Free Floating Heads

The drive to work was great this morning.  It’s late November in western Pennsylvania, the air is crisp and the sun was shining.  Yet, at a stoplight I looked to my right and  was shocked by what I saw.  Maybe I am a bit private or its the way I was brought up.  There was a middle aged guy using his Norelco shaver in his car.

Please, shaving is something you do in the privacy of your bathroom and not at the stoplight on McKnight Road at 7:30 in the morning.  Besides, I can remember a couple of Christmas’ when I received one of those shavers with the triple free floating heads only to discover that I was not happy with their performance.  In a nutshell, not close enough.

Performance aside, to use one in your automobile seems a bit too exhibitory and what happens to all the stubble that is shorn?  Does it end up in your lap or imbedded in the the seat with the sesame seeds from last weeks bagel to go breakfast?

Maybe I am sheltered, but I heard Burl Ives’ voice and replayed the “holly jolly” snow man snow boarding on his Norelco shaver.  Tell me, is this something that others see on their morning commute?

Lewis and The Weight of Glory

Probably my all time favorite sermon that I read and reread is C.S. Lewis’s The Weight of Glory.  It is full of so much good stuff but I always seem to come back to a  few lines at the end of it that seem to put all of life in perspective as I attempt to relate to others.  The lines read:
….it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.  There are no ordinary people.  You have never talked to a mere mortal.  Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.  But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with , marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.  This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn.  We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.  And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.  Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.  If he is your Christian neighbor he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden. 
May our charity toward one another be a real and costly love.