If you are over twenty-five years of age, and sensitive, there is a good chance that, like most of the rest of us adults in the Western world, you are living in chronic depression. 

What is chronic depression and why am I suggesting that most of us live in it?

Depression is one of those things that can be understood best by examining its opposite. The opposite of depression is delight. When there is delight in my life, I am not depressed. Conversely, when there is no delight in my life, I am. 

However, delight itself should be correctly understood. Real delight is not be confused with the kind of upbeat optimism and the life-of-the-party zip that is peculiar to certain temperaments. In fact, often times these can hide a deep depression. Delight has little to do with being the life of the party and even less to do with who sees the bottle as half full instead of as half empty. Delight has to do with this: If on any given day, particularly on a very ordinary day, in an ordinary situation – walking home from work, driving my car, washing dishes, getting out of bed, eating a meal with my family, pausing for a breath at work – I feel my life, my body, my sexuality, my mind, my soul, my purpose on this planet, and I breath the air, look around me, and spontaneously say: “God, it’s good to be alive!” then I am experiencing delight. 

Conversely, I can be a good person, can work hard and unselfishly for years, can genuinely help others, be faithful, admired, and spend years doing altruistic things and never have a thimble full of genuine delight in my life. All that goodness and effort can be too work-driven, duty-driven, and compulsive to give me much in the way of delight.

Today, among adults, not very often does one hear the expression “God, it’s good to be alive!” Not very frequently does one witness outbursts of spontaneous delight at the goodness of it all. Depression is more the rule. Where one does still see delight, spontaneous joy in the goodness and excess of life, is among children, the very young. 

Go to a primary school playground sometime and observe little children who have just been let out for a recess. What you hear is a din of shrieking – laughter, shouts, crying, and mostly screaming just for the sake of screaming. Not very many of these sounds are conscious attempts at communicating anything; mostly it is simply spontaneous outburst, frequently expressing delight. I say this, not to idealize children’s playgrounds, more than enough cruelty, selfishness, and bullying happen there, but to point out that all that shrieking is what an un-depressed atmosphere looks and sounds like.

There is no small irony in the fact that today we are all too often irritated by children shouting. All that shrieking is interfering with a depression. It is an affront to the serious business of living. Best to classify the louder children as hyper-active and sedate them. Few things irritate a depression as much as does spontaneity. 

I point this out because today, both in the world and in the church, it is politically correct to be depressed, unhappy, heavy, sullen, and hyper-serious – all in the name of being adult, searching for or defending the truth, having a proper sense of reality, working for justice, and taking the Gospel (the “good news”) seriously! Small wonder everyone is off searching for his or her inner child! 

Moreover, no ideological camp is better or worse than the others here. At the end of the day we all appear equally depressed: Conservatives with all our anger and over-seriousness, liberals with all our self-hatred and hot-wired intensity about justice, there are precious few spontaneous outbursts of “God, it’s good to be alive!” within our civic, academic, church, or government circles. 

I say this with sympathy, as one whose spontaneous feelings too frequently vent themselves in outbursts that do not exactly bespeak delight. It is hard, in our culture, to be adult and not depressed, too much conspires against delight. But recognizing, and admitting, our chronic depression can be helpful. Like an alcoholic who cannot be helped until he admits he has a problem, so too our culture. Delight cannot be forced, but at least I should know that it is far from ideal to go through life saying: “Be it ever so humdrum, there’s no rut like my own!”

I am not sure how often I have read Zorba the Greek. It is a haunting book with a strange power to ignite.

Most of us know the story. An intense, reflective, morally uptight, cautious young writer meets Zorba. In him, the young writer sees celebration, freedom, and zest personified. Zorba is a man given to total spontaneity, all heart. He lives freely, loves freely, and simply bursts into dance whenever the occasion calls for it.

Zorba takes life as a child, trusting, without hesitation, and he declares that the only unforgivable sin is to not abandon yourself in love when asked (in some less philosophical version of that statement).

The book haunts because, measured against Zorba, most of us appear as emotionally crippled, uptight, non-celebrating, very inhibited persons. Moreover, recent studies have shown that there is a certain co-relation between how autonomous a person is and how religious he or she is. Simply put, the more autonomous a person is the less religious he or she is. The reverse is also true, the more religious a person is the more unfree and inhibited is he or she. At least so it would appear.

Where does that leave us? Are religion and real freedom incompatible? Does religion make us uptight? Should we abandon the gospel for Zorba? Does Christian morality, taken seriously, rob life of spontaneity, richness, and freedom?

These questions can torture the mind. Yet there is a point where the torture must give way to a certain exorcism. What is at issue here is a certain fallacy that, if left unexamined, wreaks much emotional havoc. What is the fallacy? The identification of pre-morality with genuine liberation, the identification of the mind of a child with the mind of a truly free person.

Zorba is presented to us as the paradigm of freedom. But what this would have us believe is that it is easy to celebrate and love and take life. It would have us believe that society’s rules, personal inhibitions, feelings of guilt, and agreed upon standards are of minimal consequence. In short, it would have us believe that we can live free as the birds, soaring, unencumbered by the demands and expectations of others.

Unfortunately, anyone who is even remotely moral knows that it is not so easy, and is in fact quite impossible because as we try to share our lives in love and celebration without exploiting and raping each other, we run into an emotional, psychological, moral, sexual, and spiritual complexity that makes the studies of a brain surgeon look like elementary arithmetic.  Only two types of persons do not know and respect this: the amoral-immoral, who ignore or flaunt the moral structure; and the pre-moral, children, who are insufficiently developed to recognize morality.

When a child’s spontaneity and unchecked zest for life push her into uninhibited enjoyment, irrespective of consequence, there is no element of rape present because she is just a child and we see the selfishness as being cute.

The ideal that is presented in Zorba the Greek is precisely that, the pre-moral, actions of a child – cute, inhibited, happy, but irresponsible. What masquerades as autonomy and celebration is largely pre-moral spontaneity and there is an immense difference between this and true adult freedom because the latter must be sensitive to a moral and aesthetic structure which, when respected, induces constant hesitation, agony, inhibition, and frustration. Loving is not a simple business.

The Kingdom of God can only come about when all of us can sit down at the same table and share food, wine, love, hearts, bodies, sex, and spirit with each other. That coming together is not easy, as the cumulative frustration of humankind more than adequately attest to.

Zorba was on to something: That coming together does require much spontaneity, abandonment, and the child-like giving and receiving of life which permits a simple enjoyment that is not paralysed by an unhealthy frigidity and neurotic over-reflection.

However, it also requires a very unchildlike discipline – wide respect, chastity, patience, and waiting. The moral order is as intricate and complex as the central nervous system and brain structure within the human being. In loving we must tread sensitively – considerably more so than did Zorba.

What a curious line, what a curious logic! One person gets lashed, another gets healed; one suffers, another is set free; one dies, another comes to life.

An odd logic, but a gospel logic; gospel not just because it appears in the bible (1 Peter) but because it contains the kind of paradox that lies at the heart of the good news of Jesus. Life comes from death and, sometimes, the death that produces life within us is not our own but the death of someone else.

How does this work? How can we be healed by someone else’s suffering? Or, perhaps even more importantly, the reverse: How can we suffer so as to heal someone else?

This concept, vicarious suffering, has an important place within all the great religions of the world. That should tell us something. No spirituality worth the name does not, at some point, make a place for it. In Christianity, it lies at the heart of everything: Christ died so that we might live. By his stripes we are healed.

Now we have not always had the best explanation of how that works. Too often, both in theology and in spirituality, we took a metaphor too literally. For example, in theology, there was the idea that because of sin, original sin and our own sin, some great debt is owed to God and the sufferings of Christ and of good people fill in that debt to the benefit of the rest of us. Scripture, on occasion, though not often, expresses this in metaphor. However if this idea is taken literally it does not do much justice to God. It makes God seem arbitrary, petty, and legalistic, and it gives the idea that there is, somewhere, a divine credit union within which sin and merits must be balanced like a bank book.  Sin makes a grace withdrawal. Sacrifice makes a grace deposit.

We had this idea in a popularized form within spirituality, although, admittedly, not in as crass as sense as just expressed. The idea was that good people could make sacrifices for others. Thus, for example, a good mother with a wayward son would make sacrifices for her son. She would do virtuous acts and offer them up for her son and he, on his part, would somehow be helped by that. By her stripes he was healed.

We want to be careful not to be too cynical about this. The logic behind this needs refinement, but both the sincerity of intention of the mother and the net result of her sacrifice should not be underrated within the economy of grace. Her sacrifice does help her son, if he is at all open to grace. However, it helps him not because there is a divine credit union where her deposits of grace let him overdraw his account, so to speak, but because in the economy (perhaps not a good word here) of grace we are, indeed, helped by the sacrifice of others. How?

Let me illustrate with one simple example: Growing up as a young boy, I had a brother who was two years older than myself. He was not only older chronologically, he was also considerably more mature. One Sunday afternoon, during a spring when I was eleven and he was thirteen, we were playing outside the house when we came upon a copper boiler that my mother had put there to catch water from the snow as it melted on a roof. There was a crust of ice over the water and, being a young boy, I wanted to break it. I picked up a small steel crowbar and was about to poke into the ice with it when my brother warned me: “Careful,” he said, “if it slips you will ruin the boiler, it’s sides are soft.” Then, seeing that I was going to do it anyway, he tried to wrench the steel bar away from me, but, before he was able to, I slammed it into the ice … and, just as he had predicted, it glanced off the ice and punctured the side of the copper boiler, effectively ruining it.

The next morning at breakfast, my father, having seen the ruined boiler and having deduced the cause, confronted my brother and myself at the table: “Who ruined that boiler?” Frightened and ashamed, but deeply aware of my guilt, I sat in silence, too immature to admit what I had done. After a brief pause, my brother spoke: “I did,” he said, “I was trying to break the ice with a crowbar and it slipped and went through the side of the boiler.”  My father admonished him briefly, telling him that, at his age, he should have known better. He, for his part, he did not protest that he did know better, nor did he look at me in anger, or gloat in glee. Mostly he just looked at me as a younger brother who was a bit immature and needed an older brother to bail him out.

He took the rap for me and, because of that, I grew up a bit. He suffered, I matured. By his stripes I was healed.

One of the foremost anthropologists of our century, Mircea Eliade, once commented that “no community should botch its deaths!” Deaths, like births, are important times, formative periods, for all families. There is a spirit, a grace, to be received and a community is poorer if it botches the moment, if it is not properly reflective and receptive.

Sometimes it is not so clear how this all works: How are we blessed in someone else’s death? How is a community, a family, pulled together through a death? How do we remember correctly so that, unlike the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we recognize in a new presence the person who has passed on? 

These are questions very much in the hearts of the people in the diocese within which I now live because a short while ago, our bishop, James Patrick Mahoney, died of a heart attack. He was a robust man, still quite young and much loved, and he died prematurely. He was a friend of mine and also the man who ordained me to the priesthood, and so, for me, his passing had an extra significance.  

How does one celebrate a death like that so as not to sentimentally eulogize nor sloppily forget? One does it by looking on his life as the word made flesh. The ancient church writers used to say that God wrote two great books: the bible and nature. But God has written more than two books. God’s word takes on flesh wherever you see someone who, in his or her flesh, gives concrete shape to the unbounded energy and love of God. 

This our late bishop did for us; not perfectly, of course, nobody does, but enough that, for us who knew him, God became a bit more believable. He incarnated a lot of things. He could. He was huge of body, heart, and faith. He was also huge in humility. 

His distinguishing characteristic was precisely his humility; something which many, confusedly, saw only as a sense of humour. But those who did not see the depth under that surface missed the reality. He as a humble man, not in that false sense where one protests that he is inept and not fit for his responsibilities, but in the true sense where humility manifests itself in earthiness, in lack of pretence, in hospitality, and in a sense of humour which does not make a pompous, narcissistic tragedy of everything. He had his two big feet solidly planted on the earth and for this reason power never went to his head. He could laugh at it, not because it did not take it seriously, but because he understood human power for what it is, not much. 

There was a lot to admire in the man. He had a conservative temperament, but he never let that, nor other personal preferences, interfere in his actual decision making. He made decisions on the basis of conscience and not on the basis of temperament. I remember a particular meeting in which he made a very difficult decision, one that went smack against his own preferences. One of the priests, not without some anger and sarcasm, said to him: “You did that just because it is politically correct!” “I did it,” he said, swallowing hard for reasons his critics would never know, “because it is correct!” 

And he loved the church, in every aspect of his person and in his every decision as a bishop. He loved it completely. He hurt when it hurt, he rejoiced when it rejoiced, and he mourned when it mourned. He defended it always, even to excess. He was a soft man, a bishop who found it hard to come down hard. He could only be hard when he felt the church was being hurt. One year he delivered the convocation address at the college where I was teaching. It was a gala event, expensive clothes, flowers, formality everywhere. His message, as always, was challenging and laced with humour, earthiness, and a deep love for the church. At one point, he addressed the graduates in particular: “You have all just graduated with degrees in theology and ministry and you are being sent to minister in the church in various places. A word of advice to you: If you come into my diocese, I am not so concerned whether you have all the proper theological papers. Don’t get me wrong, I respect theology and professional training, but … if you come into my diocese I want, first of all, that you love the church and if you don’t (and this is some of his vintage earthiness) I don’t want you buggering around in my diocese!” He meant it. I don’t doubt it’s good advice. 

Twenty-three years ago, this man ordained me to the priesthood. He whispered a little wise crack, under his breath, as he was anointing my hands. Two weeks ago he died. I know where to look for him. I’ll seek him out, not in his grave, but among those who are humble, laugh a lot, and who love the church.

There is a story floating around, fairly common within homiletic circles, that merits retelling:

There was a father of a family who was confronted one day by his wife who challenged him to spend more time with his 14 year-old son. “He needs you,” she said, “and you are neglecting him!” “He doesn’t need me!” the man protested. “He’s at an age where he should be cutting the family strings somewhat more.”

His wife, however, insisted and the man, more out of guilt than conviction, went into the living room where his son was watching television and asked him  to accompany him on a trip to the market to buy groceries. The son, more out of boredom than interest, agreed and so the two set out. In the car on the way to the store, the father tried to get a conversation going:

“How’s school?” “Okay,” came the reply.

“How’s basketball?” “It’s okay.”

“What were you watching on T.V?” “Nothing!”

After that exchange, things went silent. At the grocery mart, still in silence, they loaded the items they wanted into the shopping cart and waited in line while a very slow, inept, and disinterested cashier dealt with the customers ahead of them. Finally, when their turn came, the father, quite out of sorts because of the unnecessary wait, deliberately tricked the cashier. He placed a fifty dollar bill on the counter and then, thanks to the inattention of the cashier, was able to substitute a twenty dollar bill for it before the cashier picked it up. The price for their groceries was nineteen dollars and the cashier gave the father thirty dollars change – on a twenty dollar bill. But, instead of walking out of the store thirty dollars richer, the father instead calmly (though obviously making his point) pointed out to the cashier his mistake and returned to him the $30 that he had, in his inattention, incorrectly given.

As they walked out the door, several other customers who had experienced a similar irritation with the cashier said to the father: “You should have kept the $30. It would have taught the slob a lesson!” 

When they were in the car, his son said: “Dad, that was neat!” Then, without any prodding from his father, the son began to talk and to share with him a lot of things about his life, including how school was going, how basketball was going, and what he had been watching on television. The father, for his part, said little and, in fact, heard little for he was thinking: “If my son had not been with me, I would have kept the thirty dollars! Moreover, my wife is wrong, my son doesn’t need me … I need him!”

We need our children, and for more reasons than this story, good though it is, makes obvious. Our children raise us, not vice versa. It is they who put a rope around us and take us where we would rather not go, namely, into an adulthood and into a selflessness that, without them, we would never attain.  We become adult by having and raising children. This, perhaps more than anything else, moves us beyond being children ourselves. Why is this so?

Some of the reasons are more obvious than others: When we are raising children it is more natural for us to stop thinking of ourselves as children, when we are forced to respond to others’s needs we tend to be less focused on our own. Raising children forces us to live a certain virtue. It is conscriptive adulthood; we mature, almost against our will. But there is a deeper dynamic operative too: Children have the power to fire within us the deepest and most powerful surges of love that we can ever experience in this life. More so than does romantic love or the love that we have when we get involved in causes, love for our children is a love that can take us beyond ourselves, break our narcissism, and let us genuinely imitate (weak though it may be) the life-giving love of God. 

There is something in children, some combination of helplessness, dependence, innocence, trust, vulnerability, simplicity, playfulness, and simple physical beauty that opens the heart to selflessness in a way that our other loves do not. That’s why celibacy can be dangerous: Perhaps there is nothing in this world as powerful to break selfishness as is the simple act of looking at our own children. In our love for our children we are given a privileged avenue to feel as God feels – to burst in unselfishness, in fire, in joy, in delight, and in the desire to let another’s life be more real and important than my own.

There is a tradition within Christianity, strong in Scripture and in the early church but now sadly in danger of dying, of welcoming the stranger.

In the early church there was a custom of welcoming the strangers with the belief that they, being foreigners, were specially privileged in their capacity to bring new promise and fresh revelation from God. It was with this is in mind that the author of the letter to the Hebrews wrote: “In welcoming strangers some of you have entertained angels without knowing it.”

Thus, every family was encouraged to set aside a room in its house to serve as a guest room, a room within which strangers could be welcomed and hospitality shown to them.

In Scripture, God’s promise, revelation, and new truth are most often brought not through what’s familiar or through those whom we know and who are like us, but through a stranger or an angel (an angel being even more foreign than a stranger). Thu s, for instance, we see: Sarah and Abraham receive the promise of a son not from a family member, a neighbor or the local doctor, but from a stranger who has wandered in to their camp at night and to whom they have shown hospitality. Jacob meets God by wrestling with a stranger. Christ is visited in the crib not by the Jewish rulers but by the Magi, strange foreign kings. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the wounded man is helped not by his own kinsfolk and those who were of his own religion, but by a Samaritan, a stranger. With the stranger lies surprise, new possibility, contact with that part of God and reality that we have never experienced before.

Why is that? Would it not be more logical, and indeed in line with the principles of the incarnation, that God should speak to us most deeply through that which is familiar to us?

The familiar is important. In the end, the real test of charity is our own family. Charity begins at home. However, precisely because it is home, it is not the place where we are often surprised. It is too familiar and because it is so familiar it is also not the place where we are likely to have our hearts stretched. God is not familiar. God is other. Accordingly, those who are other to us, strangers, are in a privileged position to reveal God to us.

As Parker Palmer puts it: “The role of the stranger in our lives is vital in the context of Christian faith, for the God of faith is one who continually speaks truth afresh, who continually makes all things new. God persistently challenges conventional truth and regularly upsets the world’s way of looking at things.

“It is no accident that this God is so often represented by the stranger, for the truth that God speaks in our lives is very strange indeed. Where the world sees impossibility, God sees potential. Where the world sees comfort, God sees idolatry. Where the world sees insecurity, God sees occasions for faith. Where the world sees death, God proclaims life.

“God uses the stranger to shake us from our conventional points of view, to remove the scales of worldly assumptions from our eyes. God is a stranger to us, and it is at the risk of missing God’s truth that we domesticate God, reduce God to the role of familiar friend.” (The Company of Strangers, p. 59).

There is a double challenge in that: The first has to do with racism, sexism, provincialism and sectarianism of all sorts. Invariably we are afraid of, and unwelcoming to, strangers—be they different vis-a-vis race, color, creed, gender or sexual orientation. We fear what is different from ourselves. We are comfortable only with our own.

However, within our circles much of the otherness of God cannot be revealed. Within familiar circles, good as these might be, there is too little in the way of promise, of newness. God can speak only a limited word here.

Nothing is impossible with God, but that is only true when we move outside of our own circles. Like Jacob, we must wrestle in the dust with the stranger. Who knows? The person who puts out your hip might well be God!

But we must welcome the stranger in another way too. In a world and in a church polarized by competing ideologies and torn by factionalism, we must welcome the stranger, show hospitality to, those who are different from ourselves: Conservatives must welcome liberals and liberals must welcome conservatives. We are strange to each other.

Feminists must welcome those who are afraid of them, and those who are afraid of feminism must welcome feminists. The same is true between pro-life and pro­choice. In welcoming the stranger, in showing real hospitality to those who seem foreign to us, whom we do not understand, we are given the opportunity to hear new promise, to hear a fuller revelation of God.

Several years ago, one of my sisters died of cancer. She was an Ursuline nun, possessed a deep faith and had, for many years, given herself over to the service of others with an unselfishness that was exceptional.

Yet, despite all this, she found it very hard to die, very hard to let go.

Why? I have seen others, with less faith, let go much more easily. In my sister’s case, this was the difficulty: She was not afraid of God, of the after-life, or of the unknown. This was not the issue.

The reason she found it so hard to die was, quite simply, that she loved her life so deeply.

She thoroughly loved and enjoyed her life. Friends, work, family, good food, good weather, good chocolate (her weakness), these she basked in.

She wasn’t a particularly reflective person, but she wasn’t a moody one either. Her impatience was with those who gave life too much of a tragic or stoic twist. This she considered pompous, false, a waste.

Life, for her, was good, something to be drunk in with delight. Her view: To enjoy life is to end up with a double chin. This is what separates the true Christian from the stoic. The formula worked for her. She had a happy life, did eventually develop a double chin and died a deeply loved woman. What this story highlights is something that is too often lost within spirituality, namely, that the highest compliment someone can give to a gift giver is to thoroughly enjoy the gift. The highest compliment we can give to God, our creator, is to thoroughly enjoy the gift of lie. One should never look a gift universe in the mouth! The best way to pay for a beautiful moment is to enjoy it.

More often than not, this is not the message that has come through in Christian spirituality, or in virtually every other spirituality and secular philosophy for that matter. Mostly what has been presented as mature, as the ideal to be imitated, is stoicism, the Hamlet-figure, the Socrates-figure, the person who is somehow above and detached from the enjoyments, pleasures and delights of the ordinary person.

A saint who craves chocolate! There aren’t many icons, outside of Buddhism, that show someone with a double chin. We are the poorer for that. What is not mature is our spiritual understanding. We have mistaken Hamlet for Jesus, stoicism for Christianity, despair for healthy detachment.

This needs correction. The Christian, as John Shea is so fond of pointing out, is not the noble anti-hero, luxuriating in despair, but the child of the kingdom, the grace-merry person who, while sharing fully in the tears of this world, is ultimately distinguished through his or her laughter.

To consider life as tragic is to not believe in the resurrection. It is also to not imitate Christ who shocked as many people with his capacity to enjoy the earth as he did with his challenge to live in the face of the fact that this world is not our true home.

I was taught this lesson by Gustavo Gutierrez, the father of liberation theology. I was once fortunate enough to meet him. He is a man with a passion for justice but he is also a man with a passion for life. I remember an incident some years back when he came to deliver some lectures at the college where I was teaching. My job was to pick him up from the airport, take him to breakfast and get him settled in. I guided him into my car with considerable trepidation for, in my mind, I was transporting an icon.

That feeling, unfair as it was, disappeared when I took him to breakfast in our college cafeteria. He wasn’t a pious icon, he was man, and he was a man who thoroughly enjoys his breakfast!

After loading his plate with a generous sample of everything that our cooks had laid out, he sat down to the table, said a grace, and then made the pronouncement: “I like eating! When I was a child there often wasn’t enough food. Now, when there is, I thoroughly enjoy it!”

He enjoyed good food without apology. He also had the beginnings of a double chin. Hardly what you expect from the father of liberation theology! But then people didn’t expect that of Jesus either.

Passing strange, yet strangely true, but it is invariably those who see and live out most clearly the fact that this world is not our true home who also have the ability to enjoy life most fully. Occasionally too they have double chins. My sister would have liked Gutierrez. They would have enjoyed chocolate together.

The best way to thank a gift giver is to thoroughly enjoy the gift.

Nobody gets through grade school without having to write an essay on My Day at the Zoo. One never outgrows the need to write such a piece. The zoos just change.

Recently I was in the gambling capital of North America, Las Vegas, to give a talk on prayer and contemplation at a local church. I had a couple of extra hours before my talk so I headed for the nearest casino, a place called The Gold Coast. Since I’d played a little blackjack at some clerical parties I thought I’d give that a try. So, trying to look as confident and professional as possible, I seated myself at the two-dollar card table.

The dealer, a young woman with a name tag reading: “My name is Henja and I am from Sweden”, did not speak. Her business was not to socialize and so she dealt, poker-faced and silent. The others at the table were not so silent:

“You play much?” asks a young man wearing an LA Dodger baseball cap.

“Sure, all the time.” I answer, “I’m a professional. I make my living gambling. I play all over, even in Monte Cassino.”

“Well, that certainly explains your unorthodox style! Nobody here takes a card when they have 14 and the dealer is showing a a low card.”

A middle-aged woman at my immediate left glares at me every time she loses: “How can I win when you keep taking my cards?”

“Maam,” I say, meeting her stare, “I thought the dealer dealt me that card.”

“You know what I mean! You shouldn’t have drawn a card. It was a high card, it busted you and I needed it.”

“Sorry.”

Two minutes later, it’s her again:

“I can’t believe it. You took my card again! I needed that low card and you took it. How can I win when you keep taking my cards?”

“And you knew it would be a low card?” I ask.

She’s too angry to answer. She keeps losing – we all do.

The kid with the baseball finally says: “I’m outta here. This dealer’s an undertaker. I’m off to another table.”

He’s gone. My bad luck isn’t. Neither is the lady’s to my left. Her mood matches her luck: “You’ve taken my card again! I needed that high card. I can’t win when you keep taking my cards!”

My two hours are coming to an end, as are my patience and my pocket money. I’m dealt a good hand. Finally! I double my bet, my last 4 dollars. I draw a low card, I needed a high one. The lady to my left draws a high card, she needed a low one: “Thanks,” she snarls, “you took my low card!” The dealer draws a good card. I am out of money and out of the game.

“Hope your luck improves,” I say to my lady friend as I leave.

Outside the fresh air is a welcome relief from the smoke-filled casino. The kid with the baseball cap is sitting on the railing. He looks pretting dejected.

“Any luck at another table?” I ask.

“Nope. My luck’s been bad. They’re on a roll in there. I lost big time … Hey, your aren’t really a professional, are you?”

“I am, but not at cards. I’m a priest. I’m here giving some talks at a church.”

“No kidding! Well, that certainly explains your unorthodox style. What are your talks about?”

“Prayer.”

“No kidding! Where are they at? With the way my luck has been running, maybe I could use something like that!”

“I’m at Christ the King, up on Torrey Pines, 7:30 tonight.”

“No kidding! Gee thanks. I might be there.”

Just then my lady friend emerges and from her face I can see that, after I left, someone else must have been taking her cards.

I can’t resist: “Any luck after I left?”

“No, some horrible man kept taking my cards!”

“Did you lose a lot?” I ask, with genuine sympathy.

“Over 400 dollars just this afternoon.”

“No kidding! Well that certainly explains your unorthodox manners!”

“I’m coming back here tonight,” she snarls angrily. “You’d better not be at my table. That’s a warning!”

“No kidding! Gee thanks. I won’t be there!”