than I am. And it also desperately wants to be validated. To be a member of a lay movement, no matter its I'm sure enormous challenges, is to have a whole community supporting, praising, encouraging you.

My faith is public. My life in Christ is hidden, but my faith, my abhorrence of war, abortion, capital punishment, the prison industry, pornography; my views on the sanctity of marriage, my deep love for the Church are all a matter of public record. I’ve written books about it. I blog about it. I speak about it. I take a constant public stand and the stand is Christ.

The other day I had a talk with a good, kind, sensible friend who approvingly referenced an op-ed in Sunday's NYT to the effect: Why can't you Catholics focus on what you do best--serve the poor--and just shut up about sex, about which you know nothing, about which you insist on clinging to your ridiculously medieval notions that any self-respecting modern person would be mortified to voice? Having been raised in the Church and long since fallen away, my friend can't possibly see, for example, why anyone of nominal intelligence, and the Church, would not counsel every woman in the world to get birth control. If women where in charge of the Church, she is sure THEY would change the law...

The L.A. Marathon, which goes straight through my neighborhood and makes driving impossible, took place yesterday. I'd been out of town, saw the signs Saturday and, as usual, thought bitterly, Thanks for trapping me in my home all day. Then I walked to 8:00 Mass down Sunset. Boulevard and within minutes was weeping at the sheer beautiful humanity of it all: a guy in a kilt playing bagpipes, punksters, infants, old people such as myself....

I sometimes worry that I'm not doing something truly important with my life. Caught up in day-to-day trivialities, it doesn't seem that I accomplish that much...To be loving is to be fully alive. To be fully alive is to use all the splendid faculties of my personality in every area of my life.

A resort for rich retired folks who live in air-conditioned isolation, a downtown featuring a giant statue of Marilyn Monroe, blocks of dead-quiet houses, casinos: Palm Springs is not, at first glance my kind of town.

Several years ago at a writer's residency I met Paul, a banjo-playing composer who at the time was contemplating writing an opera about a 30-year-old guy from Kansas who lived with his parents and claimed to be the Pope.

A couple of Saturdays ago I was at morning Mass when I became fixated upon, perhaps more accurately obsessed with, the guy a few pews up. He was sitting with what looked to be his wife and five-or-so-year-old daughter and emblazoned across the back of his hoodie was the slogan: SEPARATE YOURSELF FROM THE WEAK.

“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” [Acts 9:4] Authentic conversion always comes from realizing that we have been “persecuting” Christ. In the fall of 1986, I spent thirty days at an addiction treatment center in rural Minnesota. Hiking trails meandered through the woods. The trees were turning color. One morning I crept out for a walk just past dawn. Not another soul stirred. I came upon a pond and, through the mist, saw a blue heron, standing stock still, noble head erect. I saw the heron and the heron saw me. It was a moment from the Song of Songs, a moment of liminal space and time, an instant of such heart-stopping beauty that in my memory it has attained the level of myth.

The other day, driving around L.A. on a series of pesky errands, I started thinking about Thomas Merton's famous "moment" on a street corner in Louisville where, suffused with love, he realized "There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun." I thought, a bit churlishly to be sure, Yeah, I'd think people were shining like the sun as well, if I didn't have to wade through them every day. I see the monks "shining like the sun" when I visit a monastery, too--mostly because I don't have to live with them...

A reader recently e-mailed expressing interest in learning about confession so as to bring it into her (non-Catholic) circles. She had only one question: did the sexism in the Church ever bother me? I replied, “What sexism?” She thought I was kidding, but I was totally serious. I'm with Flannery O'Connor (I've been fixated on two subjects lately, I know, Flannery O and death camps) who said, "On the subject of this feminist business, I just never...think of qualities which are specifically feminine or masculine. I suppose I [divide] people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome without regard to sex."

Last post I mentioned a reader who expressed interest in bringing the gift of confession into her own (non-Catholic) circles. In its way, this is lovely. But Confession the way I understand it--and there's a world of difference between that small “c” and a capital “C”--is a Sacrament, the only possible two authentic participants being a Catholic priest and a penitent. Now I find it very interesting that left to our own devices we do have a moral compass, a conscience, for it very much goes toward the idea that deep inside every man, woman and child is the fundamental idea of God.

Recently I read a magazine piece about an evangelical mega-pastor who was involved in a (to me) much-ado-about-nothing theological controversy, wore out his welcome in the mid-West, washed up on the shores of Southern California, and is trying to raise the funds to found his own church here. The piece described a men's retreat he hosted at a tony Orange County beach. The guys surfed (rented wetsuits and boards were available), they ate, they publicly prayed for each other. The emotional finale consisted of the men coming up one by one and the would-be pastor holding each person’s left shoulder with his right hand, making eye contact, placing a piece of bread in their hands, and saying, "The Body of Christ, broken for you."

I don't know about you but I have always loved a nice warm, snug sweater. I still remember the sweater in the photo which was a kind of gray-green, to this day one of my favorite colors. Every couple of years I find a sweater I'm really crazy about and then I wear it practically every day, like a nun would wear a habit or like a person in a mental institution would wear the same pajamas...I have and sometimes wear all kinds of other sweaters but for some reason I get hooked on one, or attached to one, the way a child gets attached to a blanket.

Last Saturday afternoon, in preparation for Advent, I trudged to Confession at a nearby church. Usually the priest is to the old confessionals by the side, but the church is undergoing renovation, the pews have been removed and replaced by plastic chairs, and it took me awhile to realize that Father, in full view of the early birds for 5:00 Mass, the workmen hauling extension cords to hook up the Christmas lights, and the practicing choir, was up front with a purple stole around his shoulders and a prie-dieu beside him.

I really came to blogging because I had so much material and I was sick of sending the pieces out one by one and waiting months to get an answer (often a rejection). So though of course I am always scrambling to earn a livelihood (fyi, the blog brought in maybe two grand in donations the whole year), in a way it started out and has remained a kind of spontaneous (though I spend hours and hours a week at it) eruption of love...I think to love Christ is to be fully human. Not a brand, not a shill for yourself as opposed to Christ, not an entrepreneur whose "product" is the Gospels. You can't promote the Cross... But you can, and in fact perhaps are obliged to, promote your own original thought, expression, work etc.

As with all "big" things in life (getting married, getting a degree, getting a job, getting sober, getting divorced), you kind of think, all evidence to the contrary, When THIS happens, it's all gonna start coming together. Finally, I can rest. Finally, the shelf on which I live overlooking the abyss will be many feet wide, maybe even an acre or two, instead of three inches where I am always trying to find a foothold by day, and tossing and turning at night, and my heart is lurching lest I fall into the precipice. Finally I will have a little bit of money. Finally I will have friends...Then you realize two things. None of those things are going to happen. And two, they've happened, in their way, already.