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A Catholic aware of their blessed items and their proper disposal can end up almost with a drawer full of blessed sacramentals no longer usable.  The normal disposal for blessed items is burning or burying, not simply tossing them in the trash.  Over the years I have managed to collect blessed palm branches, warn out rosaries, brown scapulars, and other blessed items.  Burning is not feasible for Rosaries and the thought of burying these items in my yard does not appeal to me.  I think of a future owner digging into the ground and finding all of these items in various states of deterioration and wondering if the previous owner might not have been a Catholic serial killer in the sense of one who only killed Catholics and disposed of them in the back yard.

So here is my proposed solution.  Parishes should keep a box up front marked for disposal of blessed items.  This would be great on a couple of levels.  1) People can have blessed items properly disposed when no longer usable.  2) It would give people the awareness that blessed items are to be disposed of in a particular way and not just trashed.  3) Teach people that blessed items are of some importance in the first place.

So what do you think of this idea?

When it comes to ecumenism, it seems to me that hardly anything is as ecumenistic as a Christmas Carol. In churches throughout the world you can find traditional carols being sung that were written Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, and on and on. These traditional carols written across denominational lines emphasize the wonder that a child was born unto us who would redeem us from our sins. The basis of ecumenism is to find our commonalities while not ignoring doctrinal differences. When it comes to the Christ Child he is both common to us all and wonderful to us all.

When we are singing these great traditional carols we are not thinking that Silent Night was written by a German priest, Hark the Herald Sings by Methodist founder Charles Wesley, or LIttle Town of Bethlehem by an American Episcopalian priest Phillips Brooks. Instead we look to the beauty of the carol and the doctrinal purity they contain about the incarnation. While it is also fun to find the history of a specific carol as to when it was written and who wrote it; finding this out does not ruin it for us just because it was written by someone from a different ecclesiastical point of view.

As the Angels sang to the shepherds, Christmas Carols are also accessible to men of good will. These traditional carols can transcend the line of belief in Christianity. As I wrote in my conversion story it was the traditional Christmas Carol that I most loved even as a young atheist and then throughout my life. While I also enjoy the songs containing Christmas trappings or Christmas weather they were always a second tier for me and songs about the birth of Christ were always preeminent even I did not have a clue about the theology of the incarnation and my need for a redeemer – at least on a conscious level. No doubt this is also true for other non-Christians and these songs could be used as a vehicle for grace and conversion as was done in my case.

As someone who really loves to read/listen to books I do some thinking about fiction and the way the story is presented. Not at any real literary level, but as also a geek I also think along those lines.

Now I have wondered if there is a technical term for the time it takes a book to suck you into the story. Sometimes a book gets you going from the first pages and sometimes much more is required to be setup before you really enter the story. I wouldn’t say that a good book always grabs you from the beginning, but often this is true. I have also found enjoyable stories that took much more to setup, especially in Science Fiction where sometimes a lot of history in this universe must be explained first.

Now whether there is a technical term or not for this – I call it a books “Event Horizon”, this is where the escape velocity exceeds you’re wanting to leave the book. Once you have entered the Event Horizon you are sucked into the book and can not leave it. Up to this point you could put the book down and maybe not even pick it up again. Now every book does not have a Event Horizon that suck you into the story, some just plain suck – and live you empty at the end. Unfortunately I have a high tolerance for fictional pain and rarely stop reading a book just because I didn’t like the story. Though when it comes to theology I won’t bear much silliness before the book hits the event horizon of my trashcan.

In the “When life gives you Lemons” category, this year I have a much longer commute to work that tripled the time I spend to drive. To demonstrate what a book lover I am, my first thoughts were “Wow, this gives me more time with audiobooks.” Thankful for sites like Librivox, Podiobooks, and book-reading podcasts like Forgotten Classics I have a steady diet of free audiobooks.

The Vatican has released the post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Word of God in the life and mission of the Church.

Unfortunately the Smoke of Satan has entered the Church since the Apostolic Exhortation on the Vatican website has been released in PDF format. Jimmy Akin has rightly called this “an evil file format” as he explains here. Though some of his objections are overcome for Mac users since PDF’s can be read natively without extra software or those who use and Adobe Reader replacement program like Foxit Reader on the PC. The formatting of this document is pretty nice though.

Regardless I still don’t like reading long PDFs on a computer anyway. So I have converted Verbum Domini to two eBook formats which gives a good in-depth table of contents and being easily readable on a eBook reader.

ePub format This format is good for most eBook readers except the Kindle.
mobi format Good for the Kindle and some other eBook readers.

Note 1: I uploaded these files to Dropbox. This is a great service that gives you 2GB of space free that you allows you to create a folder on your computer that is continuously synched and can be synched on multiple computers with difference operation systems. If you’re interested use this link which both gives me 250MB more file space and automatically adds 250MB to your free account.

Note 2: I got a Word file version from The Cross Reference and then was able to load it in Apple’s Pages and export it to ePub, which is a really nice new feature. I then used the open-source multi-operating system program Calibre to convert it to mobi format.

I have been thinking of renaming my blog from The Curt Jester to the The Catholic Jester. I don’t feel as curt as I once did and am hopefully more Catholic. So if you are inclined to helping me out her on this question please answer the poll question or leave a comment.

Blog Polls

Update: OK, The Curt Jester it remains and for the good reasons mentioned in the comments. Besides sticking with the pun is more my style. I originally choose the name in homage to the Danny Kaye movie The Court Jester which I own and love and have watched repeatedly. I so enjoy Danny Kaye movies for his great talent and humor and The Court Jester is a classic with some of the greatest movie lines. Thanks for participating in this poll.

As a convert from atheism the lead up to Christmas always reminds me of my first Christmas with faith in Christ. It also reminds me of the odd path and what God used to get my attention in some ways.

Strangely God seems to have used a fouled up class assignment as part of this. As a Freshman in High School I went to the room number of the next class on my schedule only to find that it was the music room for Freshman choir – a class I had not signed up for at all. While I loved music and at the time was a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young Fanatic along with of course The Beatles the idea of Freshman choir sounded quite boring to me and not the type of music I wanted to sing at all. I was much more comfortable singing CSN songs with my Father’s theatre friends. I informed Mr. Gissel the music teacher of this mistaken class assignment and how I needed to rectify it and he asked m “Why don’t I stay and see whether I liked the class or not.” Well for me this was pretty much like Andrew telling his brother Peter to “Come and see” in the influence it had on me. Mr. Gissel was an almost stereotypical teacher with a bow tie and who lived in “Boring, Oregon.” Almost a Don Knotts lookalike (though he was a childhood friend of Andy Griffith). He was also a very humble man with great gifts as a music teacher and I remained in the choir throughout High School.

While I ended up enjoying all that we sang from a wide variety of music it was the Christmas performance I looked forward to the most. The first year before my voice had changed I sang the solo tenor part in Good King Wenceslas. It was also the traditional Carols singing of Christ’s birth that I so loved even if I had zero idea of what the Incarnation is or even a very basic understanding of the Trinity. All that I knew was that there was a beauty in the music and the lyrics that captivated me. As a young atheist is was the materialistic part of Christmas that I looked forward to the most. The outer trappings of the Christmas season were appealing as participating in a tradition older than you that helped you to generate cozy feelings. Also as a young atheist liberal my deepest theology was “All you need is love” which of course had no definition of Love worth thinking greatly on. I just knew that I loved the old hymns and greatly enjoyed Caroling in the neighborhood.

Christmas for me was also a time for me to use my creativity. I enjoyed hand-crafting ornaments and creating my own bows made of multiple segments of ribbon and the use of a glue gun. In my own creativity I never reflected on my own creator. As a radical environmentalist creation for me was something that had to be saved from man – not something for man. It is no surprise that the emotions artificially generated from a materialistic Christmas never stateside me and as the last gift was opened there could be nothing more. So Christmas for me as always a thing of highs and lows. Anticipation and melancholy.

Christmas of course changed over the years as I got married and we had started a family. I slowly learned that it truly was more blessed to give than to receive – though I also had no idea where that quote came from. Christmas for me had reached the Hallmark Channel “It is all about family” to me. An understanding on which I thought sufficient. The music of Christmas was also always a constant companion to me. I still so loved hearing those hymns and singing along with them in the car. You could always rely on picking up some secular station that played Christmas music.

Though over the years less and less secular stations would play Christmas Carols or if they did it was for a limited time and mainly of the “Jingle Bells” variety. While I also like the secular hymns that speak of Winter and the atmosphere of Christmas they do not hold a candle to me compared to the beauty of the traditional Carols that sang of the birth of Jesus. Unfortunately it was becoming harder and harder to the music I so loved in the bands of the radio I went searching for it.

1996 was the year I left the behind the dregs of my directionless deism. The deism that I had floundered in when I lost my faith in atheism. Searching through the radio the only Christmas music I could find that I liked was on the dreaded Christian radio stations. While I had grown to more and more to admire committed Christians actually listening to what they had to say was another story. Deism is a sort of no-mans land, but not a no-Gods land. I didn’t want to be lead to Christianity because of a cultural preference for it. I wanted to know the truth, but did not know what tools I could use to determine the truth about God. At that point I saw philosophy only as a way to deny something you are plainly able to see. I was unaware that the philosophy I was aware of was of the sort infected by relativism and skepticism.

So I took the plunge and started to listen to Protestant Christian radio to be able to hear the music I so loved to hear and sing. I put up with the interruptions to the music about Christ when they actually talked about Christ and why he came into the world. These annoying interruptions of preaching and reading from Scripture soon came less and less annoying. I became eager to hear more and more about Christ and to really hear the scriptures for the first time. Sure I had my abortive attempt to read the Bible as a deist started from beginning to end without going much further than the Book of Numbers. Sola Scriptura from the perspective of an atheist turned deist just doesn’t work. I had no traditions, even Protestant, one from which to interpret scripture. Through Protestant Radio I first heard scripture via a tradition that interpreted it and presented it in a understandable way.

This was the very beginning of an actual faith in Christ though it would be over three years later until my journey ended (and started) in the Catholic Church. I still had some years to devour as much as I could get in the library from the Protestant and Catholic sources. I just now reflect on the providence of the mess-up school schedule that in some ways brought me to faith. My aesthetic love for the music finally lead me to an actual love of Christ. I have written about other aspects of my conversion story, but I really see this as one of the larger threads in it.

Plus as a Catholic I get the bonus of being able to listen to Christmas Music up to the Epiphany! I no longer have that after opening the gifts melancholy, because now I have a gift I can never exhaust – the gift of faith. Thank you Mr. Gissel for your version of “Come and see.”

So whether your are a fan of my blog, a casual reader, or one of my blessed trolls – I wish you all a blessed and Merry Christmas and that the joy of the Incarnation will fill your heart. A special shout out to my fellow bloggers, podcasters, and everyone writing about, defending, and preaching the Catholic faith for all they have taught me.

Once again the news stories that seem to get the most attention in the culture is surrounded around a celebrity. There is always so much attention paid to when a celebrity falls even though what they did is all to common. Attention is also paid to those who are famous for basically being famous. Those from a prominent family with lots of money who make fools of themselves in their lack of restraint. A culture that worships fame and money seems to take some pleasure when they fall. A sort of smug attitude is easy to develop to think “Hey if I had that much money or was so famous, I wouldn’t make those mistakes and would enjoy having it.” We wonder how they can squander their “good luck” and to end up causing scandal. Surely with enough money we would be content.

To paraphrase the Prophet Samuel when relating a story to King David. “We are that man.” Which one of us has not squandered the gifts given to us from God. That have not prepared ourselves for the grace He would surely give us if we were open to it. As Catholics how much do we really do as individuals to both prepare ourselves for and to avail ourselves of the sacraments. We go to Mass distracted and remain so even as Calvary unfolds before us and the wonder and mystery of the Eucharist presents itself to us. We hardly pray or fast and then wonder why God has not made saints of us yet. We have the Pearl of Great Price and still try to fill our lives with what will never fulfill us. But hey it’s much easier to ding on the latest celebrity scandal then see our own sins and how far we have fallen from the mark. in fact it is much easier to write a blog post on this then to take my own advice.