The Hands of the King are soft and fair;
  They never knew labors stain.
The hands of the Robber redly wear
  The bloody brand of Cain.
But the hands of the Man are hard and scarred
  With the scars of toil and pain.

The slaves of Pilate have washed his hands
  As white as a king's may be.
Barabbas with wrists unfettered stands,
  For the world has made him free.
                                     But thy palms toil-worn by nails are torn,
                                            O Christ, on Calvary!

                                                    --James Jeffrey Roche

We’ll be discussing this poem in an upcoming podcast.  I thought I’d put it out there for discussion ahead of time, since we’re closing in on Holy Week.  It’s an exercise for the reader to make a connection with Lent.

“The Way of the Cross”

Along the dark aisles
Of a chapel dim,
The little lame girl
Drags her withered limb.
And all alone she searches
The shadows on the walls,
To find the three pictures
Where Jesus falls.

The good news:  Our webhost server is valid as a pilgrimage web site.

The bad news: Your computer or web-enabled device receives the plenary indulgence, NOT YOU!

Joe Geisler (your host)

Joe is a Catholic engineer, entrepreneur, world-traveler, swing dancer, and man-about-town.  A raconteur, if you will.  He’s from a big fat German (or Austrian) Catholic family.  He’s spent a bit too much time reading Latin and Greek writers, not enough reading C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton.  Some have called him a visionary.

Sam Higgins (2nd banana)

Sam is a shady angry loner.  He’s currently studying transportation engineering at UT Austin and is sometimes distracted by shiny bits of glass.  He’s read extensively in theology and philosophy, including C.S. Lewis, and did a year stint at NET Ministries.  He’s fortunate enough to be one of Joe’s close friends.

I’m going to post this as a permalink, but I wanted to share my motivation for the podcast/website.  Forgive the formatting, the wordpress formatter is even worse than Word:

Motivation: Why do I want to do this?

• I want to tell the stories, mainly about the Catholic community, that need to be told
• I want to show how Catholics live out their faith in Austin (the interesting ones, at least)
• Discover and share insights from the Saints.  Got a problem?  They’ve already written about it 500 years before you were born.  We try to reinvent the spiritual wheel a bit much.
• This is one of my ways of tithing (unless it generates a cash stream)
• I want to shine a light on the 1/3 of the church that is single in a church that counts its parish sizes in “families”.
• I want to help foster a sense of community
• I want to share with my family what the heck I do in Austin, and introduce all the amazing people I’ve been blessed to get to know in my years here.

Maybe “Inside the Christian Actresses Studio”? What do you think of Thomistic theology? What’s your favorite sound?

OK, I’ve lined up two amazing and beautiful ladies to interview as my first guests.
Another very photogenic young lady and my friend Arlen will join me to discuss Sacred Poetry.
We have musicians ready to go. The JOE’s PEOPLE logo is looking awesome, thanks to Sabrina Vega!

We still have to finalize a location for recording where we can have a small audience and decent
acoustics, but it’s all coming together.

First podcast recording targeted for March 2nd, possibly will slip to Sat March 9th. We do some
editing, and then it goes live on the interweb at 8pm the next day.