Oh, I’m still here.
Whoa, WordPress.com went to the 2.5 layouts! Trippy.
I’ve been working on other, worldly projects, so I haven’t updated this blog in some time. Lately I’ve been slammed by Google Image Search hits, looking at a post that I wrote last year, which I guess is nice. I never really had an intended audience for this blog, so maybe people looking for pictures of a certain cathedral can be my core audience. No fights in the combox that way.
By not updating, I guess I missed my chance to run for the Cannonball awards. In the heretic category, naturally–agnosticism is a heresy. Sorta.
I am still attending Mass sporadically. I haven’t been to confession and thus not to communion, since there’s something very wrong in principle with receiving sacraments when I don’t believe in them. Or am not sure that I believe in them.
I still love Catholic liturgy, culture, and moral theology, as I did even as an out-and-out atheist. I’m just not where I stand theologically on the question of whether there is a God, of whether there is a personal God (a very key distinction) and whether that God left messages for humanity, then a message made flesh, with the Hebrews, a somewhat obscure if centrally located tribe of people.
That’s where I stand.
So you’re saying that sex isn’t healthy or pleasant? Well, crap.
I can’t comment on the Off the Record blog, see. So I’ll comment here.
Just because you train children to do something doesn’t mean that they actually do it. “Abstinence” to most teens means sticking to oral and anal sex. And nobody uses protection for oral sex.
I’d like to live in that ideal world where people don’t have lots of unprotected random sex, but none of us does.
I sure as hell didn’t go to high school there.
Uh oh!
Oh noes! The atheists and antitheists have wandered to the Curt Jester entry on homophobia! Look how ~*~*edgy*~*~ and rebellious they are, spelling “God” in lower case! My poor brainwashed mind can’t handle their crushing wave of logic.
If you’re gonna blaspheme, at least make it funny
NEW YORK, NEW YORK—IT’S A HEAVEN OF A TOWN!
Daily Show writer Rob Kutner, with a lot of time on his hands these days, wrote up an itinerary for the Holy Father’s upcoming visit to New York City. It starts by mentioning that the visit occurs in the “sweet spot between tax time and Passover, so all of the Jews are busy.” It goes downhill from there–I don’t think I cracked a smile during the whole thing.
Our Lady of the Thruway
I had a busy and incredibly stressful day that ended with overnighting some items to a friend who has traveled cross-country to be with her mother as she dies. I haven’t been able to afford gas, and as I merged on to the interstate, my car began to slow down and shudder a bit. Empty tank.
“Please,” I prayed. “Get me through this, get me to the next exit and a gas station.”
“Nah,” God replied. “You need a firm lesson on planning ahead and taking basic care of yourself before you put yourself out for others. Plus, you didn’t make it to Mass today.” The car slowed down and shuddered to a stop as I pulled over.
Putting the “public health” back in “public radio”
WDUQ, the NPR affiliate in Pittsburgh, has its home at Duquesne University, a Catholic university. The university has instructed the station to stop accepting underwriting funds from Planned Parenthood.
This question ultimately is about about the place of a Catholic institution to make such demands on media affiliated with it. I do listen to a lot of NPR–always with a critical ear, naturally, but they’re much more balanced than they once were. (Maybe not my local station, but that’s a whole other post.) Public radio underwriters usually aren’t very controversial, and while some people wonder what’s so controversial about low-cost Pap smears, the truth is that accepting advertising from PP doesn’t look good for a station that’s ultimately affiliated with a Catholic university.
(As an aside, though, I’m going to have to start visiting my local PP for health care if I don’t find insurance or a low-cost alternative soon. Sigh.)
Nicole’s Pilgrimage
When I studied in France years ago, I lived in an attic maid’s room and took meals with a family who lived in a small apartment in a nice neighborhood. The family rented a room within their apartment to another student, an Evangelical my own age from Arkansas, and we all often had dinner together. The family forbade us to speak English to each other in the house, and we often had very deep and fascinating conversations over dinner, even with our slightly mangled French. Nicole’s hadn’t studied French for very long, only five semesters or so, and her language skills were weaker than mine.
Our host family were indifferently Catholic, perhaps practicing a little more than most French people. I was lapsed at the time; I think I attended Mass two or three times in the six months I lived there, but visited dozens of interesting churches. The other student–I’ll call her Nicole here–attended small non-denominational churches, many run by expats, in Paris. Sometime that spring, she heard about an organized pilgrimage to the cathedral at Chartres. She had never visited that cathedral, and made a note of the meeting time and place, deciding to go.
Now, Chartres is a spectacular cathedral, and an old, old traditional pilgrimage site. As Nicole reached the gathering site around dawn, she noticed that other people had large backpacks and other camping gear. She didn’t pay much attention to this until the group of people started to move. She assumed that they were moving to buses…or to a train station….to some sort of motorized transport.
They were not. This was a traditional pilgrimage, and it was on foot. Nicole realized this too late, traveling with only the spring clothes she was wearing and her school bag.
I think that the trip she was part of was the Notre-Dame de Chrétienté Pentecost pilgrimage that happens every year, and that she had received bad information about the nature of the trip. (Here’s another article about the Notre-Dame pilgrimage, which sounds fascinating.) They had traveled outside of the city before she realized what was truly going on.
She decided to continue with the trip. She kept to herself and was too shy and embarrassed to ask her traveling companions for help or for food. Some people may have shared water or snacks with her, but she traveled without meals. When it came time to sleep, she separated from the group and slept on the ground with no blankets. She had decided early on to make this a true pilgrimage of her body and her spirit, and though I don’t think she framed it in quite those terms, to unite her suffering with that of Jesus on the cross. She did not tell the other pilgrims how she was suffering, and as she told us about her pilgrimage trip, she was modest and matter-of-fact, not seeking sympathy or pity.
I’ve tried very hard to forget most things that happened to me during that part of my life, but this story that she told at the dinner table has stuck with me. Her suffering in silence, determination to finish the trip without complaining, and ability to view a disaster as a spiritual learning experience have stuck with me.
It reminds me of a lot of adventures we have in this life–things we never would have started if we had realized beforehand how difficult they would be.
