Welcome, folks!

I thought this would be a simple way to keep you up to date on the daily (or occasional) meanderings of my life up here in the wilds of Wisconsin. The name and the image are from Sen. Chris Dodd's political campaign, but it does not indicate that I am a supporter. I just thought it an amusing title for the blog.

I will post various things here with some regularity. Thoughts, reports, photos. Nothing too personal or too private, don't worry. If you want to join the conversation, just click on the "Comments" button and add your two-cents. I will set the comments so that I can moderate them to prevent spammers from messing with us.

Here's a sample:

From The Chicago Tribune:

Money really can't buy happiness, study finds
Clergy are the most satisfied with their jobs; lawyers, doctors down on the list

The old saw "money can't buy happiness" apparently holds true when it comes to work.

Highly-paid professionals like doctors and lawyers didn't make the cut when researchers set out to find the most satisfied workers.

Clergy ranked tops in both job satisfaction and general happiness, according to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.
...

Other occupations in which more than 60 percent said they were very satisfied included teachers, painters and sculptors, psychologists and authors.

"The most satisfying jobs are mostly professions, especially those involving caring for, teaching and protecting others and creative pursuits," said Tom W. Smith, director of NORC's General Social Survey, a poll supported by the National Science Foundation.

The worker satisfaction study, set for release Tuesday, is based on data collected since 1988 on more than 27,500 randomly selected people.

...

Clergy ranked by far the most satisfied and the most generally happy of 198 occupations.

Eighty-seven percent of clergy said they were "very satisfied" with their work, compared with an average 47 percent for all workers. Sixty-seven percent reported being "very happy," compared with an average 33 percent for all workers.

Jackson Carroll, Williams professor emeritus of religion and society at Duke Divinity School, found similarly high satisfaction when he studied Protestant and Catholic clergy, despite relatively modest salaries and long hours.

"They look at their occupation as a calling," Carroll said. "A pastor does get called on to enter into some of the deepest moments of a person's life, celebrating a birth and sitting with people at times of illness or death. There's a lot of fulfillment."

These results don't surprise me. I found my time as a priest very rewarding precisely for the reasons noted by Dr. Williams -- the opportunity to be present with people at particularly profound moments of their lives.

I sent a link to this story to Fr. Michael Berry, the vocation director for the Discalced Carmelites -- the guy who does their recruiting and a man for whom I was vocation director -- in hopes that he might be able to use the information in his work. It reminds me of a brochure I designed about twenty years ago -- a mockup of a newspaper job ad boasting long hours and low pay.

Today I miss that form of ministry. Hospice touched into it for me, but in a very piecemeal sort of way.

Now if only I could become a satisfied author ...

Peace and love,
Michael