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Since I am current reading the outstanding biography of St. Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd (The Life of Thomas More) it is interesting to make a comparison between this saint and the saint who is celebrated today — St. Thomas Becket.

Interestingly they were both born within 20 yards of each other but a little over three hundred years apart. Both wore hair shirts under their fine clothing ,though Thomas More started doing this early in his life and Thomas Becket accepted the practice towards the end of their life. They both ended up being Load Chancellor and both ended up being martyred defending the rights of the Church against the King (Henry II, Henry VIII). In both cases this included defending the Primacy of Peter.

Though St. Thomas Becket is truly someone who grew in office. In the U.S. they refer to Supreme Court justices who become more liberal during their time on the court as growing in office, but Thomas Becket truly grew in office since he grew in holiness. No one would have pegged Thomas Becket as someone likely to be martyred earlier in his career. His appointment as the Archbishop of Canterbury was largely a political appointment with Henry II thinking he was stacking this position in his favor. Yet St. Thomas Becket became an ascetic and took his duties seriously and defended the Church against local control of the Church.

It has been reported that Henry II said "Who will rid me of this turbulent (or troublesome ) priest?" or something along that and his command was taken as authority to kill the Archbishop. You do wish there were more troublesome priests/bishops in England today that annoyed politicians.

Since today is the Feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe I think it is a good time to remind people about some of the myths involved with this miraculous image, and yes I do believe this is a miraculous image.

As Catholics we are quite use to unhistorical elements developing in the stories of the saints, especially of the early saints. Though this is something that still happens. Over the years I have compiled some interesting facts that Catholic historian Sandra Miesel has written about some of these items that have developed around the story and image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The following are from what she has written in the past.

1. Our Lady of Guadalupe’s appearance to Juan Diego in 1531 did not halt Aztec human sacrifices. Those had already been stopped by the Spanish capture of Mexico City, more than a decade previously.
2. Today is the date of the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe which prompts me to vent some pet peeves concerning this apparition. First, Our Lady is not, not, not dressed like "an Aztec princess." The Aztecs wore calf-length wrap skirts and loose sleeveless blouses, no veils. The Guadalupana’s garments are those of a typical late medieval Marian image. Rose and blue were favorite colors. Nor is her apparent pregnancy unique. Pregnant Madonnas used to be quite popular in the Middle Ages until Trent decided they were in poor taste. (Some had see-though bodies or fetal Infants who could be taken in and out.)

   Next, the sun, moon, stars, and angel were painted by human hands at some point in the 16th C. They are discoloring and flaking as was seen up close when the tilma was removed from its case for scientific examination in the 1980s. These features bring Mary’s iconography in line with medieval Immaculate Conceptions or Assumptions. She used to wear a silly little crown, too, but that was removed in the 1890s.

3. A recent academic study of the history of devotion to the Guadalupana is MEXICAN PHOENIX by DA Brading (Cambridge, 2001). One surpise there is that the earliest record of the apparition refers to a variety of flowers, not just roses.

Can you imagine even thinking of painting on a miraculous image? How could anybody have thought that was a good idea at the time. Surely some artists have giant egos and you must have a pretty good sized one to decide to "improve upon" a miraculous image.

Mulier Fortis tagged me with this meme.

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags? Wrapping paper. As a kid I was pretty good at wrapping and use to create my own custom bows. Though I did end up having to wrap presents for everyone else
2. Real tree or artificial? Sometime real, sometimes artificial
3. When do you put up the tree? After thanksgiving I put up my Advent tree. Yeah Advent Tree which mysteriously turns into a Christmas tree on the 3rd week of Advent.
4. When do you take the tree down? Feast of the Epiphany.
5. Do you like eggnog? Never tried it.
6. Favourite gift received as a child? A cassette player.
7. Do you have a Nativity scene? Yes.
8. Hardest person to buy for? Jesus, it’s his birthday after all. What do you buy for the person who made everything. Thinking about this though maybe I should buy him something I like, that way if he doesn’t show up to pick up his present I can use it till he picks it up.
9. Worst Christmas gift you ever received? As a kid I hated getting clothes.
10. Mail or email Christmas cards? Snail mail.
11. Favourite Christmas Movie? I am not good at picking just one favourite. "It’s a wonderful Life" is probably it. Though I also love "Elf" and "A Christmas Story." Plus I guess "Die Hard" is a Christmas movie since it takes place during Christmas. Though the problem with Christmas movies is that they are basically movies that take place at Christmas, but are not about Christmas itself. I am still waiting for a truly good Nativity story on the level of "The Passion of the Christ" which I watch every year on Good Friday. From the reviews I had read of "A Nativity Story", which I will probably watch this year, show it was not up to the quality artistic retelling I want.

    Almost every movie that gets made for this time of year has the message "don’t be selfish and spend time with family." While the message itself is good, we need to spend time with our family and the Holy Family. The trend in Hollywood movies released for Christmas in the last several years such as "Christmas with the Kranks"
    are only getting worse.

12. When do you start shopping for Christmas? No set date other than being prior to Christmas.
13. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present? No.
14. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas? Candy canes.
15. Clear lights or colored on the tree? Colored lights for all of you clear light heretics!
16. Favourite Christmas song? Like I said I am not good at picking just one favourite. It would have to be something like "The Boar’s Head Carol", "Hark the Herald Angel’s sing", "The first Noel." I pretty much love most traditional Christmas carols – you know the ones that actually mention Christ.
17. Travel at Christmas or stay home? Stay home. My worst Christmas was one at sea.
18. Can you name all of Santa’s reindeer? Probably not without getting some mixed up with The Seven Dwarfs.
19. Angel on the tree top or a star? Angel.
20. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning? Morning. When my kids were younger they got to open one on Christmas Eve.
21. Most annoying thing about this time of year? That it ends. Other than that it would be the war against Christmas.
22. Best thing about this time of year? Celebrating the Incarnation. Okay that was the first pious thought that popped into my head. There is just so much to love about this time of year where even though the popular culture does it best to suppress it, they can’t totally suppress that we are celebrating the birth of the Messiah. As hard as they try to turn this into a generic unspecified holiday season, they are still not quite effective. After all a major step in my conversion was because secular radio stations stopped playing traditional Christmas carols and I was chased into the realm of Protestant radio to find the songs I loved since I was an atheist child.

Some people have asked about making available the file I made that converted the Pope’s new encyclical Spe Salvi from text to speech. I had processed the file to remove references in parenthesis and footnotes to make it better to listen to.

I have two versions of the file one as an mp3 that was converted using AT&T’s Natural Voice Mike and the other in AAC format using the Alex voice the comes with OSX Leopard. Unfortunately I did not have any voices with a slight German accent.

If you want the file you can go here and select the file of your choice

Two years ago I decided to create my own Advent Wreath graphic instead of just using the normal animated gif that I used previously. If you would like it for your own blog you can use the html code below which uses some homepage server space that won’t effect the bandwidth for my blog. I will replace the graphic each week so that it correctly shows the number of candles that should be lit. On Christmas I will change it to another graphic I created for Christmastide.

<img decoding="async" src="http://home.comcast.net/%7Ecurtjester/curtjester_advent.gif" width="170" height="189">

Additionally underneath my Advent graphic on my left side I have created a JavaScript that gives a countdown to Christmas. If you want to do the same thing you can insert this script into your blog template with the following code underneath where you place the graphic. Though WordPress.com users would be out of luck since they don’t allow JavaScript.

<!-- Christmas Countdown - Jeff Miller--><br /> <script language="JavaScript"> function eventcount() { var now = new Date(); var message = ""; var event = new Date("Dec 25 2007 00:00:01"); var seconds = (event - now) / 1000; var minutes = seconds / 60; var hours = minutes / 60; var days = hours / 24; if ( (days%1)<.5) days++; days = Math.round(days); if (hours< 0 && hours >= -24) message = "Merry Christmas; Christ is born!"; else if (days > 0) message = "Only "+days+" praying day"+ (days>1?'s':'')+ " till Christmas!"; document.write("</p> <p>"+message+"</p> <p>"); } eventcount(); </script><br /> <!-- End Christmas Countdown --><br />

For a nice early Christmas present Pope Benedict has given his new encyclical Spe Salvi. SPE SALVI facti sumusin hope we were saved.

Update: I had converted the new encyclical to audio and listened to it while I was at work today. Once again I am in pure awe of the writing and intellectual ability of Pope Benedict XVI. With the upcoming Feast of the Incarnation when hope was truly born this encyclical is a wonderful extended meditation of hope. I have never really given extensive reflection on the theological virtue of hope thinking that the theological virtues of love and faith being much meatier. Once again I learn how wrong I was and joyful to have been instructed in the depth of hope and its meaning. The encyclical starts off reflecting on what St. Paul told the Corinthians and expanding it that without God that there is no hope. He later goes on to describe that hope has been transformed from a theological virtue to a pure materialistic concept of hope in progress. His telling of the story of African Saint Josephine Bakhita is quite compelling in the context of this slave finding hope in the true master Jesus Christ who was flogged just as she was.

Now she had hope no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: I am definitively loved and whatever happens to meI am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.

I could probably just keep on quoting more an more from Spe Salvi to the point that I end up posting the whole thing. It will be of no surprise to anybody who is familiar with the Pope’s writings that once again he makes extensive use of St. Augustine to good effect. I like that he touches on the concept of “offering up” and that while at times there were exaggerations in this devotion, that there is something essential and helpful contained with it.

The Pope ends this encyclical as he did with his first one with a wonderful Marian meditation and prayer centered on Ave maris stella – Mary Star of the Sea.

Happy Catholic tagged me with the 100 Films Meme from the AFI’s top 100.

1) Your favorite five movies that are on the list.

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark
2. It’s a Wonderful Life
3. The African Queen
4. The Gold Rush
5. Duck Soup

Though there are several others that depending on my mood could easily be top 5.

2) Five movies on the list you didn’t like at all.

Well I pretty much have seen all of them and there aren’t any that I didn’t like at all. I liked One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest for the most part, though on rewatching it I hated the ending. I use to work for one of the women who played a nurse in the movie. She ran a children’s theatre company that my father use to work for and that I spent a lot of time at. I also once sang as part of the choir to the patience at Damish Hospital where part of the movie was filmed.

Mainly I would have quibbles about a movie being in the top 100 in the first place, for example Platooon and Easy Rider. Easy Rider was fine if you watched it in the seventies, but it just doesn’t wear well. Some movies you watch when you are younger and think were great at the time just should never be rewatched. Platoon is okay, just not top 100 material or even top 200.

3) Five movies on the list you haven’t seen but want to.

1. Amadeus

I have seen all the others on the list.

4) Five movies on the list you haven’t seen and have no interest in seeing.

Zero for this category.

5) Your favorite five movies that aren’t on the list.

1. The Passion of the Christ

2. A Night at the Opera

3. The Lord of the Rings

4. Braveheart

5. The Haunting of Hill House

A poster promoting a 2006 parish carnival at Hollywood�s Blessed
Sacrament Church has provoked a series of escalating problems � to the point
that some parishioners have asked the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to reign in
their pastor.

Parishioner Larry Bugbee, spokesman for the �Committee of Hundreds of Parishioners
and Friends� of Blessed Sacrament parish, says that their pastor, Fr. Michael
Mandala, S.J., has promoted indecent entertainment at the last two parish carnivals,
which included scantily-clad dancers making sexually suggestive movements in
front of an audience of all ages.

The committee�s foremost complaint is over a poster promoting the 2006 carnival,
which prominently displayed photographs of scantily clad women in suggestive
poses. When a similar poster was circulated for the 2007 carnival, Fr. Mandala
told one parishioner, �It�s not as bad as last year�s.�

…Copies of the 2006 poster have been hand-delivered to Cardinal Roger Mahony,
as well as his Vicar for Clergy, the Clergy Misconduct Oversight Board and the
director of Safeguard the Children for the Archdiocese. In March 2007, a detailed
letter was delivered to the same people, as well as to the Jesuit provincial.
One of the signers of the letter was a former prioress of the Monastery of the
Angels, a cloistered Dominican nun who lives near the parish. Neither Cardinal
Mahony nor anyone else from the Archdiocese has responded to the letter, Bugbee
said.

During the 2006 carnival, parishioner Russell Brown came out of church after
Mass to find several men whistling. He witnessed a female performer shaking her
breasts, then her buttocks onstage.

I just watch Raymond Arroyo interview Andrew T. Miller the composer of
the contemporary cantata, The Birth of Christ which will be aired on
PBS this season.  The clips played were really quite beautiful
with a full orchestra, choir, and talented soloists.

You can watch video clips, listen to samples, or find the TV
schedule to determine when it will play in your area here..

I
find it quite hard to believe the device that Amazon is selling as it’s
new e-book reader the Kindle.  Three years in the making and
much delayed and they came up with a device obviously designed by a
committee where little interest was paid to people who would want an
e-book reader in the first place.  Now if I wanted to design
an e-book reader that was sure to fail and possibly serve as a tax
write off like in The Producers these are some of the features I would
include.

• Charge $399 for the reader.
• Make it really ugly with
  lots of angles.
• Make it incompatible with
  the ebook format you use to sell.
• Not allow you to add your
  own files such as PDF, docs, and text without going through the
  companies site with a fee attached.
• Charge you two bucks for
  books available for free at Project Gutenberg.
• Allow you to read from a group of blogs selected by the
  company and then charge you $1 to $2 a month for each blog you
  subscribe to.
• Have EVDO available but not WI-FI.
• Charge you $14 dollars a month to view newspaper content
  freely available on the web.
• Add a crappy cover that won’t last long.

Oh wait that is the Kindle.

The e-book revolution has been
forecasted to occur for a number of years and a device like this is
sure to delay that day or set that back.  The first person you
have to please with new technology is early adopters who are willing to
pay a higher price point for cutting edge technology.  Sony’s
second generation ebook reader uses the same screen as the Kindle, is a
hundred dollars less, and allows you to add your own content. But sales
of the Sony Reader have been dismal. Amazon will surely have a much
larger library and the built-in EVDO is a good feature that allow’s
people to use the device without a computer. Early-adopters though
probably have a computer and surely want to be able to place their own
content on their own reader.  I know that is a deal breaker
for someone like myself who otherwise would like a solid portable
reading device and the ability to get books from Amazon.com.