power of money

Once upon a time there was a child, the apple of everybody’s eye in the small village. He spent his childhood flitting from one smile to another. No fear, no hurting, not even a single twinge of sadness filtered into his life. No wonder he wanted to give back what he received, so one fine day he decided to become a priest, thinking it was the best way for doing that. He was over the moon when he got into the college. All was just turning up the way he planned. Then he met his colleagues. They were like chalk and cheese, funny colorful fellows – each and every one of them, having different social and financial backgrounds, different beliefs, different tastes. The one thing they had in common was their motivation. They all thought that the god business is a good business. Neither his teachers were any different. Some of them even requested an amount of money to give the students permission to sit in their exam. No need to say he was bitterly disappointed. However, he graduated from that university and started practicing as a priest in his home village, where to his surprise the series of disappointments persisted. An elderly lady came to confession. After she enumerated her sins she handed over an envelope containing a sum of money hoping her sins would be more easily forgiven; the mayor came to his office and asked him without any trace of shame to promote his campaign after service. Once again he found himself holding an envelope before having the chance to disagree on the proposition. It was only then he started to realize what his former colleagues were talking about. Money simply kept flowing into his bank account without pulling his finger out. One day he remembered why he wanted to follow this path in life and decided to try his luck someplace else. He got himself a meeting with the archbishop and requested a transfer to a church in a town. It cost him an arm and a leg, but he got what he wished for. It was all over again the same story in different clothing. Today people  simply just buy everything may it be of material or spiritual value.

Let’s just keep telling ourselves that we make the money and not vice versa.

christmas thoughts

I bumped into a classmate of mine the other day. It was christmas day in the morning. She was in a hurry, just like everybody else, rushing to do the last shoppings before the ‘big’ day. She was after the sweet rolled dough filled with nuts, a must have, especially if you buy it from Annie’s Home Made. She said hello, smiled politely, asked about my health bla bla bla. To my surprise I answered  the same way although all I wanted to do was to smash that pretty dimpled face of hers against the wall. I’m hundred percent positive that the feeling was mutual. We had lived once to make each others life miserable. Still, it was christmas. We had to show kindness, right? This is what it’s all about: being nice to people who you haven’t been in touch with for a long time, being nice to people who come unscrupulously to knock on your door and sing a carol, being nice to people who at the end of the year suddenly remember that you still breathe, being nice to people who show up once in a while asking for favors and now they’re just paying their respect, being nice to people you’d rather see two meters under the ground…All these colorful species just keep coming and going through your home and you find yourself smiling and welcoming, setting specific dishes on the table, and everybody is nibbling on the food, which you ordered so carefully from a catering service. Why the hell should you bother to cook if you anyway throw away most of it? But it’s part of the picture: the rissoles, schnitzels, roulades and boeuf salads, the sweet rolled dough,  the plastic christmas tree with the star on the top full of jelly filled chocolate candies wrapped nicely in shiny colored tinfoil, the blinking lights on the tree, on your roof, on your entrance door, on your back door, everywhere, the large red socks hanging from your fireplace where the fire’s still smouldering…When you come to think of it you created this pixel perfect picture just to show these people that you’re not any different from them, that you’re doing the same thing on the same occasion as they are, and maybe you try to attach some meaning to it, you spoil yourself with the thought  that you’re celebrating something called life, where in fact what you do is just the yearly routine, nothing special, nothing meaningful.