Mercy and mission
Homily for the Second Friday of Ordinary Time
1 Samuel 24:3-21
Psalm 57:2, 3-4, 6 and 11
Mark 3:13-19
Today the Church celebrates two saints - Saint Vincent, a deacon who was martyred in Rome during the persecutions, and Saint Marianne Cope, who served a community of people suffering from leprosy on the island of Moloka’i. Providentially, the readings for today invite us to meditate on mercy and mission.
David has an opportunity to end his troubles once and for all, for Saul has been delivered directly into his hands. One quick act and it would be over. He does not, instead showing mercy to his opponent who later acknowledges this as the hallmark of a true king.
In the Gospel, our Lord calls his apostles - those who are to be sent, which is what apostle means. The same word gives us postal and post office. Discipleship is certainly, in one sense, something that is focused on the self. Only my sins will keep me out of heaven, and I need to work out my salvation and relationship with Christ as best I can. But it is also, by necessity, something that takes place in community. Our task is to take the graces we receive in here and bring them to others out there, and demonstrating mercy can be one of the ways - maybe the chief way - we can do this. It will be imperfect mercy. We will fall short, often. But even so, others will see, wonder, and ask, and so we bring them to Christ.
St. Vincent, deacon and martyr, pray for us.
St. Marianne Cope, pray for us.
Oh how happy are they who keep their hearts open to holy inspirations! For these are never wanting to any, in so far as they are necessary for living well and devoutly, according to each one’s condition of life, or for fulfilling holily the duties of his profession. For as God, by the ministry of nature, furnishes every animal with the instincts which are necessary for its preservation and the exercise of its natural powers, so if we resist not God’s grace, he bestows on every one of us the inspirations necessary to live, to work, and to preserve our spiritual life…When we are at a loss, and human help fails us in our perplexities, God then inspires us, nor will he permit us to err, as long as we are humbly obedient.
— St. Frances de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God
My spiritual director steered me towards St. Frances de Sales and I’ve come to love his writings very much. His most approachable (and probably most well-known) book is Introduction to the Devout Life, which is very much like it sounds: a practical how-to on cultivating holiness regardless of your station in life. How, someone wrote him, can someone who is not a cleric or part of a religious order hope to become holy? Can a soldier, merchant, or housewife aspire to saintliness?
Of course, wrote St. Frances. We take that sort of thing - the universal call to holiness - almost for granted these days, but it wasn’t necessarily the case for a lot of people who tended to see The Church as the place where holy people went, and The World for the rest, sort of schlepping along as best as can.
St. Frances responded to this letter with the Introduction, which lays out the case for attaining holiness wherever you happen to be, and more importantly, lays out the ways to do it. It is a very practical little book, though obviously bits and pieces are very much a product of it’s early 17th century setting. It is a gentle little book, and it served me very well for spiritual reading. I finished it quickly, but returned to it a second time. Ordination was drawing closer and I was preparing to make a general confession beforehand; St. Frances de Sales was an enormous help.
His other major work, Treatise on the Love of God is full of the same sorts of insights, but is a pretty dense work. I’ve been consuming it one chapter at a time as part of my morning holy hour and am about two-thirds of the way through it now. If you only read one thing from the spiritual father of the Salesians, make it the Introduction, but if you want to spend time studying the love of God from a spiritual master, take a run at the the Treatise, but festina lente. Make haste slowly.
Brothers and sisters: as we watch the approaching weekend weather, just a reminder that severe weather or road conditions are a prudent and just reason to stay home on Sunday. If you cannot get to Mass safely, there is no obligation to attend. Make a spiritual communion and spend some time with the Lord in the Mass readings.
Hermanos y hermanas: mientras observamos el clima que se aproxima para el fin de semana, les recuerdo que las condiciones climáticas severas o las condiciones peligrosas de las carreteras son una razón prudente y justa para quedarse en casa el domingo. Si no pueden llegar a misa de manera segura, no hay obligación de asistir. Hagan una comunión espiritual y pasen un tiempo con el Señor en las lecturas de la misa.
Rules and relations
Tuesday of the 2nd Week of Ordinary Time
Samuel 16:1-13 Ps. 89:20, 21-22, 27-28 Mark 2:23-28
I was a catechist in our parish’s OCIA program for a number of years. People come to the church for all sorts of reasons, from all sorts of places, and they have all kinds of questions. We encourage them to come to mass frequently, and then they come back to class with even more questions: Why do you do - ? Why did I see someone do - What does it mean when - Once I sat down but everyone else knelt was this wrong? Is it OK if I - I accidentally forgot to and is this OK and so forth. For a little while, all they can do is sit, confused, confronted by an utterly baffling set of rules and rituals and none of it makes sense.
Of course none of it makes sense. Not at first. The rules are important, but only because they refer to something else. They flow from somewhere, and that’s where we should be spending our time.
If you studied a couple who have been married for a really long time, you could probably put together a decently-sized book that listed out all the little things they do for one another. The things that they say, or don’t say. The many little gestures that demonstrate the deep and abiding love they have for one another. The inside jokes that sprout from share memories, and so on. You’d have that book, but if you just had that book and read it cover to cover, you’d no more understand their marriage than the Man in the Moon.
The relationship comes first, then the rules. The relationship is source of all the little things, and without it, that entire book is just a list of interesting trivia. This doesn’t mean the rules aren’t important, but they’re not the point. They’re the means to a much more glorious end, and it’s the same end which, paradoxically, causes all of the little things to grow.
There’s a reason why the scriptures are filled from one end to the other with nuptial imagery. Our faith isn’t a matter of rules, but a relationship - an encounter - with a Person, and when our relationship with that person is rightly ordered, the rules aren’t just rules, they’re the little things that adorn something that’s already beautiful.
St. William, pray for us. St. Sebastian the Martyr, pray for us. St. Fabian, pray for us.
Reflexión en las lecturas de hoy
Lunes del la II semana del Tiempo ordinario
1 Samuel 15, 16-23
Salmo 49, 8-9. 16bc-17. 21 y 23
Marcos 2, 18-22
Hay dos tipos de personas - los que dicen al Señor “hágase tu voluntad,” y los a que el Señor dice lo mismo. En las lecturas de hoy, seguimos con la tema de obediencia. Aquí hay el rey de Israel - Saúl - que recibió un mandato de Dios. Anda a ese ciudad, y destruirlo todo. Completamente. No quiten nada, no llevan nada. Y que pasó? Saúl vuelve con animales y tesoro, y dice ‘por queremos ofrecer sacrificios a Dios.’ Y respondió el profeta Samuel - ¿Que hiciste? La obediencia vale más que el sacrificio. Como Saúl se apartó del Señor, el Señor lo permitió.
Cuando ponemos nuestros voluntad en lugar de Dios, es como idolatría. Salvación, como dijo Padre ayer, es sencillo pero no es fácil. Tenemos que mantener nuestra voluntad en el Señor - ‘aquí estoy para hacer tu voluntad.’
Y si hacemos esto, por la gracia de Jesucristo, podemos ser más. Podemos crecer, como los odres nuevos llenos de vino nuevo. Porque el vino nuevo no es completa. Sigue el proceso de ser vino mas fino. Exactamente como nosotros - obras en progreso de ser santos.
extra Missam
Our pastor is heading out of town for a few weeks on some well-earned vacation and has asked me to lead communion services in place of the daily masses. I don’t think I’ve ever actually been to a communion service before. Maybe once years ago; I honestly can’t recall. I had the ritual book in English, picked up a copy in Spanish, and have been studying them for a bit. It looks pretty straightforward, which is good, since the both of us are Strictly-By-The-Book types. I also went last night to watch him do Exposition so I could get a sense of any local customs and…they weren’t any. Also very strictly by the numbers, which is how I intend to do it as well.
Nerdwatch: the ancient laptop that I was using for Home Assistant finally croaked for good, so I purchased one of their turnkey ODroid boxes and it’s been working great. Because I am lazy, I wasn’t bothering to back up the old config so I had to start from scratch. I’m a little bummed at losing all of the historical data, but whatever. Much of the old config was busted and things needed a good clean-out anyway. I’m not much for all of the home automation stuff; there’s not much I need automating except for making sure the lights all get turned off at night and Hue is already doing that. What I’m mainly after is a single place to look at all the various “smart” things instead of having to keep a half-dozen individual apps.
Nothing changed book-wise. Business travel earlier in this week had me catching up on magazines, all of which I read on the iPad these days. I’ve been making the most progress in Congar’s book of late. Hope to get some more done this weekend. Very excited to hear of a second season for The Night Manager.
I preached all four masses this past weekend, and for the first time in Spanish. I worked very closely from the text below and have decided to post the Spanish version.
Homilía para la Solemnidad del Bautismo del Señor
Nuestro Señor viene a Juan para ser bautizado. Pero, ¿por qué? La respuesta de Juan es perfectamente razonable, porque él sabe quién es Jesús. Sin embargo, nuestro Señor insiste en su petición: “Déjalo ahora, porque así nos conviene cumplir toda justicia.”
Y cuando Juan termina de bautizar, toda la Trinidad se manifiesta: Padre, Hijo y Espíritu Santo.
Sabemos como católicos que el Bautismo hace varias cosas: quita el pecado original. Nos hace parte de la Iglesia y abre el camino a los demás sacramentos. Se nos manda hacerlo para que podamos ir al cielo. Por eso es el sacramento más importante - tan importante que, en peligro de muerte, cualquier persona puede bautizar a otra. Así de importante es.
Sin embargo, nuestro Señor no necesitaba un sacramento. No tenía pecado original. No le falta nada. Él vino del Cielo, y ciertamente no necesita nada de nosotros para regresar allá. Él mismo no está atado a los sacramentos o reglas que nos da a nosotros.
Entonces, ¿por qué pasa por esto?
Lo hace para mostrarnos cómo nosotros también podemos nacer de nuevo del agua y del espíritu. Como discípulos, como dice un antiguo dicho judio - nos toca seguir a nuestro maestro - seguirlo tan de cerca que el polvo de sus sandalias caiga sobre nuestras ropas.
Primero - nos está mostrando lo que nosotros también debemos hacer, y al santificar las aguas del Jordán, hace posible bautizar con cualquier agua en cualquier lugar. Este sacramento no está atado a un lugar en particular - el agua cubre la mayor parte de la tierra, y también la invitación de Dios a la vida divina. Este momento es uno de los pocos que muestran a Jesús como verdaderamente es—en este caso, la segunda persona de la Santísima Trinidad. La misma Trinidad en cuyo nombre se nos manda bautizar después.
Segundo - aunque sin pecado, asume la figura del pecador. Esto anticipa su muerte en el Calvario.
Tercero - como escribió San Gregorio Nacianceno (Oratio 39.15), Él desciende al agua como descendió del Cielo. Cuando sale del agua, lleva consigo al mundo pecador - de la muerte a la vida.
Esta revelación de Jesús encaja bien y con propósito al final de la Epifanía. Primero vino en la carne - la Navidad. Luego se mostró con los dones de oro y incienso, que era Rey y Sumo Sacerdote. También se nos mostró que moriría con el don de la mirra.
Ahora nos muestra el comienzo de la vida sacramental por la cual recibimos las gracias de Dios, y este sacramento primero que todos. Es apropiado - muy apropiado - que celebremos este momento ahora, en uno de los puntos importantes del calendario.
Pueden pensar en el año litúrgico como un mapa que muestra toda la historia de la salvación. En este mapa hay dos montañas. Subimos una lado de la primera montaña el Adviento y llegamos a su cumbre en la Navidad. Hemos estado bajando por el otro lado durante algunas semanas - la Sagrada Familia, la Epifanía, y ahora estamos aquí, casi en terreno llano, a punto de entrar en nuestro primer período del Tiempo Ordinario.
Es posible pensar que Este período corresponde, de cierta manera, con el tiempo del ministerio de nuestro Señor en la tierra. Él ha nacido, ha sido bautizado, y nosotros los fieles bautizados caminaremos con él hacia la próxima montaña, que es aún más grande. Nos tomará toda la Cuaresma subirla, y cuando lleguemos a la cima, seguiremos hacia Pentecostés, y todo lo necesario para nuestra salvación estará completo - la Pasión de nuestro Señor y el nacimiento de la Iglesia. Luego volveremos a esperar con la Iglesia a que él venga de nuevo al fin de los tiempos. Y esa espera se convertirá en un Adviento, y sigue y sigue.
Pero por ahora - el camino está comenzando. Nuestro Señor ha sido bautizado. Ustedes también lo han sido, o espero que si. Si no han sido bautizados, por favor hablen conmigo o con el Padre después de la Misa. ¡De verdad queremos hablar con ustedes!
Como bautizados, se hicieron ciertas promesas por nosotros. Las afirmamos con más fuerza en nuestra Confirmación. Si no han sido confirmados…por favor hablen conmigo o con el Padre después de la Misa. ¡También queremos hablar con ustedes!
Renunciamos a Satanás y a todas sus obras. Profesamos nuestra fe en Dios: Padre, Hijo y Espíritu Santo. De nuevo la Trinidad. Profesamos fe en la Iglesia, el perdón de los pecados y la resurrección del cuerpo. Nos unimos al Pueblo de Dios, ungidos como sacerdotes, profetas y reyes.
Esas promesas y responsabilidades vale la pena revisarlas y renovarlas, porque nos marcan como hermanos y hermanas de Cristo. Esta es la alegría más grande que existe, y es nuestra tarea llevar esa alegría a nuestro campo de misión, que está fuera de este edificio y por toda nuestra parroquia: nuestros hogares, nuestro trabajo, en todas partes. Sé que se siente como si las fiestas hubieran terminado, y seguro, esta parte del año litúrgico está terminando, pero el trabajo apenas comienza. De Belén al Calvario — caminemos juntos con alegría con el Senor, proclamando el evangelio a todos. A todos personas, a todos partes de nuestra campo de misión.
Back at it
Not so bleak indeed. The highs may reach 70 here by the weekend. I can’t say that I hate it, but am also sort of bracing for the inevitable cold spells to come. Feels like we’ll need to pay for this mildness at some point. Or maybe not. We’ll see.
We finished up Stranger Things. Sure there were plot holes, but whatever. A decent enough homage to 80’s era pulp sci-fi/fantasy, though they went a little lighter on the nostalgia that was more evident in the first couple of seasons. We also finished up Down Cemetery Road which we also liked. Not surprising, we very much like Slow Horses too. Enjoying Elric and Slay the Spire. I was delighted to see that it’s available as a standalone iPad game, but have opted (for now) to keep it restricted to my workstation. I like it too much right now to grant myself even easier access to it.
So everyone’s back to work and school today and trying to get back into the normal routine. I have homilies to prepare for this weekend and some business travel set for the week after. Then it will be cold again, but we’ll be a couple of weeks closer to spring.
Oramos también por nuestras hermanos y hermans Venezolanos, que la verdadera paz de Cristo esté con ellos, dondequeria que estén.
Currently reading: Elric of Melniboné by Michael Moorcock 📚
Currently reading: The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos 📚
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.
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.
Trees
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.
Notes on Notes
I wrapped up Notes from Underground while traveling yesterday. It’s not terribly long, and I figured I’d be able to finish it during one of my flights.
One of the things I’ve been using an LLM for (I favor Claude, which I’ve mentioned here before) is to set the table for some books before I start them - historical context, whether or not there are theological themes to be aware of, that sort of thing. I might ask a few more questions, skim the Foreword, and then dive in. This one was no exception, and it was good to go into Notes knowing that it was a reaction piece to Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? which went on to become something of a classic in the Soviet canon. Reading it as an extended meditation which answers “fat chance” to engineered Utopias is profitable for sure.
Then I started the book and instead found myself imagining that I was reading someone’s blog instead and…it felt pretty contemporary. You could probably break each section of part 1 into separate posts, throw them on a Substack, and generate a fair bit of engagement. And the Underground Man’s rant starts to sound sort of coherent towards the end - that if you engineer away human needs and provide everything that is formulated to make us happy, we will almost certainly destroy it, just to feel a sense of agency again.
Then you get to part 2 - the memoir portion - to see just how horrible this ends up looking. The line between Underground Man and the murder in Crime and Punishment is straight, short, and bright. Poor Liza; I hope she eventually finds peace and warmth. Without the transcendent, the world is a bleak, bleak place where the monotony is broken only by the violence required to feel something, anything.
Notes completes the Doestoevsky arc for now. I will probably revisit Crime and Punishment and Karamazov again in the future, perhaps with different translations. As it is, I’m satisfied to leave 19th century Russia behind for a bit.
Currently reading: The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa 📚
