If You Don’t Practice What You Preach,

There Is No Genius In That!

October 20 – The pastoral text of Fr Reuter is this: To be an apostle, a laborer in God’s vineyard, you don’t have to preach. You can bring others to God by what you are.

Father, I should know about preaching, even if I’m not a preacher. I mean the other side of preaching, that is, being preached to. Do you realize, Father, that nagging is preaching? So, I take it that your thought for the day is also for naggers, and I thank you!

In my own way, I preach, but in an indirect way. I have learned to write about the negative in a positive manner, so that you don’t immediately realize that I’m writing about you when I’m writing about me. Even when writing about science, such as ‘The Green Elephant Of India’ (thefranciscanessay.wordpress.com), I’m writing about virtues even if you don’t read the word ‘virtue’ in my essay. Do I write from a position of virtue? No, but I write about it anyway!

The other day, I biked through the busiest street in town and what did I find? You can see in the photograph: many cars and particularly a line of cars parked in a no-parking street. ‘No Parking in Rizal Ave!’ screamed the big sign at one end of the street. (Actually, I changed the name of the street; I cropped out the plate number of the red car to protect the innocent-until-proven-guilty guilty party. In fact, I shot each of the plate numbers of those cars in that writ-defying row of vehicles.)

I also ‘preach’ about how to be creative, positive, in the midst of the great negative that is the Manila Imperialism of intellectuals and other do-gooders. Even if you’re the most-read columnist (or blogger) in the Philippines but you can’t think positive, you are merely the most read negative columnist (or blogger) in the Philippines; even if you’re a genius but you keep preaching (and practicing) negative, there is no genius in that!