Two years ago at this time, my friend APB – who missed his true calling as a writer and became a lawyer – wrote a blog about Good Friday that included the following truth: “Pretty much all of us have people at the foot of our crosses, people who never abandon us even if they are only there to take us down.”

This has been a rotten Lent for me. (Not that Lent is ever great for me. Like being a John girl or a Paul girl, depending on which Beatle you like best, I’m an Advent girl, not a Lent one.) I’ve been stressed and worried over the impending layoff and what that means – or doesn’t – for my future as a journalist, which means I’ve just been slogging through the season without much thought.

And that’s why I’ve been thinking about Paul’s statement about people at the foot of our crosses. Sometimes, when you’re slogging through life, there are people around you – at the foot of your cross – who get you through. Without them, the slog would be unbearable. With them, it is tolerable.

For me, this Lent, the folks at the bottom of my cross are in the daily Mass community at the St. Thomas More Newman Center. Mostly, its the students, who bless me more than they could ever know. They don’t do anything in particular, but in their energetic, thoughtful selves, they give me hope – for the world, for the church, for the future. And, this far into the dark penitential season of Lent, hope is the light at the end of the tunnel.

(For those who want to read more from APB, he’s plays hooky from lawyering over at The Moving Finger Writes)

So I’m on Twitter, still trying to discern why it’s important for me to know why a group of students at a university are headed for ice cream or how a certain NPR host defines “distinguished” (can you REALLY do that in 140 characters?) when I stumble upon a bunch of Catholic twitters.

Who knew there was a plethora of Catholic Twitter feeds? There’s catholictweets (a page that is awfully barren), legit_catholic (not sure of the definition he/she is using) and even two catholicdads sites. But the one that caught my eye was this one:

“Catholichermit — consecrated Catholic hermit living a rule of the nine s’: silence, solitude, slowness, suffering, selflessness, simplicity, stillness, stability, serenity“

Isn’t it sort of anti-hermit to be twittering your every move? It reads, somewhat, like an online confession. Discuss among yourselves.

Not that I’m bitter or anything … not that I’m not the teenyist bit frustrated with the “you may not get your severance upon layoff” message we’ve been getting …. but, it is a bit irritating to read, as though I should feel sorry for the guys, that the CEOs of my newspaper’s parent company are (sniff) having to cut their bonuses by 60 percent. Apparently, they’ll only get about $3.1 million in bonuses this year.

Is it wrong to make so much money – is it immoral? Sinful? I’m not sure. But in this economy, with millions laid off, I think it is, at least, tasteless. Shame on them for taking any bonus when they are continually asking their papers to lay people off or force furloughs. Maybe they wouldn’t be losing money if they weren’t paying such outrageous salaries. Just a thought.