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...tired as a dog.
So yesterday I spent several fun-filled hours in the sun, and today I'm lathering myself up with Vitamin E & Aloe gel, while drinking large quantities of tea to help me wake up and recover from my vacation. The strange thing is that the sun didn't seem like the burning type. Maybe it was the cool breeze that was blowing that made me forget that I was getting hot, or maybe it was the water balloons. Hard to tell.
"The faithful expect only one thing from priests: that they be specialists in promoting the encounter between man and God."
-- Benedict XVI to a group of priests in Poland.
He doesn't want them to get distracted by political, or economic concerns, but to dedicate their time to prayer, and not consider that time wasted, because, as he says, "it is precisely then that the most wonderful fruits of pastoral service comes to birth." Hmm... prayer, a thing so often forgotten in the daily crunches of life, and yet I would think that any pastor should be more focused on this than on any other concerns, since he has been entrusted with tending to the those people God has put in his path.
"'We grow in affective maturity when our hearts adhere to God,' the pope said, adding that 'Christ needs priests who are mature, virile, capable of cultivating an authentic spiritual paternity.'" Spiritual paternity. They're called Fathers for a reason.
Good article on the Pope's priority on restoring Unity among all Christians.
"A marriage between Christians of different denominations can be 'a practical laboratory of unity' if the husband and wife are guided and supported by both their churches, Pope Benedict XVI said."
So on Tuesday I stopped by the pharmacy to pick up the drugs my podiatrist prescribed for this monster on my toe. Cost of monster killer? $400.29 for 30 pills. Sick and wrong. Then I pulled out insurance, and after getting authorization from my doctor, I picked up my pills this morning. Cost today? $30. Whew...
Star Trek is having a garage sale!
I can't seem to stop tinkering with the BCP site. Since adding the Holy Days and such, I've added in a function to check a Sunday for a Holy Day - because Holy Days take precedence over normal Sundays - and a function to calculate the observance of Foundation Day. For example, this year, Proper 7 is Foundation Day Sunday, even though Foundation Day is technically on Monday. And, Proper 13, August 6th, is also the "Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord," and is celebrated with different readings than Proper 13. When a person wants readings for Sunday, August 6th, the script checks to see if its a Feast Day, then inserts the Feast Day readings instead.
And, even more exciting - at least I think so - is that I've added liturgical colors into the reading headers. Blue everywhere got boring...
The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, has sparked a lot of controversy - and rightly so - as it attempts to pass off fiction as fact. Fiction that, if taken as fact, discredits the Roman Catholic Church specifically, and Christianity in general.
Unfortunately, many people are taking this fictitious work as fact, partly because of the packaging of the book. On the first page, under the bold-faced word "FACT" comes the following sentence: “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” As a friend of mine pointed out, this made him wonder at first, until he read it again, and realized something: all the descriptions of these documents could easily be accurate, even though the conclusions drawn from them could be completely false. Still, for those not as astute as my friend, this simply translates as "This stuff is all true." What's worse, however, is that apparently not even this statement lives up to its claim of truth. Scholars who have studied the same documents as Dan Brown, point out that even his descriptions are flawed, and his data wrong (the most simple of which is giving the wrong date for the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls). [For more, view these articles: 1,2,3,4]
So where does that leave us? Sitting with a runaway best-seller that many people are taking as truth, and it is affecting their beliefs about Jesus, the Church, and Christianity. A recent poll in England shows that people are "now twice as likely to believe Jesus Christ fathered children ... and four times as likely to think the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei is a murderous sect." (Reuters)
Should we be concerned?
Yes. And No.
Yes, because many people are reading this book and are becoming convinced that what they are reading is truth, and so are being duped in to believing a lie. Yes, because what they are reading leads them to believe that the Church is a farce, and that real truth cannot be found in the Church. Yes, because anything that undermines the Gospel in the eyes of its followers is a threat, however momentary it may be, to those who stand to preach the Gospel; this "yes" is simply a call for us to stand up and proclaim Truth all the more.
No, because if we are adequately equipped with the Truth, we can answer the questions or criticisms of those who believe this fiction with the real facts, and point them in the right direction. No, because throughout time the Church has dealt with fictions, lies, slander, and outright persecution, and she has stood for over two millenia. No, because we know that many noted Christian Scholars are already on the offensive, entering into dialogue to dispel the fictions presented in this book; let the battle go to those best equipped. And finally, No, because ultimately, we know the outcome of the grand story, and all efforts to undermine the Truth of God's victory have already - and will continuously - fail.
[On another note: it appears that about 900 reporters who got a free screening of the movie ended up laughing at the last line, which was intended to be poignant. So, it looks like the Code is beginning to crack after all.]
One of the things that struck me immediately as I was reading today's Gospel in the Daily Office was the infamous show stopper, ala Fr. Rich. What's a show stopper? It's anything that we do that hinders the grace of God flowing to us, and in this case, it's quite simple: "if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." Those are the words of Jesus (I figured, why not make 'em red?), so they hold some weight, you know. So that means, if we don't forgive others, then God doesn't forgive us, and then unforgiveness becomes a show stopper. Kind of a bummer, if you ask me, and more than enough reason to reevaluate our unforgiveness levels, but also a reason to celebrate, because we know that if we've forgiven others, then we too are forgiven and the Grace of God abounds in all, and nobody dies from high blood pressure.
But what about the first part of the passage? The part that says, "in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.?" Matthew is trying to point out that God doesn't need to be bombarded with loud voices, multiple petitions, or extravagant pleas, because He is already listening. In fact, Matthew points out, God is way ahead of us, and knows what we need without us even having to pray about it. I used to take that as a why bother? I mean, if God knows what we need before we even ask it, then why bother praying at all? Makes sense, doesn't it?
Except that prayer isn't so much for God, as it is for us. Prayer does the following:
And besides all that, prayer is a command, so illogical or not, we better do it.
Today my podiatrist sent me to the lab to get some blood work done. They sucked the life right out of me.
New Cheese Perfume and a website to buy it.
This morning as I was driving to work, I was listening to the radio and heard an interesting statistic about leaf blowers: "These machines are a significant source of smog-forming emissions. In one year, the average two-stroke backpack leaf blower emits as much pollution as 80 new cars."
80 cars!
Can you believe it? And this from some piece of equipment that basically just blows yard waste from one spot to another, so that you can't see it anymore - I usually see gardeners blowing dead yard waste onto existing plants, down drains, or into the streets. To me, that seems the equivalent of sweeping the dirt under the rug.
Of course, I can understand the gardeners who don't want to spend an hour raking up leaves when they can blow them around in 15 minutes. Makes sense to me. I'd do the same thing, probably. And apparently Los Angeles is doing something about it - offering trade-ins for new, low-pollution, low-noise blowers to gardeners who are willing to trade-in their old blowers. The blower is made by STIHL, a German company (my uncle works for them), and retails for $460. However, the emissions from this 4-stroke (not the normal 2-stroke) engine "are nearly five times cleaner than the California Air Resources Board’s most stringent standard for new blowers." By getting the professional gardeners to trade in their current leaf blowers for the new ones, the governement hopes it will reduce smog by 14 tons per year!!
And all this from a little backpacky garden tool. Blows me away.
I've begun a monthly Prayer Letter. You can subscribe to it in the right hand column, under "Links," should you feel led to pray for me.
So today, during lunch, several of our people got together and played Wallyball. I'd never heard of it, so for those of you in my position, it's basically Volleyball played in a racquetball court.
It adds a certain flavor to regular volleyball, in that you can't really dive for the ball when it's close to the wall - you might lose your head. The ball can bounce off the walls, and can gain some wacky spin, so it makes for quite a bit of diving. Still, something worth trying. I'll be there again next week.
So after hearing so much about the Gospel of Judas in the news, I finally went and read through it. While some people might want to claim that this sheds light on the Christian faith, they are mistaken. This is nothing more than a document spouting the heresy of Gnosticism - something denounced by the Early Fathers millenia ago - and something that becomes apparent through a quick read-through.
In it, mythologies are merged, and you have multiple gods and rulers, one of which is the Christ. In it, Jesus is quoted as telling Judas that he should step away from the others, so that Jesus can give tell him the "great secrets that no one has ever seen," telling Judas and the other disciples that their "stars" shall guide them, and that when people perish, it is their bodies that die, and their souls will remain alive and be taken up. In fact, throughout the document, Jesus is quoted as referring to Judas and the others as spirits (in fact, Judas is referred to as the "thirteenth spirit"), rather then men. Jesus tells Judas that the archangel Michael was ordered by God to "give the spirits of people to them as a loan," which is a standard Gnostic concept. Finally, it sets up Judas as a hero, who hands Jesus over to the rulers at Jesus' own request, so that Jesus' earthly body can be sacrificed.
As I recognized the Gnostic signposts in this document, I looked it up on the web, and found that several scholars have already denounced this gospel, so don't just take my word for it, but read these articles: (1, 2, 3). Finally, you can read the National Geographic translation of the text here.
Now, the troubling thing about all of this is not that it is a Gnostic document, or that it the writers of these documents were considerend heretics in their own times, but that now we have so-called scholars debating whether or not the name Christian ought to be applied to these texts. In other words, they are arguing that this writing could really have come from Jesus because it was a "private revelation" to Judas, or that it isn't called a Christian writing simply because the writers of these documents were in the minority, and not part of the mainstream Christian movement. For an interesting read on particular views expressed by these scholars, go here.
-or- God told me not to read.
Just before I left for my camping vacation, I stopped off at church for noon Eucharist. In my car I had packed several books (six to be exact), that I expected to devour while on my little retreat. But God had other plans, and gave the Padre a word for me: "If you were planning on doing a lot of reading, don't. Read nothing but the Word of God, and write."
Well, God did many wonderful things through that, though I won't bore you with those details... at least not today.
What I will bore you with, however, is the culinary menu I took the time to write down each time I had a meal. You see, I had plenty of time to do so, and I discovered that I eat much, much better when I'm camping than I do when home. At least I eat three square - and yet remarkably well-rounded - meals a day when I'm out camping.
So, on with the boring details:
Tuesday:
Dinner: Triscuit with cheese and pickled egg. CranRaspberry juice.
Wednesday
Breakfast: Sourdough egg, cheese and cajun-style Andouille sausage sandwich with Lapsong Souchong tea.
Lunch: Chicken noodle soup, Triscuit crackers with cheese and pickled egg. CranRaspberry juice.
Dinner: Sourdough Andouile Sausage sandwich with cheese, and Rooibos tea.
Thursday
Breakfast: Sourdough egg, cheese, and Andouille sausage sandwich. Lapsong Souchong tea.
Lunch/Snack: Dr. Pepper & Lay's Potato Chips.
Dinner: Triscuits and cheese, and Triscuits with honey. Chocolate. Rooibos tea.
Friday
Breakfast: Sourdough egg, cheese, and Andouille sausage sandwich. Lapsong Souchong tea. Peach tea.
Lunch: Sourdough bread with Sunbutter and Honey.
Dinner: Flame broiled trout, prepared with olive oil, white wine, and lemon. Brown rice, and sauteed onion. White wine.
Saturday
Breakfast: Sourdough bread with Sunbutter and honey.
Actually, I love SPAM. That gooey, oozey salty jelly on the sides of the can really get me excited...
But I'm referring to email spam. So I took off for one business week of vacation, or nine full days, during which time I did not check my email. When I returned home, I had 160 emails in my inbox, of which 125 were junk emails. At work, I returned to find 80 emails in my inbox, of which 19 were PayPal phishing attempts. Of the 61 remaining, only 8 of them were not work-spam. You know, the type of email you get in order to "keep you informed," but which doesn't pertain to your job or your little domain of control....
So, let's count the numbers 240 emails, of which 43 were of use to me. That's a mere 18%.
I hate spam.