Today's Word: Meanwhile

Here, in this transition, when the traffic whizzes by, when the people walk down the street, when the interlude sings, is when you learn you have a terminal disease, when your wife leaves you, when the final door closes on a childhood dream. Time regains...and that middlespace of ponderance becomes now, and you have things to do. Emerge.

"Sin City" number one at the box office. Pope dead. Not all that pre-cog of me, but it's nice to get the predictions right once in a while.

I'll spare you a diatribe about a passing of a pope. He was influential for his time. He was a media-friendly pontiff. He was a vanguard for human rights, when he wanted. He hated war. He apologized for the Church's blind eye to the Holocaust. And like all popes, he thought little of women's rights. Or gays. Or children molested by priests.

The irony...God's representative to Earth was as complex and contradictory as the rest of us down here. It's reassuring, in a quiet way, verging on that taint of gloating. But in the end, I'm drawn to the outpouring of love under the clouds of mourning. For hundreds of millions of faithful, this man was their bedrock, and his vacancy will be filled, but it won't be the same. They will miss the coy smile, the stature unique to this Polish man who donned the miter and scepter, the inflection of his native tongue on holy words. When the faithful weep, it's genuine tears, and to have a sincere outpouring from the heart is something I get envious of. I'm not a man of faith. I have too many questions to accept the marching orders. I envy the solace that the faithful have, albeit at the price of their own free will. I marvel at their broken hearts, and I hope to one day understand the alchemy of love and devotion to the divine that they have. I'm more wrapped up in the abstract, which I call my God, than a man in a robe on a throne.

But of them, the masses, I am in awe of their tears.