The not-so-bleak midwinter

Only 3 more masses at my home parish: 7PM on the Solemnity, and two Vigils (English and Spanish) of this upcoming Sunday. After that it’s full-tilt at St. William; the pastor and I have already been hammering out the next month or two, which will include covering for him while he’s out of the country for a couple of weeks. Practically speaking, this means communion services - Word and Eucharist, but the Eucharist will be distributed from what’s reserved in the tabernacle. A priest will be in for the Sunday masses, so we should be in good shape to keep things going. I’ll do at least one Exposition/Benediction while he’s out and…I guess be on-hand as much as my job allows.

Fortunately for me I’ll have a couple of weeks to settle in there before flying solo. I’ll need them to get a sense of How Things Are Done, which is to say What The People Expect. Fun stuff. I’m excited and (of course) a little nervous. God will supply what I am certainly lacking.

Absolutely unrelated: I’ve put Factorio aside for now. The truth is that I haven’t played since about this time last year, so first I needed to apply a year’s worth of updates. Then I opened my last save and stared at it, trying to remember the keyboard mappings, the new things added by the Space Age expansion, and my general state of mind as regards belts and defenses. Then I gauged how much I’d have to grind to launch the rocket and actually see the new Space Age stuff, and I compared that to the amount of time I actually have and, Reader, the news was not good.

So: off to peruse Steam’s winter sale, and I came away with Megabonk, which is very similar to Vampire Survivors in game-play. I also grabbed Slay the Spire, another rogue-like with deck-building which seemed crazy popular a little while back. Both of these look to fit the bill perfectly. And for, what, a combined total of $11? That’s crazy cheap, even for me.

I’m going to hang up The Book of Disquiet. I’m nearly at the end. The little texts are beautifully written, but the speaker is something of a nudge, and it’s getting a little old. I’ve got other things in the stack to get through and have been eyeballing a revisit to Michael Moorcock, who I haven’t read since…gosh, high school, probably. I don’t know if I ever actually finished the Elric books, but all of them are available in a three-volume set, so really, what’s my excuse?

Homily for the Solemnity of the Holy Family

It is something of a cliche to talk about Man’s search for God. We are constantly seeking for Him everywhere. We look for truth in science, we look for new frontiers, new freedoms, and new ways of understanding the world.

The Incarnation of Christ shows us, however, that the truth is completely inverted, and has always been about God’s search for us. This search began in a garden and can be seen throughout the entirety of the scriptures. God has been seeking his people, testing them, refining them, and preparing them for the most improbable thing ever. He would cross the infinite space between Him and His creation, entering into the world in a way we could know Him and this most extraordinary thing would happen in the most ordinary place: in a family.

We’ve read the genealogy of Jesus several times in the past week - once at the vigil, and beforehand during daily Mass. Our Lord’s family tree is no boastful list of kings and might heroes, though there are a few of those in there. Most of the names in there are pretty ordinary, relatively speaking. And as anyone who’s worked on their family tree knows, there are a couple of questionable names in there too. If you’ve worked on your own tree and haven’t found the colorful or questionable names yet, I have some bad news for you, because it just might be you.

But names and lines and boxes on a family tree hardly do justice to the enormity of what we see: entire lives, lived in ordinary times, suffering and celebrating the same way we do.

Families are a central part of God’s plan, and reflect the way he wants us to know Him, for this is how He came to us. Families are the places that we learn to love, to pray, and to serve. They are perfect little communities and the basic cell of any human society.

Families begin in faith, starting with the promises and consent of marriage, each person trusting in God to deliver on the promises of grace to live out the vocation of Marriage.

Families grow in hope! Hope by its very nature is oriented to the future, to what’s ahead, not what’s past. And just as we are here because of the hopes of those who’ve come before us, so we pay it forward, and pass it to those who will come after us.

Families abide in love, in the relations between their members. Families are the first places we learn who we are as we learn about others. Babies only know three people in the world: themselves, Mom, and Not-Mom. As we mature, though, we come to a greater understanding of our selves. Once we know our self, we can learn what it is to love selflessly, in agape.

Now I say all that to say this: families can also screw things up pretty badly. This crucible that forms us can also be a place of pain, of hurt. He knows about this too. But little by little, we can - with His grace - begin to inch things back into their proper place. It may take years; we might not ever finish. This is fine. We might think about forgiving a hurt or a sleight. If not for the other person, than as a gift we can dare to give to ourselves, letting go of a weight we no longer need to carry.

So let’s take a look at the Holy Family as a model and guide, and I realize that sounds like something of a tall order. After all, we have the Son of God, the Immaculate Conception, and saintly Joseph. That’s a pretty tough act to follow. A closer look at the Holy Family reveals some beautiful catechesis:

They are obedient to God’s will. Joseph got up in the middle of night to move his family to safety. Any of us would do the same of course. But what about in the many small things of life? Are we as ready to obey God in small moments as well?

They are attentive to God in prayer. The most remarkable thing about the infancy narratives - the stories of our Lord’s childhood - is their silence. We don’t hear much from them at all. This silence invites us to create spaces of silence in our own lives, a place to share in the silence of Bethlehem and Nazareth. Silence is necessary for prayer and prayer is a non-negotiable part of our interior lives. Let’s look for some of their silence and sit in it for awhile this season.

Finally, the Holy Family moved quickly and decisively. If you’ve been discerning God’s call to your something, whatever it is, it may be time to step off the boat and trust in Him for the next steps. In formation, they called this ‘setting your hand to the plow’ and moving ahead. Let us all pray for the grace to act.

G.K. Chesterton wrote:

When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into a family, we step into a fairy-tale.

Our Lord stepped into a fairy-tale by entering into a family, only He was the author and he came to show us how the story will end.

All of our greatest stories begin in families and find their frameworks, their contexts, in families. The story of our redemption is no different. Neither is yours or mine.

Let us then follow the Holy Family, learning from them the silence of prayer, obedience to God’s will, and willingness to follow wherever it leads. Let us follow them from Bethlehem to Egypt, and from Egypt to Nazareth, and from Nazareth to Jerusalem.

Amen.

Feast of St. Stephen the Protomartyr (and deacon)

Merry Christmas! I trust that everyone is having a good one. Several more days to go until we’ve run through all twelve, so probably wise to pace yourself. For example, I don’t usually open the monastery fruitcake until a few days after the 25th. True, this is because the house is still stacked with other desserts; I don’t want the fruitcake to get lost in the shuffle.

Christmas Mass was lovely and the first Spanish liturgy at which I’ve assisted. I’ll get plenty more opportunities to assist (and preach) in Spanish soon enough. As it is, I’m preaching on Sunday for the Solemnity of the Holy Family. Will be working on that a bit later. Today was mostly about cleanup, a few errands out and about, and the construction of another terrarium. I made one last year and it’s survived pretty well since then, so when we were about to throw out a large glass drink dispenser earlier this summer, I set it aside for just this purpose. Now it hosts a small fern, false aralia, and a bit of pixie ivy. Now when the dreariness of JanuFeb hits with its full force, I can look over at my tiny bit of rain forest and daydream until spring. In the meanwhile, we’ve come to really savor the latter days of the Octave. Most of us are still on vacation and things are quiet. Right about the time the walls start moving inward, it will be time to get back to work and it might even feel like a bit of relief. Or at least for a few days anyway.

The Liturgy of the Hours was a sobering change-up in the midst of all the Christmas rejoicing. One moment you’re tooling along with “Rejoice! Rejoice!” and then you’re reading the martyrdom of Stephen, one of the first deacons and the first to die for Christ. Our own turns will come, probably in thousands of small ways rather than one big one. Tomorrow, which is also my birthday, the Church celebrates the Feast of St. John the Evangelist. I get to do my first home blessing, too. Solidly festive, if you ask me.

Peace and God Bless.

More pictures from Saturday, courtesy of my oldest daughter’s excellent eye, which can make even me look pretty good.

Believe, Teach, Practice

The buzz is just starting to wear off, but just a little. Father let me off the hook for preaching at my first Mass. He figured I had enough to worry about, but left me the option, and I was glad to exercise it. This let me concentrate on the other details, like remembering new places to stand, things to say, and all the rest. It was wonderful, also, to have two of my sons up there as servers. There was a nice reception afterward and a smaller dinner of family and close friends later that night. Just beautiful, end to end.

My oldest daughter is a professional photographer and got some great pictures throughout; I’ll post a few as soon as I can.

First Mass

On the cusp

Starting tomorrow, I’m on PTO through 1/5, which is going to be lovely. It won’t quite be two weeks of extended relaxation, though. Ordination is on Saturday, and I’m scheduled for five masses, one of which is the very next morning. After that is the noon Christmas (in Spanish), two Sundays, and The Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. Then the new assignment starts and I’m on for 4 liturgies per weekend: two each in Spanish and English, split over Saturday and Sunday. Haven’t quite figured out what the weeknight stuff looks like.

It sounds crazy, and I’m sure that it will definitely feel crazy, but I expect there to be a few pockets of quiet here and there and I hope to get some reading done. We’ll see. Last night was the OCIA Christmas party, and it was nice to chat with folks and try various desserts. It’s a little bit of a bummer having to leave them, but they’re in excellent hands and I trust that the Lord will do His thing between now and Easter. I will probably return at some point after the first of the year to do the contraception/IVF session.

I likewise have my last parish finance committee tomorrow. Clergy are members of these committees ex officio, so while I’m certain I’ve not seen the last of parish finance meetings, I can’t be a member in any active or voting way, which is fine. I’ve learned a tremendous amount, and I’m inclined to credit God’s providence for putting me there despite my constant confusion. Balance sheets don’t make much sense to me and all I brought to the table was a willingness to take notes and ask dumb questions. I’m neither an accountant nor do I have any background in finance. I suppose the willingness was enough.

In any case, here is some nerdspeak: I’m basically all-in on emacs now. I’ve used it to replace my RSS reader (with elfeed), console browser (changing elinks for eww), and email client (switching from neomutt to notmuch). Since it makes a decent text editor as well, I’ve also kicked vscode to the curb. I haven’t tried the irc client out yet but probably will at some point. I like my current client quite a bit and don’t feel any particular urge to switch (weechat for anyone who might be wondering). I’m relying pretty heavily on Claude for configuration assistance, but it’s mostly in the form of “how can I make X in emacs act like tool Y on the console” and the AI is happy to oblige without losing patience or telling me how I ought to be doing it. There is a close-to-zero chance I would have gotten this far without it; I’ll call it a win.

Book status is unchanged. I’m getting a little impatient with Pessoa, but will make a push and try to finish it out soon.

Still no radio activity. I’ll see if the mood strikes over the holidays; if not, there will be plenty of indoor time during JanuFeb for tinkering. Until then, I’ll leave you with this: CHRISTMAS WEATHER CHANNEL VAPORWAVE Vol.02 // 90s Nostalgia Mix. Enjoy!

This, that, and the other.

Still tinkering with emacs, but I’ve got my main use-cases more or less ironed-out: email, RSS feeds, and writing like this. I can toggle light and dark modes and even turn my my desk lights on and off. It’s easy to see why people just opt to do everything with it. I still need to get my head around the some of the text-editing shortcuts. Yes, I’m aware of evil-mode; I was running in to a lot of conflicts and whatnot with some of the packages I was using and was getting tired of continually adding exceptions and workaround in my config file.

Still dipping in and out of Pessoa. The individual texts are beautiful, but the overall tone is sort of depressing and the speaker (whoever that is) is continuously struck by the banality of life, but also seems to have come to peace with it. Most of the time, anyway. Religious references pop up here and there, but nothing that would have you conclude he’s any sort of believer. Pessoa himself was something of an occultist, apparently, but Soares sort of drifts along between the day-to-day grind of life and the interior castles of his books and dreams.

For study, I’ve started Congar’s I Believe in the Holy Spirit, which I got last year for Christmas. It’s slow going so far. Same for De Sales, but that’s only a chapter at a time as part of morning prayer.

Ordination is in one week’s time. Lots to do between now and then, including wrapping up some stuff at work in advance of a few weeks of year-end PTO. Last night was the middle school band concert, which was lovely. Today was a pair of basketball games. Next week has a couple of parties, and then family begins to arrive. Ordination, and I’m on the mass schedule as of the following day. I stay at my home parish until January 5, which is when my assignment officially starts. If you’re the praying sort, and I hope you are, remember me and the other candidates (two of which are preparing for the priesthood). And thank you.

There’s an enormous honey locust tree in our back yard, way back in the corner and too far away to hurt anyone with the colossal thorns that bristle along its trunk and branches. Owing to it’s shape, it wouldn’t be much of a climbing tree, but the thorns - which can and have punctured mower and tractor tires - seal the deal. Stay away, unless you’re a squirrel. It’s a nice looking tree. The leaves are lacy and small and it turns a lovely yellow in the fall. It also produces long bean-pod looking things as its main fruit. The pods, or at least the goo inside, is said to be edible and are what give the tree its name. I just run them over with the mower and chop them up, but they originally evolved to feed large animals which no longer exist on our continent.

Same as the Osage oranges, which are those knobbly looking green softballs that are all over the place along the greenway this time of the year. I was amazed the first time I saw them and immediately disappointed to learn that they are not edible. They’re not much good for anything, though I read somewhere that if you put the fruit under your bed it will repel spiders. We haven’t tried this yet, so your mileage may vary. Both the honey locust and the Osage orange (also called hedge apple) developed their fruits to be consumed by the megafauna which used to roam our landscape but faded away a long time ago. The fruit would be gobbled up in one place and the seeds passed out somewhere else. Avocados were distributed the same way. Making giant fruit with a single seed in the middle takes a lot of energy, which means the tree was counting on something which would take windfall or ripened fruit elsewhere. Not at all like maples, which cast their seeds on wings every time the wind picks up.

For what it’s worth, I did my part to try to make up for the lost megafauna. I brought home a couple of Osage oranges from the greenway and chucked them into a few spots here and there around the yard. Nothing happened, but I’m not about to attempt their customary pathway. Maybe I’ll try burying them a little next time.

Other tree updates: new Pistache trees are settling in well. The weather has been relatively mild and pretty wet, so I know they’re getting plenty of water. The quince and medlar trees are supposed to ship in late winter, around February. At the longtime request of my wife, we also added a dogwood - ‘Cherokee Brave,’ which is one of the darker pink varieties. It’s likewise doing well out front so we have high hopes for this spring.

There’s nothing in life that’s less real for having been well described. Small-minded critics point out that such-and-such poem, with it’s protracted cadences, in the end says merely that it’s a nice day. But to say it’s a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes on. It’s up to us to conserve the nice day in a wordy, florid memory, sprinkling new flowers and new stars over the fields and skies of the empty, fleeting outer world.

Text 27, The Book of Disquiet

This is a strange little book; little meditations, observations, and rhapsodies on everything under the sun, as written and gathered by Senhor Soares, who may (or may not) be one of the personality/heteronyms closest to Pessoa himself. Soares is an accountant at a small firm whose days are filled a quiet routine that is gilded on all sides by his observations and occasional fantasies. Text 27 continues:

Everything is what we are, and everything will be, for those who come after us in the diversity of time, what we will have intensely imagined - what we, that is, by embodying our imagination, will have actually been. The grand, tarnished panorama of History amounts, as I see it, to a flow of interpretations, a confused consensus of unreliable eyewitness accounts. The novelist is all of us, and we narrate whenever we see, because seeing is complex like everything.

The texts seem to have been something of a lifetime project. Gathered and arranged more or less, you get the feeling that you’re reading a sort of diary or commonplace book, except that the gathered thoughts are his own, and by his I’m still not entirely sure if we mean Soares or Pessoa, and maybe it doesn’t matter since they’re one and the same person. The writer is clearly someone who finds himself in his own head an awful lot, a state probably familiar to a lot of us. Anyway, his observations of daily life are beautiful and bite sized. You can dip in and out at will without losing the thread, because there really isn’t one. Just a big of threads, along with random buttons, shiny rocks, random ticket stubs, a half-chewed pencil, a tiny ceramic dog - everyday treasure of the sort that surrounds us every day.