Brother Caedfile's Porridge

Blog Number 1: Why am I writing this? Not just to be “relevant.” If I wanted to be relevant, I would try learning how to ‘tweet’ …or is it ‘twitter’? No, I am making this effort because Jim suggested it. After telling me he thought it was a good idea for me to move my weekly Fragments from Email to our website, he asked innocently: “Will you also include a blog?” “I dunno,” I responded “…a blog?” Then, “A blog, that sounds like a good idea. Maybe I will.”

And so you see, at that moment, as I thought about it later, I felt “called” to write and post this blog. I use the word “called” deliberately, as I have a great interest in what we ─ that is what you and I ─ are “called” to do. Traditionally referred to as “a vocation,” we have big callings ─like getting married or becoming a monk ─ and small callings, like putting out the garbage or moving to a new apartment. Maybe we can undertaking to write a blog, as a medium-size calling. In our next few attempts, we hope to explore different aspects of one’s callings. An aspect we address here today, is ‘desire.’ I have, for example, an abiding desire to express myself in writing. It started when I was a boy. Raised largely by my mother and her sister, my aunt, their big brother, E. F. McDermott, was the male role model in our family.

“Uncle Bud,” as he was known, was a big man …with a mustache and a deep, bass voice. And my mom and aunt used the threat of Uncle Bud’s big shoe to get me and my brothers to eat our carrots. The most important thing about my uncle for me was that he was a journalist, the publisher in fact, of the Idaho Falls Post-Register. Thence was born in me a desire to write, and to be “a newspaper man.” In high school, I wrote for Galesburg’s Daily Register-Mail, covering the Knox County baseball league. I wrote for my school paper in high school and college, and never stopped writing after I left college. At the time I made my decision to pursue a calling as a monk, I was an apprentice editor at the above mentioned Register-Mail.

Desire is important in any calling. It surely helps mothers get up in the middle of the night to change a diaper or rock a baby. And dad, to make his hour’s drive to work through bumper-to-bumper traffic. Towards the end of his life, my favorite saint ─ the Venerable Bede ─ said that all his life it was his constant joy to study, teach or write about the word of God. Bede never traveled very far, in fact, from his Northumbrian English monastery of St. Peter and Paul on the Tyne River. Towards the end of his life, Jesus said to his closest disciples, “With desire I have desired to eat this Pasch with you.” “If you like what you do,” someone has said, “you have a vocation. If you don’t, you have a job.”

With desire then, we begin this blog. We pray God to bring forth fruit from our efforts. But if he doesn’t, please, please …don’t blame my friend, Jim.