Fiat:Responding to God’s Call

This will be my last post at fiat.cybercatholics.com.

As of today, I’m moving here. Update links and bookmarks.

I’m extremely appreciative to cyberCatholics’ Joshua LeBlanc for allowing me this site for so many years. Hopefully, the archives will stay up long enough for my friends to find the new site. I’ve always wanted to own my own domain and server space, and I finally broke down and pulled the trigger this morning.

So, see you at Quid Sit?.

Be sure to visit Father Robert Barron’s Word on Fire. Do so often.

And while you’re at it, read The Priority of Christ: Toward a Postliberal Catholicism, one of my favorite contemporary theological works.

Oh, and watch his analysis of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”:

Howdy from Naperville. I’m officially beginning week three here at Ss. Peter and Paul, during my pastoral internship quarter (which will extend into August at my prerogative, what with nothing better to do this summer, due to my decisively less-than-enthusiastic attitude toward the prospect of spending another three months south of the border).

I think I’m finally starting to get the hang of things around here: parish life is, beyond a doubt, very different from anything I’ve ever experienced. I’ve met a lot of good people, but nowhere near the 4,500 or so registered families. I’ve seen 5 A.M. more in the past two weeks than in the past few years (unless I count the mornings where reading or video games kept me up to see the sunrise). The church is beautiful and the liturgy extremely reverent, making for an enjoyable and prayerful experience while serving, reading, or assisting at Communion.

They’ve given me enough to keep me fairly busy around here. Of course, my schedule isn’t as busy as the associate pastor’s, and he isn’t as busy as the pastor. The pair have been invaluable to me; one is an old seminarian schoolmate of mine, the other an experienced priest who knowledgeably answers my barrage of questions with the right mixture of candor and humor. I’m lucky to be where I am.

One of the things my friends often ask is, “What are you doing there?” A fair question, given that a seminarian isn’t a priest, which limits how much genuine “on the job training” I can actually receive. But anyway, here’s a brief summary of what I do in any given week:

• Either read, serve Mass, or distribute Holy Communion on a daily basis. I believe we have 11 Sunday liturgies, and I’m scheduled for two.
  
• Preach at the Stations of the Cross. An interesting experience, I tend to enjoy it. And I haven’t embarrassed myself (too badly) yet.
  
• Plan various vocations events. Challenging, due to the affluent community. One can’t serve both God and Mammon, after all. My first attempt was a terrible disaster, but I’m looking to redeem myself with an Operation Andrew Dinner in April.
  
• Plan and execute communion calls to the homebound.
  
• Visit local hospitals.
  
• Attend meetings. Parish council, school board, local cluster and staff meetings.
  
• Help out/attend RCIA meetings. A year-round program here. Converts rule.
  
• Teach 7th grade in the parish middle school.
  
• Visit religious education classrooms and tell my vocation story. Good times.
  
• Visit and present at Quest Group confirmation preparation. My first one of these was tonight, and it was excellent.
  
• Assist with 8th grade religious education. Almost over, since their confirmation looms.
  
• Greet people after Sunday Mass.
  
• Write bulletin articles. Usually on a remarkable priest or religious order. This week, I profile the Nashville Dominicans.
  
• Assist with weddings and funerals. Haven’t done either yet, but it’s coming. I’ll also be leading wakes and internments here soon.

We have a Tridentine Mass, but I haven’t made it yet. So that’s on the list of things to experience before I leave here. We have fairly good attendance, at around 300. As far as doing anything at the altar, though, not possible (and I have no desire to learn it: there are plenty of liturgically oriented seminarians to pick up the extraordinary form and keep it alive for those who prefer it, which is great. For systematicians such as myself, however, no dice).

It’s also important to note that I’m doing many of these things in a clerical shirt, when appropriate, and this marks the first time I’ve worn clerics for anything. Any time I teach, visit the hospital, or do something liturgical, I bring out the standard Toomey tab collar. I’ve had to explain that I’m not a priest a couple of times, but it’s very helpful for things such as hospital visits and teaching in the schools. It brings instant recognition from patients, understanding who I am and what I’m doing in their hospital room. And the kids respond favorably as well. As always, I’d be fine wearing an over-sized garbage bag to such things, my level of formality ranking just above the neighborhood bum who drunkenly greets you on the way to the office. But what it represents to others is precisely why I plan on wearing them consistently after ordination.

So, life is good. I’ll be updating more in the future, so stick around.

There Will Be Blood is perhaps the most interesting film I’ve seen in a long time. Can’t say I liked it, but I sure did enjoy watching it. Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance is masterful, and he has slowly worked his way toward becoming my favorite actor. Blood sticks to the bones, lingering in the mind long after the closing credits.

Anthony Sacramone, managing editor of FIRST THINGS, posts an excellent look at the movie here. One thing he misses, though:

But the characterization of religion as nothing more than a manipulative fraud is mitigated somewhat by a benign, even sweet (albeit brief), alternative depiction. One could unpack a lot from that little church scene, but I fear doing so would give away a key plot point.

Describing the scene in question gives away little. Sunday’s “bastard in a basket” son, H.W., grows up in a split second. We see him standing in front of a veiled blonde, the sister of the evil, fraudulent, self-proclaimed prophetic minister. They’re marrying in a Catholic (or Anglican, I suppose, though the image was meant to invoke Catholicism) church.

Now, what’s significant here is that one or both are obviously converts. They’ve disassociated themselves from the “Christian” sham offered by their town’s leaders, seeking a more moderate and reserved form of Christian expression. H.W. and his wife are the only major characters to display any kind of virtue throughout the entire film; both are depicted as intelligent, reserved individuals with none of the qualities that doom their respective family members.

None of my friends caught this, and after we stepped out of the theater a couple of them voiced their disgust at the portrayal of religion until I pointed this key out. The film isn’t an indictment of religion so much as it displays how atheism and rabid evangelicalism parody each other in ridiculousness.

The Middle Way, however, represented through classical Christianity, shines on.

Most of you I keep up with via AIM or ICQ. My seminary has blocked these now, due to the fact that they’re attempting to conserve bandwidth. How exactly this will preserve bandwidth is beyond me, seeing as how they require virtually nothing to run in the first place.

MySpace is now a no-go. Blocked earlier this week. Find me on Facebook… For now. It’ll be the next to go. Set your watch by it.

I first started using AIM on a dial-up modem, back in the day. Way, way back in the day. It never even slowed down that connection.

I’ve been on cable or better since 1997. Over ten years. The T1 line we’re on has been obsolete for that long.

Fun fact: My home in Joliet has eight times the bandwidth of this institution. Eight. Times. My house. In Joliet.

I shan’t complain, however; it’ll all be fixed by the time I return from internship in August, and I’m thankful for the fact that we have Internet access at all.

In other in-house news, we got new dryers! The old ones were in varying states of disrepair.

I’d seriously considered outsourcing my laundry to the fine Korean lady who charges $.80/lb. just up the block, but it looks like things are all fixed now.

We actually went down to look at them today. It was like a mini-pilgrimage.

Or at least a visit to the Art Institute.

Or something.

This passes as entertainment around here. We admired them like a kid admires his first bike at Christmas. We’ve been lobbying for these for two years.

I should’ve taken a picture with all of us giving the thumbs-up. I should’ve printed up a banner reading, “Mission Accomplished.” We could’ve been giving the thumbs-up in the picture, in front of the banner.

And lest this seem like a litany of complaints: life here is good. I love this place. Couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. Except for my internship parish, which I’m eager for.

The Eucharist, three square meals, a library which keeps me in fine theological texts (and solid student employment), and a place to lay my head: what else does a guy need?

Well, maybe working Internet.

The first is that the Price is Right is officially terrible with Drew Carey. This is the first time I’ve seen the show under his charge, and it lacks all of the charm it once had. Will it crash and burn, or is the franchise stable enough in itself to make it through?

No idea. But I do know Drew Carey is terrible.

I just learned this morning that the Weekly World News stopped printing this past summer. Then again, I probably haven’t stood in a supermarket line since summer.

I loved that tabloid. It was hilarious, and for the dollar-whatever it used to cost, mom usually didn’t protest more than an eye-roll when I threw it on the checkout belt as a kid.

Fare thee well, WWN.

Well, we’re well into another Christmas season now, and I have a free moment to check in. Things have been fairly busy and somewhat stressful since my last update: some things worth my time, and some things most certainly not.

But, I’m still feeling good about things. Life is good, overall. And I keep laughing.

It was a wonderful Christmas day around the house here in Joliet. The basic family was all gathered, and we enjoyed a great dinner together. Lamb was my personal highlight; nearly ten years of institutionalized buffet have me loathing ham, which pretty much kills the traditional Christmas dish around here.

Santa was good to me. Received more than I wanted and more than I deserve, as always. I have enough recreational reading to see me into the second quarter of the new year.

I picked up my first straight-”A” report card this past quarter. Somehow, I managed to avoid the apathy-fueled “B+” which usually finds me. Let’s hope I keep it up this quarter as well.

To be honest, I’m ready to move on. I’ve seen too much of the inside of classrooms and too little of the “real world” for the last ten years. And make no mistake: there’s certainly very little of the real world in the classroom. I grow more and more eager to start my internship in February.

I’ll be around more from now on. Sorry to some of my friends out there, with whom I haven’t conversed lately. I know I’ve been a bit reclusive as far as correspondence goes, but hopefully that all changes in the coming weeks.

Until then, everybody be good. And keep laughing.

It’s done! Over! Finished!

Sometimes, simply getting things out of the way is the best possible end-result. It was a crazy quarter for me, for a number of reasons. It was extremely busy and, at times, extremely ridiculous. But it’s over, and I think I’ll have fairly good grades to show for my effort.

Always one to look ahead, however, I’m encouraged by the classes I’ll be taking next quarter. I’ll be launching my official canonical S.T.B. studies with a class on pneumatology, a subject I know very little about. In orthodox Christianity, the West hasn’t always been inclined to emphasize the Holy Spirit, so it’ll be great to fill a gap in my education.

My recent silence makes sense, in light of the quarter’s struggles. To be honest, this term did very little to engage me intellectually. And yet, I had no time to pursue my own interests, as I usually do when things get dry.

I’ve come to realize that this level of engagement is essential. An “intellectual convert” (but not really a convert in the strictest sense, since I was baptized a Catholic at age four), I only really feel connected to God and to my work when my mind is engaged. I need a project, something for me to hold on to. And when that slips, so does my sense of purpose and mission.

Closing the door and praying - while important and necessary - just isn’t enough. I need the relational element of prayer, no doubt. But my awe, my sense of service, my joy, it’s simply not there in prayer if I’m not constantly informing my faith through study. You can only believe what you know.

And so ultimately, this quarter has been a blessing, vital to my priestly formation. I know what needs to happen in a parish environment to keep ministry from becoming “one damned thing after another,” as a presenter at the Institute for Priestly Formation put it this summer. I realize that - just like prayer - I need to foster an active intellectual life.

My internship parish for the Spring quarter has been named, and I’ll be at Ss. Peter and Paul in Naperville. I am extremely excited about this since the parish is one of our finest, as are the priests serving there.

WE DID IT! The Illini beat the Buckeyes, 28-21. Ohio State stands up there with Oklahoma for my least favorite team in all of college football, so to have my Alma Mater - who isn’t embarrassing, for once - beat them is sweet indeed.

Hope everyone’s doing well! I’ll be more consistent with checking in, I imagine.

The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that, because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality…But the real novelist, the one with an instinct for what he is about, knows that he cannot approach the infinite directly, that he must penetrate the natural human world as it is.

Precisely. And this tactic - attempting to approach the infinite without going through the finite - is exactly why most modern “Christian” art fails.

(Quoted from “Fantasy and Faith” by Sally Thomas, in this month’s FIRST THINGS.)

Well, we’re about three weeks from the end of the quarter. It’s been my worst academic period of all time, and that’s saying quite a bit in this very late educational hour. My grades won’t be bad, but what I feel I’ve accomplished is minimal at best. Part of it’s my fault, and part of it I can’t take the blame for.

Either way, I’m looking forward to getting this show on the road. Internship looms, and I’ll be out of the classroom until August starting this February. Fan-tastic.

Other stuff since I last checked in:

I nearly laughed until I cried, learning that Al Gore had won the Nobel Peace Prize. In a few years when man-made global warming alarmism has gone the way of the anti-CFC aerosol activist, we’ll all look back on this and laugh even harder.

All things considered, I think we ought to give Bobby Brown a Nobel for his work in physics; he’s contributed about as much to the field as Gore has to the cause of peace.

Imagine if the Chicago Cubs won the World Series one time. And afterwards, imagine that an overwhelming number of fans maintain the Cubs are the greatest team on earth, ever to play the game. Better even than the Yankees, whose World Series dominance is tough to argue against.

Ridiculous? You bet. Impossible? Nope. Proof? Boston Red Sox fans. Red Sox fans are certainly more annoying than Cardinals or White Sox fans, and here’s a solid list of Ten Reasons to dislike them.

Go Rockies.

College football is even a trainwreck this season. Something is certainly wrong with the cosmos, when my beloved Nebraska would get beat by Illinois if they were to go at it. But then again, that’s not saying much: Illinois isn’t all that great, either.

College football this year is one huge disappointment in general. When South Florida is ranked #2 and you’re watching them take on Rutgers because the result is actually important, something went terribly wrong somewhere down the line.

No matter who wins in early January, we’re all losers. College basketball, get here fast.

BURDENS

Heavy weight, o weight that Jesus carries,
That one who bears the world’s suspended weight
Should on his shoulders brace iniquities:
Calamities and cruelties of state

And yet there is a peace around the hill,
The crucifixion detail and the mob
A scattering, the Friday markets fill:
The torture of the Son of God a job

And if the dead emerging from their graves
Would stagger toward the temple and give tongue,
Who would pay attention but the slaves
Who carry burdens through the Gate of Dung?

Pavel
October 8, 2007

DUDE to somebody else: Hey, at least we have the Bears to look forward to.
JOSH: 1-3, baby!
DUDE: And the Blackhawks are starting off!
JOSH: 0-1, baby!

JOSH, to a group of Marines: Thank y’all for your service.

A MARINE: Thank you for your service to the Cubs. It takes more dedication.

True…

True.

I’ll certainly be reading Clarence Thomas’ new autobiography at some point. Along with Oliver North’s trial, Thomas’ flea circus of an approval hearing stands as one of the first political fiascoes I remember with any clarity. It wasn’t until I got to be a little older that I realized what a sham the proceedings actually were.

Thomas was also a student at Conception Seminary College for a time, where I studied philosophy. Click here for an article on Justice Thomas’ 2001 visit to Conception.

Two observations from tonight’s loss:

1. Brandon Webb simply outpitched us. Nothing beats a phenomenal pitching performance.
2. Lou’s decision to replace Zambrano with Marmol served to seal the deal. You should never - ever - put a first-year player into the very first relief position in the very first playoff game. The tension is too high. Notice how Bob Howry came in and managed a 1-2-3 inning? That’s because he’s been around long enough not to throw out of his own arm in that situation.

We’ll get ‘em tomorrow.

I’ve deleted the last post. Thanks to commenter “anon.” for bringing a couple of things to my attention. Even though I agree with what I wrote, I didn’t intend to complain about anything when I wrote the post, but rather simply meant to explain why I haven’t been around all that much lately, and why I’ve been so frustrated over the course of the past few weeks.

In the course of doing so, however, I unintentionally broke my chief blogging rule: don’t complain about life. Especially when it isn’t warranted. In fact, if I had to sum up how things are in general, my review would be far from negative. I love the seminary, my studies, and life in general.

The floodgates are about to open, so keep all of us in your prayers!

Thanks to a) the St. Louis Cardinals playing as bad as they should have played last year (no pitching) and b) The Milwaukee Brewers imploding (no pitching), the Cubs have won the division!

Watching this division race was kind of like watching the Canadian Football League playoffs: no matter who wins, the big boys lurk elsewhere.

Still, it’s a playoff birth. And for my money, the Cubs are playing better baseball than most teams looking to win in October.

So, here’s to this season’s baseball blessings:

1. The Cardinals stunk.
2. The NL Central Division stunk.
3. The Cubs look like winners.
4. The White Sox are back to zero fan support again.

The last one really bothers me, by the way. Shame on you White Sox “fans.” But at the same time, thank you for confirming my two standing Chicago baseball truths: 1) It’s a Cubs Town 2) “Fairweather” doesn’t even begin to describe Southside fandom.

Should the Cubs win it all, look for Chicago to explode. Sure, they held some dopey parade when the Sox won the Series a couple of years ago, and the city pretended like it was interested. But just imagine what’ll happen when the Cubs actually do it one of these years:

• Chicago won’t sleep for days.
• Steve Bartman will come back to town and everyone will want to apologize and buy him a draft.
• We’ll never hear about the goat again.
• We can suck for the next 99 years and none of us living today will care.
• Ron Santo, the biggest Cubs fan out there, can relax a happy man.

Eamus Catuli!

So, some Nebraska state senator is suing God:

Chambers says in his lawsuit that God has made terroristic threats against the senator and his constituents, inspired fear and caused “widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth’s inhabitants.”

The Omaha senator, who skips morning prayers during the legislative session and often criticizes Christians, also says God has caused “fearsome floods … horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes.”

Of course, much of this could be hyperbole designed to make his true and rather humorous point. However, the skipping out on morning prayers suggests this guy might actually believe what he’s saying.

The more I think about it, the more I agree with Fr. Bob Barron, of whom I’ve had the privilege of studying under here: atheists are helpful in that they tell us precisely what God isn’t. It’s impossible to find an atheist who starts with the same presuppositions I do; they always begin with what none of us believe in the first place.

It’s not difficult. God allows but does not cause evil. And once we realize that Christianity is directly concerned with a growth in virtue which leads us back to God, we understand that growth would never occur without bad things happening. If I were always happy, never meeting any tragedy, what spur would I have to continue seeking the Highest Good, the source of true happiness and freedom?

Unfortunately, explaining this or a similar approach to the Problem of Evil in light of Christ always seems to fall on deaf ears, because people are either too obstinate or just don’t have the background to put it all together. It’s like casting pearls at swine.

And thus, I haven’t posted in a while. The beginning of the school year is always the worst, but I believe the end is in sight; I should be able to settle in to a comfortable routine soon.
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Classes? I’m still waiting for them to get interesting. For the most part, we’re stuck in front matter material. I can’t tell you how many times this quarter I’ve come out of a class thinking or saying, “Man, that was boring. When are we actually going to get to the important stuff?” An appropriate question, given that we’re on a 10-week quarter system.
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Coolest thing so far? A Marriage Encounter weekend, sponsored by my diocese. It was great to meet the couples and actually do some (gasp) ministry. I’m really looking forward to internship, which begins in the third quarter.
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Hope everyone’s doing well! I’ll be around soon with some stuff concerning my current pet project, Thomistic approaches to spirituality.

Video here. John Grisham remembers Burke Masters hitting the walk-off grand slam to send Mississippi State to the College World Series in 1990.

These commercials are running on ESPN during SEC events, and I’d assume they’ll be active during the football season as well. For a complete directory, click here.

For those of you who don’t know, a vocations director is one responsible for seminarians, making him my “boss” in a sense. Fr. Burke is great to work with, and a credit to our wonderful diocese.

In other baseball news: Cubs have the look of winners, declares ESPN columnist.