Another fabulous video from CatholicVote.com.


Thank you kindly, Deacon’s Bench.

Today marks the beginning of the observance of the Octave of Church Unity, a special time of prayer for the unity of all of Christ’s faithful. The official resources are available on the Vatican website here. I will be putting up the each day’s  readings, commentary and prayer if you’d like the abbreviated version.

The inspiration for this year’s observance was taken from both Ezekiel and from the experience of the Christian church in Korea. In the passage of scripture (Ezekiel 37:15-28) from which this year’s theme is drawn, the prophet Ezekiel writes to a deeply divided nation.

In our time, we can look to the church in Korea for an example of a church facing division because of a divided nation. “From the situation of a country which is divided, but has the will to overcome not only political divisions but also divisions among Christian churches, the Korean churches propose the theme for the week of prayer 2009: “That they may become one in your hand”. They find that new hope is born from their reflection on God’s action to reconcile and bring shalom to God’s people.”

Today’s reflections, readings, and prayer:

We begin with a reflection on the unity of Christians. Contemplating our doctrinal divisions, and our scandalous history of separation - and sometimes even hatred - among Christians, we pray that the God who breathes the Spirit of life into dry bones, and who moulds in his hands our unity amidst diversity, will breathe life and reconciliation upon our dryness and division today. On this and each of the eight days, we are invited to pray for situations in our world where reconciliation is needed, especially attentive to the role that the unity of Christians will play in bringing about this reconciliation.

Ezek 37: 15-19, 22-24a One in your hand
Ps 103: 8-13, or 18 The Lord is merciful and gracious, …abounding in steadfast love
1 Cor 3: 3-7, 21-23 Jealousy and quarrelling among you… you belong to Christ
Jn 17: 17-21 That they may all be one… so that the world may believe

Commentary

Christians are called to be instruments of God’s steadfast and reconciling love in a world marked by various kinds of separation and alienation. Baptised in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, and professing faith in the crucified and risen Christ, we are a people who belong to Christ, a people sent forth to be Christ’s body in and for the world. Christ prayed for this for his disciples: may they be one, so that the world may believe.

Divisions between Christians on fundamental matters of faith and Christian discipleship seriously wound our ability to witness before the world. In Korea, as in many other nations, the Christian gospel was brought by conflicting voices, speaking a discordant proclamation of the Good News. There is a temptation to see current divisions, with their accompanying background of conflicts, as a natural legacy of our Christian history, rather than as an internal contradiction of the message that God has reconciled the world in Christ.

Ezekiel’s vision of two sticks, inscribed with the names of the divided kingdoms of ancient Israel, becoming one in God’s hand, is a powerful image of the power of God to bring about reconciliation, to do for a people entrenched in division what they cannot do for themselves. It is a highly evocative metaphor for divided Christians, prefiguring the source of reconciliation found at the heart of the Christian proclamation itself. On the two pieces of wood which form the cross of Christ, the Lord of history takes upon himself the wounds and divisions of humanity. In the totality of Jesus’ gift of himself on the cross, he holds together human sin and God’s redemptive steadfast love. To be a Christian is to be baptised into this death, through which the Lord, in his boundless mercy, etches the names of wounded humanity onto the wood of the cross, holding us to himself and restoring our relationship with God and with each other.

Christian unity is a communion grounded in our belonging to Christ, to God. In being converted ever more to Christ, we find ourselves being reconciled by the power of the Holy Spirit. Prayer for Christian unity is an acknowledgement of our trust in God, an opening of ourselves fully to that Spirit. Linked to our other efforts for unity among Christians - dialogue, common witness and mission - prayer for unity is a privileged instrument through which the Holy Spirit is making that reconciliation in Christ visibly manifest in the world Christ came to save.

Prayer

God of compassion, you have loved and forgiven us in Christ, and sought to reconcile the entire human race in that redeeming love. Look with favour upon us, who work and pray for the unity of divided Christian communities. Grant us the experience of being brothers and sisters in your love. May we be one, one in your hand. Amen.

If you don’t watch this video, you will regret it for the rest of your life. If you are a parent, it may scar you for life but I think you still find the video instructional. Thank you kindly, Creative Minority Report.

Yes. I admit it. Vanity is something I struggle with. I have been resisting taking my laptop with me to class to take notes because of the Total Geek factor. In my mind, somehow, someone at my age should not succumb to the need for laptop notetaking when doing it the old fashioned way has worked for me for so many years. I like computers and technology but I try to maintain a veneer of coolness with respect to the latest and greatest technology. It’s a thin veneer. When my husband reads this he will no doubt remind me of the times when I have been caught standing in front of a particularly cool piece of computing technology  and drooling whilst saying “This is so TOTALLY cool!” I will also confess to more than a momentary twinge of envy when Curt Jester twittered that he had installed a terabyte-sized hard drive. Sigh. Terabytes. Yeah, it’s a pretty thin veneer. So last night, since I type so much faster than I can write, I bit the vanity bullet and took my laptop to class for the first time.

Oh my merciful heaven!! I turned on my computer and it instantly started talking to the wireless network that I should have guessed was there but was actually clueless to its existence. I sort of figured that there was a wireless network around but that you needed to have some kind of access code or something to access it. Nope. Or if you do need some sort of code, my computer was just so hungry for internet access that it ate through the security system by sheer force of will.

Did you know you can buy books while IN class with these sorts of tools? If your professor mentions a certain out-of-print book that she would have preferred to use for the main text, you can just pop open a window, surf on over to Abebooks.com and voila! that book is on its way to your house.

I’ve got Themes of the Old Testament and Church History this semester in addition to pastoral and spiritual formation courses. I’m not sure how that will influence my blog content or if I will just keep telling you about how university life has changed since last I was there.

Buying books while IN class….can it get any better than that?

Mea culpa. I have been seriously remiss in both contributing to and posting the Catholic Carnival. Go read what Catholic bloggers have to say at Homeschool Goodies.

It’s almost Lent again (where does time fly) and Evann has put together a truly creative Mardi Gras themed carnival. Go read and comment and make a bloggers day.

When I first converted to the Catholic faith, I didn’t understand the need for sacramental confession. I didn’t like it and was certainly not as obedient as I should have been with respect to seeking sacramental confession. (Ever notice how the phrase “not as obedient as I should have been” really translates to “not very obedient at all”?) However, as the Lord has worked in my life and I have decided to become obedient whether I saw the need to or not, I have become exceedingly grateful for the great gift of sacramental confession. Oh sure the grace of the sacrament is significant. As Jesus promised in John 20:19-23 the peace of the sacrament is very real, regardless of how we feel. And if there were no other benefits to it all, I should be very grateful and content. But today, I found myself meditating on the very temporal benefits of an obedient, disciplined, and frequent reception of the Sacrament of Confession.

Let’s be frank. I don’t find the process of confession to be pleasant at all. To make a good confession you must spend time in prayer asking God to illuminate your conscience and time examining your conscience in a systematic way. In this respect an examination of conscience is very much like cleaning house. Going and looking for dirt in the corners is always more likely turn up something gross than simply taking a quick swipe at the kitchen counter and calling it done. (How to make a good confession.) Then as if that wasn’t painful enough, you’ve got to go in front of another person and speak these things out loud. It can be intensely painful and I don’t remember the last time I left the confessional with dry eyes. It is also something that gets easier with practice and something that carries over into my relationships in real life.

So if you are a Catholic and you’ve been away from the confessional for a while. Bite the bullet. The discipline of regular confession will probably make you more intimately aware of Christ’s sacrifice for us, of His great love and the ocean of His mercy but it may be one of the best things you can do to improve the relationship you have with your spouse and children…or the other loved ones in your life.

I didn’t actually make a resolution to be nicer but I probably should have. It’s a good thing I didn’t resolve to be nicer because this quote had me busting a gut this morning. I hope it makes you laugh too. You can be nice later.

A while back I told you all about a book to help with teaching your children about the week’s Gospel readings. (If you missed that post, you can read it here.) In my post I mentioned that I would receive a small amount of any sales generated through my blog and I also mentioned that I planned to give that money to Kiva. Well, I didn’t really expect to have to follow through but apparently some of you actually ordered (Thank you.) and I have received enough money (plus a little extra) to fund a loan. Meet the Nelva Mery Nipa Pelaez Group I will use the extra as a donation to Kiva.

The above script will show the Nelva Mery Nipp Pelaez Group until their loan is fully funded, then a random loan will display. For a direct link to the Nelva Mery Group click on the hyperlink above.

We’ve been having a discussion on the Catholic Spitfire Grill that’s had me deep in thought for a while now. ”They” say….and I have no official source for this number whatsoever….that 40% of those who are received into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil Mass aren’t attending by the following Vigil Mass. I have no idea if this is actually true, but I do know several people in both my real life and in internet life who have struggled with staying in the Church and so this number bothers me deeply.

So what are your ideas? What does your parish do? Your RCIA teams? How do we keep those who have made the swim across the Tiber from feeling unwelcome? Unfed? Unwatered? Unpruned?

General: That the family may become more and more a place of training in charity, personal growth and transmission of the faith.

Mission: That the different Christian confessions, aware of the need for a new evangelisation in this period of profound transformations, may be committed to announcing the Good News and moving towards the full unity of all Christians in order to offer a more credible testimony of the Gospel.

I think I’d like to demand another couple of weeks in 2008. Quiet weeks with absolutely nothing scheduled so that I could do nothing but finish everything I had planned to do in 2008. What do you think the odds are? (Shhhh don’t answer that.)

Between school, vacation (drove a couple thousand miles), and a bout with flat on my back illness, I am ready to petition for some real vacation. The kind where you sleep as long as you need to and still manage to carve out huge portions of the to-do list. And with the New Year just around the corner, I feel like I should have some great ideas of resolutions for the coming year. Mostly, I have just had more questions than thoughts about things like resolutions. Like what the heck to do with this blog!? Going back to school has caused a cataclysmic shift in focus. Somewhere in the back on my pin-headed mind, I had this picture of just taking a few classes without it really changing anything. HA! Education always changes things if only just the things you need to rearrange to make room for it. The time I used to spend in those apologetic conversations that leaked over into this blog is gone and instead I am reading textbooks and writing papers. Trust me. It’s really not blog content. Somewhere in all of this I can’t believe that there isn’t a different sort of blog content to come out of these life changes. I’m not sure what it is yet. I can’t believe that I’ll completely stop writing about apologetics. All it will take is some stranger on the street telling me how I worship the Pope and I’ll be off to the races, but I am having those sorts of encounters infrequently these days.

So I find myself at the end of the year, whimpering a little from a schedule that I haven’t yet quite gotten a handle on and struggling to find my bearings with what comes next. There seems to be more real life interaction and less room for the internet and that shift seems to be provoking a shift in mindset from “What do I think about that?” to “Well now what am I going to DO about it?” And wouldn’t you know it, the real life problems are always messier than those hypothetical doctrinal questions that are so fun to play with.

It’s feels a little weird to be doing this thinking “out loud” but I just didn’t want anyone who’s still hanging around that I’ve abandoned this whole project.

BTW….I do have a “vintage” Sister Spitfire apologetics post on the back burner. I hope to have it up soon.

Happy New Year to you all!! And tomorrow, I’ll have a question that’s been bugging me that hopefully, you all will have some thoughts on.

I saw a list of the Best of the Web in 2008 kind of awards and this YouTube video was one of the winners. I can’t believe I haven’t seen it before this. If you haven’t see the video of Christian the Lion, you really must (unless you are a cold-hearted animal hater). It will bring a tear to your eye and a smile to your face. Guaranteed.

Oh and I’m not quite dead. Just up to my eyeballs in life. I anticipate actual blog content soon.

It’s snowing in Houston. Yep. Real live stick to the ground (and my lemon trees) snow. In the homeschooling spirit of taking advantage of the moment, I’ve declared a “Snow Night.” Even though it’s 11 pm I’ve wakened the children to go play to their heart’s content in the snow because it doesn’t last long here. We’ll sleep in tomorrow.

Well they’ll sleep in. I’m working on a take home final. Besides, if I wanted to play in that white stuff, I’d still live in Chicago.

It feels like yesterday but it was actually back in October that I posted a review as part of the Catholic Company review program of the Faith Database. If you want to refresh your memory, you can click here. I was quite frankly very disappointed in the product and said so pretty bluntly. Well to make a long story short, I was contacted by the people who put the Faith Database together and asked if I would be willing to try a new version of the product and give my opinion on that. I agreed and they provided me with a new version. They did contact me very quickly and got the new copy to me quickly as well. I am afraid that the delay in getting this review up has been a swamped schedule. All that said, I am thrilled that they gave me this opportunity to re-review the Fath Database.

The last time around I said this:

First, let me start with what I love. The bible search function on this CD is worth the price of the CD if that is something that you need and use regularly. I have been using WTCC for my bible search needs and been hugely frustrated with the quality of the results on that. Is it too much to ask that the references be sorted in order? With all of the results in the Psalms in order and listed ahead of those in Matthew? So many times I would be looking for something in particular and know that what I was looking for was in the Psalms but would get 400 hits sorted in some order known only to God and the wisest of angels and as you might imagine that was not helpful. Cue the Hallelujah Chorus, the Faith Database sorts search results in order. Not only does it sort the results in order but you can switch from 10 different Bible translations including a Greek interlinear. Be still my geeky heart! There were some other things I liked as well. I like the (searchable, printable) collection of writings. I like the encyclopedia. Great stuff. Truly. Overall once you get the program started, it’s very easy to navigate and use.

That is still very true. But then I went on to detail difficulty I had in installing the product. Problem gone. This time it installed like a dreamed and started up much more quickly.

I was grocery shopping today and as the clerk hit total (which was somewhere around a bazillion dollars) the little coupon machine spit out a coupon for me. It was for Vivarin.

How did they know? Is there some sort of digital sensor on the machine that counts the number of children accompanying the person swiping the credit card? Then rather than taking a retinal scan to protect me from identity theft, it scans the dark circles under my eyes and says “Get this woman a transfusion of caffeine”?