dcn. jquinby's scribbles

I joined our parish’s RCIA team this year and will be delivering my first topic - The Church - in a couple of weeks. I had already signed up to teach about the liturgical year a bit later on, and have that lesson all set and ready to go.

One of the books I used for background material is With Christ Through The Year: The Liturgical Year in Words and Symbols by Fr. Bernard Strasser, OSB. This little book is out of print, as far as I can tell, but I managed to get a used copy from Amazon awhile back. It looks to have once lived in a Jesuit college library.

It’s a wonderful old little book, and I’ve found myself going back to it every so often as the year passes. Here’s a bit from the general introduction:

But the Church year is not primarily a commemoration of the history of our redemption, a recalling of the past. Nor is it a mere anticipation of the joys of our future life in eternity. Rather, the liturgical year is the opportune present. It is the day on which, as our Lord says, we are to work out our salvation (John 9:4), the grace-laden present which alone to belongs to us since the past is irrevocably gone and the future quite uncertain.

The sanctification of time is something really want to highlight during the lesson. There is nothing ordinary about Ordinary Time at all, really. The days proceed to and from Sunday. The year proceeds to and from Easter. Writ large, the calendar recapitulates the history of salvation and our patient wait for the Lord to return in glory. Examined closely, and you’ll find the days (and even hours) tied one to another, pointing and re-pointing to Christ through the Scriptures and feasts. God created the world to show forth and communicate his glory. That his creatures should share in his truth, goodness and beauty - this is the glory for which God created them CCC, 319. The cosmos exists in time; so time should also show forth the glory of the Creator.

Strasser:

Faithful co-operation with the mind and spirit of the liturgical year will acquaint us more familiarly, too, with the life, works, suffering, and death of Christ, and this help us to center our life more completely in His and so live in closer conformity with His divine ideals. Our Christ-life, ever growing more perfect under the beneficent influence of each liturgical year, will help us to achieve even within ourselves the primary purpose of the Church, that is, the glory of God and the sanctification of souls.

More Newman:

…yet a Faith, which generously apprehends Eternal Truth, though at times it degenerates into superstition, is far better than that cold, sceptical, critical tone of mind, which has no inward sense of an overruling, ever-present Providence, no desire to approach its God, but sits at home waiting for the fearful clearness of His visible coming, whom it might seek and find in due measure amid the twilight of the present world.

That’s from the 11th sermon in this collection, preached on January 13, 1839. These can be pretty dense reading, and to be sure, these were originally written to be read aloud to a (packed) congregation. Keeping in mind that they were delivered in the period before his conversion - and I generously allow that this simply be the benefit of hindsight - a sense of his mind has been coming through his arguments and assertions.

The last sermon in this collection, “The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine,” was only months away from his final sermon at St. Mary’s. His conversion was still a couple of years away. A scarlet thread in his writing shows up now and again, a brilliant mind contending with itself in the matter of Truth: how it is to be known, and what we are to do once we know it.

I was speaking with my pastor the other day and the conversation turned to Newman. He gave me a small book of meditations on his writing. They’re short, and very well suited to daily devotional reading. These small gems leave behind, thankfully, the arena of intellectual disputation and reflect a simple, lively joy:

God has created me to do him some definite service; he has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission - I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. Somehow I am necessary for his purposes, as necessary in my place as an archangel in his - if, indeed, I fail, God can raise another, as he could make the stones children of Abraham.

Yet I have a part in this great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for nought. I shall do good. I shall do his work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, though not intending it, if I do but keep his commandments and serve him in my calling.

I’m working my way through Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford by John Henry Newman, which is exactly what it sounds like it is. I liked this bit about Faith and Reason, as delivered on Epiphany of 1839.

…to take a parallel case, a judge can be called the origin, as well as the justifier, of the innocence or truth of those who are brought before him. A judge does not make men honest, but acquits and vindicates them: in like manner, Reason need not be the origin of Faith, as Faith exists in the very persons believing, though it does test and verify it. This, then, is one confusion, which must be cleared up in this question,— the assumption that Reason must be the inward principle of action in religious inquiries or conduct in the case of this or that individual, because, like a spectator, it acknowledges and concurs in what goes on;— the mistake of a critical for a creative power.

The whole thing is very much worth reading. This part in the conclusion is particularly resonant:

Half the controversies in the world are verbal ones; and could they be brought to a plain issue, they would be brought to a prompt termination. Parties engaged in them would then perceive, either that in substance they agreed together, or that their difference was one of first principles. This is the great object to be aimed at in the present age, though confessedly a very arduous one. We need not dispute, we need not prove,— we need but define. At all events, let us, if we can, do this first of all; and then see who are left for us to dispute with, what is left for us to prove. Controversy, at least in this age, does not lie between the hosts of heaven, Michael and his Angels on the one side, and the powers of evil on the other; but it is a sort of night battle, where each fights for himself, and friend and foe stand together. When men understand each other’s meaning, they see, for the most part, that controversy is either superfluous or hopeless.

I very much liked reading Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and was eager to read more. This sermon was delivered at the height of his influence at Oxford and at (or near) the beginning of his doubts regarding Anglican theology and authority. Ultimately he would convert to Catholicism, be ordained a priest, and later elevated to Cardinal.

Finished Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Mysterium Paschale. Much of it was beyond me; I can’t pretend otherwise. Chapter 4 (“Going to the Dead: Holy Saturday”) is something I will probably return to in Lent. I also found this bit from Chapter 2 worth highlighting and saving:

Philosophy can speak of the Cross in many tongues; when it is not the ‘Word of the Cross’ (1 Corinthians 1,18), issuing from faith in Jesus Christ, it knows too much or too little. Too much: because it makes bold with words and concepts at a point where the Word of God is silent, suffers and dies, in order to reveal what no philosophy can know, except through faith, namely, God’s ever greater Trinitarian love; and in order, also, to vanquish what no philosophy can make an end of, human dying so that the human totality may be restored in God. Too little, because philosophy does not measure that abyss into which the Word sinks down, and, having no inkling of it, closes the hiatus, or deliberately festoons the appalling thing with garlands…

Either philosophy misconceives man, failing, in Gnostic or Platonic guise, to take with full seriousness his earthly existence, settling him elsewhere, in heaven, in the pure realm of spirit or sacrificing his unique personality to nature or evolution. Or, alternatively, philosophy forms man so exactly in God’s image and likeness that God descends to man’s image and likeness, since man in in his suffering and overcoming of suffering shows himself God’s superior….

If philosophy is not willing to content itself with, either, speaking abstractly of being, or with thinking concretely of the earthly and worldly (and no further), then it must at once empty itself in order to ‘know nothing…except Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (1 Corinthians 2, 2). Then it may, starting out from this source, go on to ‘impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification’ (ibid., 2, 7). This proclamation, however, rises up over a deeper silence and darker abyss than pure philosophy can know.

And this is just a small taste. von Balthasar conducts a deep meditation on the triduum, setting the table with the Incarnation and the section just quoted on the folly of the Cross before proceeding to a careful study of His going to the Cross, to the Dead, and to the Father, each in turn.

It feels like Holy Saturday gets a bit of the short end sometimes. Between the agony of Good Friday and the ecstasy of Easter Sunday, though, there is a time of silence and this, too, is full of deep meaning. What does it mean, that very-God and very-Man lay in a tomb? If no one can come to the Father, except through the Son, and the Son lies beneath the ground, is the Way closed, however briefly?

Not even for a moment. In the Liturgy of Hours for Holy Saturday, the Office of Readings quotes an ancient homily:

Today a great silence reigns on earth, a great silence and a great stillness. A great silence because the King is asleep. the earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began…He has gone to search for Adam, our first father, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow Adam in his bonds and Eve, captive with him - He who is both their God and the son of Eve…“I am your God, who for your sake have become your son…I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead.”

As the Catechism (no. 634, from whence I hustled that homily excerpt) teaches, the Descent brings the Gospel message of salvation to complete fulfillment. Reaching backward in time, Christ’s redemptive work is now spread to people of all times and places, even to the beginning.

Speaking of the Catechism: I’ve volunteered to assist in our parish’s RCIA program. The class was introduced to the CCC last night. I remember the first time I saw one, at the outset of my own RCIA experience. I remember thinking it was really heavy and, leaving through it, sort of confusing at first glance. Our teacher, though, hammered this home right quick: there are no secrets in Catholic teaching. Everything that we are bound to believe as Catholics is right here in this book. If it’s not in there, I am not bound to believe it. Everything in there is fully annotated, footnoted and cross reference with Scripture, Patristics, Conciliar documents - in short, the depositum fidei. If you have a question, you can find not only the answer, but the vast body of work and thought that led to it. So many rabbit-holes. Hooray for the Magisterium!

Speaking of rabbit-holes: I’m working my way through a collection of Newman’s sermons on faith and reason. I’ll finish the book because I love Newman, but the it’s one of those I-bound-a-public-domain-text-and-sold-it-on-Amazon books. Crappy typesetting and so on. If you’re going to sell it, add some value, man. Clean it up or throw in some footnotes. Getting to the Newman book means I have nothing in the on-deck circle, something I need to remedy post-haste.

Radio-wise: this summer I was able to get the vertical antenna site, installed, and tuned. Seems to be doing pretty well - I’ve made my first JA contacts and hope to add to my DXCC pile this winter when there’s less yard work to do. Hopefully the bands will improve a bit, too. Made my first attempt to capture some NOAA GOES imagery last week but it was a bust. Like all satellite-related things, the best passes seem to either happen right in the middle of times when I have Other Stuff To Do or when it’s raining.

Lots going on around here. I’ve whittled away my social media activities to nearly nothing. Twitter was the last to go, painful as it was. I reserve the right to come back at some point, but for now, I need to focus more deeply on substantially fewer things. to that end, the bulk of my online experience has reverted to text-only. This means console clients like alpine and elinks for email and web usage, and I’ve recently started using newsbeuter to follow a number of RSS feeds related to work.

I still bounce into full browsers occasionally - mostly to check a few headlines, access Outlook for work, or manage local Raspberry Pis on my local network. One runs pi-hole, pivpn and a chrony/NTP server; the other runs a ZumSpot, a UHF hotspot for accessing D-STAR reflectors. If none of that means anything to you, suffice to say that it’s for ham radio stuff.

The text only stuff started as an experiment during Lent this year, and I was surprised to see that I lost very little in the way of general productivity, and on the whole, found myself able to generally focus a lot better on things without a constant visual assault of graphics, movement, and other tricks meant to capture attention.

So: deeper into books, study, prayer. More time on RF tinkering. I’ll update when I can.

When I was a boy, there were only a few ways to learn something. You had to ask someone else - a grownup, usually - and maybe they knew the answer. If they didn’t know the answer, they might tell you to go look it up. Most houses, as far as I can recall, had a dictionary. A few had full sets of encyclopedias. My own grandparents gave us a set that they found at a flea market somewhere. They were old, and I remember spending hours going from one article to the next, following one SEE ALSO section after another.

You could use the school library, of course, and as you got older, the local public library with its card catalog. There were archives of old newspapers, microfiche, and collections of weird old trade journals and periodicals.

Mass media was a handful of TV stations - the three major networks, one PBS station, and maybe a couple of UHF channels that showed old movies and off-brand cartoons. I don’t remember listening to the radio much as a kid. We lived near big cities (Chicago and later Atlanta), so there were two newspapers available. I remember the Tribune and the Sun-Times, and later on the Atlanta Journal and Constitution as separate papers in competition.

If you had questions that couldn’t be answered by your immediate circle of adults - parents and grandparents, teachers, or maybe your friend’s parents, you had to expend a fair amount of effort to find the answers. The one book at the library that talked about whatever it was you were interested in was pretty much the final word on the matter. The point is that it took some work, and so the gaining of knowledge was a two-fold reward. First, you learned something new, which is reward itself. Second, you achieved this as the result of self-directed effort. You had to want to know something, and then go through some bit of effort to find an answer. The gaps were filled by your imagination.

Maybe this is just a memory viewed through then lens of childhood, but the world seemed to be a large, strange and impenetrably mysterious place. Distant events reached us via the distorted word-of-mouth railroad of neighborhood kids. Our imaginations filled in the rest, probably to our detriment. In living memory, I can recall several pretty scary events. I remember watching the nightly news when Chicago’s most famous serial killer was caught. The deadliest air crash in US history happened as we were leaving school. I can remember everyone looking at the smoke plumes, clearly visible from the parking lot. I asked a teacher if we should call someone. She told me that it they firemen were probably already there taking care of it. We hid in the halls once for an honest-to-God tornado once. The City wasn’t really visible but for the glow of it at night towards the east. It sort of loomed there in my imagination: hopelessly huge and the place where my father went every day to find the bad guys. He’d come and go on a train, wearing a gun under his suit coat.

The summer sky was lit up with what we called heat lightning and I can remember at least one electrical storm. My bedroom window look towards a radio tower. One night my father woke me up so I could see the St. Elmo’s Fire going up and down the guy wires of the tower. I had never seen anything like that before and haven’t since, either. But if I couldn’t find it in one of the Little Golden Guides that I used to make sense of the world, it remained a mystery to me. One of my friends - his dad was into ham radio. He used to occasionally show us stuff in his shack. Once he referred to noise in the ionosphere. I remember walking home that day and looking up, half-expecting to see some dim thing moving around high in the sky, barely visible. Clouds, or something. I was becoming aware of the liminal nature of things, though I didn’t know it at the time. There was a world just beyond what I could see, touch, or know. It was larger than I could imagine, mysterious, and more than a little unsettling.

It’s taken me over forty years to recognize these moments as way-stations along a long path of preparation. Other hints came later - some subtle, others not so much.

When I was a boy, there were only a few ways to learn something. You had to ask someone else - a grownup, usually - and maybe they knew the answer. If they didn’t know the answer, they might tell you to go look it up. Most houses, as far as I can recall, had a dictionary. A few had full sets of encyclopedias. My own grandparents gave us a set that they found at a flea market somewhere. They were old, and I remember spending hours going from one article to the next, following one SEE ALSO section after another.

You could use the school library, of course, and as you got older, the local public library with its card catalog. There were archives of old newspapers, microfiche, and collections of weird old trade journals and periodicals.

Mass media was a handful of TV stations - the three major networks, one PBS station, and maybe a couple of UHF channels that showed old movies and off-brand cartoons. I don’t remember listening to the radio much as a kid. We lived near big cities (Chicago and later Atlanta), so there were two newspapers available. I remember the Tribune and the Sun-Times, and later on the Atlanta Journal and Constitution as separate papers in competition.

If you had questions that couldn’t be answered by your immediate circle of adults - parents and grandparents, teachers, or maybe your friend’s parents, you had to expend a fair amount of effort to find the answers. The one book at the library that talked about whatever it was you were interested in was pretty much the final word on the matter. The point is that it took some work, and so the gaining of knowledge was a two-fold reward. First, you learned something new, which is reward itself. Second, you achieved this as the result of self-directed effort. You had to want to know something, and then go through some bit of effort to find an answer. The gaps were filled by your imagination.

Maybe this is just a memory viewed through then lens of childhood, but the world seemed to be a large, strange and impenetrably mysterious place. Distant events reached us via the distorted word-of-mouth railroad of neighborhood kids. Our imaginations filled in the rest, probably to our detriment. In living memory, I can recall several pretty scary events. I remember watching the nightly news when Chicago’s most famous serial killer was caught. The deadliest air crash in US history happened as we were leaving school. I can remember everyone looking at the smoke plumes, clearly visible from the parking lot. I asked a teacher if we should call someone. She told me that it they firemen were probably already there taking care of it. We hid in the halls once for an honest-to-God tornado once. The City wasn’t really visible but for the glow of it at night towards the east. It sort of loomed there in my imagination: hopelessly huge and the place where my father went every day to find the bad guys. He’d come and go on a train, wearing a gun under his suit coat.

The summer sky was lit up with what we called heat lightning and I can remember at least one electrical storm. My bedroom window look towards a radio tower. One night my father woke me up so I could see the St. Elmo’s Fire going up and down the guy wires of the tower. I had never seen anything like that before and haven’t since, either. But if I couldn’t find it in one of the Little Golden Guides that I used to make sense of the world, it remained a mystery to me. One of my friends - his dad was into ham radio. He used to occasionally show us stuff in his shack. Once he referred to noise in the ionosphere. I remember walking home that day and looking up, half-expecting to see some dim thing moving around high in the sky, barely visible. Clouds, or something. I was becoming aware of the liminal nature of things, though I didn’t know it at the time. There was a world just beyond what I could see, touch, or know. It was larger than I could imagine, mysterious, and more than a little unsettling.

It’s taken me over forty years to recognize these moments as way-stations along a long path of preparation. Other hints came later - some subtle, others not so much.

Radio stuff went on hold for a bit while I rebuilt the workstation I use to drive all of my apps. A comedy of errors resulted in me physically knocking the thing over which clobbered the hard drive and that was that. Even so, I was able to pull most everything off before it gave up the ghost entirely. A new HDD has been installed and everything is right as rain. I’ve been exploring OLIVIA a bit. It’s a fun mode, and a nice change from the FT8 grind.

I have been extensively playing around with Arduino stuff in the meanwhile, and have added a WINC 1500 WiFi shield to the 2560. Along with a BME280 sensor which returns temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure, the thing works as a pretty nice little remote weather station. The only two things I would add are an anemometer and a wind vane. The vane, I think, will be relatively straightforward and use a 360-degree potentiometer. For counting the RPMs of an anemometer, I’ve been looking at reed switches and Hall effect sensors and keeping my eyes out for a suitable bearing. Then I need to enclose the whole thing, figure out power and siting, and land on a sink for the data (local? cloud? APRS-IS?).

Started some preliminary planning for the spring garden: tomatoes, squash, flowers, garlic. Also putting feelers out for bees as we slowly approach spring. Looking forward to rebooting the apiary after last summer’s dismal end.

Reading: Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Cardinal Newman.

Then came old Ianuary, wrapped well
In many weeds to keep the cold away;
— Spenser

We are settling back into normal routines after the Christmas season, having put all the decorations away on the 6th and, for the most part, returned to normal work and school schedules. For me, this means:

1. up early/shower/shave
2. get coffee started
3. tend to animals (dog, cat, chicken)
4. Lauds + coffee
5. read news

Spending a lot of time recently digging into Arduino-related stuff. I received a 2560 starter kit for Christmas, and it includes a whole pile of different sensors, servos, and other doodads plus a CD full of (very) basic projects that use them all.

It includes a 2560, of course. Our original board, an Uno, continues to drive our WS2811 LEDs, but Christmas is over and our Stranger Things-inspired message wall has been dismantled. The parts have been claimed by one of my daughters and turned into something of an art-lamp-thing which will almost certainly disappear into their bedroom shortly. I’m enormously OK with this and have strongly encouraged her to look into the tutorials and other materials at Adafruit to learn more.

Not too much on the radio front to report. I received my WAS Mixed certificate in the mail and have duly framed it and hung it up in the office. I will probably turn my attention to some band or mode endorsements next. One thing I definitely want to do is put the new antenna analyzer to work on a fan dipole, but I’m waiting on better weather. Otherwise, I’ve been trying out some of the other digital modes, OLIVIA chief among them. The FT8 areas are getting really crowded, and while I’m not the most rag-chewiest guy on the bands, grinding for contacts ain’t the most exciting way for me to operate.

Still reading Ratzinger’s book on the liturgy. Not sure where I want to go next. Maybe something math-related. Gardening catalogs are starting to show up in the mail. The lengthening days have me thinking about bees again, and restarting the apiary in the spring after last summer’s total loss.

So we had a lovely still stomach bug sweep through the household in 3 waves. First it came for the littles, but they got over pretty quickly as the littles often do. Then it came for the basically everyone else, leaving only my oldest son and I standing. Then I got it. Now he has it, so it’s been something of a clean sweep. Two blessings at work here. First, it goes nearly as quickly as it arrives, so you get 24 hours of misery and then recovery begins. The second blessing is that it’ll clear out by Christmas, so we’re not waiting around for the final shoe to drop on anyone else getting sick. Will be glad to get this completely behind us.

In the meanwhile…let’s see. I logged the last couple of contacts I needed to qualify for Worked All States and have dutifully sent in my application and money. ARRL seems to have accepted everything so now I’m just waiting for it to show up in the mail. I may go hunting for some band endorsements, but the Triple Play has me eyeballing CW again so I’ve dusted off a few of the “Learn Morse Code” apps I was using awhile back and started playing with them again. According to LoTW, I’ve got 44 confirmed DXCC entities, so that’d be another one to start working on.

Reading: The Spirit of the Liturgy by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI. Also re-reading Farenheit 451 for the first time since high school. Also the usual stack of magazines.