Who's in, who's out? Who's listened to, who's not? Slightly different questions: where am I listened to? Who listens to me? I married (1968), a ritual to glue me in, to mark an achievement. Sixteen, seventeen years later I separated, divorced, freed of glue (sort of), thrown into limbo, the liminal, the in-between, another sort of ritual. It could be called the ritual of alienation. Seven years later I was bereaved when my partner died; a funereal ritual of abandonment – the two of us because I was alone with the loving duty to bring up our three year old daughter.
Urban life (the one we all seem to have now even if we live in the country, though I suppose there must be a few of us still living a rural, peasant life in Western Europe) is necessarily one of alienation; is it I and Thou or Me and the Other? The politics of envy and consumerism; wars on the TV news; God's either disappeared or on some distant horizon or is on Big Brother. Terrorists have a go at waking us up but they're pretty scary, mad, bad; best left to the authorities to deal with.
This minute, now, I must find the word or words through which alienation is diminished, limbo is narrowed, and life becomes, once gain, the same old miracle. And, amazingly (I remind myself), the Mass still has the power to reconnect me to you and You, and the hunger of purpose is a joy.