I’m just back from a week in Chicago, at this year’s Tcl conference. If you left a comment on a recent blog post during the last week, I might just have responded today.
I visited St. Peter’s in the Loop a couple of times, and hey, Julie, they have two copies of your book in their bookstore.
After eight (8) months, we are back in our kitchen! There are a few little things still to be done, but we have actually eaten some homecooked meals in the new kitchen this week. Woohoo!
No pictures, yet, as there are cardboard boxes everywhere still.
I just discovered that someone close to me, someone who shall remain nameless (to protect the guilty), someone who has become known for not seeing e-mails that have been sent to, um, him or her, has been using the Junk folder in uh, his or her, e-mail program as a place to put e-mail messages that, hmm, he or she, wants to look at later.
Let me say that again.
This individual has been using the e-mail program’s Junk folder as a place to stash messages to look at later. (A note to the tech-savvy in my audience: remember what they say about making assumptions.)
We have had a frank and honest exchange of views, and I have agreed that this individual’s use of the Junk folder was based on a plausible model of how to do things, and this individual has promised not to do it any more.
I actually picked up the Rosary before I returned to the Catholic Church. A non-Catholic high school friend had gone on a trip to Rome, and since I was still Catholic then had brought me back a rosary from the Vatican. (He also brought back a photo of a statue of a pope that he and his sister thought looked like me. I have no idea who it was, really.) I didn’t pray the Rosary at that time; but in the year leading up to my return to the Church I pulled it out, and began to figure out what it was all about. I was doing a lot of business travel that year, and having the Rosary with me was a comfort.
The Rosary is probably the Catholic devotion; it’s also the one that non-Catholics look at and say, “Oooooh: vain repetition!” But that’s missing the point of the Rosary.
Yes, it’s a repetitive prayer: five decades (the usual daily allotment) has five Our Fathers, fifty Hail Marys, five Glory Be, a Hail Holy Queen, and a variety of other things depending on just how you do it, because there’s more than one way. But it isn’t about the repetition; it’s about the five daily mysteries: five scenes or periods from the New Testament upon which to the meditate. The prayers to Our Father and to our Blessed Mother aren’t just words; we mean them sincerely. But at the same time, they serve to give our bodies something to do while our souls are attending to the mysteries. And in addition to that, you can offer up your Rosary, or individual decades, for your prayer intentions.
So in one small package you get:
Which is to say, a way to spend time with God, that helps you focus on God, such that you don’t have to do all the work yourself, and when you’re done, you know you’re done. It’s the perfect antidote for planned spontaneity.
I won’t try to explain how to say the Rosary here; there are scads of websites and oodles of books, and frankly, though I’ve been praying it for years I’m no expert. But if you’ve not tried it, it’s well worth a try.
It’s Tuesday. It was a Tuesday, eleven years ago, that I came downstairs for breakfast, in a hurry to get to work, and found my wife watching the news on TV. “Will, a plane hit one of the World Trade Center buildings.”
I didn’t get it. I thought it was a small plane, an accident, I wondered how a small plane had gotten into that airspace to begin with. It took a while for Jane to make it clear that the plane was a 747, and it was a while longer before I realized that it wasn’t an accident.
I think that the penny dropped as we watched the second plane hit the second tower. And then, as we watched and listened, the first tower collapsed.
It wasn’t an accident; it was a terrorist act, an attempt to scare us and break our wills, to break our country. It was deeply, deeply wrong.
So the lightning; now for the lightning bug.
In recent weeks (a phrase I could have written with equal justice at any time in the last ten years) I’ve seen scorn, bile, foul language, and vitriol in on-line forums and comment boxes. Much of it is directed at shutting down voices the commenter doesn’t like, not by reasoned argument, but by shouting and fear. It’s an attempt to scare the speaker, to break his will, to take him out of the dialog.
This isn’t the lightning; it’s only the lightning bug. It doesn’t kill people. Purveyors of combox hatred aren’t mass murderers. Still, the lightning bug does resemble the lightning in its own small way. And it, also, is deeply wrong.
So I’ve been working on this novel for the past year or so, with the intent of reading it to my kids. They knew I was working on it, but they didn’t know anything about it. A couple of weeks ago, I judged that it was, if not finished, at least ready to share with them; and just a few minutes ago we finished it.
Now, I’ve read them many, many novels, by many different authors. I didn’t make any kind of fuss about this one; I just told them the title, and read it to them. And when we were done, my eldest asked, “Is there a sequel?”
I said, “No, I haven’t written it yet.”
“You wrote that?”
In fact, it took a while to persuade them that I am, in fact, the author.
Color me very, very pleased.
(For the record, it’s still not quite done; whilst reading it to them I identified a number of over-used phrases, typographical errors, continuity problems, and such like. I’ll keep you posted.)
Just got a cold call from a building contractor, looking for work. You know, “Hi, this is Fabulous Construction, we’re paying courtesy calls today on the people in your area….”
I told him, “We’re six months into a kitchen remodel, and we still like our contractor.”
Before I even finished speaking, he said, “Well, I can’t beat him!” and we closed the conversation amicably.
Julie wrote a post today that jibed with something I’ve been pondering, and nudged me enough to actually write something about it. In her post, she’s talking about taking time for prayer, and recognizing that that time for prayer is supposed to be a time of rest.
As a Lay Dominican, I pray the Divine Office every day (Morning, Evening, and Night Prayer, also known as Lauds, Vespers, and Compline). I like the Divine Office, because I don’t need to be with it. Some days I really enjoy spending time in prayer; and other days I’m tired and distracted. If I’m not with it, I still know when I’ve said my prayers that I’ve spent time with God…and the fact of the matter is, my feelings about my prayer time are a very poor indicator for the quality of my prayer time.
Still, even if I’m not with it it’s still necessary to focus as best I can. And that’s where distractions are a problem. It’s way too easy to sit down to the Office with a sense of rush: I want to sit down and do this so that I can move on to something fun. And so even as I pray, my mind is on what I want to do next. (For some reason this is especially a problem on weekends, when my time is my own and there’s nothing that I particularly have to do next.)
So it occurred to me the other day…a big part of the growing in the Christian life is detachment. I’m not expert in this, but detachment, as I understand it, is all about putting God first rather than second. There should be an order in our loving and our desires, and in particular we musn’t love the things of this world more than their Creator. Detachment is the process of learning to put God first.
And just maybe, just perhaps, the things that distract me from God during the Office are the things I’m in danger of loving more than Him. Not all of them; some of the distractions are duties and obligations that I really have to attend to. But many of them: the computer game I want to go back to, the book I want to keep reading. You know—the stuff I like.
Joy, he said, somewhat sardonically.
Kudos to the MSL team, who are all looking a lot more relaxed than they were a very short while ago.
I just had a moment of revelation. I looked at myself in the mirror whilst washing my hands, and I saw myself. And the revelation is what I saw.
I’ve been working at JPL for over twenty-five years, pretty much ever since I got out of school. And I recognized what I saw in the mirror.
I saw an Old JPL Hand. I saw someone who looks like he’s been at JPL for twenty-five years.
Oh, dear.
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The View from the Foothills 