When I read the accounts of Jesus feeding thousands of people, his abundance and miraculous powers are preeminent.

But there are other things as well. He says that the disciples need to feed them.

He demands the impossible of the ordinary.

He has not provided (that we know) consistent meals and snacks. He waits until they are truly hungry.

He exhausts the resources of the ordinary.

He predicts that without Divine intervention they will “collapse on the way.”

He knows the limits of the ordinary and is willing to push those limits.

We are so ordinary.

I am particularly ordinary.

And I need to face my ordinary hunger, my ordinary need…

For this God, this extraordinary Savior. Jesus, who defines himself and winnows us by proclaiming that in his body and in his blood is the fulfillment of every human hunger.

With or without a little boy’s ordinary lunch, Jesus satisfies, Jesus is able to feed, every human heart.

It is profoundly telling that we allow/promote a woman’s prerogative to overexpose her body for sexual purposes for years, but do not provide safe harbor for that same woman to tell the story of her childhood victimization.

I don’t care if Hugh Jackman dressed up like Wolverine for Halloween (..and no one noticed..), but I do care if Bryan Singer sexually assaulted teens and no one noticed.

The same rule applies to Ms. Anderson:

Not only do we need to examine why her body is of interest to millions of men, but we also must question why the identification and prosecution of her abusers is of interest to none.

If Anderson could not tell her story until now, how many other victims have been forced into silence?

And at what cost?

I often tell myself–don’t write in the wee hours of the morning.

But I still do. Because I am a ghost. I am the only kind of ghost I believe in–a human, ordinary human, haunted by the past.

Losses of the past. No one is haunted by the gains, the victories, the trophies.

No.

We are haunted by the what-ifs, would have beens, and hairpin turns on dark highways.

I have been a ghost since 1998 when I lost Veronica.

I began to rattle my chains in 2009 when I lost a slew of other people.

Also ghosts, all of them.

I say all of this because tomorrow I will exercise my ghost. Myself.

I will run, jump, and glide in order to remind myself of the very most fundamental lesson of metaphysics–

How we live matters
How we die matters more
And how we live again: most of all.

There are no ghosts in heaven
You must wake
To get there.