Raising the Breakfast Bar

For the first time in two years I was able to enjoy a complimentary hot breakfast at the hotel I stayed in last week. I am honestly a tad ashamed at the amount of sausage and scrambled eggs and toast and biscuits and gravy I consumed. I ate more than I should have. Far more. Quiet Ron.

Still, it reminds me of a story where me brother Phil and a good friend of the family, one Fr. Scherer, had went out to to eat together at a dinner buffet restaurant. It may help non-Catholic readers to know that the Church teaches there is a difference among sins. Mortal sins are very bad and separate us completely from God. Think murder, for an easy and (I hope) noncontroversial example. Venial sins are sins, but not so bad as all that. Think the proverbial little white lie here.

Anyway, Phil and the good padre, by their own admittance, readily availed themselves of the buffet. A bit too readily they each, again, conceded. They sat at the table afterwards like bloated, contented lions on the Serengeti. "I ate too much," Fr. Scherer remarked.

"So did I," Phil agreed.

Father observed, "You know, gluttony is a sin."

"Yeah," my brother shamefully allowed, with slowly shaking head.

"But we didn't eat so much as to make us sick," Fr. Scherer continued. "So it's only a venial sin."

I like how that priest thinks. I don't feel so bad about last Thursday now either.