I hate to write. I know people who love it and that is great but…I’m not one of them. I am jealous though and I suppose that’s a sin, but it’s pretty far down on the list and it’s one I’ve never heard in a confession before, and believe me, I’ve heard some pretty boring confessions over the years. Nothing like you would imagine. I suspect that people with really interesting, salacious confessions don’t really bother. Maybe it doesn’t bug them enough to break the threshold of silence and actually tell someone what they have done or maybe they are really good at suppression, or maybe they aren’t religious, or just don’t care…that’s for someone else who is smarter than me and has waaaaaay too much time on their hands to figure out. As for me, the confessions I’ve heard were almost always about venial rather than mortal sins and can put you to sleep in a heartbeat. Now my sins on the other hand are a different story.

My sins are infinitely interesting and varied. They almost always involve the stupidity of youth,or hurting someone else (particularly someone I cared about) or the first part of the summary of the law (you remember that..”Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength”…yea, that one). Then there are my sins of omission “things I ought to have done” but have left undone as we used to say in the liturgy. That list goes on and on and on and on (you get the idea).

Which brings me back to the title of this blog. It’s really not about God and me, it’s about me…and kinda about God. Which is why I think that may help overcome my reluctance to write.

For me, writing has always been work. I had to write a lot in college and seminary. Writing was all about fulfilling an assignment, proving that I could put together a semi-intelligent thought and transfer it to paper without embarrassing my grade school teachers and always about something that any normal person would find imminently boring. Later, I wrote professionally as a priest and pastor…mainly newsletter articles, letters and that kind of thing. For awhile I wrote for a newspaper and as a Fire Department Public Information Officer, I tried to make sense out of the Associate Press Stylebook. So, writing was not for fun and always stressful.

I think this may be different for a bunch of reasons. For one, I can write as much or as little as I want. I don’t have to fill up the front page of the newsletter or a set number of column inches. For another, there is no deadline, if I feel like writing, I will and if I don’t..I won’t. But most of all I get to write about ME (and occasionally, probably, about God). It’s common knowledge that you should write about what you know and I know ME better than anyone, though I guess not as well as God.

That doesn’t mean that this blog will be without merit or intrinsic worth. My experience is that God can and does speak to us through a bunch of things; prayer, sacred writing, other people, and (you guessed it)….experience.

If we are open to it, life and living may be a portal to wisdom; IF we are willing to do the work and take the time to reflect on it with even a modicum of integrity. So maybe, dear reader, if we are both lucky, my reflections can open some kind of door to understanding for us both. Well….maybe. Miracles can happen you know. We’ll see…..