New Year means nothing to me.
Just a new calendar.
Nothing new here. So. We're all caught up then?
I spend too much time on FB and monitoring Twitter. Although most of my FB time is spent watching home improvement videos, along with arts and crafts videos. Otherwise I come across Catholic posts which generate controversy over fake news and conspiracy theories, which annoy me and sometimes I comment or post on it here, only to have my POV ignored. Sometimes I form an opinion without knowing the facts and when I do, I sometimes moderate my tone. I should really just shut up.
It's kind of fascinating having been on social media for so many years. I've learned a lot, especially about others, no doubt others have learned a lot about me as well. Knowing aspects of one's private life and beliefs contradicts what many people thought they knew about you - that works both ways of course.
Now that I'm old a lot of that no longer matters. At least I hope it doesn't. Friending and unfriending on social media is absolutely meaningless. People I have never met or knew once upon a time in the workplace are not friends in the sort of flesh and blood sense - therefore when they unfriend me, it's fine. Unfriending means they never knew me in the first place - they believed me to be someone they wanted me to be. Hence they were never friends in the first place.
I was looking for something I once wrote on friendship. Especially as it applied to same sex friendship. It is an issue that has been gravely exaggerated due to the fact that same sex couple may now legally marry, although the Church cannot recognize SS marriage. It's also been a concern to some Catholics if two men or two women share a house - are they lovers? I've wasted much time on that subject, but again, those who did not know me, never understood what I was saying. To be sure, it never should have been an issue and now, in 2022 it no longer is.
That said, I came across an extraordinary statement made by a former Priory of a monastic community who had been accused of certain improprieties with a member of his community. I don't want to get into details of the scandal - both men have distanced themselves from me because I have shared my reflections on their situation and considered both actors were sufficiently aware of the objective boundary violations within the relationship. The former prior unfriended me simply because I questioned the authenticity of his vocation within a vocation, for various reasons. That's another story.
I do have to conclude there probably is something to the whistleblower's accusations and the prior's behavior. A little thing the prior wrote, which I copied and pasted for a post I did, thinking it just might help people understand a chaste, same-sex friendship between laymen, could be very telling. The link to the author's 2012 blog post has since been deleted. The quote:
"... one must have friendships in life. [ . . .] Let yourself love. There is no danger so long as the spirit of prayer exists in you. And young priests have hours of loneliness that are very hard. They need affection and tenderness. If you don't give it to them, they will go looking for it just anywhere.
Also, at certain hours we need someone to show us affection: a mother, a sister, a brother. Otherwise, if the heart is not anchored, it goes anywhere at all, and is lost." - One must have friendships in life.
I believe this is significant, and ought to be reassuring to the whistleblower that something inordinate was involved in their rather small, albeit intimate community.
A long post about nothing.
