So yesterday afternoon I scraped together the last July's pittance and went shopping in Honolulu's real-deal of a Chinatown for absolutely necessary provisions for the last days of the month:

Coffee (with chicory), 40 oz. of firm tofu, dried mushrooms and wood fungus, basil, onions, vegetarian stir-fry sauce, two pounds of plain rice noodles, and a large clump of nutritious-looking, nameless potherb for only a dollar and a half, which, according to the couple of Chinese ladies who observed my selecting it with skeptically, more than usually narrowed, eyes, "Can be chopped up and put in soup."  Plainly, they doubted that my cooking skills would be equal to doing that.  Clearly, les dames Chinoises would be astounded to see the fragrant and nummy Pho that I am concocting this afternoon.

But to the point of this today's blog: Just as I left the Chinese market place yesterday, hurrying to catch the next bus home, I was hailed by an unknown, beggarly sort of Chinaman, who thrust into my hand a small, shiny pamphlet which said, "Jesus Loves You!"  Which, when I had looked for half a second to see what it was, I firmly thrust back into the beggarly Chinaman's hand, saying, "No! I don't want this.  Take it back," and he took it back, looking somewhat confounded.  And I felt good, as tough, gruff Mr. Hemingway used to say--wonderful even--at having at last told Christians that they may not bestow their unwelcome gift of presumptuous love and the insulting superfluity of salvation upon me.

So how is it then that I get on so well with St. Francis of Assisi--whose Little Flowers I am all the time re-reading in the original 14th century Umbrian dialect?  Well, frankly, I just bleep over the parts about Jesus and Mary and 'Iddio,' and Hell and Satan and damnation, and skip right to the sermons to birds and animals, and to the lovely, lovely disquisitions on Holy Poverty, which nothing even in Buddhism or Vedanta surpasses.  And of course, like a child at bedtime, I have my favorites--San Francesco ed il Lupo di Gubbio, for example--that having read hundreds of times before diminisheth not a whit the Aesopian charm of.  And withal, finally, I must confess that any of the stories about Santa Chiara I find, somehow, infinitely appealing and persuasive--She is such a dainty, genteel, angelic lady-saint.  Fierce and growly atheist/epicurean that I am, I am not so stiff-necked with pride nor so obdurate in sin that I could resist Santa Chiara.  If Santa Chiara were to offer me the Holy Eucharist, I very much fear that I would accept it.