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With Christians, a poetical view of things is a duty. We are bid to color all things with hues of faith, to see a divine meaning in every event.
— St. John Henry Cardinal Newman

OCIA begins tonight. Last I heard, we had 36 folks signed up, so it looks like it’s going to be another big year, thanks be to God. The deacon who used to work with the program has recently stepped back from many of his ministerial roles as a sort of prelude to retirement, so it may fall to me to lay-lead the Liturgy of the Word at the beginning of class. Although not (yet) delegated to preach, I have a brief reflection also prepared. This is an easy one; today’s Gospel reading is a portion of the seven woes. The discourse continues tomorrow, and since I was already looking ahead in case Father asks me to deliver a reflection, these words have been on my mind for a few days now.

One of the key elements - maybe the key element of preaching is the assembly. Who and where are they? You’d think that a homily would largely remain the same across four or five masses on the same day and without a doubt, it makes zero sense to write four or five separate sermons. The assembly, though, may require a different emphasis. The early morning folks tend to be older; 11AM is family-palooza, afternoon is sometimes University Catholic-heavy, and evening in Spanish. All of them need the Word proclaimed; all of them need something different. In the end, the Holy Spirit will move them according to His will anyway, so maybe the most I can do is try not to frustrate that movement.

Mutatis mutandis, the readings today and tomorrow concern internal pieties and external demonstrations of them. The Lord is very clear to his listeners that the first drives the second, and the second is no substitute for the first. In fact, hollow externalities may be worse. We will be known by our fruits, and tomorrow we will be able to contrast superficiality with the fruitful piety of Saint Monica. Her steadfast prayers and concern for rhetoric-bro son (yes) make her a natural patron of parents today, but also demonstrate to all of us what can happen when we let an interior life of prayer become the animation of our actions, large and small. Who knows how many Augustines are among us today?

For the seekers and potential candidates, and catechumens, the message is largely the same, but perhaps with a view closer to 35,000 feet. From the outside (or periphery) looking in, Catholicism must look something like a giant coral reef. Endlessly baroque in some places, occasionally chaotic, but nevertheless giving the sense of a larger order and picture. It may be exactly those external expressions of faith that have drawn them in. Many have told us so in the past - the awe of attending mass for the first time, or a piece of achingly beautiful music or art. The faith is physical, sensual. For us, matter matters. Yet all of these things are means to an end, not ends themselves. They draw us closer to Him, who beckons us to Come, to discipleship. To a radical re-reckoning of the world around us, seeing it with new eyes, everything pointing to a deeper meaning. But also not losing the forest for the trees.

We must let these things lead back to ourselves, back to our hearts, so that we can open them anew to God’s grace. If we don’t, we risk loitering in the lobby rather than entering the feast.

The August formation weekend is behind us, and for my cohort, that amounted to just Saturday, which was nice. We spent the day preaching to each other and going over the finer points of The Order of Celebrating Matrimony Without Mass and then preaching some more in the context of a wedding. Difficulty level: two hours of notice. It probably makes sense to adapt Alec Baldwin’s speech and Always Be Preparing (a homily).

Do you know what it takes to preach the Gospel?

[ holds up a brass rosary ]

Also on the to-do list: I need to write up a final self-evaluation and a petition to the bishop. My wife, for her part, will write a letter expressing her support and consent for the petition. Meetings with mentor and spiritual director. More upcoming practices in September, October, and November. Everything leads to December 20, but everything after that is a gigantic question mark. No idea where or what we’ll be assigned. At my home parish, I’m slowly sort of winding down current ministries in anticipation. OCIA kicks off tomorrow night (36 signed up!), and I’ll need to hand my notes and materials off to someone else. The finance committee met last week, and we’ll need to name a new chair and make some additional adjustments. And so on.

There are a couple of things I avoid writing about. I avoid, if I can, any discussions of work. I like having clear boundaries, and would just rather not get into work stuff. The other topic I stay away from is politics. This one is very much vocation-related.

During my application for aspirancy several years ago, I had a series of conversations/interviews with the director of vocations. One of the things he made clear was that, after ordination, my opinion as such didn’t really matter anymore. In fact, not only did it not matter, it probably ought not exist at all. After ordination, he explained, you will be a cleric of the church. When you talk, you will be speaking as a cleric, whether you’re dressed as one or not. Everything you say or write will be seen as coming from The Church. People will ask you for your opinion, and your opinion no longer matters. If you are the sort of person who likes to have an opinion and enjoys weighing in on the topics of the day, he continued, you may need to reconsider the diaconate.

As a deacon in this diocese, he went on, you will almost certainly have people in the pews who are undocumented, and they will be two pews away from other parishioners who are headed to a Build The Wall rally after Mass. You will be ordained to serve all of them, period.

We can talk about policies and programs, but not people or parties. _If my sister runs for dog-catcher, _ he said, I can’t put a sticker on my car in support of her. This is how it is.

He went on to suggest that, even as an aspirant, beginning the habit of this sort of partisan detachment might be a good exercise, and so I did. As it turns out, this wasn’t particularly difficult for me - I haven’t had a home anywhere in the current political spectrum for some time now, and this conversation gave me a vocabulary and grammar I had lacked to describe why. In the end, though, hewing completely to the Church’s teachings (social or otherwise) gives an interesting sort of new freedom. Unmoored from either party, I can make common cause on programs and policies that comport with the Church regardless of their source. I can likewise take either side to task for their shortcomings. It feels very mercenary and in a way, it is. This turns out to suit my personality pretty well, actually. Nice job on program X, I can support that. Programs Y and Z, however, are bad, and I can in no way defend them. Get your act together. It’s all very surgical.

Are there clerics who weigh in? Sure seems like there are. I can’t answer for them, how they were formed, or how they minister to people On The Other Side of whatever divide they’re on. I can only manage myself, and that’s job enough, thanks.

This doesn’t mean I don’t keep up - I do, probably a bit too much. I have several magazine subscriptions, follow a couple of hundred RSS feeds, and do my level best to gather and glean from across the opinion landscape. As I read, I’m always thinking What is this story about? Who is speaking or quoted? Who is silent? What am I meant to come away with? Some of this is j-school remnants, I think. I never went into the business, but studied journalism as an undergraduate at one of the best schools in the country, intending to go into radio or television news. Instead, I got married, took a full-time job as a sort of junior analyst fiddling with computers, and the rest is history.

In any case, if we’ve spoken in the past and I’ve come off a little hard to pin down politically, good, that’s the point. Because it really doesn’t matter what I think. What I’m trying to think is here and here.

I didn’t get a chance to deliver the reflection I mentioned below, but I did have a chance to try again yesterday, and I am in need of more practice. I tried to cover too much in 3 minutes and forgot the advice about having “One Thing.” I will ask for another at-bat next week. At least I avoided heresy!

Still working through Rayuela. It’s good, but not the most exciting stuff. Lots of Bohemians lying around and discussing jazz, except, you know in Spanish. It’s slow going, and I’m only reading one or two chapters at a time. They’re short, though.

Radio stuff: the N2EME SDR switch, which replaces the MFJ-1708B-SDR arrived the other day and works great. The next order of business was getting sdrpp to act like a proper panadapter and submit (via hook, crook, or rigctld) to be synchronized with the radio. I enlisted Claude to help with several approaches, but none of them worked out, so I turned my attention back to gqrx, which used to work great until suddenly it didn’t and I never could figure out why.

Well, it turns out that somewhere along the way, gr-osmosdr got clobbered and replaced with a version that didn’t support SDRPlay’s API. So I fixed that plus a few other dependencies, rebuilt gqrx, and everything works again. Now I just need to move all my sdrpp bookmarks (JSON) back to gqrx (CSV), which is just going to be some good, old-fashioned text munging.

When that’s done, I’ll be able to get all my apps (fldigi, wsjtx, cqrlog, et al) up-to-date/re-tweaked so I should be back in business radiowise. I should be good to go for the fall and winter. We did a massive closet and garage cleanout a few weeks back, and I found an enormous pile of old CDRs, including Quake and all of my old Valve games (HL, HL2, Opposing Force, Blue Shift, etc). I managed to get keys found and/or recovered via Steam, so they’re all in my current library again, which is just a hoot-and-a-half. I restarted HL2, and I have to say it holds up pretty well. I can only play for short bursts, though; Factorio seems to be more my tempo these days. I started a new playthrough last winter with the new space expansion, but didn’t get very far.

I’m not trying to exit summer too quickly, but I am saying that if the weather were to turn gross tomorrow and all the yardwork suddenly ended, I’d be, y’know, set up for amusement.

Our pastor is out of town for a while, so one of the associates (who knows I regularly serve on Wednesday mornings before work) asked if I wanted to practice giving some brief reflections on the readings. We can’t call them homilies, but that’s basically what they are. I will probably take him up on this, but noticed that the first Wednesday out of the gate is on the Feast of the Transfiguration. I suspect he will want to preach this one, but on the off-chance that he doesn’t, my thoughts are swirling around the following:

  • Everything that God desires to reveal about Himself is revealed completely in Jesus
  • We may find ourselves, like Peter, exhilarated, confused, or maybe even paralyzed by this, and if this is the case:
  • “Listen to Him,” in prayer, in five minutes of silence, and in the words of those around us. We find ourselves with Him now in the Eucharist; let us ask for the grace to Listen to what He may have to tell us.

As for everything else:

I finished Morel the other day. The plot was absolutely bananas and it’s hard to believe it was published in the 1940s, especially seeing how well Casares anticipated some of the mind-blowing plots that have shown up in recent sci-fi/prestige shows. I’m going to put more of his stuff in my queue for sure. Rayuela is going well so far, but I’m only a couple of chapters in. I’ve opted for the conventional path; the author has another suggested path that skips around through the chapters in a different pattern and includes ‘extra’ material that isn’t part of the straight-through read. I may do that on a second go-round; we’ll see.

We’ve gotten a nice break from the summer heat this past week but I think we’re ready for the overcast skies to go away. It might look vaguely like fall out there but there’s still plenty of summer ahead. As a measure of certainty, I planted the lavender cuttings and added some monarda that I found at Home Depot the other night. I’d like to add some Joe Pye weed, creeping thyme, and more coneflowers to the mix and am hoping to catch some bargains as summer winds down a bit.

The annual cicadas are getting their last words, and the late-summer field crickets and katydids have joined in the ruckus, which is nice. Goldenrod is starting to show up around here, which called my first beekeeping season to mind - goldenrod honey smells like…well, feet. Or sweat socks. It’s pretty pungent stuff. You could smell it a good distance from the hives and I was happy to let them keep it for their winter stores. Seeing it in bloom is one of those temporal waypoints I watch for in the landscape. The other one is tall ironweed, which should be blooming soon.

I’ve been doing a little work on the radio shack - added some proper power distribution for the Astron to get rid of a rat’s nest of wiring. I added an inline power meter in the process and have been very happy with it. I’m interested to see how it performs under a TX load. I also re-guyed the vertical antenna with some adjustable tensioners while I wait for a new SDR switch to arrive.

Yesterday, as part of preparation for ordination, I made a general confession. I had been thinking about it for awhile and my spiritual director encouraged me to continue meditating and praying about it. De Sales’s Introduction was a helpful (and fruitful) aid for this, and a week or so ago I sat down with pen in hand and started writing down everything. Old, new, I-think-I’ve-confessed-this-but-can’t recall, and so on. It started slow but picked up speed, and burning the paper afterward was thoroughly satisfying.

I don’t know if I will do it again but at a major hinge-point of life, it seemed fitting. As for the graces - seeing everything laid out on a list which covered a page was humbling, but also a reminder that God’s mercy is far beyond our understanding. Maybe we can’t understand it, except in tiny glimmers here and there.

My spiritual director (and confessor) related a story about St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. When she was revealing her visions, her own spiritual director sought to test her a little.

During your next vision, he said, ask the Lord to reveal my last mortal sin. At a subsequent visit, he asked if she had managed to do so.

Yes, she said.

And what did He say, asked the priest.

I don’t remember, said Margaret Mary.