"His second night in Talkingham, Hazel Motes walked along down town close to the store fronts but not looking in them. The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all of time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky."
           From Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

I write a blog called Paying Attention To The Sky under the pseudonym of Derek Jeter, and proclaim myself "an unknown yet consumate icon of the famed New York Yankee shortstop of the same name." I have been auditing courses from time to time in the Masters in Ministry Program at St. Johns Seminary in Boston. I  lived and worked 23 years in Japan and after returning to the states in 1994 worked in a series of Training and Curriculum Design positions at Boston area companies.

Right now I am semi-retired (working as a Sys Admin/Site Manager for a computer training center in Downtown Boston) and currently exploring (what the Catholic Church calls "discernment') his vocation with the Church.

I am dedicated to paying attention to the sky and other metaphors that echo the words of the apostle Paul in 1 Thessalonians 5:2 when he recalls Jesus' warning to his followers to be on the watch - a warning about expectation of the end-time, which will come upon sleeping humans like "a thief in the night" (Matthew 24:43).

Simone Weil urges a Christian poetic that insists on educating the reader into paying attention to people and to language and to things, because the cultivation of attention directed to the other (the suffering neighbor; the created order as God intended it, or shalom; the created order as it is, broken; and God) is fundamental to the ethics of Christianity.

One cannot love or help a person one refuses to listen to; one cannot redeem a world one doesn't look at; one cannot serve a God one doesn't engage with, ask questions of, listen to, study. And, as Weil points out, one cannot space out and pray, prayer demands attention. Perhaps a Christian poetic might insist on nourishing a broken faculty of the modern mind - attention.

If you visit the stadium in New York, you may see the real Jeter during long at bats for an opposing team's batter, scanning the sky and smoothing the ground in front of his position. You might even wonder what he is thinking about. Well, rest assured,  it's much the same as I write on my blog -- all part and parcel of the same thing, paying attention to the sky, alert to the next crack of the bat, anticipating the pitch.

nice place here, indeed...trying to get in the swing of things and make some new friends...I am David and also a Catholic newbie!