Ubi Petrus

I know it’s been really quiet here and I can’t say as I’m all that happy about that fact.  Despite plenty of excuses know that I am doing my best to get back to a regular blogging routine.  Honest.

That said, I plan on dragging you all along with me as I work to tackle three projects over the course of a good chunk of this year.  First, I’ve committed to getting my Latin studies going for real.  I’ll be going through John F. Collins’ Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin and using its associated Answer Key targeting roughly one unit per week.  There are 35 units in the book, so that means it’ll take me the better part of the year, but I’m going to let myself get ahead if I can.

Second and third, I’m going to read the entire Bible this year as well as the entirety of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.  I’ll be following the schedule set up by the good folks at the Coming Home Network.  I started this once before and hit a roadblock a couple of months in.  Hopefully this time will go more smoothly, although I am already a few days behind in starting.

I intend to share any reflections I may have or quotes that strike my fancy or even just the occasional “wow, Latin is a weird language – did you know …”.  That won’t be all I’ll be blogging about, but at least it will give me some structure going forward.

Yeah, work is kicking my keester and I’m feeling perpetually further behind than I was the day before. But I’ve got nothing on this. ‘Scuse me, I have to go admit that I’ve got it easy to a few people.

In counterpoint to the sour and dour of the last post …

My wife and I were laying in bed this morning telling each other that we really needed to get up, using our black lab as an excuse not to when my six-year-old daughter walked in. She usually tries to climb in bed and snuggle for a few minutes before we get up and moving for the day so we didn’t think anything of it.

Until we hear her address the dog with “the Lord be with you”. As we attempted to stifle impressed chuckles she proceeded to instruct him in the proper way to make the sign of the Cross. Now, St. Francis loved animals so maybe this is her inner Poor Clare coming out, but I don’t know. If nothing else, it reminds me how different her life is growing up knowing God and His Church from my life at her age without any of that.

I’ll post on the very good, if also very full, vacation later. Somewhere in all our gear is the camera, but I know not where.

My wife and I chatted briefly this morning how nice it was to again sleep in our own bed, and I realized as well how nice it would be to go back to our parish this morning and not play the game of church roulette that travel can often become (think “Risen Christ ‘Crucifix’” and you’ll get an idea). That thought was heartening as we drove to Mass.

As we knelt to pray our choir director took to the microphone to mention two announcements that had not made the bulletin this week. The first passed quietly, letting choir members know their practices would start again soon with the end of the summer approaching. The second started even better – “We are starting a new group for the 11AM Mass”. My head raced at the thought they might be starting a schola, or at least a group intended to target more traditional musical forms. “We will be singing the same songs as we do now”, he continued. My face dropped. “But we will be doing them in a Praise and Worship style.” I burped. “We’ll be adding instruments including guitar, drums and bongos.” The taste of last night’s dinner invaded my mouth.

Yup, that’s right, I was the victim of liturgical music whiplash. The parish under our new pastor had slowly been righting the liturgical ship, re-introducing things such as incense and candle bearers and even appropriate periods of silence. Everything was pointing to a recovery of the tradition so easily discarded in the silly season which worshiped only the “right now”. And now this. In a small way I can now understand the betrayal those who love tradition felt when it was ripped away from them by people who “knew better”. I simply, frankly, do not understand why now, when so much of the Church is re-discovering tradition and discovering it is what the younger generation wants rather than this thin and transparent attempt at pandering – that only now do I find myself faced with people who want to go in exactly the opposite direction.

What am I going to do about it? I don’t know. As neither a cleric nor a trained musician my opinion will hold little weight and I am constantly harassed by worries that complaining may hamper any future vocation to which God may be calling me and might even cause difficulties in my work with the RCIA team.

Speaking of the RCIA team, I shudder at the mere thought of the impact this decision will have on their formation. Praise and Worship music, and by extension any Mass in which they are used, tends to be wafer-thin on catechetical value and submitting our inquirers, catechumen and candidates to that experience (since the 11AM Mass is the one they attend prior to the Breaking Open the Word sessions) frightens me beyond belief. Thinking back on it I wonder very much if I could have made it through my own RCIA experience if the only Mass I saw was full of P&W – it simply does not show forth a Church fully convinced and deeply invested in the truths it professes. And as a catechist I simply do not know if I am possessed of the spiritual strength to maintain myself appropriately when I have to attend with our candidates and catechumen. How am I to explain to them the Mass of the ages when I have to simultaneously explain that what they are seeing is in fact at significant deviation to it? This, as they say, has disaster written all over it.

St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Charles Borromeo, St. Cecilia and Mary, Mother of God, ora pro nobis!

We’re heading off for a week of unplugged rest and relaxation. I expect by Tuesday I’ll have the jitters from not getting my St. Blog’s fix, but that too shall pass. As Mark Shea would say … Beans. Noses.

The cheerful news this past weekend that a local woman had qualified for the upcoming Olympics in race walking (oh, I should mention that as a local parishioner she was featured in the Diocesan magazine Parable before the race) got me to thinking. Strangely, it got me thinking about martyrdom. Then again, if you’ve ever trained for a race that connection isn’t as strange as you’d otherwise think.

Just as racing is generally divided into long- and short-distance the muscles that run those races can be divided into fast- and slow-twitch. Fast-twitch muscles are what we generally think of as “stronger”, generating more power and speed, but they quickly tire. Slow-twitch muscles generate less power and speed but tire much less slowly. Everyone has a different balance of fast- and slow-twitch muscle fibers. Those with a high proportion of fast-twitch tend to become sprinters or body builders or the like; those with a high proportion of slow-twitch tend to become distance runners. The former garner all the attention, the latter are often shown on TV in the wee hours of the morning. In the end though, it’s still a gold medal.

I’ve harbored for a long time a haunting wish that God would grant me the blessing of becoming a martyr for His Name. Not because I enjoy pain or have some particular interest in death but because, well, in some curious way it seems easier than the life-long alternative. It’s a one-shot deal with a guaranteed ending if you can hold on for just a little while. It is, in that way, like a sprint – one short burst of extreme pain and then, at the end, if you compete well, you garner that gold medal. It’s short, glorious and when it’s over you get the title of “World’s Fastest” and your face on a cereal box, or in our case you get the title of Martyr and your name remembered in Masses until the end of time.

But really, how many of us are there out there who are built like that? No, we’re here for the long haul. We are, in fact, race walking – putting one foot in front of the other time after time after sometimes painful time. Striding ever forward, sometimes dodging a puddle, a rock or a pothole and always trying to avoid drivers who have better things to do with their time is our call.

You know, maybe being a walker isn’t so bad. The sprinter has his glory and his crown, is regaled in song and cereal box and meets his eternal destiny in the blink of an eye. His is an inspiration to a life that almost no one can attain because it is only through a gift of God that he was built that way to begin with. But the walker grinds through life and is met by many who, if he is doing his job, find their own inspiration to take up that walk and join on the road. Most of us will never be championship sprinters, but we are all called to walk the narrow path.

Well, let’s just say life at work as been … interesting. Having somehow, and only through the grace of God, managed to dodge the many bullets flying around I’m just now going to get back into the swing of a “normal” life.

So what have I been doing during all this time other than dodging work bullets? Mostly … reading. I started with Questions and Answers – a collection of, as you’d guess, questions and answers from various groups over the beginning of Pope Benedict’s pontificate. If you follow the Pope closely none of this will be new since these sessions were well-covered at the time; if not, however, this book is a priceless insight into the mind and heart of the Pope. With his wonderful way of treating even complex issues in the simplicity born of love of God he takes questions from groups as diverse as young children and priests of different dioceses in Italy and gently answers every question giving the same attention to a simple child’s question as to a deep question from a priest. The contrast between the innocent yet sincere questions of the children and the less-a-question more-a-statement types of the priests of Rome cannot be missed.

Next I went to A Civilization of Love by the Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, Carl Anderson. Perhaps the best part about this book for me was that it was simply impossible to pin Anderson down to one political ideology – every time it seemed he was about to over-state a point he would produce a deeper insight into the topic and show he had always been trending to the center. Several time I caught myself thinking “I know where he’s going with this” only for him to prove me wrong and point out what is truly not the left or the right, but the Catholic position. I would say his strongest points are those where he is talking about things done by the Knights as a group which, given his position, could be expected. He doesn’t call us to anything extraordinary nor does he promulgate any particularly new teachings – what he does do, however, is remind us how much we can do even in the small things if only we do them, and do them in faith.

Finally, I just finished Augustine’s Confessions as translated by Albert Outler and revised by Mark Vessey for Barnes and Noble Classics. I can’t say much about the Confessions that hasn’t already been said and far more eloquently so I’ll only comment on the translation and the commentary. As good as this translation is, reading through it I came to understand the old latinist’s saying that reading Augustine in anything but his original Latin is a crime – he was too much an artist with the language for all his finest points to translate into another language. It’ll be a while before I’m ready for Augustine in Latin, however, so that’s going to be a ways off before I can speak to it first-hand. One thing I found rather interesting, and this goes for both the translation and the notes, was how the secular viewpoint affected everything. A Christian would expect words such as Lord and God to be capitalized, and would be surprised to find them left lower-case as in this book. In the commentary you can tell the endnotes were written for literary studies rather than spiritual edification, and sometimes the notes belie a certain critical attitude to the Christian points Augustine is attempting to make. At first I found this annoying but quickly found it a source of learning as I had to think through some of the comments to decide where they may have missed the mark. It has been several years since I read Confessions, and I must not wait that long again.

What’s next? I don’t know for sure. I have some thoughts in mind, and if my one project comes together y’all will be among the first to know.

Honest. Just really, really busy. Still.

Pardon the one unclean word at the end. You can’t have gone through a computer degree in college and not have seen this movie at least once. Several of my friends could relate the whole movie from beginning to end from memory. Scary, yes…

On the way to school yesterday:

Son: Can we listen to EWTN on the satellite?
Me: You don’t want to listen to Kids Stuff?
Son: Nah, EWTN please.

On the way to son’s Karate class:

Daughter: Can we listen to the song on EWTN?
Me: You mean the Divine Mercy chaplet in song?
Daughter: *already singing the chaplet*

Yup, they’re warped. And in the best possible way too. After spending the first twenty some-odd years of my life wandering in the desert I can’t even comprehend being so very comfortable with all these Catholic-isms. As I watch my kids grow in the Faith, each very much in their own way, I’m continually reminded they are experiencing this all in a way I will never quite understand.

Dang it, doesn’t he know it’s not right for a grown man to cry?

And to think, just this morning I was more than just a little stern with my son for something which, in retrospect, wasn’t really all that important. Apparently St. Jerome and I have more in common than just a love of languages. *sigh* It’s times like this when you realize just how far you really do have to go.