Punditry

I keep looking for a no fuss Rosary. I like the beaded ones with metal links, but I want to try to pray the Rosary, not spend time keeping it repair. The last Rosary I bought was a knotted Rosary to prevent this problem, but recently the wooden Crucifix on it broke. Yes I enjoy a certain conceit in wearing out Rosaries. Which sucks that I can be conceited about this.

So this time I turned to Rugged Rosaries which I had previously run across.

Most of the Rosaries they sell use military grade paracord which is “Durable, waterproof, and very difficult to break.” They have a variety of colors and styles. When ordering you can choose to add medals to the Rosary. I choose to add the Divine Mercy and St Benedict Medals.

The model of Rosary I choose was the Catholic Gentleman Rosary – Be a Man. Be a Saint.

So using this Rosary over the last week I found it was exactly what I wanted.

During the work day I take two prayer walks. One to pray the Rosary and the other the Divine Mercy chaplet at 3:00 PM (when I am able). What I enjoy the most about this Rosary beyond the sturdiness and build quality is the heft of it. It has a nice weight too it. Plus I can easily hold it one handed going through the beads as I am walking and my arms are swinging to some extent. Just love the aesthetic feel of it in my hands. But mostly I don’t have to think about it.

Combining some exercise with prayer works for me. When I first started to take daily walks I was usually listening to audiobooks and podcasts. Usually would pray the Rosary before going to bed. Often though I would fall asleep while praying it. Yes I heard the bit about your Guardian Angel finishing a Rosary for you when you fell asleep. Still it finally dawned on me to combine the walks with praying. I found for myself it helps me focus better and that from time to time prayer actually breaks through the distractions.

While Chesterton has been tagged as being the Apostle of Common Sense, I would add also a the Apostle of Gratitude and Thanksgiving. Nothing makes me see the actual wonder of our lives as much as GKC does.

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” (A Short History of England » Ch. 6: The Age of the Crusades)

“When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?”

This one described much of my life as an atheist to a T (there is a Tau joke in there no doubt).

“The worst moment for an atheist is when he is really thankful and has no one to thank.”

“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.” (early notebook, mid 1890s)

And lastly:

“The Americans have established a Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the fact that the Pilgrim Fathers reached America. The English might very well establish another Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the happy fact that the Pilgrim Fathers left England.” (Chesterton in America “And What about the Quakers?”)

Tim Kaine claims Catholic Church could change on gay marriage.

Washington D.C., Sep 11, 2016 / 04:50 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, a Catholic who is currently the junior Virginia senator, said on Saturday that he thinks the Church will eventually drop its opposition to same-sex marriage.

“I think it’s going to change because my church also teaches me about a creator who, in the first chapter of Genesis, surveyed the entire world, including mankind, and said, ‘It is very good’,” Kaine said Sept. 10, according to the Associated Press.

His comments came during his keynote address at the national dinner for Human Rights Campaign, an influential LGBT advocacy group, in Washington, D.C.

Tim Kaine is no doubt another great Selfie Prophet. Being able to predict that the Church will change to his beliefs. That after close to 2,000 years finally we have a theologian with the depth of Kaine to set us straight (pun always intended).

Just like the religious sisters who proclaim themselves part of a prophetic movement. More like a pathetic movement. They are prophets not calling for people to repent, but for the Church to do so. Prophets applauded rather than persecuted. The Old Testament prophet had to call out the people for being lax and following the spirit of the age. These modern “prophets” say “Hey get with the spirit of the age” and that those who actually follow and believe Church teaching must repent.

The hubris of the age is “The Church is wrong and I am right.” My will be done. In my own experience I found the exact opposite to be true.

Really I can’t understand the idea of wanting to belong to a Church that could change here teaching. One that does is a human institution with no authority to teach. Development of doctrine is one thing, theological U-Turns quite another.

An imbecile habit has risen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma was credible in the 12th century, but is not credible in the 20th. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays (G.K. Chesterton – Orthodoxy)

If same-sex marriage was actually marriage then you would have to say the Holy Spirit was rather incompetent. That somehow nowhere in scripture is there one example of same-sex marriage being normative. That God from the beginning intended homosexual acts to be normative, and yet never mention this fact or guides his people to this fact. That we had to wait for abortion loving Democrats to finally learn the truth.

Recently we had a Catholic Vice President officiate a so-called same-sex marriage, and now a Catholic VP candidate telling us how the Church will change regarding this.

From St. Augustine’s City of God.

So we must not grumble, my brothers, for as the Apostle says: Some of them murmured and were destroyed by serpents. Is there any affliction now endured by mankind that was not endured by our fathers before us? What sufferings of ours even bear comparison with what we know of their sufferings? And yet you hear people complaining about this present day and age because things were so much better in former times. I wonder what would happen if they could be taken back to the days of their ancestors–would we not still hear them complaining? You may think past ages were good, but it is only because you are not living in them.

It amazes me that you who have now been freed from the curse, who have believed in the son of God, who have been instructed in the holy Scriptures–that you can think the days of Adam were good. And your ancestors bore the curse of Adam, of that Adam to whom the words were addressed: With sweat on your brow you shall eat your bread; you shall till the earth from which you were taken, and it will yield you thorns and thistles. This is what he deserved and what he had to suffer; this is the punishment meted out to him by the just judgment of God. How then can you think that past ages were better than your own? From the time of that first Adam to the time of his descendants today, man’s lot has been labor and sweat, thorns and thistles. Have we forgotten the flood and the calamitous times of famine and war whose history has been recorded precisely in order to keep us from complaining to God on account of our own times? Just think what those past ages were like! Is there one of us who does not shudder to hear or read of them? Far from justifying complaints about our own time, they teach us how much we have to be thankful for.

There is much just critique of the cult of progress where history is seen as a line sloping up. Progress measured by an ever changing metric.

“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.” G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

At the same time there is a view taking the opposite direction of regression and decline. A nostalgic take for a world that never existed.

Both view things that we are in a point of history that intersects either a line going upward or downward. As a pessimistic/optimist I am at times drawn to both viewpoints. Still I think Dicken’s famous introduction regarding it being the best of times and the worst of times is the correct view that straddles all points of the timeline. The present is always a mixture of various rise and falls.

“I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ – though it contains some samples or glimpses of final victory.” J.R.R. Tolkien

With a clear-headedness we can see all that we have to be thankful for even in the most tumultuous of times. There has never been a time when someone could not be a saint. If anything society’s brokenness can shine a light on our own brokenness.

“At times of course it is hard to understand this profound reality, because evil is noisier than goodness; an atrocious murder, widespread violence, grave forms of injustice hit the headlines; whereas acts of love and service, the daily effort sustained with fidelity and patience are often left in the dark, they pass unnoticed” (Te Deum and First Vespers: Homily of Benedict XVI, 31 December 2012)

So easy to put a lot of effort in what’s wrong with the world and others, and little effort with the same in ourselves. I would rather rant than pray. Long for holiness while not wanting to put much effort into that desire. Knowing I suck, while seriously trying to not block the grace to reduce my suckitude.

The saints are oases around which life sprouts up and and something of the lost paradise returns. (Pope Benedict XVI Jesus of Nazareth P. 248)