My mother died this morning in Portland, Or. I am glad that I had a change
to spend a week with her last week before she had passed on. She also had the
opportunity to receive last rites to which I am grateful for.
My feeling are definately mixed. I am glad that she has gone onto eternal life
and has left behind the painful chemo-therapy treatments, but I am going to
really miss her.
Eternal Father,
I offer Thee the Most Precious Blood of Thy Divine Son, Jesus,
in union with the Masses said throughout the world today,
for all the Holy Souls in Purgatory,
for sinners everywhere,
for sinners in the Universal Church,
those in my own home and within my family.
Amen.
Back in blog
After a short hiatus and finally escaping the confines of blogspot to my own web site and publishing this weblog using Movable Type, I am back to blogging. For those who posted comments about my previous departure from the blogosphere, thank you. I kind of felt like I was present for my own eulogy from reading those postings and I felt kind of bad for not mentioning my future return to blogging in my first farewell post. Before I break out in a Sally Field “You really love me” outburst, thanks again.
I bought the domain name of www.splendoroftruth.com in honor of the Pope’s Encyclical Veritatis Splendor, which for those Latin-challenged as I am – Splendor of Truth. And now Richard Chonak of Catholic Light won’t be able to complain about illegal URL naming conventions in my blog name (Previously I had used jeff_miller.blogspot.com which had an underscore in it causing some browser not to be able to see the site).
I have also changed the name from Atheist to a Theist to The Curt Jester mainly since I no longer desired having the word atheist in my blog title and also to more accurately pertain to the thrust of my blog, which is hopefully a humorist take on the world via the eyes of the Catholic Faith. I was a class clown growing up and thought Jester was appropriate and curt seemed to describe my short blunt comments and besides the word pithy is much overused since Bill O’Reilly brought it into style. Also due to my punning propensities I thought the title a good pun.
I mainly choose Movable Type as the software to use for blog publishing because it seems to be used by many heavyweight blog sites, highly configurable, good support and future growth. But what really hooked me was the installation said that I would have to mess with cgi scripts and that they could do a paid installation if it was too difficult. That naturally appealed to the geek in me that it wasn’t simple to install and dealt with modifying and FTP’ing files to the server. I naturally made the Tim Allen “Tool Man” grunt sound when contemplating the geekiness of the install. Unfortunately it wasn’t that difficult to install and get running, so if your are thinking about using Movable Type the installation documentation makes it pretty easy and wearing a pocket-protector isn’t necessary. Another advantage is that it has an integrated comment systems so that I don’t have to rely on commenting systems that are either slow or get knocked out for a period of time.
So if you are new to my blog – welcome and if you are a previous reader of my old blog, well then you already know what to expect.
Today is my six month blogiversary since I started blogging on 24 Jul, 2002.
Today I went over 10,000 hits and 465 comments, and yes hitting the refresh
button so many times to increase my count was exhausting. I would like to thank
Catholic Light for first
mentioning my blog and Victor Lams
for first sending traffic my way. Also those readers and commenters who have
challenged me and helped me back on track when my charity was lacking. A special
thanks to those who have blogrolled me and linked to my posts.
When I first starting blogging I would see Mark Shea post the addresses of new
blogs. After a while when I never saw mine listed I thought, gee I must really
suck. Only later did I find out from the posting of other bloggers that they
emailed Mark asking for the listing. Boy did I feel stupid, of course that doesn’t
mean that Mark doesn’t think my blog sucks.
Blogging has been very very good to me. It has helped reign in my natural tendencies
to want to read every back issue of the Wanderer and to bash Hillary Clinton
at every opportunity. Sometimes I actually think first before posting.
This was my first post six months ago.
First entry to blogdom:
And I said let there be blog, and there was blog and it
was good.
Put myself in the first person like God on the very first
sentence, I must have listened to Here I am Lord too many times.
“It is a good sign in a nation when things are done
badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is bad sign in a
nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts
and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on.”
–
G.K. Chesterton “Patriotism and Sport,” All Things Considered
Hopefully my blogging will be a good sign, even if done
badly. While reading through the blogs of the parishioners of St. Blog’s Parish,
I have been tempted to add my two cents to the discussions. Not all blogs have
comment sections and there is the vanity in me that prefers not to have my ideas
hidden in the comment section. This blog is my comment section on
life.
“The vanity in me”, what was I doing trying to get points
for alleged humility? “Comment section on life”? Can you imagine the
arrogance of myself for spouting such dribble.
I throw my blog on the mercy of Nihil Obstat.
Well guess what the unknown one wasn’t merciful and mentioned a spelling
error that got corrected before the anonymous one posted. At least the title of
Nihil Obstat’s post was No Mercy.
This website has pictures
of the use of Engrish in Japan.
Q. What is Engrish? A. Engrish can be simply defined as
the humorous English mistakes that appear in Japanese advertising and product
design
Most of the Engrish found on Engrish.com is not an attempt to
communicate – English is used as a design element in Japanese products and
advertising to give them a modern look and feel (or just to “look cool”). There
is often no attempt to try to get it right, nor do the vast majority of the
Japanese population (= consumers) ever attempt to read the English design
element in question …
Here is text from one of the pictures:
Please Keep chair on position &
Keep table cleaned
after dying.
Thanks for your corporation.
I spent two years stationed in Yokosuka, Japan on the U.S.S. Midway (CV-41) and I well appreciated
the people and culture of Japan. There were many strange juxtapositions of
Japanese and American culture. The first time I went out into Yokosuka it was a
culture shock with almost all of the signs being in kanji and the total alien
feeling of the architecture. Walking along in this environment it was pretty
strange to see a seven foot plastic Colonel Sanders in front of a Kentucky Fried
Chicken restaurant, it just looked so out of place with the rest of the Asian
ambiance.
Most people there were taught English in the schools and had to
have a minimum vocabulary, but they didn’t really get a chance to converse in
it. Normally if you wrote something out and used hand gestures you might be able
to converse a little bit. They also seemed to have a vending machine for every
product. There were machines out in the town that dispensed beer, cheeseburgers,
and cough syrup. At bus stops they had umbrellas available in case it was
raining and there were too many people to fit under the bus shelter. When I saw
this I thought that those umbrellas would have a street life of about five
seconds before someone would have stolen them here in the US. At there rock
concerts people would sit in their chairs and watch without hardly a sound. A
friend of mine and I were walking around one day and we got mooned by a group of
Japanese teenagers in their car, good to see American culture being spread far
and wide. Or is mooning a result of the fallen natures? I just can’t imagine a
group of Roman kids hanging out their posterior from their father’s chariot.
Japanese shipyard workers were used to help keep up the maintenance of the
ship. The U.S.S. Midway was a forward deployed ship so it’s home port was in
Japan and she didn’t go back to the united states (until the ship was
decommissioned). I was amazed at the hard work and dedication that these
shipyard workers performed. They were able to do in a month or two what would
have taken at least five times longer in the US. When a ship I was on was
dry-docked in Portsmouth, Virginia I observed quite the opposite. Some shipyard
workers in the US would urinate and defecate in parts of the ship instead of
finding a working bathroom. Fast food wrappers were left everywhere. The only
way you could tell the difference between an homeless person and a shipyard
worker is that the homeless person would ask you for money. Once in Portsmouth
they built a new aircraft elevator door (which is gigantic on an aircraft
carrier), it was hilarious watching them try to get it into position –
especially since it turned out they made this one inch too tall.
One of the times they were doing an overhaul on the ship, a group of us went
on detachment to Iwakuni to support our ship’s A-6E aircraft avionics out of
avionics vans located at the the Marine Core Air Stations there on the flightline. These were
real Marines uncorrupted by working alongside of us Sailors. The Gunny Sergeant
there soon put us on night check to keep us degenerate sailors from influencing
his Marines (and looking back, I don’t blame him). We rented bikes from the base
there called “benjo bombers.” These were named such probably from the
predilection of drunk Americans crashing these cheap bikes into benjo ditches
(open Japanese sewer ditches). In fact one of our group (surprisingly drunk) did
manage to crash into one of these ditches and loose his glasses, he was treated
with a plethora of shots because of this. On one of our sober jaunts into the
countryside, a family waved us down and invited us in. We were in an area far
away from the base and not frequented by Americans. They had been educated in
the states and wanted a chance to converse in English again. We were introduced
to their grandfather who had fought in W.W.II and were served seaweed covered
rice. It took all my acting expertise to keep my face from reflecting the
disgust of my palette. It was an Oscar deserving performance and I don’t think
our fine hosts ever caught on. They were very nice and we later went out camping
with them.
The trains were another interesting experience in Japan. They employed people
to try to almost shoehorn people in to get as many people on the train as
possible. I am only 5’8 but was almost a giant in this culture. One of the
advantages was that even in a tightly packed train, my head protruded above the
crowd into the stratosphere of the train compartment ensuring a fresher air
supply. While at Iwakuni we visited Hiroshima. You would not have realized the
death and destruction that had occurred with the thriving city that had been
rebuilt everywhere but at the epicenter. Seeing Peace Park and the lone library
that withstood the destruction brought the reality of this history into my
conscience. It is one thing to read about the events and quite another to have
it brought home to you.
I was also able to spend two months at the cushy (at least by Navy and Marine
Corps standards) Kadena, Air
Force Base in Okinawa while I was going to micro-minature repair school
(advanced soldering and circuit repair). I also will never forget my trips into
Tokyo, which has to be seen and experienced to be believed. For the most part
people were very pleasant and courteous to us, except for the infrequent
anti-American demonstrations at the gate of the naval base and the few “Japanese
Only” shops and restaurants. I probably experienced more anti-military
discrimination in Norfolk, Virginia (at least in the pre-Desert storm days of
“Dogs and Sailors keep of the grass” signs).
Thanks to those who said a prayer and/or left a comment, greatly appreciated.
This has caused me to reflect more on the mystical body of Christ and especially
purgatory. I am also thankful of purgatory, especially with the statement in the
book of Revelations
But nothing unclean shall enter it [heaven]
So if I make it that far I will be more than happy to receive the deep
cleaning and scrubbing required to look at God in the Beautific Vision. In some
ways I see the blogosphere as a metaphor for the communion of saints. We ask for
others to pray for us even though normally we don’t see them or know what they
look like or even where they are located. And we pray for others who we also
can’t see. It was a great mercy of God that he allows our prayers to work in his
will (it certainly wasn’t required). One of the best descriptions I head of this
was the example of the mother who lets her child help her in the baking of
cookies, the mother certainly didn’t require this help – but through love
included the child in the preparation.
The prayer of
a just man has great power in its effects. –James 5:16
Well I’m just a man so hopefully that will be good enough. I have often heard
of the spiritual cleansing fire in purgatory and thought about the fact that we
always seem to concentrate on the seemingly negative aspects of things. We
normally don’t see the great joy of having faults and imperfections removed from
us. When we think of detachment we think of having to force ourselves from the
attachment to things. There is that famous statement of St. Augustines’ “Give me
chastity and continence, but not yet.” I try to think of it as attachment
instead; attachment to God alone. To attach ourselves to God alone we must
remove those many tentacles of attachment to things. Just another of those many
seeming paradoxes, such as dying to ourselves to live. Our society sees many
things as a zero-sum game, such as if someone earns another dollar then someone
must be losing a dollar. We think that to love and devote ourselves to God more
is to love and devote ourselves to our neighbor less. This zero-sum game in
economics is patently false and it is even more false in our relation to God and
neighbor which is dynamic. Another example that I have heard used is of a
triangle; where one side of the triangle is the love of God and the other side
is love of neighbor, as you approach the apex both sides get closer and at the
top they are perfectly united.
My Grandmother has two sisters both living (one who is 99) and I know that
there time here is closing and I have another Grandmother in her late 90s. My
mother is dying from cancer and my Aunt is also not in very good condition. I
certainly don’t look forward to when they do die and know there will be great
pain in this (just admiting this to mysellf and writing the last couple of
sentences was more painful than I thought it would be), but the reality of
redemption and salvation also makes me rejoice in their hopeful union with God
alone.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord.
And
let the perpetual light shine upon them.
And may the souls of all the faithful departed, through
the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.
Blessed (Cyriac) Kuriakos Elias Chavara, co-founder and
first prior general of the congregation of the Carmelites of Mary Immaculate,
was born at Kainakary in Kerala, India, February 10, 1805. He entered the
seminary in 1818, and was ordained priest in 1829. He made his religious
profession in 1855, in the congregation he founded. In 1861 he was named vicar
general for the Syro-Malabar church; in this capacity he defended ecclesial
unity threatened by schism when mar Tomas Rochos was sent from Mesopotamia to
consecrate Nestorian bishops. Throughout his life he worked for the renovation
of the church in Malabar. He was also co-founder in 1866 of the congregation of
the Sisters of the Mother of Carmel. Above all, he was a man of prayer, zealous
for the Eucharistic Lord and devoted to the Immaculate Virgin Mary. He died at
Koonammavu in 1871. His body was transferred to Mannanam in 1889.
Entrance Antiphon
I will give you shepherds
after my own heart, and they shall feed you on knowledge and sound
teaching.
Opening Prayer
Lord
God
You raised up Blessed Kuriakos Elias Your Priest
to strengthen the
unity of the Church.
Grant that through his intercession
we may be
enlightened by the Holy Spirit
to read the signs of the times with
wisdom
and spread the news of the Gospel
by both word and example.
We
ask this through Our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son,
Who lives and reigns with
You and the Holy Spirit,
one God for ever and ever.
Prayer over the Gifts
Lord, accept these gifts
from Your people.
May the Eucharist we offer to Your glory
in honor of
Blessed Kuriakos Elias
help us on our way to salvation.
Grant this through
Christ our Lord.
Communion Antiphon
The Son of Man did not come
to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.
Prayer after Communion
Lord, we receive the bread of
heaven
as we honor the memory of Blessed Kuriakos Elias.
May the Eucharist
we now celebrate
lead us to eternal joys.
Grant this through Christ our
Lord.
First Reading
Ephesians 4:1-7, 11-13
I, a prisoner for the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy
of the calling to which you have been called, with all lowliness and meekness,
with patience, forbearing one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of
the Spirit in the bond of peace. there is one body and one Spirit, just as you
were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one
baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in
al. But grace was given to each of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift.
and His gifts were that some should be apostles, some
prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for
the work of ministry, for building up the Body of Christ, until we all attain to
the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature
manhood, to the measure of the stature f the fullness of Christ.
Responsorial Psalm (Psalm 23)
R/. The Lord is
my Shepherd, there is nothing I shall want.
The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall
not want;
he makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside
still waters;
He restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness
for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of
death,
I fear no evil; for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff, they
comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me
in the presence of my
enemies;
thou anointest my head with oil, my cup overflows.
Surely
goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life;
and I shall
dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.
Gospel
Luke 10:1-9
After this the Lord
appointed seventy others, and sent them on ahead of Him, two by two, into every
town and place where He Himself was about to come. And He said to them, “The
harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; pray therefore the Lord of the
harvest to send out laborers into His harvest. Go your way; behold, I send you
out as lambs in the midst of wolves. carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and
salute no one on the road. whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace be to
this house!’ And if a son of peace is there, your peace shall rest upon him; but
if not, it shall return to you. And remain in the same house, eating and
drinking what they provide, for the laborer deserves his wages; do not go from
house to house. whenever you enter a town and they receive you, eat what is set
before you; heal the sick in it and say to them, ‘The Kingdom of God has come
near to you.’
I have been messing around with my blog template to add a new feature. For
each day any Feast, Memorial, Solemnity will be displayed at the top. Also shown
will be the liturgical day and the vestment color. I did it in JavaScript for
the whole month so that it will correctly display based on date. I also looked
through my blogroll to see if all of the blogs I was visiting were on it. Some
are new and some are ones I thought I had previously added but must have
overwritten or messed up. So if yours disappeared you weren’t excommunicated. I
got excommunicated from Catholic Light‘s blogroll when they added James Akin’s blog,
but who can complain about being replaced by James Akin.
One thing good about reading these blogs is that it knocks the heck out of my
pride. If you just watch TV, listen to the Radio, and read books on theology you
can think your pretty sharp. Weblog reading has put the damper on that. There is
so much knowledge and depth of information provided that I am glad that I just
stick to my roll as class clown.
David Ancell Danger! Falling Brainwaves
Robert Diaz Caritate Dei
Michael Inman The Inman
Family Page
Sean Gallagher Nota
Bene
Bill Cork Ut Unum
Sint
Oswald Sobrino Catholic Analysis
Robert
Gotcher Classic
Catholic
Jeff El Camino
Real
Steve Shaw Listen Don’t
Speak
Michael Roesch Res Et Rationes
Dave Sons of Frater Louis
Will Mysterium Crucis
The Mighty Barrister
Pdawwg
The Cranky Professor
Cacciaguida
Elinor Dashwood
(alias) Mommentary
Blogspot Template Advice
If you have a blog on blogspot and
are planning on experimenting with template changes here are some
suggestions:
- Go to your current template and copy all the code in it.
- Create a new blog in blogger and don’t make it public.
- Edit the Template and paste the code you copied from your real blog
- Make changes to your heart content and if you mess it up too much you can
always copy it again from the original. - When you have it the way you want it copy the code from your test blog
template and paste it into you real blog
I watched the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers at the theater and I am not
going to present a review since my analytic abilities when it comes to movie or
book reviews would be no more profound then “Thumbs way up.” Normally I go to
movies even less than Victor Lams does but I was not about to wait eight months for
the rental. The movie was almost three hours long which is only slightly less
than the time taken by all of the movie previews and other video game
advertisements shown. I now know all the movies that are going to come out
within the next ten years. Maybe I will start a new subscription service called
MOVIETIME where you will be given both the time the previews start and the time
the movie actually starts.
But seeing LOTR got me to thinking about the reasons why I had never read the
Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy until just about two years ago. In my adolescence I
was a computer geek without a computer to geek on. It wasn’t till my senior year
in High School that I even played with the Altair 8080 which used
switches to enter programs in octal and communicated via a teletype. I have
always greatly enjoyed the field of science, this was a special time of awe with
the space program and moon landing occurring. I had tried experimenting on the
small amplifier in a portable record player and I mixed household cleaner
ingredients in a lightbulb with the base removed. That I survived my inquisitive
childhood is a surprise. My father bought me electronic kits to put together to
try to aim my propensities into safer directions and he also introduced me to
science fiction which was the bulk of his library.
When I finally took to
reading I really took to it and read constantly, and yes what a surprise that I
am another shy introverted blogger who reads a lot. My Sci-fi of choice was
“hard science” fiction such as Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Hal Clement, H.G.
Wells and Arthur C. Clark. The only thing I really read outside of Sci-fi was
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle “Sherlock Holmes” series and Dorothy L. Sayers “Lord
Peter Wimsey” stories (introduced to my by PBS’s Masterpiece Theater). I was
also interested in the Roman and Greek myth and enjoyed the Odyssey and the
Iliad. When I joined the Navy I found I had many opportunities to read,
especially while standing in the chow line and I also picked up the bad habit of
reading while eating. It was very easy to exhaust the ship’s library and the
books of those around me and one time I picked up what I suspect to be one of
Piers Anthony’s Xanth series books. All of the bad puns obviously didn’t bother
me but a walking skeleton was just too much for my scientific preferences and I
wasn’t able to overcome this prejudice at this time. Which is rather odd since
my favorite genre of movies was of the “Jason and the Argonauts” and the
“Sinbad” movies type
The first fantasy series that I came to read was Stephen R. Donaldson “Thomas
Covenant” series, which I enjoyed greatly and so I added dwarves, orcs, and
elves to my repertoire of reading. Looking back I now realized that I enjoyed
these fantasy books because of the usual tight camaraderie of the characters and
also that they had strong moral convictions on what they would do and in
rescuing their friends. I at the same time was growing in moral convictions (not
necessarily moral actions) and as I had mentioned in a previous post I found the
the very characters I loved were much more moral than I was and I paled by
comparison. One series of books that I read before my conversion was R.A.
Salvatore’s “The Icewind Dale Trilogy” a story about a Drow Elf Drizzt Do’Urden
who overcame growing up in a dark elf community to leave it and to live in the
human world as a ranger in the face of massive prejudice and distrust. I reread
this series and the beginning “Dark Elf” trilogy and I found them to me to be
very Catholic. Nowhere else had I read someone pondering about the morality of
killing orcs and whether they could be redeemed. The struggles Drizzt had with
the temptation to wear a mask that would hide his Dark Elf features and all of
the moral problems he worked to overcome. There is a very strong redemptive
streak in these books and the struggle against evil. But as I mentioned at the
top of the post I am no reviewer and might have read into these books more then
was there. I have no critical abilities when it comes to prose, especially since
my own writing is like grammatical speed bumps so I can’t say for sure that
these books are well written.
Getting back to why I had never read Tolkien’s works till recently, for
whatever reason I just hadn’t come across them yet. Towards the end my my kids
high school I had homeschooled them using the courses from Seton and they had a reading
list for which books they could do book reports on. I found this a very good
guide for myself since it included the LOTR. It also led me to read Graham
Greene, Louis de Wohl, and Evelyn Waugh. So my literary universe has been
greatly increased and I look forward to all of the other great literary works
that I have yet to read. My love of science has not decreased since my
conversion but has deepened. Before I was like a camera stuck in zoom mode,
admiring all of the details. I lived in a universe where paintings could have
randomly painted themselves. Now I can zoom out and pan around a little and not
only to see the beauty of creation but also it’s author.