http://solent-art.co.uk/coastal/ I stopped off while uptown at my old parish, Mater Dolorosa, to see if I could see my old pastor, whom I knew simply as John. He was the only priest I have ever known to inspire me to come to mass every Sunday; he was one of the few priests that I have ever felt really respected and loved his parishioners. I rang at the parish office and asked for him, but he had retired; the secretary made it very clear I would not be seeing him around there anymore. She wasn’t terribly friendly about it; perhaps she was busy.
buy modafinil chemist warehouse He always used to say, “The Lord is with you,” instead of “The Lord be with you.” When I first heard this, I thought it was another of these nonsense feel-goody things Vatican-II-type priests might say; but like most forms of nonconformity, it made me think. I looked at that Greek and Latin forms, which lack verbs, and so the translation using the indicative, rather than the optative, is not obviously wrong. And the more I thought of it, the more I thought his was the better translation. God is with you, realized or not, wished or not. Indeed that might be the key realization. Wishing it might be counterproductive, in that it suggests that God is not there, or that God’s presence was the kind of thing we could attain by wishing. All you can do is realize. His translation is at least suggested by what Samuel says to David: “Omne quod est in corde tuo vade fac quia Dominus tecum est.” “All that is in your heart go, do. For the Lord is with you.”
But like good people everywhere, he had been shuffled along by the world. If I were running the world, I’d promote people like him until all the important decisions were made by such men. But I suppose most priests find themselves pretty busy, so I presume the church has not banished him to idleness. He was a good man. Though I suppose it must have been difficult to work with him: he was like the cool teacher in a school: his masses were always packed, and no one came to the masses held by other priests. He gave short – always under three minutes – incisive sermons, and I always felt I learned something when he spoke. It was a pleasure to come back week after week, and after years I presume he had long forgotten me, but I had not forgotten him.
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