It often happens that I wake up at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember that I am the Pope.
“the sisters gave Oprah a rosary, and taught her how to pray it. She seemed really interested.”
In many rectories the bishop has given permission for chapels to be erected for adoration, prayer, and private Mass. It may seem odd to some that this is done being that rectories are often so closely connected to parish churches but no priest would think it odd. Assuming that you can find time that the church is not in use it almost never happens that you can go there and be unmolested by people who just happen to need to talk to you at that moment or a maintenance problem for which your advice is sought or that you feel you have to be well dressed in case someone is there. So you (read: I) stop going. You are not going to be able to pray or meditate in your homily anyway.But the poverty of praying the Liturgy of the Hours or preparing a homily without the presence of the Lord is deemed by many priests (myself included) sad. So recently I petitioned the bishop to establish a chapel in the St. Sebastian Rectory.
5. The League of Bearded Catholics posts on Tolkien's view of the USA plus some of their own commentary (this is not Tolkien speaking):
The American tendency toward cheap and shabby artifice, for the slick and transiently fashionable (and ugly), her penchant for the disposable and temporary, is a problem. There is ... yet hope, however, for a kind of flowering of a real American culture that is lasting and beautiful. It's the as yet still unparalleled freedom of American life that may make this possible. This involves making some choices... deliberately and patiently and systematically restoring the worthy aspects of our Western heritage while rejecting the unworthy, and rebuilding the connections with our past that we have so actively and enthusiastically destroyed over the course of our relatively brief civic life.Our passion for burning the bridges of traditional culture has left us with few remaining authentic traditions, and has even given rise to the ridiculous idea that (as at Christmas), rather than carrying on old traditions, we should always be busy inventing new traditions - an oxymoron. Authentic traditions are not deliberately conceived and built on the spot, like a house, but grow like seeds in the dark earth and flower in the course of time. If the culture is really ready for a particular tradition to take hold, it may require only the flimsiest kind of temporal or historic pretext to flourish. On the other hand, might, main and money can't create a new tradition out of thin air if it does not already have some firm root in the cultural psyche.We can go back to mine our cultural roots, without also endorsing all the mistakes of our forebears... slavery, Total War, that sort of thing. There's nothing to prevent us.
6. Torture as a game show. A bad sign for humanity.
7. A musical episode of Fringe? Fantastic!
Also, Sawyer apparently didn’t leave the island. Contrary to what I have been saying the last few weeks. And Jin is still around. I had no idea what happened to him. Good to see he is still alive.
11. Did you ever want the plot of Terminator 2 presented to you as a rap song? Your wish has come true. [Warning: Some residual swearing from the movie itself ... and also Christian Bale]
No comments:
Post a Comment