So I’m giving the helix editor a whirl. Usually, I write my blog posts in vscode and then use a vibe-coded plugin to push the post into micro.blog, but I’d need to do some pipe-to-a-shell-script thing to accomplish the same thing. The purple color scheme is nice, and the lightweight vim-like feel also feels sort of comfy. The tutorial (which I have not completed) is also well-done.
Last night at OCIA, a catechist discussed spiritual warfare, on which I have some complicated thoughts.
On the one hand, the Bible and the Catechism are clear: spirits exist, and they are either helpful aids to our salvation or adversaries bent on our destruction. Dismissal is not an option, and I have zero problem whatsoever acknowledging this aspect of our faith to myself or anyone else. There’s no whitewashing or handwaving. We should understand them, their nature, their missions, and so forth.
It’s the obsession with the warfare metaphors that makes me a little uncomfortable, because it seems a bit too easy to go down a few different (and in my estimation, wrong) pathways. First, the battle is over. It was over, definitively and eternally, on Easter morning. The idea that, somehow, we’re in a pitched battle on the ground with armies of demons and whatnot elevates the adversary to an entirely unmerited position. We don’t need to be on a constant battle footing because they have no power except what we willingly give them, which brings me to my second point.
The battle, if someone wants to retain the word, is principally interior: the movements of our passions, thoughts, and will are where the attention needs to be focused. This is where temptation happens, and this is where we can lean on the ordinary means of sanctification - prayer and the sacraments, chief among them - to obtain the graces we need to defeat it. This means a lot of sitting quietly, honest introspection, prayerful trips to the confessional, and maybe spiritual direction. If you want to see what spiritual battle looks like, you can’t do much better than St. Anthony the Great, when he was attacked in the tombs:
He lay watching, however, with unshaken soul, groaning from bodily anguish; but his mind was clear, and as in mockery he said, If there had been any power in you, it would have sufficed had one of you come, but since the Lord hath made you weak, you attempt to terrify me by numbers: and a proof of your weakness is that you take the shapes of brute beasts.' And again with boldness he said, If you are able, and have received power against me, delay not to attack; but if you are unable, why trouble me in vain? For faith in our Lord is a seal and a wall of safety to us.' So after many attempts, they gnashed their teeth upon him, because they were mocking themselves rather than him.
Anthony’s confidence lay in the victorious Christ and in the words of scripture, not in any effort or merit of his own. Mocking dismissal is his response, because it’s all they deserve. The battle is won in a place of stillness and quietude - hesychia - obtained from the struggle to release the self from its sinful attachment to passing things. It’s fought with pretty ordinary methods: prayer, fasting, or other askesis, and almsgiving. These aren’t as hot-and-sexy, though, as the constant proliferation of military iconography in our culture tends to encourage, but they surely (to me) seem more in keeping with the example of our Lord.
A Christian anthropology views the human being as the imago dei, damaged and susceptible to concupiscence, but also reconciled with God and given the means to be restored to its rightful telos. Though this struggle takes place in the context of the community (for that is precisely what we are made for), it is undertaken by the individual and it is kenotic, rather than assertive, in nature.
Our formation weekend was cancelled, so the Trinity homilies will need to wait…until the actual Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, when maybe we’ll get a chance to dust them off and use them. We learned that we’ll likely be in our home parishes for the Christmas octave, and that we should “probably be prepared to preach,” so we’ve got that to look forward to. I’ve also been penciled in for a house blessing, too.
Spent the weekend moving our oldest daughter and her family into their new house, which was a lot of fun. Many hands and all that. Getting someone from an apartment to a house is busy, but not a tremendous amount of stuff. Moving from a house to another house is another story and they’ll be on their own for that one. The grandchildren and cats have more space to run and everyone can spread out a little. Everyone’s over the moon, them most of all (as you’d expect).
Bit of travel next week for work, which is fine. I have plenty to read en route and it will be nice to see lots of people in person instead of via Teams and Zoom.
Definitely looking and feeling like Fall. The leaves are changing in earnest and the temps are steadily falling. Still plenty of bugs out and about. There’s been a bit of frost in the morning, but no hard freeze as of yet. The flowers are basically done, except for some scattered asters here and there and a few mistflowers. Right now it’s gray and overcast too, so the vibe is nearly perfect. I wish things were a tad less busy for a minute or two, but here we are.
For our next formation weekend (which is actually just Saturday), we’ll be preaching for…The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. I am reliably informed that this is one the least-favorite days on which to deliver a homily. Fortunately for me, I saw the email about this when I was on retreat so I made some use of the monastery library and pulled a dozen or so sermon collections off the shelf to look some inspiration.
As it turns out, most - if not all - of the homilies I read covered the ground I was already considering, which is:
We really can’t get our heads around this, and it’s no use trying to make it easy. Here’s what we know, and here’s what to do with that knowledge…
In any case it’s nice to know that some of the pressure is off.
Our second homily on the weekend will be short-prep-time sort of thing, topic TBD. We’ll find out when we get there. As for the rest of the process, my final evaluation went well and we had a follow-on meeting to discuss the ins and outs of the assignment process. The main part of this was to give us a chance to discuss anything that they needed to be aware of beforehand - unfixable personality conflicts, insurmountable scheduling, and so on. We met with the vicar general and head of deacon personnel and they were both very gracious and attentive. I still have no idea where I’ll be sent, but I know now that I’m to consider the assignment “stable,” which is to say “we’re not sending you to X for a year before bringing you back to Y. We need for you to invest in the community, keep your eyes off the calendar, and bloom where you’re planted.”
Sounds good to me. I won’t be able to fully relax my brain on this until the question is answered, since it will deeply affect our lives from that point on, but it shouldn’t be much longer before they let us know. Until then: ora et labora.
Speaking of, the monks prayed the most beautiful confiteor as part of their Compline. The temptation has been strong to print it out and stick it in my breviary:
I confess to God Almighty,
To blessed Mary ever Virgin,
To blessed Michael the Archangel,
To blessed John the Baptist,
To the holy Apostles Peter and Paul,
To our blessed Father Benedict,
To all the Saints,
And to you,
Brethren,
That I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word, and deed:
By my fault,
By my own fault,
By my own most grievous fault.
Therefore I ask blessed Mary every Virgin,
Blessed Michael the Archangel,
Blessed John the Baptist,
The holy Apostles Peter and Paul,
our blessed Father Benedict,
All the Saints,
And you, brethren,
To pray for me to the Lord our God.
Lots going on, but not much to write about. Work is very busy and things continue to arc towards December 20th with an ecclesiastically deliberate pace. Started Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and am enjoying it. Picked up another one (The Emerging Diaconate) while I was on retreat, but haven’t started it yet. Francis de Sales in bits and pieces.
Things are definitely cooling off slowly outside, though I’m looking at a yard that needs mowing again and lots of weeds vigorously growing where they ought not be. The only vegetation I want to think about right now is the kind that takes place on the couch with bourbon.
Next week, I will be taking my canonical retreat before ordination - five days at a Benedictine monastery down the road a bit. Things look like they’re going to be nice and busy at work up until the very last minute, which, y’know, sort of tracks. Other than knowing that I’ll be out-of-pocket and off-the-grid for a little while, I haven’t given it much thought. I’ll take a few books with me, but don’t have anything planned otherwise.
Our monthly meetings are reduced to a single Saturday now. We spend a couple of hours delivering and writing homilies or stepping through various liturgical things. Last weekend, we learned a bit about serving mass when the bishop is presiding. Our director of deacon personnel was there, and he showed us a cheat sheet for when to get him the mitre and crozier, and I need to ping him to see if he’ll send it out to the rest of us. In the meantime, I see that they’ve published the banns for our petitions, which means that the people of God get three weeks to register their feelings regarding our ordinations. I hope they’ve staffed up the call center.
Our OCIA is busting at the seams. Over 70 at this point in both the English and Spanish sections. We’re honestly out of physical space to hold everyone. This sounds like the opposite of a problem, and it is in a way. People continue to show up week after week, with I heard this was where OCIA is, and we show them where to sit and get them onto the sign-up sheet. I wish we could just split them into separate evenings or something, but it’s not my call, and I’ll likely be gone by January anyway.
Cooling off slowly outside. It’s starting to look and feel a little more fall-ish, but the grass has gotten tall again, and I’ll need to cut it again soon. Still working through de Sales, MacIntyre, and PKD. I just noticed that the latest season of Slow Horses has dropped and am very stoked. Otherwise, it’s old British detective shows for us via Britbox: Lewis and Happy Valley right now.
Volume 2 of PKD’s short stories is underway. Also about to revisit After Virtue. I read it a while back as an e-book, but have been slowly replacing important e-books with actual books. The weather is slightly cooler at night, but the days are still warm, so even though it’s starting to look like fall, we’re not quite there yet.
Nature seems to be carrying on, though - seasonal changes are appearing on schedule, so maybe things are closer than I thought: scolid wasps are out and about, and the late summer flowers (ironweed and others) are peaking or winding down. The starlings are gathering here and there, and the afternoon light has taken on some very subtle changes. The golden intensity of summer is giving way to a hint of chalky paleness. The sky hasn’t turned pure cobalt yet, but it will soon enough. Thankfully, the grass has slowed down, but I bet I’ll be cutting it a few more times before it’s over. One year I was mowing into December.
Formation-wise, still slowly marching towards December. I’m getting a little of homiletic practice at OCIA, delivering short reflections after we do the daily mass readings at OCIA. Meetings and self-evaluations with mentors and spiritual directors are scheduled. Petitions written and signed. My canonical retreat is scheduled in a couple of weeks, and I am very much looking forward to the silence.
I put Rayuela down, probably for good. I’m…sort of bored with it, and my language skills are probably not where they need to be to pick up on the subtleties. I started re-reading a collection of Philip K. Dick’s short stories which included a letter from him to another author explaining what he thinks science fiction is:
We have a fictitious world; that is the first step: it is a society that does not in fact exist, but is predicated on our known society; that is our known society acts as a jumping-off point for it; the society advances out of our own in some way, perhaps orthogonally, as with the alternate world story or novel. It is our world dislocated by some kind of mental effort on the part of the author, our world transformed into that which is not or not yet. This world must differ from the given in at least one way, and this way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society - or in any known society present or past
For PKD, setting a story in the future isn’t enough to make it science fiction, and this had me mulling over the dislocation he talks about, which gave rise to more woolgathering, until I landed on a what-if scenario:
What if Eternal September had never happened, and moreover, never could have happened? That is, what if the internet as we knew it in 1993 had remained the exclusive domain of academia, government, and large enterprises?
Remember that at that time, there were bulletin boards, many joined to message-passing federations like FidoNet, and larger private online services like CompuServe. If those had remained the only options for connectivity, what would the world look like in AD 2025?
Just for the fun of it - and fully conscious of the irony - I put the question to both ChatGPT and Claude and got back answers which, to be honest, were a little depressing in that ‘homesick for a place which doesn’t exist’ sort of way. Herewith some of their observations, and it’s pointing out that without the internet corpus, it seems pretty unlikely that LLMs would have emerged at all. AI research would likely have remained focused on things like genetic algorithms and neural networks.
Without internetworking between commercial services and the academic internet, we’d have multiple incompatible digital ecosystems. CompuServe might have evolved into a corporate-focused network with robust business applications, while AOL could have remained a consumer entertainment platform. GEnie, with its origins in General Electric’s timesharing systems, might have specialized in technical and engineering communities. Each would have developed proprietary protocols, incompatible file formats, and distinct cultures.
Local bulletin board systems would have become the primary bridge between these isolated networks. By 2025, BBS networks might have evolved into sophisticated federated systems - imagine FidoNet scaled up with modern hardware but retaining its store-and-forward architecture. Local sysops would function as information brokers, manually transferring messages and files between incompatible commercial services.
This fragmented world might have been more sustainable - each network optimized for its specific community rather than trying to be everything to everyone - but it would have severely limited global knowledge sharing and collaborative innovation.
In short:
No Eternal September → slower, more elitist Internet, delayed mass adoption.
BBS-first world → more fragmented, localized, community-governed networks; less centralization; a digital culture shaped more by sysops than by Silicon Valley.
By 2025, you’d probably have a digital world that’s:
Less commercialized, more community-run.
Slower and more text-heavy.
Rich in local cultures, but without a single meme-flooded global commons.
Basically, closer to Ham radio + local newspapers than Twitter + TikTok.
I graduated from college in 1993 and used the text-only internet (newsgroups and email) a fair amount while I was a student. I remember seeing one of the guys in the computer lab show us a new program called Mosaic, but there wasn’t much you could use it for at the time. Archie and Veronica were way more useful. Right before graduation, I got a part-time job helping a market research company run consumer tests for a CATV set-top box, which offered electronic messaging, interactive menus, and so on. The big idea at the time was “convergence,” where your telephone and television would all come on a single wire, and the fight everyone was preparing for was whose wire: The telephone company? Or local broadband CATV franchisee?
Good grief, it sounds like a discussion of steam vs. horse now. Still, if the walled garden online services had remained isolated and things like FidoNet continued to develop as a sort of backbone, we would have lost the immediate access to (nearly) unlimited information, but we’d also be spared the global bathroom wall of opinion and invective. As for the internet, it might have remained a B2B sort of thing, or a place for enterprise applications. Websites might be limited to catalog storefronts for large retailers, but maybe they would have cut deals with AOL and GEnie instead. Social media would not have emerged, but there’d still be localized enclaves and cliques. So memes, maybe, but slow-moving and regional at best. Newspapers would probably still be around, and maybe CATV/minitel-like services emerged for the non-computerized households.
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.
So I managed to remove most of the hydrangea. It was…colossal, and I ended up transplanting an offshoot in a different spot where it’s free to get as crazy-big as it wants to. What’s left is bits of the stump which I’ve painted with a bit of herbicide to make sure I’m not fighting it for the next ten years. I’ve got some catmint rooting in water and will take some cuttings from the lavender and brown-eyed susans a bit later today.
In any case, all I can say is: be careful where you plant oak-leaf hydrangeas. Very careful. They can become uncontrollable monsters.
