ONE WAY HOW AMATEURS DIFFER FROM PROFESSIONALS

It's not complicated, but I never in my life thought about this way.  It came about in a conversation with an avid golfer whom I know quite well.  No, not you.  This person is happy just to be out on the links.  He goes to golf at least once per week and goes to the Philippines with a group golf tour just to watch the grass grow.  Now this guy is a real competitive guy.  He is in business for himself and I work with and for him.  Yet, while we were chatting the other day, he was carrying on about how nice the weather was and about how much fun he had with the guys.  I personally could never be like that.  When I do a sport, I have a hard time realizing that it is only a game.  I really do.  For me, baseball is war; hockey is war; ping-pong is war; tiddly-winks is war, for crying out loud.  There's no such thing as a "game."  When I told him that he laughed and said that he now knows why I never played professional sports.  He said that it is because I never learned that perfection is not a reality, but a goal.  As long as you keep it in front of you as a goal, then each mistake that you make is just another time when you realize that you are not yet perfect.  He said that the difference between a professional and an amateur is that the professional has more reason to get angry at himself/herself than the amateur, but doesn't.  The amateur (many of us) have the tendency to get angry at ourselves for every missed shot, but we don't have the "right" to do so because we are not good enough to begin with.  His point made sense to me on the intellectual level.  Every time we watch professionals play, we see their cool, self-containment and inner directive focus in action.  We see the football star drop an easy "catch".  We watch the baseball star strike out.  We see the crack tennis champion double fault and yes, we sometimes see the bright star of the hockey rink miss an open net.  In most games that are played against the clock, we often see the star who made the calamitous error early on, make the play that seals the victory.  My friend said, in competition it is not perfection that is the goal, it is comparison.  It is the ability to control the comparison and stay on the positive side of the "I am better than you" comparison.  It is not possible to control that if you consider yourself perfect and get angry at yourself for not being so.  The professional is one who realizes this to a high degree.  The professional knows that he/she is not perfect, so mistakes don't drive the professional crazy like they do the amateur.
Without thinking about it during the conversation, I thought of myself, the professional driver.
There are people on the road for whom being there is war.  Beware of them.
I learned a lot from the conversation with my friend.  I never thought about life that way.  I never thought that I could find the description of  the thought within my very self.  I am amazed that there is indeed one thing in me that is not war.  Too bad that God has made arrangements that dictate that I will have to learn how to be a professional at something else, because driving nearly put me away for good.
Isn't that what war does?
HHmmmm!

MYSTERY, SHERLOCK HOLMES, 007, CSI, ALGEBRA, OR GOD?

Mystery is a great word. It is word that carries a lot of baggage and it gets heavier as you grow in age with it.  I grew up at a time when the rites of the Catholic Church, especially the Mass were called "The Sacred Mysteries."  When I was young, I thought that that was so cool.  After a while though, that expression went away and we referred to the rites, the rubrics, the sacrifice, the sacraments, etc.  That was OK but mystery was a word that I wished would have stuck around a little longer in our Catholic vocabulary.
For a while there, it did make an occasional appearance when you would hear someone say, "We believe that, but it is a mystery that we don't understand."  That usually was the end of the discussion. But then, like so many of us do, I grew older (notice not "up" but "older") and I did learn some things.  I learned that there are some people who thrive on "mysteries" because they feel that the more they know about something that others do not know, they are better than the rest.  It gets to be a religion with some, and even with some Christians and Catholics too.  Some religious people will only tell what they think is a high form of human knowledge about the divine, to certain "initiates" who have passed certain hurdles in society.  Some people think that the more you know about mysterious things, the more divine you become.  The intriguing dimension of this is that Catholics fall into this trap all the time.  Yes, even priests and bishops.
Now, I am not a holy guy.  Trust me, that is not a mystery.  The real mystery about me is, "the good die young, so why am I still here?"  It's a good thing that no one here on earth can figure that out.  What I want to say is that this "the more I know the more divine I become" is a very insidious attitude.  We like to think that what we know about the mysteries of our faith makes us more divine.  That is wrong thinking.  The secret of our lives and the direction that God and His Son, Jesus all together with each other and the Holy Spirit give us is that we must strive to become as close to perfect human beings as we can.  God knows that He has to help us do that.  His great love is what we need to tap into to strive on that path.  The more we do that, the more we will come to understand about Him.  The more we understand about Him the more we will be convinced that it is not we who strive to become divine, it is He who by making Himself human makes it possible for us to aspire to human perfection so as to spend the rest of eternity with Him.  For me the great mystery is, "what we have the most in common with God is our humanity."  Keep that in mind the next time you take Communion.