CAREER? WHO NEEDS IT? IT'S MORE FUN WITHOUT IT!

Yesterday, or the other day I mentioned that my younger son was interviewing for a job outside of his line.  One of you jumped all over me (private email) and said some very interesting things about what taking a job outside your line could do to your life, to your self image and to the image that others have of you.  It is a major sin to "change lanes".  Once you have been endowed with the gifts that can serve as the foundation for your career, you must stick with them and make them, and them alone carry you through life.  To that I say, stercus taurorum!  Why? I'll tell you why.
A career is a track to run on.  If you don't believe me, check the etymology.  You can check the Latin languages. Horses have careers.  Humans don't.  Humans have the freedom to choose what they want when they want.  The reason I took that design up there is because it is the perfect image of a career.  Go straight down the track and make the first left for the rest of your life.  Ask any run of the mill race horse.  How many horses ever have a second chance before the glue factory? Not too many.  In this day and age of artificial insemination, even the second chance that they used to have is not that glamorous.  So, you want to run around in circles, or ovals?  Have a career.  My view of the world is,  don't have one.  Do what you either want to do, or have to do and learn to like it, or don't do anything at all.  Don't talk to me about image.  Image will not put steak on your plate.  Not the image you have of yourself nor the image that others have of you.  WORK is what puts steak on your plate.  That is what humans are called to do, WORK.  Not run around in circles and look good.  I know people who are "one trick" ponies.  They have a Church career, many of those that I know.  Fifty years they've been working in Church and fifty years later they still have nothing but the groove in the track that they've been on all the time.  They are good, solid, career people.  How many priests do you know who have left the active ministry of the Catholic Church and gone across  the street to the Anglicans, or others?  Is it because they like the Anglicans better?  No.  It's because they're incapable of surviving out of their line.  That's why I'm against taking  the Anglican priests into the Catholic Church.  We're not doing ourselves any favors.  They aren't smart enough to be able to survive outside the clerical state.  Why should we take them?  They haven't been any more faithful to their original calling than the Catholic priests who've gone to the Anglican side of the street.
I personally have had a lot of opportunities to learn a lot of things, up to and including being an Anglican.  Work for the Queen of England?  You gotta be nuts!  Back to stuff I learned, stuff like, cussing in Latin and seven other languages.  I learned a lot about labor law.  I learned a lot about computers.  I learned how to write a little bit.  I learned how to talk straight without covering up the truth.  I learned how to organize events.  I learned how to teach.  I taught theology for thirteen years for a Southern California diocese.  I learned how to study so that I never had to cram for exams.  I graduated with a masters in Theology from a prestigious Dominican University in Rome.  I learned how to marry late in life and still keep it going for 35 plus years.  I learned to recognize  that I was not ever going to be good enough to play professional baseball and dealt with the disappointment.  I worked in Italy, France, Mexico and the Philippines besides here in the U.S.  I worked in church.  I worked as a paralegal advocate in the church office of marriage annulments.  I worked in manufacturing plants.  I worked for non profit NGO's.  I worked as a professional driver.  I worked as a cashier in a taco shop.  I worked as a telephone answering service operator.  I worked as a professional interior painter and I worked as a clerk in a store that sold soap and other non consequential life style items.  Now I am working as an independent billing contractor.  Wife and I also have a small Melaleuca business.  Those are the things that have generally $upported me in life.  Now, for O income,  I also write blogs and serve as the Theology Editor for ParishWorld.net, an online Catholic Magazine and finally, as the official pain in the ass of the Priest Moderator of Temporalities and Service Commissions at the church that I attend.  
So, go ahead, ask me if I have a career, or had a career and my answer is, Who needs one?  Horses.