One of my former high school students pointed me the other day to the St. Anthony High English Blog.
A recent post offers seven "funny one-liners," my favorite of which is:
Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.I am a great lover of tomatoes, but I cannot imagine they would go well in a fruit salad.
God our Father,
maker and lover of peace,
to know you is to live,
and to serve you is to reign.
All our faith is in your saving help;
protect us from men of violence
and keep us safe from weapons of hate.
We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.
In just a few minutes my secretary and I will meet in the rectory with the Diocesan Parish Finance Coordinator, who happens to be a grade school classmate of mine.
Hopefully, he'll be able to tell us what to keep, how long to keep it, how to keep it and where to keep it.
Today, the organization of the parish office will either take a giant leap forward, or quite a few backwards.
Father Kevin Laughery, Judicial Vicar and Pastor of Holy Cross parish in Auburn, provides us the answer in his typical fashion: "They're ready when they're ready."
Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms us and frees us, allowing us to become fully ourselves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives becomes evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation “as through fire” (I Corinthians 3:15). But it is also a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally of ourselves and totally of God. In this way the interrelation between justice and grace also becomes clear: the way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our defilement does not stain us forever if we have at least continued to reach out towards Christ, towards truth and towards love… The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy.
This afternoon we celebrated the Blessing of Graves at the Virden Cemetery. About 20 of the faithful attended the 4:00 p.m. prayers.
One of the parishioners mentioned beforehand that he wished he had brought his camera along. I reached into my cassock and produced my camera. He kindly took the following pictures:
A light-hearted moment before the prayer.
A small portion of the Virden cemetery.
Listen, brothers and sisters, to the Scriptures.Death is, then, no cause for mourning, for it is the cause of mankind's salvation....
Death was not part of nature; it became part of nature. God did not decree death from the beginning; he prescribed it as a remedy. Human life, because of sin ... began to experience the burden of wretchedness in unremitting labour and unbearable sorrow. There had to be a limit to its evils; death had to restore what life had forfeited. Without the assistance of grace, immortality is more of a burden than a blessing.
The Kingdom of God is a gift, and precisely because of this, it is great and beautiful, and constitutes the response to our hope. And we cannot—to use the classical expression—”merit” Heaven through our works. Heaven is always more than we could merit, just as being loved is never something “merited”, but always a gift. However, even when we are fully aware that Heaven far exceeds what we can merit, it will always be true that our behaviour is not indifferent before God and therefore is not indifferent for the unfolding of history. We can open ourselves and the world and allow God to enter: we can open ourselves to truth, to love, to what is good. This is what the saints did, those who, as “God's fellow workers”, contributed to the world's salvation (cf. 1 Cor 3:9; 1 Th 3:2). We can free our life and the world from the poisons and contaminations that could destroy the present and the future. We can uncover the sources of creation and keep them unsullied, and in this way we can make a right use of creation, which comes to us as a gift, according to its intrinsic requirements and ultimate purpose. This makes sense even if outwardly we achieve nothing or seem powerless in the face of overwhelming hostile forces. So on the one hand, our actions engender hope for us and for others; but at the same time, it is the great hope based upon God's promises that gives us courage and directs our action in good times and bad.
Lately (well, for about a year or more) I've been finding my laptop more of a burden to use than a help. It is faster than my desktop, but I have always been fond of a desktop, in no small part because of the actual mouse (I know, I know; I can get a mouse for my laptop). For whatever reason (which I don't quite understand myself), I simply prefer a desktop now that I am not travelling as much as I did in the seminary.
This evening I was actually going to post the homily I preached this weekend for All Saints Day (I haven't posted a homily since I've been in Virden because they have largely been reworks of homilies I've already preached) when, lo and behold, my desktop appears to be near death, suffering from a series of "thermal events" and various other problems besides, including the dread "blue screen of death."
I suppose it's time for a new desktop, which means I can start playing cool games again.
Thankfully, I have most of the files on my desktop also on an external drive. Naturally, I haven't yet placed this weekend's homily on it.
Instead, in a few minutes, I'll give you another thought from Pope Benedict XVI.
Father Selvester provides us with a short history of today's Solemnity.
Abbot Cuthbert reflects on the place of today's Solemnity within the context of the liturgical year.
"The saints are the true bearers of light within history, for they are men and women of faith, hope and love."
Ashley, the daughter of my Hawaiian friend Easter, who blogs at, among other places, A Tribute to Our Priests, posted the following picture to her Facebook page:
It shows the location in the Honolulu's Cathedral of Our Lady, Queen of Peace, where the relic of Saint Damien of Molokai will be enshrined during tomorrow's observance of All Saints Day.
Ashley comments that in addition to the expected 1,200 members of the faithful, some 13 Bishops and 1 Cardinal are also expected tomorrow.
The shrine itself appears to be made of koa wood, a highly prized wood on the islands. To either side of the shrine stand two feathered kahili, a symbol of royalty once carried in procession before the Kings and Queens of Hawaii.
I am very much looking forward to returning to the Land of Paradise to pray again before the relic of this holy priest.
Those of you in Hawaii: do take lots of pictures for those of us who cannot be with to celebrate.
A few moments ago I returned to the rectory from a errand-running trip to Springfield where, it seems, a great many people are not thinking properly today as they run their own errands. I encountered nothing out of the ordinary, just people parking their carts in the middle of the aisle; having lenthy conversations with several shoppers clogging up the crossroads, as it were; and people who have simply forgotten the rules of the road. The difference this morning seemed to be the larger numbers of such people.Looking through the parish office files, we do not seem to have a form for new parishioners to fill out.
If you have such a form for your parish (and wouldn't mind me using part or all of it), would be so kind as it to send it to me at daren[at]servantandsteward[dot]com? Thank you!
The weekend of November 21-22 will see the annual collection for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD).
In a memorandum dated October 2, 2009, The Most Reverend Roger P. Morin, Chairman of the CCHD, assures his brother bishops that although the CCHD has in the past funded groups - such as ACORN - that have contradicted Catholic teaching measures are in place to ensure the CCHD does not fund such groups at the present time or in the future.
Indeed, "you can assure your people," he writes, "that this will be the third CCHD collection in which no funds have gone or will go to any national or local ACORN structures." The CCHD was founded in 1969.
What is more, the CCHD "takes seriously any allegation that groups we fund are not in compliance with Catholic teaching, or are participating in partisan political activity."
Many of the faithful remain concerned about contributing funds to the CCHD.
A friend passed on this suggestion to me for those with such concerns: contribute instead to Aid to the Church in Need, a group endorsed by the Servant of God Pope John Paul II.
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