random thoughts at the coffee shop

So just now I'm reading an article in Books and Culture - a gift from my father-in-law - and it's a particular article called The Eucharist Makes the Church by JI Packer Professor of Theology at Regent College, Hans Boersma. But I'm reading the article at Starbucks, with a decaf mocha in my hand, which means that even as my eyes scroll through his summary of neo-Thomism and its rise at the hands of Pope Leo XIII, my ears are listening to the overhead music, my brain wondering who the artist is, and whether iTunes sells him.

What is it? Do I want it?

That these two questions are so often possible in natural tandem is a miracle I'm not so sure I want. If you know you can buy any thing, everything becomes its own commercial. It's all for sale. Life as product. No longer are commercials the interruptions to the action; commercials are the action, the default settting of the soul with respect to things (and people) outside ourselves. And maybe you, like me, have found youself on occasion trying to buy your self as well. What an exercise. What an enemy of grace.