NICKEL AND DIMED – On (NOT) Getting By In America was written by Barbara Ehrenreich in 2001.  Sadly, not much has changed for working poor. 
In fact, it may be worse.  Ms Ehrenreich went uncover in Wal-Mart, house cleaning, nursing home aide in various States and did all the lowliest jobs for meager wages.  And lived in squalled rooms - the only places she could afford. 
It is a sad testimony on American life.  But those invisible people whom she worked with were resourceful, full of humor and grit and generous despite their dead-end circumstances.   This book will make you angry.  The least we can do
is recognize their contribution to society and thank them for their labor. The most we can do is to do something to change these peoples’ lives.


ST. FRANCIS XAVIER (1505-1552) by James Broderick, S.J., was published in 1952 by Wicklow Press, exactly 400 years after the death of the saint. Seventy years later I found this volume in the monastery library here in Beacon and began to read. And what a story it tells!  The story really begins in Paris, at the University there, where Francis meets Ignatius Loyola and his first companions, long before the Jesuits were contemplated. Francis makes the 30 days Spiritual Exercises under Ignatius in 1534 and is transformed, inflamed with a zeal to share the faith that will burn in him and lead him for the rest of his life. It is in 1541 that Francis finally begins his journey to the East. He is waiting in Portugal for a ship that will take him, and the ship is waiting for the wind, so necessary. Finally, on his 35th birthday, 1541, the ships left going first to Mozambique and at last for Coimbra in Portuguese India. The rest of the story is taken mostly from St. Francis’s long letters back to his Jesuit brethren in Italy and Portugal. It is a fascinating tale, not only of what and how he preaches the Gospel to the various peoples, but of the simple sweet human being he becomes, changing and growing with the passing of the days and months. It is also a document of the various races and cultures that he encountered in his journeys and work: the indigenous pearl fishers, in the islands; the Hindu Brahmins and the Muslim, of India and Indonesia, the Japanese he did meet and convert, and the Chinese he only met at a distance, dying a few miles off the coast of China. I am glad to have met this saint. And I recommend this fine book to you. It is truly worth the read.