This past weekend was our penultimate class. I’m just waiting for the instructor to post the exam so I can get started on it. Our final course completes our moral theology sequence, covering sexual and biomedical ethics. An assembly of the diocesan deacons and wives was also planned for the same weekend, and we all came together for mass, a brief meeting covering some new things coming our way, and (naturally) dinner with cocktails. A day of recollection was provided for the wives of men in formation, so I wasn’t up there alone the whole time.
Friday morning, our bishop came to our parish to celebrate the school mass. I tagged in to serve and managed to wind up having breakfast with him, our clergy, and some representatives of the student council (one of whom is our daughter). The school masses are always a lot of fun, and I’m glad for the chance to be there for them once in a while. The night of the assembly mass, I was asked about 4 hours prior to serve as cantor, which seemed to go fine. It turns out I have a decent voice for singing, or at least chant. I know this because others have told me, and I frequently seem to get pencilled in whenever our families are attending formation masses or other guests are present. I’m leaning in, as they say. Saturday was the first time I ever had to use a microphone and it seemed to go fine. No one got up and left, and I got several compliments, so there we go. Never too early to look over the Exultet I suppose.
School reading is going to push the leisure stuff to one side for a bit; the biomedical ethics book is pretty hefty. I’m helping our final Lenten Stations of the Cross and will be leading the Spanish portion.
Too rainy for wildflower pics today. We were dodging polygons last night as a front of severe weather blasted through the area around midnight, which set the weather radio alerts on and off for about an hour. All is well, though wet. April showers and all that.
Springbeauty grows in large areas which are beautiful, but also in these little clumps off by themselves. We’re getting close to needing to mow, but honestly I can wait a little longer.
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!
― Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts
Met with my deacon mentor today, probably for the last time before ordination unless something comes up and I need advice. We’ll see each other this weekend (big deacon meeting coinciding with our formation weekend) and will probably cross paths before December. He’s got a great perspective, having been in the role for awhile and at a parish that’s at some distance from all the goings-on downtown.
One of the things I’ve been working on a little is Marian piety - discovering ways to approach the Blessed Virgin in ways that don’t feel forced to me. I love the idea of the Rosary a lot, but it’s never been a go-to for me during times of mental prayer. This has felt like something that needed a closer look, so I made it part of Lenten devotions and as luck (?) would have it, our director of vocations invited many of us to join him in a novena to Our Lady Undoer of Knots. Why? It turns out that the incoming group of seminarians is so large that there’s some concern about where they’re going to be housed. This is a good knot - maybe the very best knot - but a knot nonetheless. So I joined in and managed to make all nine days without missing one, leaning on the Rosary tab of the Universalis app which has the option of including scriptural reflections for every single bead. This forces me to slow down a little for each prayer, rather than letting autopilot take over - hammering out a decade as my mind begins to drift.
I’ve also found it helpful to just ask her to sit with me before the Blessed Sacrament, letting her point me towards Him. Soon I was asking her intercessions before falling asleep. It’s happening slowly but surely. The novena was timed to end at the Solemnity of the Annunciation, which is today. When we draw closer to Mother of God, we also come closer to the humanity of Christ. We also approach Joseph, husband of Mary, protector of the Church, and model of deacons. The Holy Family has much to teach us, even - maybe especially - if all we do is rest quietly in Nazareth for awhile.
Bluets, another backyard native. These are tiny and a little tricky for me to photograph with a phone. They range in color from this pale color to dark blue/purple.
I started re-assembling my radio stack this past week, a project that started when I noticed that my main antenna (and everything attached) was suddenly deaf as a post. The problem was simple enough to fix - the lightning arrestor plug had worn down after the recent wave of severe weather, so I ordered a few more and got it up and running again. Something was still not quite right, and I next discovered that the SDR switch (an MFJ-1708-R) had blown a relay, so that component needed to be replaced as well. MFJ is now out of business, so I’m looking at some alternatives (these look good), but in the meanwhile, I got the HF rig back on the air, ironed out some wrinkles with the CAT controls, restored my lost QSL log, and made a few contacts via FT8.
Anyway, this is all to say that as we approach the formal end of studies, a bit more mind space can be returned to hobbies and whatnot, and as long as we’re still at (or near) solar max, this feels like a good time to get back into radio.
Halfway through Demons, it’s starting to pick up some speed. I’m on Paz’s final essay and will probably start Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo afterward. I’m close to finishing Introduction to the Devout Life and would like to stay with DeSales for a little longer, probably with Treatise on the Love of God.
Watching: White Lotus, The Righteous Gemstones. FOMO has gotten the best of me, and now I need to watch all of Severance so that I can speak with the rest of my family.
Statement of the Bishops of the Province of Louisville on the Feast of the Holy Family, emphasis mine:
The Church recognizes the right of individuals to migrate to sustain their lives and the lives of their family members. The Church also recognizes the responsibility of nations to control their borders and create migration policies. However, the Church teaches that this right is not unlimited and must be exercised with respect for the human dignity of each person and the common good.
The Church in the United States has long advocated for comprehensive immigration reform that includes pathways to citizenship, family reunification, and protections for those fleeing persecution. It emphasizes the need for just and humane treatment of all migrants, including access to legal protections, and due process. The Church recognizes that basic human rights are based on the dignity of being created in the image and likeness of God.
Mariam Mahmoud calls for a return to The Lost Art of Research as Leisure (h/t HN):
In this fragmented landscape, we need not just diagnoses but prescriptions. How might we rebuild the foundations of culture when our very modes of attention have been compromised? The answer may lie in recovering an ancient understanding of leisure—not as idleness, but as a form of directed contemplation.
Josef Piper, writing at the same time as Eliot, but in a defeated and fragmented Germany, declares leisure the basis of culture. By “leisure,” Pieper does not mean idleness, but the more ancient type of leisure — leisure as the Greek σχολή (scholē), or school.
Pieper’s leisure is a contemplative one—it is, in essence, a style of unconstrained research. Such leisure is not merely, or singularly, the pursuit of knowledge “for its own sake,” nor is it simply “reading for pleasure.” The leisure that forms the basis of culture is a directed and intentional curiosity — it is the practice of formulating questions and seeking answers with a disposition towards wonder, not rigid certainty. Where free time is not used for research — for developing questions, and investigating the answers with an explorer’s spirit — cultural coherence crumbles. For Pieper, without leisure as letters, or “research as leisure,” there is no pattern from which higher civilisation is found.
The corned beef and cabbage became Reuben sandwiches, and what was leftover from that became tonight’s hash.
Keiffer pear blossoms. Last year, a late frost clobbered them, so I’m hopeful that we’ll see some fruit this time.
Things I have used Claude for:
- Write a plugin for Visual Studio Code so that I can compose posts in markdown and publish them directly to microblog
- Plan an itinerary for a two-week trip to the UK this summer
- Introduce a novel with a summary of its historical context, the author’s situation, broad themes, major characters, and their relationships.
- Write a Greasemonkey script that removes all sponsored/paid posts and reaction updates from my LinkedIn timeline, leaving only original posts or reposts.
- Review essays for grammar, spelling, or structural issues without regard to the content
- Adjust the style-sheet for Lynx so that it more closely matches my terminal theme
- Write a terminal/ncurses app to display real-time data from my personal weather station
- Explain NFL punt return rules
- Add IR control to the Arduino/WS2811 LED light project that I use for the Christmas tree
- Lay out the instructions for building a GPS-powered clock, for which I have the parts and now only need some time
Paz on pause for a bit and having another go at Dostoevsky’s Demons. I’ll alternate. Apropos, here’s another use I’ve found for Claude: I have read X and Y; what things should I know before reading Z? It’s nice to have a quick digest of context, setting, major characters/relationships, and themes.
Back home again after another formation weekend. We wrapped up canon law and I have the take-home test sitting here in a sealed envelope waiting for my attention. I’ll probably work on this weekend. Friday is something of a company holiday, so I’ll be off of work, but more or less alone at home. One more bit of travel this week and I’ll be done for awhile. At the end of the month, we’ll begin the final class of formation, which is the second half of moral theology. One weekend of sexual ethics followed by another one in April on medical ethics which (I believe) is the specialty of our instructor. Syllabus reviewed, texts inbound, etc. That our studies are nearly complete still feels sort of weird but in a really good way.
Looking ahead, we have some travel planned for spring and summer, a graduation in May, and I’ll need to make a canonical retreat in the fall. All of it good stuff, praise God. After that? We’ll return monthly for fall liturgical practice, and I think we have a how-to-do-stuff session scheduled with our tribunal folks which should be interesting. Ordination is set for the 20th of December. What happens after that is up to the Bishop.
Things continue to slowly wake up outside. Trees are beginning to visibly bud and the perennials are all sending up shoots, crowns, and other things. Even with the nights still dropping in the 30s, the spring peepers are making a bit of ruckus thought it sounds a little subdued. They’ll be going all-out again soon enough.
I’m having to make a particular effort to moderate my news intake. Scan of the headlines and round up of RSS feeds is about all I can manage these days. Some advice I got in spiritual direction recently was to be mindful of letting the theoretical eclipse the concrete. That is, there are things in front of me right now that require my attention, and other things that are sort of Out There which may or may not happen but are in either case beyond my control. Stay concrete. God bless.
Back from a bit of business travel to Las Vegas. The weather was nice, the time productive, and the trips there and back without incident. Honestly, that’s about all I ask for these days. I’m home long enough to rest a bit before heading to another formation weekend, where we will complete the second half of our canon law course. Then I’ll come back from that and prepare for a quick there-and-back trip to Charlotte. Such is the life of the jet-setting businessman these days.
On the flight out, I knocked out an assigned text (Annulment: The Wedding That Was, by Fr. Michael Smith Foster) and spent most of the flight home reading El laberinto de la soledad, a collection of essays (or one long one) by Octavio Paz which reflect on the roots and contours of Mexican identity, in particular the historical and cultural movements which shape it, or at least as he perceived them in the 1950s. I’m about halfway through it and finding it an easier go than the fiction so far. Somewhere around here I have a collection of his poetry (A draft of shadows) that I need to take another look at too. I certainly have a greater appreciation for a particular Mexican vulgarity after Los hijos de la malinche!
Tracey Rowland exhorts us to recover the weirdness of a sacramental, enchanted worldview as an antidote to “correlationism” (h/t to Bishop Erik Varden):
…pastoral strategists who spent decades promoting sacro-pop music and folk liturgies and modernized prayer books and manuals of ethical behavior devoid of any reference to God, grace, or sacrality, just “principles”, woke up to find themselves surrounded by a generation who want to study scholasticism, attend liturgies in Latin and, in the context of ethics, want to know how this or that act impacts upon their relationship with God.
The very “weirdness” of things pre-modern is part of what makes them different and thus attractive to those of post-modern sensibilities. It’s a little like the difference between going into a coffee shop on some cobbled street of old Catholic Europe, with its not-to-be-found anywhere-else-in-the-world ambience and picking up a coffee at Starbucks. Those who were young in the 60s may have been excited by the proliferation of modern chain stores, replicated in every town in the country, but today’s youth are bored by this. If, for example, it’s the Feast of the Epiphany, they like receiving a little packet of blessed chalk from their parish priest so they can write the initials of the three magi—Caspar, Melchior,and Balthasar and Christus Mansionem Benedicat (May Christ bless this house)—above their doorposts.
Whoever attacks a brother in need, or plots against him in his weaknesses of any sort, surely fulfills the devil’s law and subjects himself to it.
— Blessed Isaac of Stella, Office of Readings, 5th Saturday of Ordinary Time
Thoughts on Pedro Páramo:
I liked it a lot. The narrative is non-linear which made it a challenging read in Spanish. I leaned heavily on plot summaries and occasional AI queries to make sure I wasn’t missing the thread. Will probably watch the Netflix adaptation this weekend while it’s still fresh on my mind and am curious about how they’ll handle some of the weirder stuff. I found myself reaching for the dictionary frequently, but rather than a Spanish-English dictionary, I’ve decided to switch a conventional dictionary (in Spanish). I used the online version of the DLE but have a hard-copy version on the way. It’s shipping from Germany, which I think is sort of funny, and will be here some time in March. Some of the scenes are just indelible in their weirdness, particularly the narrator’s meeting with the brother and sister about midway through. I won’t go into much more detail. If you know, you know.
I’ve started El llano en llamas (“The Burning Plain”), which is a collection of Rulfo’s short stories. I’m finding some of these even more challenging than the novella. I looked up one word in the dictionary and couldn’t find it, so I used Google and nearly all the hits were from people posting the text of the story. Back to context clues and educated guesses. The story was El hombre and the word was “engarruñándose,” in case you’re wondering.
I caught a reference in one of the short stories to Media Luna, which is an important locale in Pedro Páramo. I did some digging and, sure enough, Rulfo set his stories in a fictionalized version of his native Jalisco, along the lines of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, thought without the persistent family stuff. I’ve written here before about fictional geographies and the weird itch that the tend to scratch for me, so it was gratifying to add another page to my mental atlas of “Places That Are Real But Also Not Real.”
I can also tell you that reading stories set in a place which is always warm - where the sun, shadows, and heat play a large part in the mood - as we stare down another cold snap with snow in the forecast has been just terrific for my general mood. And, you know, the pictures of Jalisco I’m seeing online are perfectly lovely…