Be Not Idle

The One-Word Survey

1. Where is your cell phone? purse

2. Your significant other? nonexistant

3. Your hair? blonde

4. Your mother? dynamo

5. Your father? jack-of-all-trades

6. Your favorite thing? friends

7. Your dreams last night? sporatic

8. Your favorite drink? coffee

9. Your dream/goal? Heaven

10. What room you are in? office

11. Your hobby? writing

12. Your fear? layoff

13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? here

14. Where were you last night? home

15. Something that you aren’t? sinister

16. Muffins? bleh

17. Wish list item? husband

18. Where you grew up? Michigan

19. Last thing you did? exam

20. What are you wearing? skort

21. Your TV? off

22. Your pets? neighbors’

23. Friends? crazy

24. Your life? good

25. Your mood? nervous

26. Missing someone? Mom

27. Your car? Saturn

28. Something you’re not wearing? jockstrap

29 Your favorite store? Bookblues

32. Your favorite color? red

33. When is the last time you laughed? today

34. Last time you cried? June

The Four-item Survey

A) Four places that I go to over and over: Port Huron, Waterford, Stratford, work

B) Four people who email me regularly: Keith, Anne, Michele, spam

C) My favorite places to eat: Riveria, AJ’s Salt Docks, Cheap Charlie’s, home

D) Four places I would like to go right now: Toronto, Mackinaw Island, Washington DC, Spain

E) Four TV shows I watch all the time? LOST… and nothing else, really, so I’m adding:

F) Four books I always re-read? The Mating Season (PG Wodehouse), The Hobbit (Tolkien), The Man Who Was Thursday (GK Chesterton), Peanuts Celebration (Charles Schultz)

I cannot seem to load my reviews onto it. I will try to e-mail myself from college or the library and see if that works.

Sometimes Charity needs a baseball bat. - Father Jim Lopez

I think it’s the first time in my adult life I’ve laughed in the confessional.  I worry about being uncharitable when standing up for my faith, but Father attempted to set me aright. He also directed me to the Sunday evening Mass, which he says at 7 pm in order to catch the dayworkers and boat crews that are out until evening.

The Gospel was about the multiplication of loaves and fish.

Father changed his homily for the evening Mass, as he had talked to a parishioner and gotten permission to use her family’s story. He spoke about a large family whose young son was suffering from a long illness which was difficult to diagnose. 

When news went around that he was sick and going to specialists, people began to show up with food: cooked meals for the whole family, groceries, etc. It lifted a burden off the family and it also taught them something: humility.

Father said that the family took pride in being self-sufficient. (I had to nod, because that seems to be the way with big Catholic families.) It was overwhelming, but they learned to humbly accept what God was doing for them through other people.

It was one of the best homilies ever.

Last night my sister and I were sitting in the den and I said to her, “I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent on some machine and fluids from a
bottle to keep me alive. That would be no quality of life at all… if that ever happens, just pull the plug.”

So she got up, unplugged the computer, and threw out my wine.

Of course, I laughed at this joke, but then I wondered if it were true. This sounds like something her sister would do to her - and my brother would do to me!

And in that spirit, evidentally, my history professor came up with the following:

 ”Mary Magdeline was from a wealthy family. Her uncle, Joseph of Arimethea, was wealthy enough to afford a very good tomb. He was also friendly with Pontius Pilate so…”

And that’s where my note-taking ends because it wasn’t even remotely funny anymore. I have absolutely no idea where he gets this crap from. He also lectured today (and previously) that “inferential reasoning” and “most Jewish scholars” say that Jesus definitely was married or the Saducees would have attacked him. 

I give up. I’ve asked him about his sources, and he lent me a book written by a University of Michigan instructor in the ’50s with footnotes that wouldn’t pass muster in a high school student’s essay today. (For example, a comment that Buddhist missionaries obviously influenced the religious environment of Jesus’ time leads to this footnote: Gospel of John.) No chapter, no verse - and no explanation linking Buddhist thought with that in the Gospel.  The book also treated Gnostic writings as equal to Book of Tobit and such. 

I promised myself I wouldn’t even bother to ask him for sources anymore, especially since other students roll their eyes and today mutter “There she goes again.” But when he peppers his talks with dirty jokes and “On the History channel I saw…”, I want to scream.

Jeff Miller aka “The Curt Jester” has a post about women who were ordained as priests in a Protestant church - and insist they’re Catholic priests because they “remain faithful to the (Catholic) church”.  They’ve been excommunicated, of course, but they and their supports don’t “feel” the excommunication. 

Therefore, they’re not.

 This actually reminds me of an interesting anecdote that someone told me (and I have permission to share).  There was a married woman who started having an adulterous affair. Her husband and children were upset, of course, but even worse was the blithe way in which she wanted to incorporate her lover into their lives. Namely, she wanted her lover to move into the same home as her husband.

I know there are people (like NOW ex-president Patricia Ireland) who think that bigamy is fine if only people in the relationship are “open-minded”. However, the husband (and children) weren’t having it.

Her husband filed for a divorce. After it was finalized, the ex-wife continued to refer to herself as his wife.  She remarried. When he remarried, she showed up at the hotel where the ceremony took place - with her NEW husband - in order to object.

So that’s what I think of women who excommunicate themselves and then insist they’re in communion with the Church.  

One of the Baby Rabbits - the quality is poor either because I was moving too much or the camera was zoomed in too close.

Mother Rabbit and her brood - the only photo in which her head was up. The rest of the time, she was grooming the heck out of them. She actually managed to flip one of them (on the far left) onto its back. It kept nursing, its white belly exposed and its legs kicking  a little.

When I mow the lawn or weed the garden behind the house, I always watch for Mr. Toad, the amphibian that suns himself near the garden. It’s not unusual for him to leap suddenly from the grass or scurry into the flowerbed.

So today when I was coming around the side of the deck, I wasn’t particularly surprised to see movement in the grass head of me. But it was too fast and furry to be a toad and too slow to be a chipmunk. It was followed by a small explosion of other bodies running away from the horrible Mower of Earsplitting Doom.

Bunnies! Two itsy bitsy rabbits went hopping through the grass and into the garden along the privacy fence. One remained in the grassy nook between the trunks of the maple cluster until it, too, lost its nerve and made a run for the greenery. Since I like the lawn is little longer and my yard is relatively dog-free,  the backyard must have looked like a little sanctuary (until I began mowing).

I figured that their mother had left them in what she thought was a safe place, so I kept mowing.  Then she burst from the garden and ran away, leaving the three little ones behind. I got a nice look at them, since they weren’t sure at first if I were evil, too.  They are very young, so that their ears are more round than long, and I could hold them in one hand (which I wouldn’t). Then they voted that although I didn’t make a lot of racket, I was clearly a Hateful Beast. They hid in the mums.

Mother took several hours return.  She was none too subtle, either.  I looked up and there she was in front of the deck, scratching her ear. I moved and she hopped over to the corner of the deck, “hidden” by a statue of Our Lady. I could see one exquisite black pool of an eye staring at me. Once in a while the long fuzzy frond of an ear would twitch into view. 

While she waited, the three youngsters came out from the garden. I left the deck and moved to the bedroom to get a better view from that window and saw something unusual: a wild rabbit grooming her brood while they nursed.

I took some nice photos before she spooked and hid in the sedum. Then I realized there were FIVE babies. Cute ones, too. 

As a young minister, I was asked by a funeral director to hold a graveside service for a homeless man who had no family or friends. The funeral was to be held at a new cemetery way back in the country, and this man would be the first to be buried there.

I was not familiar with the backwoods area, and I soon became lost. Being a typical man, I did not stop to ask for directions. I finally arrived an hour late. I saw the backhoe and the open
grave, but the hearse was nowhere in sight. The gravediggers were eating lunch. I apologized to them for my tardiness, and I stepped to the side of the open grave. There I saw the vault lid
already in place.

I assured the workers I would not hold them up for long. The workers gathered around the grave and stood silently as I began to pour out my heart and soul. As I preached about ‘looking forward to a brighter tomorrow’ and ‘the glory that is to come,’ the workers began to say ‘Amen,’ ‘Praise the Lord,’ and ‘Glory!’ The fervor of these men truly inspired me. So, I preached and I preached like I had never preached before, all the way from Genesis to Revelations.

I finally closed the lengthy service with a prayer, thanked the men, and walked to my car. As I was opening the door and taking off my coat, I heard one digger say to another, ‘I ain’t EVER seen nuttin’ like that before, and I been puttin’ in septic tanks for t’irty years.”

Via the Curt Jester, a MySpace poll shows the Catholic Church is out of touch with young people. He writes:

Of course what most of these poll (sic) indicate is that people think that the Church is out of touch with the morality of the modern culture, that it is not an echo chamber for current societal ethics. The only thing the Church needs to be in touch with is the Holy Spirit.

If the Church were to bend with trends, it would be no use to anyone - least of all young people. The world is full of “rebels” who are easily swayed to follow trends or parrot conspiracy theories, or gossip about anti-celebrities (who are really just celebrities with anti-establishment reps). The easy way to get them to do what someone else wants? Make them think that someone, somewhere, is against them and they can rebel. (Advertisers took lessons from Satan, eh?)

My “baby” brother told me about a girl he met at college. He found her annoying because she looked down her nose at hicks, geeks, and the out-of-touch. At a party, she went on about a tattoo she really, really wanted to get. He asked her why getting a tattoo was so important.

“I want to be different,” she said, “like everybody else.”

Then she got angry when he laughed his butt off.

http://www.splendoroftruth.com/curtjester/archives/2008/07/o ut-of-touch.php