Other

25 years ago today two became one flesh. That is my wife Socorro and I were married. She was a cradle Catholic and I was a cradle atheist (never prayed once while young) so obviously there were difficulties that only God’s infinite grace could overcome. Though I thought that it was her faith that was what was going to be overcome by my belief at the time of the sufficiency of science to answer all questions. Marriage is truly a sacrifice, but luckily some of the things we have to sacrifice is our pride and selfishness. Even more difficult is to be married to someone in the military. As a Navy wife she had to endure much while taking care of our kids when I was on yet on another deployment. Plus being married to me she had to endure not only me, my insufferable Ayn Rand phase, and worse my many puns. If that doesn’t give her time off in purgatory for good behavior I don’t know what would.

Thank you Jesus.

I recently finished the new novel by Bill Kassel called This side of Jordan and I found it to be both an entertaining and informative read. Some aspects of it are as a mystery novel, but that is not the main thrust. The book starts with an incident in a small town and then goes back to pick up the threads of what lead to it. The novel’s plot revolves around a festival the town is putting together to to promote tourism and around the famous director they bring in to pull it off. The main character is a Catholic musician who does the music for the local Catholic church and is writing the music for the festival. Interesting enough one of the plot threads is on homosexuality and how the main character and the town priest pastorally deals with the issue. The priest in the novel is old school and accurately reflects Catholic teaching. In fact the whole novel addresses the Church’s teaching on homosexuality and dealing with those same-sex attraction. Though the book does not just fall into sermonizing or hitting you over the head like a Bud McFarlane Jr. novel. The characterization is very good and the novel is more about people than just events. Along the way there are also some great jabs on modern liturgy and some other insightful comments come the way via the priest and the nun who is in charge of religious education in the parish. While this nun is of the modernist persuasion she is not treated as a stereotype and while there is tension between her and the priest there is also a grudging appreciation of each others talents.

Truth in blogging disclaimer: I received a review copy of this book from Company Publications, Inc. One benefit of blogging is on occasion I have been sent copies of books for review and to feed my addiction. So far I haven’t been sent any books that I would not recommend and I have been sent some real gems that I might otherwise have never read. Now if only I could get on Ignatius Press’s reviewer list I would be in book heaven.

Roughly three years ago I started blogging (July 24, 2002) with my first blog Atheist to a Theist with the Chesterton quote "if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly." My original intent was mainly to comment on the news of the day and as a fairly recent convert to exercise my faith in the discussion on the Church and politics. I had no intent on doing any sort of humor which just goes to show how little I know myself. An article on Catholic blogging by Tim Drake in the National Catholic Register was where I had first heard of Catholic blogging. I recognized Mark Shea’s name in the article and so Googled it to find his blog. What I found had me hooked instantly and I explored the links in his sidebar to find other Catholic blogs. At that time there were considerably less Catholic blogs, probably between 50 and 100. Mark’s and Amy’s blogs were then as now the preeminent Catholic blogs, though it was Kathy Shaidle who started the first Catholic blog well over five years ago. Of course Mark has been on a writing sabbatical, but since he recently finished his book hopefully we will see him return soon. Like many bloggers I started by commenting in other’s comment boxes and made the jump to starting my own blog because of the limitations of commenting and the vanity of having my thoughts in one place.

I remember when I use to receive 5 to 10 hits a day and was pretty happy that anybody was reading what I had to say. Now three years later with 3000 plus posts, 10,000 plus comments, and close to 600,000 total hits I am still pretty happy that anybody is still reading what I have to say. I never had any intentions in life to write anything. Of course I also never had any intentions to one day become a Catholic. I am a Catholic and I write though I don’t consider myself to be a Catholic writer. I am humbled when those who can actually write link to my posts, though I know it is because of my parody and punditry and not because of my writing skills (of which I consider to be akin to grammatical speed bumps.) I have no problem when people correcting my grammatical errors in the comment boxes. Open source editing is fine with me since I need all the help I can get. I just hope it has improved a little bit over the last three years. I have no delusions of producing the great American novel and am pretty happy to tickle a funny bone once in a while or say something worth while however feebly the words are chosen.

So once again thanks to my readers and those bloggers who link to me. Some of the better comedy pieces I have produced were suggested to me by other bloggers or readers. On in particular I would like to remember is Michelle of "And Then!" A blog now sadly gone for over a year and she had many fine suggestions for me. Yearly I also always mention Victor Lams who is a major inspiration to me and who has been blogging for over four years. He is the blogger I also would most wish would come into a financial windfall. When Victor was unemployed for a bit of time after his company went down the tubes in an Enron like scandal his free time produced some of the most creative and funny posts ever seen. From Puppet blogging to his Lamstoons it was a sad day from a selfish prospective when he was once again gainfully employed.

I have put together a "best of" page to cover some of my more comedic posts over the last three years.

Clayton tagged me with a meme, so here goes.

What I was doing 10 years ago — In July of 1995, I was still a Navy Chief working in Norfolk, Va on a computer system (PDP-11) so old that Bill Gates had worked on the same model when he was originally cutting his teeth learning programming. I remember lamenting that the Navy should hire someone to rewrite the training applications and port them over to a PC, not knowing that I would be the one doing the work when I had retired and moved onto the civilian sector.

5 years ago — Celebrated one year as part of the secular order of Discalced Carmelites on the feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel. I don’t consider myself a third order Carmelite but a disordered one.

1 year ago — Wrote the "Flip Flop Mysteries."

Yesterday — Went to Mass where we had a priest I had not seen before. The third priest that we had helping out was a Redemptorist and finally got his wish to become a prison chaplain and has moved to work at the Staten Island prison. Fr. Mike was an excellent preacher it was only his voice that was disconcerting since it’s timbre closely approximated Kermit the Frog. This new priest (or new for me since he is probably another retired priest helping out) prayed a beautiful and reverential Mass and his homily had me thinking long after we had left.

Now who should I inflict pass this Meme onto? How about some newer bloggers Catholic Pillow Fight, Holy Fool, and Dad29.

I learned today that a women my wife and I knew from our parish had died recently. Pearl was elderly and had been sick during the last year. She was a wonderful women who outlived two husbands and was a cradle Catholic. We met her while going through RCIA. She was living in an apartment building close to our Church (the same Church she had been married in) and during the years became a sponsor to multiple people for RCIA. She would evangelize both lapsed Catholics and others and get them to attend RCIA. She was quiet and unassuming but her life spoke volumes. So if your could offer a prayer or two to speed her on the way I would appreciate it.

Well I have become an iPod people despite my previous post on the subject. For the last couple of months I had been looking for a good hard drive based digital music player. I have been ripping CDs to my hard drive for many years now and I have also maintained copies of these files on my work computer so that I would also have my whole music library there also. I had almost filled up the drive on my computer at work and knew it was time to go with another solution. When iTunes 4.9 was released with Podcasting I decided to check it out its capabilities as a music library. Not having to run a separate program for detecting and downloading new Podcasts is definitely a more integrated idea. I have used many different software players with various music libraries over the years. I had used Winamp back when it was version 1 to play back songs in wav format I had recorded to my hard drive to practice playing my guitar with.

I found that the iTunes music library was on par with Winamp’s and I liked how it could easily select by genre. My music collection is rather diverse from Classical, Chant, Mississippi delta blues, Classic Rock, to heavier rock and the ability to separate the music is a plus. One nice feature is its Podcasting playback is that if you leave a downloaded Podcast in the middle of playing it to play something else, that if you go back and play it again it starts where it left off. Though I do have some gripes about iTunes. How in the world do you make a software based player now without it being skinable? There is also no easy way to go from normal mode to mini-mode except to select the player and Ctrl-M. I would think that there should be a button to easily do this. Another thing missing is a right-click context menu listing various features. The same goes for mini-mode. Another annoyance is that if you choose to convert an mp3 to aac it won’t automatically delete it afterwards. There should be an option to choose how you want this to happen. What I consider to be pretty silly is that you can have album art for a song, yet there is no way to automatically get the album art. You would think they would have this linked to the iTunes website. You have to get the art yourself and then drag it into the album art area. One interesting thing is that it actually stores the album art within the tracks ID3 tag and the album art is displayed on the new iPods along with the song information. Overall I was impressed enough with iTunes to make it my primary music manager, though it took quite a while (about two days) to convert all my CDs in wma format to aac.

The other factor that got me to finally consider the iPod was the new larger hard drive sizes. A 20gig iPod was pretty much worthless to me considering I already had a 30gig plus music collection. I have also been using solid-state mp3 players to transfer files back and forth from work and so I wanted to also have plenty of room to do this also. Being that I am pretty cheap (my CD collection is primarily used CDs) the price factor on the 60gig iPod was rather steep, though considering that for $100 more you get three times the space available as the normal iPod and it has room to grow with my music collection I bit the bullet. Overall I am pretty impressed with the iPod. The color screen is really nice and even has the ability to view photos. Once you get use to the touch sensitive click wheel you can really appreciate how innovative this technology is to rapidly interact with your music library and to set the various options.

The only real faults I have with the iPod is that for such a pricey gadget that it doesn’t include a case. I have had multiple players and every single one from my first mp3 CD player on up had a case. Another annoyance is that when you plug it into your computer and later detach it that it does not remember where you left off. So if you were in the middle of a playlist or an audio recording you have to manually select it again. It would be nice if it worked similar to the way iTunes does with Podcasts in remembering the position you left off. For the last couple of months I have been using text-to-speech software to convert articles and other material to mp3s. I converted the new Vatican document INSTRUMENTUM LABORIS to mp3 to listen to while I work out. The mp3 was about 3 hours long and while the click dial is overall excellent for rapidly panning through a digital sound file it would be nicer to not have to do it.

Now if I am wrong about any of my critiques please let me know.

I did not truly appreciate being an American until through the Navy I had been in multiple countries. Today reading this story of a former atheist and now a priest in the underground Catholic Church in China also makes me remember how blessed we our in this country. I don’t have a ‘my country right or wrong’ philosophy and while I recognize some of the truly great problems with the United States I am also so glad to be a citizen. As my pastor (who is from Spain, but now an American citizen) said at Mass today -"There are no perfect countries. God Bless America and forgive us our faults."

From time to time I have documented some whacky orders of nuns and sometimes that included some Dominicans.

These are Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist in Ann Arbor, Michigan which in 1997 started with four sisters and currently has 47 sisters and 24 Novices.

No not one of those infinitely recursive pictures but a groups of novitiates going through formation. This community formed around the Eucharist, prayer, and study is busting at the seams and is currently constructing a new Motherhouse to help house the growing numbers. They could have avoided these problems by doing what so many modern orders do. Just start practicing a creation spirituality, adopt a radical feminist agenda, and build a labyrinth or two and in no time they not only would have to worry about a crowded community, but could start to rent out rooms.

The book meme has been the meme most replicating thus far and it does make me wonder about the connection of bloggers and book reading. I have not read any posts of relatively non-book reading bloggers where even the low end was in the hundreds of books currently own where usually the caveat was that they had given some away or were predominately using the library.

The responses to the meme have been interesting. I read one by an aspiring Dominican which has the most quintessentially Dominican answer that I have seen thus far.

1. How many books have you owned?

This is difficult to gauge because my books are located in three countries…

If books on three contintents isn’t enough to get you into the Dominican order I don’t know what is. As a caveat of course book reading should only be a foundation to preaching as is proper for their charism.

In the photo, Agnes Long looks drop-dead gorgeous. She’s on vacation at the Jersey shore with her husband. He is tall, tan and trim; she wears a zebra-stripe bikini, a floppy hat and sunglasses. The sea breeze has blown her platinum hair across her face and she is smiling. The picture says it all. In the mid-1970s, Agnes Long was a happily married, affluent, middle-aged woman with three children and a weakness for expensive clothes.

Today, Agnes Long is a Roman Catholic hermit. She lives alone in a thickly wooded section of Madeline Island, in northern Wisconsin. Her beloved husband is dead; she hasn’t seen her children in years. She wakes before dawn, prays throughout the day, eats small meals, works outside, makes religious paintings, and rises in the middle of the night to pray. Although she sees people when she drives her little truck to the grocery store or to mass, she has no one you might call a friend. And though she answers her phone when it rings, she doesn’t often engage in what you would call conversation. "I feel that my whole life has been in preparation for where God has me now," she says, as she slips the old photo back into the pages of her prayer book. "When you go into solitude, you find out who you really are."

Long’s life may look radical, but she is following an ancient path. Christianity has a long tradition of hermits, dating back to the third and fourth centuries, when Saint Anthony and thousands like him fled the hardships of the cities for the desolation of the Middle Eastern desert. There they fasted and prayed with the sole intent of getting closer to God. They believed stringent solitude would help them glimpse heaven; the pilgrims who visited them said they looked like angels. These ascetics are known as the Desert Fathers, and there is not a contemplative monk or nun in the world who does not treasure their legacy.

In recent decades, the word "hermit" has come to mean anyone who lives off the grid, from Emily Dickinson to the Unabomber, and the hermits following the ancient Christian tradition have been found mostly living on monastery grounds. Now a tiny but growing number of Catholics—regular people like Long, with children, marriages and careers in their pasts—are embracing the hermit life as it was conceived in the desert 16 centuries ago. They are choosing solitude, celibacy and asceticism in order to focus full time on God.

To accommodate their life choices, some dioceses have recently developed guidelines where would-be hermits go through a rigorous process that involves interviews, psychological testing and counseling. In the end, after taking vows similar to those of a priest or a nun, the hermit lives in isolation but maintains an official connection with a bishop. The number of these hermits is probably in the double digits, but that’s not the only route. Nine hundred people subscribe to Raven’s Bread, a newsletter for people interested in the hermit life, up from 700 last year, and many of them are leading some kind of ascetic exist-ence, says Karen Fredette, who coedits the newsletter with her husband. Most subscribers are Catholic, but some are Protestant and others are Hindu, Sufi and Buddhist.

…But things haven’t turned out exactly as planned. Agnes Long eats more meat than she intended, because her neighbors shoot deer and give her venison. She hasn’t been East in years; she speaks to two of her three children infrequently. She still lives on her Social Security check, and gets considerable help in the way of little favors from the people of Madeline Island who pitch in when she needs to use a fax machine. It’s a strange life. "The Desert Fathers say, ‘Go into your cell and it will teach you everything’," she says. And for her, that everything is profound, indeed. A decade of solitude has taught her, she says, that she is as broken as anybody and that God’s love is unconditional. [Source]

Pretty good article considering it is coming from Newsweek. No negative connotations about those becoming hermits. In my own diocese we have a mendicant brother who goes by the name Francis and I believe lives the life of a hermit. I often see him at Mass and I have heard from others that he will accept no money, only food. He wears a heavily patched habit made out of a rough material and he creates his sandals out of carpet fragments and carries a pack which probably contains a sleeping bag and a small tent. For me there is just something cool about seeing him at Mass or when I see him walking along the street when we are driving somewhere. A reminder of both the past and the present. A reminder also of those living a hidden life in contemplative prayer. Those that are intensely part of the Mystical Body of Christ that we don’t often see.