Today’s Life-Line is:

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen” and he would have meant the same thing.

~ John Steinbeck

♦ This is my favorite opening paragraph of any novel. Jesuit schools, in particular, always seemed fond of Steinbeck. When I was in high school we read The Pearl, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, Grapes of Wrath, and my favorite, East of Eden. Steinbeck’s Cannery Row has been a standard text in 9th and 10th grade English classes at Jesuit High Schools for years. I wonder if this is because the opening lines are as good a description of the church as any I have ever read in any theology or ecclesiology textbook. But then, in fairness, is this such a surprise? Isn’t the church, the ekklesia, simply made up of the human and the holy? Meaning not that some are holy and some are human, but rather one and the same, blessed but broken, awesomely and wonderfully made yet unfinished. So many people, and so many of those who self-identify as Christians, don’t realize that human and holy are not polar opposites. In actuality, each requires the other to become authentic, true, and fruitive. Stated theologically, sanctification is humanization and humanization is sanctification.