Sunday, January 3rd 2010
Holy day. I have been documented in spiritual readings.
Namely the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Special Report: A Frayed Connection
is an in depth article touching on the lack of local attendee's at our
neighborhood places of worship.
I was interviewed one calm afternoon by David O'Reilly,
whom graciously purchased a few ounces of our spiced assam
to try his hand at the home made chai.
My comment
"People in our generation tend to make our own paths rather than follow someone else's."
seemed to touch a nerve for an "AreaMan" whom replies:
"Yea, as long as that path is approved by thier friends and disapproved by thier parents. I grew up in Fishtown, have family members that attended the Ukie Dome for school and remember when Northern Liberties was a wasteland, and we all made fun of the kids from there when the school bus dropped them off. Now I walk around there and just think of "Life of Brian" with the line "We are all individuals! I'm not!" There is now a lot of diversity in Northern Liberties, it has every type of white person making $60,000 plus a year. They all have time for brunch, but no time for church on Sundays. Finally, as any good Catholic knows, if you oversleep and miss your parish mass, Orthodox church counts.
Unfortunately, as the daughter of an English teacher,
my first reaction is to mention that the prior statement's final sentence is waning in effort.
The frustration felt by the writer on his religious building blocks being slowly eroded by our chemical rain of spiritual forward momentum is evident in how good it must have felt to let everyone know of how in his youth he would make fun of the kids that went to school in Northern Liberties.
I know that was a run-on sentence but it just felt so "right".
What is my point, why go on about this one reaction?
I think it is that things change,
and it is more satisfying to embrace change than to
hold on to old stigmas that tell you what you should do,
and how you should feel if you don't do them.
There are too many amazing things going on in this world
to limit oneself to one belief or way of life.