QotD

"But there were others (who worked in East Harlem), the regular parish staff, who gave their lives to it. They didn't just work with the poor. They lived with them. ... There were times when you couldn't escape the feeling that, no matter how hard they fought against it, they thought of themselves as a kind of spiritual elite and of all other types of Christian service as comparatively irrelevant. There were times when their lightness of heart seemed forced and artificial and when their total immersion in the life of the ghetto seemed to border on the perverse. There were occasional glimpses of bitterness, envy, dissemblance among them ..."

Frederick Buechner, "Now and Then"

Buechner is not gratuitously bashing people who can't defend themselves here; he goes on to call them closer to saints than anyone he had ever known. Statements like this make me look at the attitude I take toward my own walk and service. It hit me hard.