Contractions:  Something we’ve had here all along.  Was it back in 2001 as far as the Minnesota Twins, the Montreal Expos?  Contraction was back in the news in another way.  Only this time it involved the newspaper. The Star Trib.  Yet no one was offering them $150 million just to pack up and call it a career. 

 It was in the Phillipines that I discovered the weak made me feel stronger.  More worthy.  I counted my blessings better.  Surrounded by greatness, by the celebrated in education, in business, in sports in my life, I felt humble.  But when you fell short, you failed to recognize a lot about yourself.  You felt challenged.  It was a lot like the Yankee series that just ended.  The Twins seemed to have proved this point the past 3 days.  Surrounded by greatness, they failed to remember the fundamental things about themselves and the game. 

Inferiority complexes.  Ego strength.  Girls.  Bad self-image?  Sleeping around.  Moral relativism.  Was it all based upon the human feeling that I was a sinner?

The things you teach.  You set up schools.  You pass on a tradition.  These days, there was a lot of relativism in public eduction, and has been over the past generation.  Read Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. 

The things you teach.  You set up schools.  The feast of Ignatius Loyola was in less than 7 days.  He worked on spiritual exercises to try to teach people to really pray.  Then he found an answer on how by establishing a curricula in schools.  His answer was in school.  There were now something like 28 Jesuit institutions of higher learning.  The trend now was to set up middle schools.  For those who could not reach the university level.  For those who never quite learned how to pray with their lives. 

There was a sense of panic within these days.  About the world.      

Today’s reading at Mass began, “The disciples approached Jesus and said, ‘Why do you speak to the crowd in parables?’” 

Stories.  It was about the stories.  Why did I buy the Star Trib?  To read stories.  To try and understand.  To be aware of the world and my place in it.  Something we’ve had here all along.  It was why people hugged at funerals, clinging to who and what was left.