A Little Silliness

Slightly irreverent and very funny... Ron Burgundy Interviews.... J.C. (and how does he keep from laughing?) Thanks Brian Barcaro for the link.

Love Your Enemies

I remember vividly this day 7 years ago. I remember who first told me about a plane hitting a building, then another. I watched in disbelief as the TV screen showed that mighty tower slide down and diffuse itself and hundreds of souls into dust and ash through the streets of New York. I remember the smallest details, the emotion, room I was in, the bright blue of the sky that day, the turns on Lincoln Drive as I sped along to get to Rebecca at Mount St. Joseph's. That was the only thought. Find loved ones, be safe. I remember making scattered phone calls, then calls not getting through. Everyone scared, blank expressions, whispers... "What is happening?" Then prayers welling up, pews filling up and overflowing; the tenderness of people's words, the slower pace we gave our steps, and how that lasted for a time. Then another thing crept into the place of silent shock; anger, bitterness, and a searching gaze into the world to see who would "pay" for this. By coincidence, or Providence, you can decide, the gospel for today in the three year cycle that the Church planned long ago happens to speak of love for our enemies. "Do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you... turn the other cheek." Jesus uses a dramatic rabbinic method of teaching here to wake up his listeners. We've heard this a thousand times, but how should we on this day of remembered terror and attack respond? When these words filter through our emotions and trickle down to the sanctuary of the soul, what are we led to do? Ultimately, forgive. And another thought came to many even on the day of September 11, 2001. Self-reflection...

Why us? Though the nature of these horrific acts is rooted in chaos, something sparked this madness. Perhaps it should drive us into a deep collective examination of conscience as a people. How does the world see us? What good have we done that has merited this action? What good have we failed to do that has drawn such anger and destruction? Are we stewards and allies or have we grown fat on our riches and bullies in the eyes of other nations? It seems to me that we have both weeds and wheat growing in our amber waves of grain. A day like September 11 is a day to walk through these fields and ponder these questions, wrap them in bundles of prayer, and turn them over to the Harvest Master Who knows our hearts better than anyone.

I'll close with a few lines from David Wilcox's poignant 9-11 song "City of Dreams." It's on iTunes and well worth a listen today. I pray we can make it's closing thought a reality.

All the flags on front porches

And the banners of unity

Spanning the bridges

From the top of the fence

As we heal up the wounds

And take care of each other

There's more love in this nation

Than hate and revenge...

- David Wilcox

Mist and Sun and the Meaning of Life

I love back roads. Swervy, windy, half in shadow, half in sun ribbons of asphalt. They're like "mobile prayer" for Rebecca and I. Add a little Lord of the Rings or Dances with Wolves soundtrack music into a Sunday drive and you are GONE... floating away to Happy Land, the Land of Contemplation! And all's right with the world! Well, mostly. My drive into school each morning is a gift; back roads abound! There are a number of paths to take and I generally mix it up from day to day. Case in point: just last week, after passing it for three years in moderate "haste," I decided to take "Grubb's Mill Road" for a spin. Now don't judge a road by its name. As I made my way over hill and dale (what is a dale anyway?) I was literally captured by the sunlight streaming through morning mist over wet grass. I flipped on the hazards and with the handy iPhone (I know I know, Geek Boy Returns) I snapped a few pics. One is handsomely portrayed in this post above for your observation. Click on it and it should fill the screen.... go ahead, try it! Now curiously, I was able to use this image as a teaching moment in class that very day. I start off my freshmen theology course light on the homework, heavy on the heartwork. I invite them into a fresh way of looking at the world.... into a "sacramental" vision. Afterall, this is how a Catholic sees the universe..... as a mosaic full of meaning, an icon, a Mystery wrapped in ribbons of protons, neutrons, and electrons. This is pretty dang exciting. Here's that quote I love to quote... again: To materialists this world is opaque like a curtain; nothing can be seen through it. A mountain is just a mountain, a sunset just a sunset; but to poets, artists, and saints, the world is transparent like a window pane - it tells of something beyond....a mountain tells of the Power of God, the sunset of His Beauty, and the snowflake of His Purity. - Bishop Fulton Sheen Back to the back roads.... This image (above) was breathtaking. And I guess what intrigues me about an encounter like this is how the physical channels the spiritual, the visible can communicate the invisible. How does it happen that we alone in the universe can "see" this? Apprehend this? Comprehend this and be captivated by this? Objectively, the scene I saw was made of water vapor, chlorophyll, and a swirl of elements bending and twisting in the rising heat of a large ball of gas 93,000,000 miles away. But it was beauty that caught me. The squirrels didn't stop and stare. Mr. Bluebird didn't land on my shoulder and strike up a conversation on the matter, cool as that would have been. For some reason, I saw in these elements a wonder, a story, a window that opened into my own experience. In this sacrament of the present moment, as the mist swirled before the sun, I thought of our sorrow thick and dank, sapping us of hope. The trees reached in and broke its cloudy mask, like the hands of friends praying for us, reaching into our lives and rooting us in hope. And then the Sun, beyond hope, pierced that mist of melancholy like a dozen swords of holy light that shone and fell upon the earth. And behold, there was light and heat and a new kind of "illumination." I think it was Dostoyevsky who once wrote that, in the end, "Beauty will save the world." Well, Beauty has arrived, and often lies waiting for us on the back roads, in places least expected, in sudden and sharp turns from shadow into light. Perhaps all we're asked to do is stop and look with love and gratitude.

Happy Birthday Humanae Vitae!

This year the Church "celebrates" the fortieth anniversary of Pope Paul VI's theological lighthouse, Humanae Vitae, a brief letter highlighting what human life is all about and what human love is meant to reflect. It materialized like a beacon atop a pillar of rock in the midst of the fog kicked up from a so-called sexual revolution in the 1960's. I call it a lighthouse because today, anyone with half a brain can see that the revolution shipwrecked in turning away from it; the Yellow Submarine sank just as soon as it set sail, and we've been floating through some pretty dark wreckage ever since. The proof is in the statistics. Forty years ago, public and parochial reactions to Paul VI's letter were said to have broken his heart. Souls abandoned the Bark of Peter in droves and chose rather to find their own way through the deep and mysterious waters of human sexuality. But we have paid a high price for jumping ship... Dr. Janet Smith (click here for the complete text) recently wrote an article highlighting the prophecies that Pope Paul VI made concerning what would happen if the Church's teaching on contraception were ignored. For one, he said that the widespread use of contraception would lead to more cases of adultery and a general lowering of morality (anyone want to argue with that one?) The Pope predicted that men would lose respect for women and "no longer (care) for her physical and psychological equilibrium," coming at last to "the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment and no longer as his respected and beloved companion." Paul VI also foresaw that the widespread allowance of contraception would put a "dangerous weapon . . . in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies." (enter China's one child policy, for example). Finally, contraception could lead humanity into a distorted sense of dominion over our own bodies. As Dr. Smith mentions, "sterilization is now the most widely used form of contraception in the U.S.; individuals are so convinced of their rights to control their own bodies that they do not hesitate to alter even their own physical make-up." Despite these forty subsequent years of tragically fulfilled prophecies, many still cling to the hope that condoms and the Pill will somehow tame the teenagers and bring us "adults" a marital tranquility that won't be "interrupted" or "disturbed" by expensive and intrusive children. Forgive us Father, we know not what we do. * Humanae Vitae hit the culture like a bomb, and many are still picking pieces of its razor sharp clarity out of their shattered dreams of sexual license and reproductive autonomy. This teaching still burrows into the skin of many Catholics, like a piece of metal the spin doctors missed. We can't figure out why the Church won't "stay out of the bedroom" - as if the Church were a building built apart from flesh and blood. Perhaps we should recall that the Church is born in the bedroom, for it's a living body after all. Where else would the Church be found? Humanae Vitae told the world that the natural and sometimes fertile flow of love from man to woman that held the power to unify hearts and bring new life into the world should never be blocked, barricaded, or belittled into something merely biological, or merely pleasurable. Sex should (and could) always be knit to love and life, pleasure and procreation, bonding and babies. Our biology is never separate from our theology. That would be a divorce. What God has brought together, let no man separate. What the world wanted to divide, Pope Paul VI announced, the Church would hold together. And I'm so glad he did. But he paid a price too, like Gandalf facing his enemy, standing on the bridge between life and death. The rather intense image in this post was inspired by a talk of Christopher West's I attended this summer. I was given permission by the artist Ted Nasmith, himself a non-Catholic, who was gracious enough to let me "alter" his work. What a hero we have in Pope Paul VI, for his courage in holding fast to the beauty of the sexual embrace, of fertility, of life, of its sacred character from womb to tomb. May it be soon that his spirit of love and sacrifice resurrects like the Grey Pilgrim from the abyss in which our culture is falling. That a true Culture of Life prevail.... free, fruitful, and full of hope. Pope Paul VI, pray for us...

________________________________________ * I recognize the strong tone of this post may offend certain readers who disagree with the Church's teaching on contraception. It is certainly a very personal and sensitive issue. I would like to welcome any comments or questions and I pray that a fruitful dialogue might come from it. This is a teaching that I and the Church I love feel very strongly about. For a deeper understanding of the issue, please read the letter of Pope Paul VI first, found here.

Faith Database.... Wow.

I just learned about this fantastic new resource through Catholic Exchange. I would have scratched it right up, but the Mac version isn't out until next month. Check out the video intro on the website here.

• 2000 Years of Christian History
• 10 Bible Translations
• 88 Council Documents from all 21 Ecumenical Councils
• 400 Early Church writings
• 165 writings from the Doctors of the Church
• 74 books from John Henry Newman
• 112 books from GK Chesterton
• 1300 Papal writings/encyclicals
• The Old Catholic Encyclopedia (1200 entries and 5000 images)
• Many classics including Gibbons' "Faith of our Fathers," Thomas a Kempis' "Imitation of Christ" and John Paul II's "Theology of the Body"
• 1000 Bible Art Images
• Over 100 Bible Maps
• Illustrated Church history
• Search Catechism and Code of Canon Law
• Some of the Over 1500 Featured Writings Classics Apologia (Newman)
• St. Thomas Aquinas (The Summa)
• St. Augustine's Confessions
• Irenaeus' Against Heresies
• St. John Chrysostom's Commentaries
• and more!

Jawdroppin' Jesus

What's the most exciting adjective ever hurled at you? Funny? Crazy? Caring? Compassionate? Nice... ? How about spellbinding. Now that's an adjective for ya. This rarely used word is the one used in today's gospel from Luke 4. Jesus is making his rounds around the towns and villages of Galilee (the sea of which is pictured above), and this time he's in Capernaum. The people are "spellbound" by his teaching. What a great word.... spellbound. It means "entranced by or as if by a spell; fascinated." But why were the people so entranced, you ask? Because he spoke with authority. Now there's something we need desparately today but are afraid to take, like nasty medicine that we know is going to heal but it hurts to go down; words of authority. The funny thing is, they only taste nasty when we are sick, that is, need to get out of unhealthy situations of self-righteousness and autonomy. When we are arrogant, anarchists, or anti-authority, words of authority come storming towards us, shining with all of the clarity, force, and power of a waterfall or a flash of lightning. They quite literally rock our world, like the words of Jesus did to the powers that be (or were) in his own time. But the truth is, we need a shock to our systems, so dulled as they are by soupy words, wishy washy words that dribble out from our lips or in opinion polls or from the media. We need a center of gravity. We need a Son to revolve around. In the me-o-centric universes that we can construct for ourselves, we simply end up floating through space like asteroids, bound sooner or later to crash into something. But it takes alot to convince us of this truth. To assure us that there is an Authority and a Law, and that we need to obey it (Him) just like the planets follow the rules. But we have the added challenge of doing so willingly, of placing our hearts and wills into His system. Falling in line with the Law of Love is the surest way of finding ourselves, of discovering our ryhthm, our pace, our deepest identity. All else is chaos. To resist his words of authority is to fall prey to the black hole of self-absorption, to lose all sense of space and time, to be bent... to be lost. The prayer today is to realign ourselves, reorient ourselves under His authority. So God, make our crooked ways straight. Draw us in and bind us to Your Truth. Then we can truly be spellbound, and in that binding we will truly be set free. "In His will, our peace." - Dante

An Inconvenient Truth

The following is from an e-mail that began circulating in March of last year. I received it yesterday from a friend. It was checked on snopes.com for authenticity and is in fact accurate! Kind of funny, kind of sad. I put it here on the blog because it puts a new spin on the spin doctors. They never tell us this stuff.... and I just wonder why. Two Houses House #1 A 20 room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house, all heated by gas. In one month this residence consumes more energy than the average American household does in a year. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2400 per month. In natural gas alone, this property consumes more than 12 times the national average for an American home. This house is not situated in a Northern or Midwestern 'snow belt' area. It's in the South. House #2 Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university. This house incorporates every 'green' feature current home construction can provide. The house is 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on a high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat-pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F) heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas and it consumes one-quarter electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Surrounding flowers and shrubs native to the area enable the property to blend into the surrounding rural landscape. HOUSE #1 is outside of Nashville , Tennessee ; it is the abode of the 'environmentalist ' Al Gore. HOUSE #2 is on a ranch near Crawford, Texas; it is the residence of the President of the United States , George W. Bush. ___________________________ You can verify it at snopes.com