Making A List....

The new liturgical year is as good a reason as any to start renewing my goal and resolutions.  I make a list of ten goals every year to work on: some long-term, some short. It's time to review and renew them. My Needs: Keep holy. Stay healthy in body, mind, and spirit for the trip to heaven.  Serve Jesus Christ first and always according to my vows, baptismal, religious, and priestly. Love God and neighbor in unselfish service.  As these stand, rather unspecific.''


Next, to plan the goals: 10 concrete objectives to accomplishment.  St Paul speaks of a division of Spirit, Soul, and Body, which William of St. Thierry uses to provide the makings of the spiritual economy of the religious. The body is the field of interaction with the world including the corporeal relationships we have with others; the soul is the field of virtue where we have the moral life, including communion in knowledge and love; the Spirit is the hermitage of the heart where I dwell with Christ alone in a way he orders and shapes as I yield him room.


Enough for now.

The Advent of Emmanuel

Advent is the period of preparation for Christmas, the feast of the Incarnation of the Lord.  The divinely revealed truths of the Trinity of Persons in the one God, and that of the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, who is truly and perfectly both God and man, are the two teachings that make Christianity unique among world religions.  Christmas shows their connection.  Out of love for us and for our salvation, the eternal and only-begotten Son of God, the eternal Word of the Father, leaped down from heaven, taking flesh of the Virgin Mary, and became man.  He was born at Bethlehem so that He might die in Jerusalem; his back felt the rough wood of the manger on the day he was born, as he would feel the wood of the Cross on it on the day he died.  He was born that he might give the God who forbad the making of idols a human face by which he might be known and loved, and in the same moment gave us the vision of what God considers perfection in human life and virtue.

The Incarnation is a teaching easily misunderstood.  Historically speaking, at one end of two extremes of error, we find the falsehood of believing Jesus to be only the first of God's creation, above mankind  but below true God, a kind of demigod whose true humanity is denied as well as his true divinity - a doctrine held by Arians in antiquity and by Jehovah's Witnesses in the present  day. A more common error in the present time is the denial that Jesus is truly God,  and just a "great moral teacher" or a "prophet".  If this were true, the death of Christ on the Cross was just another human death, without power to save the world or rescue us from death, and we are therefore still locked under sin and the prey of the devil.  If Christ were man only, earth would not be joined to heaven, and Jesus' connection with God  would not differ essentially  from that of Moses or the other Jewish prophets. Against this false understanding, Jesus says "The Father and I are one," (John 10:30) and "Before Abraham came to be, I AM," (John 8:58.) 

Thanks be to the Trinity of Power who has given us a Savior who is truly God and truly Man in one divine Person.  Jesus possesses a divine nature as the Divine Son, coequal to the Father and sharing one life and existence with Him, and also, possesses a complete human nature, with a human body, a created human soul, with a full set of emotions and passions.  God was born as one of us so that divine power, accomplishing what we could not,  might cleanse us of sin and death, and  raise us up into immortality.  This is the Christ Child we  await in Advent, fortold by the prophets (especially Isaiah, who is appropriate reading in this season):  "A child is born for us, a Son is given us, upon his shoulder dominion rests (Is. 9:5)," Jesus Christ, our brother and our God.

Thursday Thoughts

Part of my life is having snippets of time-10 to 20 minutes in duration between other scheduled jobs.  It's really not enough time to change gears and get a letter written or take a physical break for exercise. I confess I am tempted to vegetate, with or without coffee, during these times.  The better plan is to find ways to use these bits of time so as to get something useful done.  I could take notes for this blog, for instance.

Speaking of exercise, my doctor's office called with the results of my latest blood tests.  Blood pressure and sugar levels are great; however he is worried about my cholesterol.  I have not been exercising seriously since since I got here, since I firmly believe in checking with the doctor first before starting new exercise programs.  However he has cleared me for that.  He also wants to put me on a statin.  I know I am not the first of my family to get here, as we have a problem with heart disease in my dad's genetic line. Dad died at age 62 - I am 58.  It's still one more step reminding me of the brevity of this life in general and of mine in particular.  Inshallah. Or, better, as Mary said to Gabriel, Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.  It's sobering, but not at all depressing.  I'm beginning to look forward to putting this life behind me, whenever the Lord finishes with me, which, however, I recognize may not be for another 30 years.  The point is to live in accordance with the line from St. Paul:   In life and death we are the Lord's.

To accentuate the positive in the report, my plan for controlling my sugar levels by low-glycemic eating seems to be working.  At the same time I will pick up my new prescription I will also get my order of five pounds of hulled barley just across the street at Sweet Meadows Market.  Time to have fun with 13th century medieval recipes - one for a moussaka using barley.  I should also experiment with simple barley breads.  The cost saving for foods will be substantial: a loaf of purchased Ezekiel bread weighing less than a pound costs almost  $5.00; five pounds of barley - which should make at least four times that weight of bread -  is costing me just $9.00.

Thursday is my day off.  This means I need to get a lot of larger things done that I don't have time to do the rest of the week.

After lunch I'm going up to Columbus to make some SCA garb with friends.  It should be interesting, and fun.  I think the first thing will be a surcoat for fighting, which I desperately need, if i'm going to exercise.  I have a brigandined coat-of-plates which will be plenty bulky enough to give a good fit to a surcoat for what ever armor I should wear were under it.

Mental Stretch.....

So, it's Monday.  It's the beginning of the new week.  The time to organize my affairs for the week.

I've been hors de combat for the better part of the year just past, and gearing up for life in a busy parish requires some mental changes as well.  I still have to keep my recovery going while doing my best to be of use to my pastor.  One thing I do need to do is to sit down and revisit my ten primary goals for the year; things have changed radically since my allergic reaction in January.  (Then, I was planning to be in Nairobi by now.)  Pas de problem.

A couple of friends came up yesterday to take me out for lunch after the Sunday Masses.  We went to a Mexican restaurant in town called Tlaquepaque, family run, with excellent food.  I noticed that there were a lot of specialties from Jalisco, and the name intrigued me - it's Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec nation.  It turns out (I Googled the information) that the name means "the land above the clays" - a reference not just to a specific town in Jalisco, but very appropriate for a restaurant in Zanesville, Ohio, which like the Mexican town, was a major center for pottery production in its heyday.  It's a very clever name and amazingly appropriate for the location.  It's completely decorated in Mexican folk art, right down to elaborately carved and painted tables and chairs.  And, as I said, the food is very good.

It turns out that Tlaquepaque and Jalisco are remarkable for something else: a church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin under the title Our Lady Of Solitude.
  The devotion originates in Oaxaca State, which anciently was exclusively a Dominican mission under the Spanish crown.  It is said that a man guiding a burro train mysteriously found an extra animal among his own bearing a large box; when he opened the crate, he discovered a statue of Our Lady of unusual design; a church was built on the place of the discovery to house the statue, which resulted in the beginning of the devotion in Mexico.  The statue depicts Our Lady mourning the death of Our Lord on Holy Saturday.  He is caught by the coils of death, and she is left alone, apparently deserted by her son and the promises of God she received from the angel.  She is dressed in a black cloak of mourning - an unusual presentation for the Blessed Virgin.  Her desolation is in fact accompanied by hope, since she never loses faith - and is rewarded with the glory of her Son's resurrection.  In Oaxaca she is venerated as a healer and worker of miracles, is a patron of mariners, and from my reading seems to have a great attraction for people who feel otherwise alone and desolated themselves, whether by grief or by wrestling with what seems to them to be insurmountable problems.  As there is a Dominican connection, I probably should research this devotion a little more.

You Are Not Rid of Me That Easily....

My dear friends,

It's been at least the better part of two years since I posted in this blog.  Quite a bit as happened.   Mom died in April 2010, we had a provincial chapter to which I was delegate that same summer, a near-posting to Africa, and then serious injury in August, followed by hospitalization, surgery, rehabilitation at a nursing home, and physical therapy through the spring.  In January I had a major allergic reaction to a new leg brace, followed by immunosuppressants; so therefore no inoculations for tropical disease.  In May I was assigned to Saint Thomas Aquinas Church in Zanesville, Ohio as associate pastor and assistant to Father Jordan Turano, O.P.

But, I'm back in the saddle again, - although I'm still doing therapy for the leg,- and I hope to be blogging regularly again.  But we'll see.

To my family and friends, part of the purpose of this blog is to keep you informed of what is going on in my life.  Please feel free to link this blog with an RSS feed.