Other

There is a saying that if you want to make God laugh – then tell him your plans. The converse is also true. If God wants to make you laugh he will tell you his plans for you. Five years ago tonight on what was then the Easter Vigil I was received into the Catholic Church. Some eight years ago if I were to be prophetically told that I would rejoice on entering the Catholic Church, that tears would stream down my eyes as I went to my first confession – I would have told them they were crazy. I was at the apogee of my conservatism based on Randian Positivism. To me radical selfishness was the highest virtue. The heights of individualism and being a self-made man were my highest ideals. The natural virtues helped to modify this idealistic positivism towards how I related with others, but it was truly not enough. My nose had long achieved orbit as at looked down at those poor superstitious mortals who still believed in hunter-gatherer myths such as God.

The Revealer under their LINKS section and at the bottom of SEARCH RESOURCES has a link to St. Blog’s Parish.

They have a nice paragraph on this page that says:

Even as bricks-and-mortar churches close, Catholicism thrives online in a vast, argumentative, virtual cathedral known as “St. Blog’s Parish.” Catholic bloggers have, to a large extent, stolen the thunder from the Catholic print press. Readers interested in Catholic responses to the news, pop culture, or the Pope’s every move are better off in the pews of St. Blog’s Parish. Below are some of its more vocal members.

Included in the links was a blurb about my site.

The Curt Jester is a blog of wise-ass musings on the media, politics, and things “Papist.” His word, not ours.

I guess they know my site too well. Their blurbs on other Catholic blogs are also interesting. Though I do disagree with part of their assessment on Fr. Sibley. I would go to confession with him any day.

I found a free aggregator for WIndows that will correctly read those ATOM feeds that blogspot and blogger blogs produce. It is free for personal use and only requires that you have .NET Framework 1.1 on your computer. This is also a free download from Microsoft’s site if you don’t have it installed. It will also import and export OPML files so that you can import the feeds you are currently using. It has a nice looking interface that doesn’t get in you way.

Sauce Reader

If you maintain a blog using blogger or blogspot you can now provide a syndication link so that your readers with aggregators can easily access your blog and visit you when you have new content. Even if you have previously used a web service to syndicate your blog I would recommend doing the following procedure since it is much more reliable.

Here are some instructions I wrote for how to do this.

From within blogger:
1. Select the “Setting” Tab.
2. Select “Site Feed”
3. Next to Publish Site Feed, select “Yes”
4. Next to Description select Full to syndicate your full post or Short to syndicate only the first paragraph. I would suggest Short.
5. Your site feed URL is shown at the bottom of this page. Something like http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml

That is all there is to it. And ten minutes or less of your time will make it easier for your readers to follow your blog.

Here are some example feeds from my Moloch Now blogspot blog.
RSS Feed
Atom Feed

If you have any question feel free to email me or to leave a comment.

In a comment down below about the Hawaiian Liturgy, SecretAgentMan left the following comment:

Well, then, I want a “country boy” mass. The priest’s vestments will be made from denim and plaid flannel, and everyone will wear ballcaps with confederate flags or industrial logos. We’ll have slide guitars wing-wanging the hymns (I suggest “Gather Us In” by M. Haugen and “A Country Boy Can Survive” by H. Williams), and halter-topped women sitting on the shoulders of their husbands out in the congregation, snapping their fingers and swaying to the beat. Tattered nylon lawn chairs will replace the inauthentic pews, and during the consecration the priest will fly about the church on invisible guidewires like Garth Brooks. All the men will reverently remove their dips before receiving communion. The “ite, miss est” will be accompanied by rebel yells and gunfire.

Like many of my commenters, SAM can really make me laugh. But inculturation in the form of a “country boy” Mass has some possibilities. I can just see someone walk in and tip his Cowboy at a statue of the Virgin Mary and say “Howdy Ma’am.” A priest with a large belt buckle with the images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. A pickup truck with a monstrance rack. Chapel veil material sold by the yard to cover large hairdos. A new liturgical color called denim.

I was rather surprised at the mixed response on the Hawaiian liturgy post and the defense of the use of ukuleles at Mass under the guise of inculturation. First of all inculturation is something that would be properly decided at the level of the Bishop’s conference under approval of the Vatican Definitely not something that each parish can decide to do on its own. Historically there have been times when missionaries wanted to do something to conform to a local culture that ended up not being approved by the Vatican. There is a balance that must be maintained and the tendency of parishes wanting to do their own thing. The Mass is not the private property of any person or culture and valid changes must be in a larger conformity vice a narrowing that can occur. There has always been inculturation such as when the Mass went from Greek to Latin and all of the varied adjustments that have happened over the centuries. The Church has many valid expressions via the various Rites both Eastern and Western.

There are many cultural expressions that do not add to reverence but in fact distract from reverence and our worship owed to God. For example something sacred is set apart and dedicated to God. Much as what passes for liturgical music is not set apart and dedicated solely to God and is only a mirror image of secular music. I term much of the hymns today as Sacrud music. Crud is to be set apart and thrown away. Most music would not pass what I call the Sesame Street test. If you can change the words and keep the same music and see it as being able to be used in Sesame Street or Romper Room, it fails the test.

Mainly what I dislike about false inculturation is that it is rooted in disobedience. People decide among themselves how to conduct the Mass since they know better then the Church. In a multi-cultural society such as ours, we should strive to be a melting pot. Instead we are being a centrifuge where each element is removed from the whole and is set by itself. This is not an indicator of the Catholicity of the Church and can be a denial of it.

From Ecumemical Insanity via Relapsed Catholic

An Episcopal church in San Francisco has redecorated in a rather unusual way. According to the diocesan newsletter:

St. Gregory, the fourth century bishop of Nyssa, extolled use of the dance in worship. Today, the San Francisco congregation that bears his name incorporates dance in its liturgies, while two rows of saints that surround them are � not surprisingly � permanently caught mid step in what looks like the same Tripudium, danced by worshippers below.

…Among the honored: Malcolm X, musicians John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald, dancer Martha Graham, Hawaiian Queen Liliuokalani, Sergius and Bacchus (4th century Roman soldiers and lovers), Charles Darwin, Margaret Mead, Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel, Muslim poets Rumi and Sadi, Confucian Kangxi (Chinese Emperor who reigned 1661-1772), Buddhist poet Su Shi, Hindu poet Mirabai, Shintoist Chiume Sugihara (the Japanese “Schindler”), and Greek pagan mathematician Hypatia.

Kind of a holy Can Can I guess. Speaking of the Can Can, check out this page of Cows doing the Can Can.

One wish that I have is that people would have the same attention and silence at the Mass as the people watching Mel Gibson’s film. How many Masses have you been to where afterwords the people just sat in their pews making no noise?

The Sacrifice of the Mass is more than just the Last Supper represented. The Last Supper was ratified at Calvary. We have Holy Week condensed and given to us sacramentally in the Mass. Even though The Passion of the Christ is an excellent film, how much more should we be in awe and repentance as we hear “this is my body…” and we receive Jesus Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in the Eucharist?

Relatedly, I really enjoyed this truism in T.S. O’Rama’s review of the TPotC. “The movie has an aspect of “preaching to the choir”, but the choir is always in need of preaching.” Also highly worthwhile is SecretAgentMan’s Thoughts on the Passion. Dale Price has some interesting thoughts on the Passion as well in a post titled simply The Film. Mark Shea also weighs in here. Victor Lams also provides an emotional review.

My wife and I saw “The Passion of the Christ” this afternoon. Since this will probably be the most reviewed movie in history I will add my two cents. I was both prepared and unprepared for this movie. As a long time watcher of horror movies since I was a kid I did not think that the blood and gore would have much effect on me. This movie is very anti, but what it is anti about is sin. This movie is hard to watch because a microscope zoomed in on our sins is hard to watch. We can watch a movie like “Shindler’s List” and be shocked by mans treatment of man. That men, women, and children were treated as less then objects and brutalized by people who at the end of the day went home to their own families. Yet we can watch a movie such as “Shindler’s List” and still can be distant to the evil that occurred since we can put the blame on someone else. That another generation in another country perpetuated such horrible acts. What makes watching the passion difficult is that we don’t have that divide. This was redemptive suffering for our very sins. That it was our actions that mocked and scourged Jesus. Our sins drove those nails through the precious hands and into the wood of the cross. Our indifference to sin was the weight that held the crown of thorns on his head.

In many ways this movie is what I thought was missing from every movie and mini-series that included the Crucifixion. Sin and redemption were palpable. The visual imagery and the symbolic actions portrayed a supernatural reality that I had not seen before. This movie shatters the cosmetic Jesus sold to us as a nice guy with some nice things to say. I don’t think I have ever prayed while watching a film before, except maybe to pray that it would end soon. The words “I am sorry” kept coming to the front of my consciousness. What ever can be said about Mel Gibson the man, I say that he knows what sin is and what it truly means.

I have no complaint about those who choose not to watch this movie because of the violence in it. I am just very glad that I have seen it . I have been most attracted to the sorrowful mysteries before and I think that this will help me to pray them better. There is much in the movie that brings Jesus, the Apostles, and his mother alive. I also have more sympathy for the Apostles now. Peter after he had denied Christ three times and then wept with the realization still was not strong enough to go to the cross. To see Christ suffer on the Cross is hard enough in a movie and to imagine what went through the minds of his Mother and St. John is hard to fathom.

Prior to the movie the theater at least had the decency to show only previews for family movies and didn’t show previews for any R rated fair even though this movie is rated R. Just before the movie starts they ran the “Silence is Golden” film clip to discourage people from talking during the movie. Never was such an admonition so unnecessary. I also observed the silence as people just sat in their chairs as the credits rolled without moving to get up. They probably didn’t make much money on concessions for this movie, but if they had offered packages of tissues at five bucks a pop they would have sold out. Afterwords we had to pick up some groceries and while waiting in line by the counter was a display of Easter Baskets. Large plastic baskets filled with candy, a back pack, a basketball and other assorted things. This was the total antithesis of the experience of watching the passion of Jesus and his love for us to be distilled down by our culture into plastic with goodies.

Late have I loved you, O Beauty, so ancient and so new, late have I loved you!

And behold, you were within me and I was outside, and there I sought for you, and in my deformity I rushed headlong into the well-formed things that you have made.

You were with me, and I was not with you. Those outer beauties held me far from you, yet if they had not been in you, they would not have existed at all.

You called, and cried out to me and broke open my deafness; you shone forth upon me and you scattered my blindness.

You breathed fragrance, and I drew in my breath and I now pant for you.

I tasted, and I hunger and thirst; you touched me, and I burned for your peace. –Saint Augustine

If your looking for the Flash Game Kerry’s Medal Toss, then go here.

I have had some interesting referrals in the past, yet this is the first time a German newspaper has sent links my way. Unfortunately they sent them to the root of my site and not to the URL of the game they mentioned.

Tom of Disputations looks at the saying “Preach the Gospel always. If necessary, use words.” that is falsely attributed to St. Francis.

Let me suggest that the Franciscan ideal behind the “if necessary, use words” saying assumes a society in which Christianity has been found difficult and left untried. A bad Christian is far more likely to understand the good example of a good Christian to be an example of Christianity than is a bad non-Christian; for that matter, a good Muslim, say, might understand it to be an example of Islam!

This is an interesting observation. Many groups that are not Christian have been affected by Christian morality and try to bring those truths into their practices. Some modern Pagan groups now have soup kitchens and display other signs of love of neighbor. These same acts done by different groups in a way preach the Gospel, but it is heavily filtered down and distorted. In a society such as ours more needs to be done.

On the last carrier I served on I worked for a Senior Chief that preached the Gospel through his actions, but unfortunately never found it necessary to use words. His example to my then atheist sensibilities was powerful, yet I had no idea what his religious beliefs were other than that he was a Christian. We talked much on politics, culture, and family and still the subject of religion did not come up. This good man as many others I worked with showed an example I was attracted to but no one ever tried to evangelize me. Strangely It wasn’t till after I became a Catholic that people started to hand me books and flyers of a religious nature. It takes more than seeing a good example to make you want to change. We all desire change and most of our efforts have the longevity of the time-unit known as a New Years Resolution; a unit of time much smaller than what constitutes ticks in an atomic clock. We can only truly change through grace, but we can’t cooperate with grace to a fuller extent unless we know the truth. We must be preached a Christ that goes beyond Hallmark sentimentality but focuses on our sinfulness, need of redemption, and on Christ who is our redemption. I could not infer any of this from someone’s outward good actions, though I had a growing awayness of my sinfulness and that stoic efforts were not a solution.

The Franciscan phrase highlights an important truth about good example but actions don’t always speak louder than words. Preaching the Gospel through your actions can be a fertilizer to help the truth grow in someone, yet it will be to no avail if the seed of ideas through words is not also planted. This is another case of the great Catholic Both/And where both concepts are true and are dependent on each other.