I am one of those people who doesn’t make enough of an effort to remember their dreams. Therefore I can’t tell you what I dreamt about last night.

But this morning I woke up with the words of a song running through my mind, words that have been there since my youth: “Last night I had the strangest dream.” I suppose Katrina, Afghanistan and Iraq brought them to mind.

I want to thank Mr. Ed McCurdy who published them back in 1950 so that I can remember them today and share them with you.

Last night I had the strangest dream, /I'd never dreamed before. /I dreamed the world had all agreed /To put an end to war.

My father worked all of his adult life on the Union Pacific Railroad as a machinist. He made replacement parts for the locomotives that passed frequently through my hometown of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Daily he arrived home tired and covered with grease.

He also belonged to the machinists’ union. I once asked him if having a union at the railroad made any difference. He replied that on the one hand, no. The men always had the possibility of retiring at the age of sixty-five. But, on the other hand, yes. After the men unionized, some were still working at the age of sixty-five. Previously the railroad had always found some excuse to “lay them off” or to fire them.

My father escaped ever being laid off, but he often came home with reports of his fellow workers who had been. My mother would then ask how close he was to the same fate. Sometimes the answer was that he was very close, saved for the moment only by a few more months of seniority.

But one day some of his co-workers, who had been laid off, made the front page of the local newspaper. They had become garbage collectors.

I have lived in Venezuela almost continuously for more than twenty years. During that time I have looked at blank pages in newspapers—entirely censored by the government. I have seen naked bodies of young people, assassinated by the government, strewn on the floor of a hospital morgue. I spent nights in a cemetery, helping to protect a site where the government dumped 68 bodies in garbage bags. I remember very well the graffiti on a city wall near the teachers’ college, “If we are the future of the world, why are you killing us?” One morning the police raided my home and I have stood between the automatic weapon of a soldier and my neighbors.

WARNING: the following article is a theological reflection on shit and why it happens. If you do not like the word “shit” you may substitute “excrement,” “fecal material,” “poop,” or any other word you prefer to describe the matter that smells and looks like shit.

If you do not believe in God, I have no problem with that and accept your idea as a possibility and you have to read no further. But you will still be left with the question of why shit happens. All I am trying to do here, a person who does believe in a higher power, is to share with you how I have come to live with the reality.

Finally, I believe that the ideas contained herein are the result of Latin American wisdom from the people of Nueva Tacagua, a barrio in Caracas, where the inhabitants were surrounded by shit. They had to make some sense out of it. They helped me to do so also.

I see that President Bush is asking the troops to be hard on looters in the wake of Katrina. It surprises me to see this, in view of his own record on the matter.

I would highly recommend the book

ROBBING US BLIND, THE RETURN OF THE BUSH GANG AND THE MUGGING OF AMERICA

by Steve Brouwer. (Common Courage Press).

May the people of the United States be as hard on President Bush for his looting of millions from the citizenry as he is on the hungry for grabbing food.

In light of all the damage and suffering that President Bush and his staff have inflicted on the world, I would like to suggest that he henceforth be known as George W. “Katrina” Bush.

In its July 11 article about Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, TIME was only willing to print (erroneously) that Chávez called President Bush an “a_______.” However, in its online magazine August 23, Tim Padgett was able to get the magazine to print “ass_____.” That limits the imagination of people reading for the first time Mr. Padgett’s interpretation of what Chávez actually said. However, it still leaves the matter open for some delightful guessing since there are many words that begin with “ass:” “associate” (both Chávez and Bush are presidents) and “assistant” (Bush certainly has kept Chávez in the limelight) are two examples; not to mention “assassin” again (I have no comment on this one).

But I presume TIME and Mr. Padgett wish to continue the “asshole” story.

The July 11, 2005 issue of TIME in the United States carried an article about the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez (“TRACKING HURRICANE HUGO”). The first paragraph lacked one word. It said, “Since he became President in 1999, Chávez has publicly, in Spanish, called Bush an a_________ who is trying to assassinate him.”

The omitted letters immediately whetted my brain. What word did TIME not want to print? I thought of “animal.” That would not be a nice thing to say about the president of the United States. “Assassin” was another possibility, but I figured that TIME wouldn’t have hesitated to use that word since they used its derivative verb in the same sentence.

En Español In 1987 or 1988 I was in Cochabamba, Bolivia to improve my Spanish skills. One morning I arrived at the Maryknoll-sponsored language institute and discovered a great deal of consternation. A problem had arisen. A student from the United States had been denied entrance to a local restaurant.

No, let me correct myself. It wasn?t exactly that she had been denied access. She could have entered. It was just that she couldn?t take the accompanying Quechua woman friend with her.

I was ordained a Roman Catholic priest on May 29, 1965, in Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Sixteen other men, with most of whom I had shared eight years of study at Saint Thomas Seminary in Denver, were also ordained around that same time.

As a group, I don’t think I could have been a part of a finer group of men. Today four are still active in official duties; four are deceased; three are retired; and, six of us have since married.

Reflecting back over the forty years since my ordination, I would like to share a question that a woman asked me in the early ‘90s when I was giving a presentation in Wyoming: “Do you offer Mass every day?”

This is how I answered: