Diary of a City Priest - Diary Excerpts

Get a glimpse into the world of an inner-city theologian, by reading these moving excerpts from Father McNamee's journal, Diary of a City Priest:

"Simone Weil says that the charitable exchange that is real charity or love is more rare, more a miracle than walking on water. Usually the meeting of benefactor and beggar reinforces their mutual positions of someone humiliated and someone humiliating. I am afraid that this is often the case with me, despite my many years in these neighborhoods. I am very poor at it all."

"The Church is almost cruel asking this loneliness [of celibacy] of so many ordinary men and women. Life is difficult enough; we do not have to create further difficulty. I know I am spelling out only one side of the picture; many find marriage and family so difficult that they would welcome the luxury and personal space I have at home. I also know that I could not live among the poor and serve them so freely if I had a companion or a family. I recall someone years ago responding to news that a young friend was leaving the religious life to marry: 'Some of you fellows should belong to everybody rather than somebody. My experience is that once people marry that can no longer be true.'"

"I imagine my prayer a plucking of my own inner strings or heart, clumsy and always starting over from distraction, like the teacher at the piano further down in the church trying to catch the melody, losing it and beginning over or from where he faltered. Not bad. Some kind of prayer. Trying to make my turbulent heart connect with the heart pictured up there in the window, trying to see my loneliness and fear and craving for human comfort in the light of His. I must learn to let go, let this time take more of my heart, not to make the hour stand or fall so on my effort to understand or figure things out. Somehow I must learn and allow myself to enter more fully, more quietly, and confidently into the Mystery."

"What I am doing these years in North Philadelphia has precious little to do with traditional sacramental ministry. I am on the edges of Church life by reason of neighborhood anyhow. Learn to live on the edge better. A question of balance."

"Today began with a call about no heat on the upper floors of the 100-year-old school, and all day I never got far from the boiler room. My pathetic effort to help the plumber, to learn how to set or unset new sophisticated computer thermostats when dialing a telephone is my limit. I know what the problem is: an impatience, a fierce resistance even, to these chores. As though I should be free to glide through the day and be off in late afternoon to a local college and dinner with a visiting Irish scholar. A rather pretentious self coming through.... Down in the boiler room with the plumber and reading the thermostat manual, I try to bring all of me there to these mundane and petty domestic chores which occupy most lives. Who do I think I am anyhow? Simone Weil says that any attention can be prayer."

"Let me be honest about myself: my own insides as desolate and deprived as these forlorn streets. At 58 the interior landscape as unfinished and rough as anything without. Not unlikely that has something to do with my being here: the urban desert all around a familiar if uncomfortable mirror of my insides. A most incomplete man. My hope is that this Dark Night or whatever is by irony a grace. When one experiences faith as so illusive, so fragile, one might have to cling more surely, and the fragile hold keeps one close and humble."