Still sitting at the counter at Schwab's

Oh God. I have this thing where I just balk at shelling out $27 a month to "join" wonderful Bishop Barron's Word on Fire Institute. Granted, that's a cheap fee for all the scholarship and the on-line video wizardry he and his team do, but still. I think at bottom we nobodies are just waiting for our blogs to be discovered, so we can become "Fellows," never mind forming real communities and actually meeting each other, like, in our houses and stuff. (What a bore. "No American feels really free unless he is alone." I read that somewhere recently.) And all the Fellow positions have been filled, by Ph.Ds who are already famous anyway.

Isn't that a terrible attitude? What about the joy of hidden-ness and humility, a la the Virgin Mary and all the saints? Then again, what about other paths and streams of scholarship, besides those laid out by the Word on Fire team? Not that the team aren't very, very good and noble.

But one has to weigh it all. Thirty bucks a month, for there must be taxes, is thirty bucks a month.  What do you really want, and how can you really serve? Is your "community" not exactly where you are now? -- and not trapped in the dream of influencing and catching the eye of someone else, who cannot say to you, he that finds his life shall lose it, and he that loses his life for me will find it?