The Pecan Park Eagle

“You can learn a lot by observing.”

This morning, our Irish pastor priest brought together two of my favorite themes in human behavior: (1) the universal base discordant in all human conflict, the fear of the other, and (2) our personal need to be watchful of ourselves for the sake of assessing whether we are either or both contributors and/or agitators to the goal of world peace among all of us seemingly very different people.

Father brought out the example of being in the grocery  store self-check out lane (must have been Kroger) and getting behind a disheveled homeless man who was having trouble running a crumbled up dollar bill through the payment machine for some small item. The priest said he was aware of clerks and the more normally dressed neighborhood people sort of peeling back from the man, not wanting to get involved with someone who also smelled as though he had not bathed in a while.

The priest decided to move in and help. It meant exchanging the old dollar for one that would clear the payment machine. “I was mindful of the fact that I could always get rid of the crumpled up dollar bill and wash my hands when I got home.” the priest confessed.

“Then it occurred to me,” the priest added. “I was acting against the inclination to also simply ignore this different appearing person and trying to do something to help him as though he were my own brother.”

The priest’s implied message from there was that we can learn a lot about what’s in our hearts by observing how we respond to what’s going on around us, especially when it pulls us out of our personal comfort zones of everything that’s familiar and seemingly safe..

Let’s see, it seems to me that I recall a famous American pragmatist in baseball suggesting something along those same lines. Give me a few minutes. I’m sure his name will come to me.

Tags: Yogi Berra Wisdom

This entry was posted on September 9, 2012 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.