All Hallow's Eve 2015

“I always wonder,” said Lise, “why, in Britain and America, we make Hallowe’en into a frightening thing with, for children, ghosts and skulls, witches, spiders and black cats, when it is the eve of one of the most radiant feasts of the year—All Saints, all those men and women who have shone out light and goodness, courage and faith into the world.”

 “And All Souls is radiant too,” said Soeur Marguerite—it followed the next day. “For us there is loss, but for the dead, for him or her, it is the culmination, the crown . . . .” Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy, Rumer Godden

Many Christians eschew all the ghosts and skulls, witches, etc. of Halloween out of fear, and I have to admit that I have been among them. Now, not so much, although I do think that you can go overboard, and sometimes in a dangerous way. However, there is a better reason to not get too caught up in the spookiness of the evening, and that is because we might miss the glory of the coming day.

Apparently, this is what they do in Sweden on All Saints' Day Lovely.
Photo Credit: David Castor

AMDG

Learning to Read

It's been about four years since I got my first Kindle Fire. When I bought it, I didn't really have any intention of reading books on it. I just wanted a cheap tablet. Gradually though, I started buying books. At first I just took advantage of really good deals, like free books or all of Walker Percy's book for $2.00 each. Then I bought some more. I like the idea of being able to go on a trip and just take that Kindle instead of eight books. You have to have at least eight books because you never know what type of book you're going to want to read at any given moment, and they're heavy and take up a lot of room.

Pretty soon, I was reading everything on the Kindle Fire. It was convenient in a lot of ways. Easy to take with me, and easy to take notes. I'm no good at taking notes with pen or pencil. I just don't do it. All-in-all I liked it, and I still like it, but then, there is the glaring problem. (There's a glare problem, too, but I can deal with that.)

You can do a lot more on a Kindle Fire than read. You can check your email incessantly. You can check Facebook. You can play solitaire. You can take pictures. It is, basically, the most distracting item that I own.

Too much stuff

All this distraction militates against sitting for long periods of time and reading your book. Sometimes the distraction creeps in in subtle ways. What is this French word? Oh, I can just look it up on Google. Twenty minutes later, I get back to the book. After awhile I realized that I was incapable of just sitting down and reading for more than about 10 minutes at a time. This is really bad!

So, I have spent the last few months training myself to read without interrupting myself. Doing what I used to do for hours at a time if left alone, has been a real battle. Lately, it has begun to get better. For one thing, many of the books that I have been reading for the 52 Authors series are not available as ebooks. When I'm reading a real book, the distractions are still close by, but not actually part of what I'm holding.

There's a lot written about problems with the internet. People are worried about security and the potential for constant surveillance, and those are very real problems. But what really bothers me is how it changes me. All my life, one of my greatest pleasures has been sitting with a books and losing myself for afternoon or evening. For years, I've been looking forward to the day when I retire and can read the books that I never have time for now. I don't want to lose this opportunity because I'm wasting my time doing worthless things.

AMDG

52 Saints ~ Help Needed

See below if you are having trouble leaving comments.

...but I'm really thinking about it as 52 people who were saints.

As some of you know, I have been contributing to a series on 52 different authors on Maclin Horton's blog, Light on Dark Water. During the year, people have been suggesting different topics that we could write about next year, and two of those topics were 52 Movies and 52 Saints. Then, someone had the idea that we should do movies there, and saints here, so that is what we are going to try to do. Several commenters from that blog have volunteered to write about saints here, but I would like some of the people who read The Three Prayers to contribute also. I know you are out there because you have told me so, and I know that several of you would be more than capable of writing a post about a saint--or two--or three, so I hope you will volunteer.

I've been thinking a lot about this project, and about how we can keep it from becoming just a lot of pious hagiography. If I'm going to do this--if we are going to do this--I would like it to be a bit meatier than that. I've been trying to think of ways that that could happen.

At first I thought that we shouldn't do saints that were really popular like Francis, Theresa of Avila, etc., because there are a million websites out there that have so much stuff about them and everybody knows it all, but then it occurred to me that if you can talk about them from a different angle, one that not so many people are familiar with that could be great. I mean, everybody knows most of what is in Story of a Soul, but if you could write about St. Thérèse's letters, or her correspondence with the young priest, Maurice, that would work well. Or it could be some personal experience you had with the saint, for instance, I could write about the things that happened on our family's trip to visit St. Thérèse's relics. Or you could write about different authors who have written about the saint or a review a book, for instance, Heather King has a very nice book about the year she with Story of a Soul. There are just a lot of different ways to approach the saints.

It would be nice, though, to have some saints we don't know very well. Pope St. John Paul II canonized so many and there ought to be good information out there. And someone asked about Orthodox saints, and that would be great, but not protestants who we think are probably saints.

 I plan to do this on Sundays, so I would need them by Saturday. I will take the first Sunday and I will write about Junipero Serra.

So, if you are willing to give this a try, please let me know in the comments, or contact me any way you know how. Tell me what saints you want to write about, and if you have an idea of when you want to do it, tell me that, too.

 If you are thinking you can't do this, please give it another thought.

 AMDG

For some reason, it's very difficult to leave comments here and I have no idea what to do about it. When you write a comment, copy it before you submit it and then you can paste it and resend if it doesn't appear. It usually works the second time around. I'm really sorry about this.

JTC

Just Don't

Brothers and sisters, do not be afraid to welcome Christ and accept his power. Help the Pope and all those who wish to serve Christ and with Christ’s power to serve the human person and the whole of mankind. 

Do not be afraid. Open, I say open wide the doors for Christ. To his saving power open the boundaries of states, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilization and development. Do not be afraid. Christ knows “that which is in man”. He alone knows it.  See more here. 

This is part of the second reading in the Office of Readings for the feast of Pope St. John Paul II, and it comes from the homily at his inaugural.

I chose this particular passage for two reasons. One is that like so many angels in the Bible, St. John Paul encouraged us from the very beginning to let go of our fear. I don't think we listened!

Fear is ubiquitous these days both in the political and religious realms. I think that our zeitgeist is Chick Little. The reason for our lack of fear is not that bad things will not happen--they will--but because the One who calls us to endure them is with us and He is completely trustworthy. If anyone ever suffered the evils that men perpetrate on one another, it was St. John Paul, and yet, after living through the tragedies of World War II and the Communist regime in Poland he still tells us, "Do not be afraid."

The second reason I chose the passage is in that second paragraph. It sounds a little like Pope Francis, doesn't it?

Fear is one of the most damaging emotions of all. On one hand it can paralyze us. On the other, it can cause us to run around in a frenzy accomplishing nothing. In Twelve-step programs they will tell you fear is the chief activator of our faults. If you start watching for this in your life, you will see that it is true.

We are told in 2 Timothy, chapter 1 that, "God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind." Sound minds seem to be in short supply lately. We need to ask the Lord to give us a sound mind and that power of the Lord that St. John Paul spoke of in another passage in his homily.

...a power that has its source not in the powers of this world, but instead in the mystery of the Cross and the Resurrection. 

The absolute, and yet sweet and gentle, power of the Lord responds to the whole depths of the human person, to his loftiest aspirations of intellect, will and heart. It does not speak the language of force, but expresses itself in charity and truth.  

The new Successor of Peter in the See of Rome today makes a fervent, humble and trusting prayer: Christ, make me become and remain the servant of your unique power, the servant of your sweet power, the servant of your power that knows no dusk.

AMDG

Words

We had think places, private and recognized: Jon's on the roof, Rumer's in what she called the Secret Corner, which was not secret at all but a space under the roof stairs, but we soon discovered that, like snails, we could take our think houses with us anywhere; it was just as easy to go into "think" leaning on the roof parapet in the sun--the sun was a great help--or on the [boat] Sonachora holding our wave poles--the river too, helped thought--or in the tomato bed or up a tree, which was rather like the roof, because height and being high above people was good. We needed to be secret even from one another because we were "with book" or poem or painting, as if a seed, or perhaps "grit" is a better simile, had lodged itself in our minds. A grit from where? Anywhere: it might be some phrase we had heard, or a sight seen; it could be a line in a book, or an especial picture, but something suddenly detached itself from the thousands of other things round it and, once lodged in our minds, seemed to secrete til a whole would emerge, It was like an oyster making a pearl, except that the results were never pearls.                                                                                           Jon & Rumer Godden, Two Under the Indian Sun

Having come very late to the addiction of writing, it has only been in the last few years that I have encountered the experience described in the above paragraph. I have always had those periods of sitting and having a "think", but I was about 60 before those thoughts insisted on being written down. Once I begin to write a piece in my head, it lodges itself in the front of my brain, and makes it impossible for me to concentrate on anything else for very long. Paying attention at Mass is a constant struggle. When I'm praying the rosary with my husband, I announce the mystery and then find myself sitting completely still at the end of a decade, lost in the middle of a paragraph until my husband reminds me what I'm supposed to be doing. It's a sort of brooding over a thought until it comes full-grown.

We come by this brooding honestly since our Father in Heaven broods over us in this same way. Not content to just create us and leave us to fend for ourselves, He involves himself in every part of our lives if we let Him, and even if we don't. We are words proceeding from his Word and He is constantly lopping off the ungainly phrase and inserting the perfect synonym until we are a proclamation of His glory. It is not only the heavens that proclaim the glory of God.

The trick is to trust Him enough to let Him do it. We somehow get the idea that the work is ours. We tend to self-edit excessively and, inevitably, we end up looking like a toddler's scrawl instead of an illuminated manuscript.

AMDG

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

     Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, 
     Enwrought with golden and silver light, 
     The blue and the dim and the dark cloths 
     Of night and light and the half-light, 
     I would spread the cloths under your feet: 
     But I, being poor, have only my dreams; 
     I have spread my dreams under your feet; 
     Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
                                                                W. B. Yeats

AMDG