Category: Miscellaneous

Every year in August I have a series of special days. First, the 22nd (Queenship of Mary) is the anniversary of my reception into the Church. Then comes my birthday. Then, on the 26th, it is the anniversary of my wife’s death.

Renee passed eighteen years ago today after a two-month battle with colon cancer. She had just turned 28.

You can read about it if you like.

I realized that I’d never put a picture of her online, and so I scanned this one.

You don’t know it from looking at the picture, but she’s actually standing on phone books to make her look taller.

In the words of a Mark Heard song,

I see you now and then in dreams
Your voice sounds just like it used to
I know you better than I knew you then
All I can say is I love you

I thought our days were commonplace
Thought they would number in millions
Now there’s only the aftertaste
Of circumstance that can’t pass this way again

Treasure of the broken land
Parched earth, give up your captive ones
Waiting wind of Gabriel
Blow soon upon the hollow bones

I can melt the clock hands down
But only in my memory
Nobody gets a second chance
To be the friend they meant to be.

I want to wish everyone a blessed celebration of Mary, Mother of God and also a Happy New Year.

I'd also like to share some good news and thank everyone who has been praying for my close non-Catholic relative.

I'd also like to give a special thank you to SDG and Tim J, who have been providing their always-welcome contributions to the blog, and particularly while I've been dealing with my family situation and the on-top-of-it-all busy holiday season (December was already going to be a massively busy month for me even before the family situation arose).

The news is that, although my relative has a very unusual condition, whose cause is unknown, but which responds well to treatment.

Although my relative is still in a precarious position, and will need months to recover, my relative is no longer in imminent danger and is making steady if slow improvement. My relative has been moved from ICU in an acute care hospital to a physical therapy center. It is expected to be quite some time before the relative could go home, however, so prayers are still very much appreciated!

Best of all, after my relative regained consciousness I was able to explain the anointing of the sick, and my relative requested and received it.

I am very thankful to all who have been praying. Being able to make sure that my relative's sacramental needs are met is truly an answer to prayer, and I am profoundly grateful.

Praise God, and thank you all!

Up next . . . more good news

MSNBC reports on research that – shockingly – concludes that we judge our own moral lapses more leniently than those of others.

We tend to give ourselves a break when it comes to our moral failings, where we tend to shake our heads and "tsk, tsk" the same kind of things in other people.
This is why it is no mere cliché when God says to "Love your neighbor as yourself". If it were easy, He probably wouldn’t see the need to repeat it over and over. Part of living that command is bringing the same kind of understanding to the sins of others that we bring to our own, to cut each other a little slack… not to call black white (or the ever popular "gray"), but to be ready with compassion and forgiveness. This is not a matter of making all moral choices equally valid (in which case there could be nothing to forgive) – just the opposite. It is a matter of confronting sin in genuine love.

—————-

I just finished reading Steven Greydanus’ fine review of Disney/Pixar’s WALL-E, and it reminded me of this post about futurist David Zach. It reminded me specifically of the fascinating talk he gave at the recent annual G.K. Chesterton Conference, because it sounds like in the WALL-E movie, the writers make a common mistake that people make when thinking about the future; that is, they look at recent trends and follow them into the future in a straight line. So, if Americans have been getting fatter, lately, then they trace that development into the future as if we will all just continue getting fatter and fatter. the same goes for our media habits and lack of interaction with one another. The movie assumes these things will continue ad infinitum.

Now, I call this a "mistake" on the part of the creators of WALL-E, but I don’t think it was, really. If they were seriously presenting their ideas of what the future will be like, then it might be a mistake, but what they are doing is actually fine and good for storytellers. They are just exploring recent trends in our society and are using the future to pull them apart and show them to us… using the future as a kind of mirror on our lives.

I’m no tree hugger, I remain a Global Warming skeptic, but I have no problem with the moral that we need to pollute less and waste less and be more responsible. I applaud the movie makers’ critique of our media habits and our tendency to ignore relationships with real flesh and blood people. Why, instead of doing things, would we rather sit on our cans and watch other people do things?

I haven’t seen WALL-E, but I hope to this weekend. Pixar are a bunch of geniuses (or is it genii?).

Visit SDG’s Decent Films Guide for film reviews from an intelligent, Catholic perspective.

Visit Tim Jones’ Blog Old World Swine)

The first featured speaker at the 27th Annual G.K. Chesterton
Conference (which also marked the 100th anniversary of Chesterton’s
Orthodoxy) was David Zach, a Futurist.

Well, American Chesterton Society president Dale Ahlquist said some
things first, but graciously yielded the podium after numbers of us
began to stretch and look at our watches, while others feigned keen
interest in studying the scrap iron that adorned the walls of the
O’Shaughnessy Education Center lecture hall (I learned later that it
was a sculpture, which made me feel sad that someone has apparently blown it up. I wondered what it looked like before…?).

First of all, just the idea of hearing a professional Futurist is sort
of exciting. David Zach thinks a lot about, and gets paid to talk
about, the future. Being a solid Chestertonian, though, he thinks about
it with an eye to the past and the present. He maintains that without our most worthwhile traditions and principles, we are lost in the
future without a compass.

David Zach proposes,

"When looking at the world, you can divide much of
it into Fads, Trends or Principles. A little mantra for this is that we
should Play with Fads, Work with Trends, and Live by Principles… in modern times, we are too often Seduced by Fads, Ignorant of Trends, and Resistant to Principles.".

Like you might expect of a clever futurist, David Zach makes very
effective use of computer graphics to augment the points in his talk.
Not just slides, but little animations and such like. He is a very
engaging, energetic speaker, and great fun to watch and listen to,
though I told him in the elevator afterward that I was disappointed he
hadn’t said anything about jet packs or hover-cars.

In a little pamphlet he handed out for the talk, David Zach concludes,

"Not all principles are equally valued, just like not all change is
forward. The great struggle of our age is to define what should change
and what should stay the same."

The disease of our age is that we think that change is inherently good,
that new = better. We don’t know the value of the things we leave
behind until it’s too late.

If you’re in need of an inspiring and thought provoking speaker, you
can’t go wrong with David Zach. He was tough act to follow, which is
probably how he ended up being the only speaker that night.

Besides Dale.

David Zach, futurist – www.davidzach.com

(Visit Tim Jones’ Blog Old World Swine).

Hey, Tim Jones, here.
I can’t hope to give an adequate description of my experiences at the
2008 Chesterton Conference (my first) without writing some kind of
book, I can only – by way of apology – say with Inigo Montoya "Let me
‘splain… No, there is too much… Let me sum up…".

I’ll try to sum up by giving some sense of what it was like on the
last night of the conference, after all the speakers had spoken, the
presenters had presented, the toasters toasted.

The weather was iffy in Minnesota last Saturday night, so the ending
celebration – the after-party – was moved indoors. Now, "indoors" in
this case means into a college cafeteria… not exactly the kind of
place that oozes atmosphere or encourages warm conviviality. We had
enjoyed earlier some nearly perfect evenings drinking and visiting
under the stars late into the night, but we would have to cap the
conference milling around folding tables under fluorescent light
fixtures and acoustic tile. Blecch, right?

A weird thing happened though. People began to talk, and beer and
wine and cheese were brought forth, and very quickly it began to be so
noisy that we all had to shout to be heard.

I wandered around a bit, drifting into and out of the orbits of
ongoing conversations… comparing notes with a futurist (David
Zach)… trying to get a grip on the importance of beauty (Dale
Ahlquist)… watching a very spirited discussion between an
ebullient Englishman (Joseph Pearce) who seemed to be actually
defending the legendary obtuseness of Americans to an American (Scott
Richert) who had apparently grown impatient with it. The thing is,
these last two were arguing like brothers argue. They could be perfectly honest and passionate in their argument without fear of offending the other, because (really) they loved one another. Their differences were real, but what they had in common was much more real, and made the differences safe to argue with passion, and they knew this. It was a joy to watch.

One could be tempted in such a circumstance to think "These must be
important people", but that’s not the case. It wasn’t a matter of
"important people talking about things", it was just "people talking about important
things"… the only things that ultimately matter; Life, Truth, Beauty,
Goodness, Joy – things such as that – and all of us deeply grateful for
the opportunity. It was a truly liberating thing to know that most
everyone you met – even if they were very different from you – shared
the same common root, that grounding in the love of Truth which is the
love of God. This made our differences come alive, in a way. As Dale
Ahlquist had said earlier, "We don’t strive for diversity… we just
achieve it.".

In the various talks given throughout the weekend, there had been in
the audience always a joy bubbling just under the surface, the
readiness to laugh out loud or to interrupt (like one might interrupt a
family member without rudeness or worry) with a joke or comment. These
Chestertonians were (by worldly standards) just confoundingly happy and
indefensibly content. No one has the right to be that well adjusted.

You could hardly hear yourself think for all the laughter in the cafeteria that last night.

Imagine; You are standing with a cup of home brewed beer (or wine)
in one hand, a hunk of good cheese in the other, talking with new
friends about things that really matter, surrounded by laughter. There
are children ducking in and out and under the tables, squealing and
playing hide and seek. There is a group of teens and young people (a
surprising number, to me, given that we’re spending all weekend
ostensibly talking about a dead Englishman) off in a corner where they
have cleared a sufficient space, wheeling in some kind of wild,
improvised dance, like pairs of figure skaters who wandered in from an
Olympic ice rink (a little later, the teens are flipping the younger
children upside down, or swinging them around in great, breathless
arcs).

Then a man (Mark Pilon?) produces, seemingly out of thin air, a
hammered dulcimer and sets it up in a corner and begins playing; The Rights of Man, Star of the County Down… and he’s really good. Spontaneous hoots of applause and gratitude erupt from the crowd after every tune.

It’s a delightful, almost raucous scene… good drink, friendship, music, dancing, and none of it planned (well, the drinks were
certainly planned, but you can’t leave everything to chance). This
jovial spirit just seemed to rise up out of the floor like a mist and
coalesce into little pockets and eddies of good feeling.

It reminded me for all the world of Tolkien’s descriptions of the revelry of elves. It was like being in the House of Elrond, "The Last Homely House
east of the Sea… A perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or
storytelling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant
mixture of them all. Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, and
sadness.".

This was a group drawn together not so much by ideas, but by an idea… The
Idea that was in the mind of God in the beginning. We were all just
feeling around the edges of it together, and even that was – I believe
– better than any of us thought we deserved. We had had the great privilege, for three days, of learning more about this Idea, the foundational idea of creation, from  G.K. Chesterton, a
clear-eyed observer and merry servant of the Idea… the Word, the
Logos. He, I believe, had a somewhat less obstructed view of the Idea
than most. I think it’s clear he was a saint. In fact, I’m now
following the example of one of the speakers (Geir Hasnes, a towering
Norwegian) by asking Mr. Chesterton to pray for me.

I’ll try to give my impressions on some of the featured speakers in
subsequent posts. I never was much for note taking, but I hope I soaked
in enough of their brilliance to give at least a rough sketch of the
conference highlights.

I want to thank Mark Shea both for calling my attention to a set of loony criticisms being made against me and for defending me against said loony criticisms.

GET THE STORY.

Here’s a key excerpt from Mark’s blog:

One reader,
for instance, prophesies (on the basis of nothing whatsoever) Jimmy
Akin’s looming apostasy. Why? Because Gerry Matatics has apostatized
into nutty sedevacantism and, if you’ve seen one convert, you’ve seen
’em all:

I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts that if
Benedict lasts another decade or is succeeded by a like minded pope,
some of the lay apologists that are trashing Gerry now will be jumping
ship themselves.

There’s NO WAY the Jimmy Aikens are going to
sit by while Rome says things like: "pro multis means for the many",
"the Mass of Pius V was never abrogated", "Protestant Churches are not
true Churches."

Jimmy’s accuser has a far higher regard for his own mind reading powers than the actual record warrants.
But when you are engaged against an enemy of the faith as slippery as a
convert, accuracy is of secondary importance. So you can just sling
such prophesies, even when they are contradicted by known facts and
ignore requests to
document, for instance, a single place where Jimmy has ever dissented
from the Church’s teaching on our relationship with Protestant
ecclesial bodies. The main thing to remember is that converts aren’t
*really* Catholic.

Now, I’ll be the first to concede that the critic has a point that in the cases of some converts, the conversion hasn’t "stuck." In other cases, it hasn’t proceeded far enough, and the convert has retained undue elements from his prior religious affiliation. (Just as somemany cradle Catholics leave Catholicism or adopt false elements of other religious traditions. Both converts and non-converts have free will, and many are willing to use it inappropriately.)

I can’t speak for such converts. In my case I have tried to rigorously assimilate the Catholic spirit. My religious reading matter consists principally of official Church documents, the Bible, the Church Fathers, and Catholic authors who are almost wholly from pre-Vatican II days.

I really don’t read much, if any, "convert lit." While it’s a historical fact that I am a convert, I don’t walk around every day thinking "I’m a convert." That’s not what is central to my identity. I think of myself as a Catholic, and days can go by where I don’t even think about my conversion.

I certainly don’t make a point of it, except on those rare occasions when someone asks be to tell my conversion story. And I daresay that most people who hear me on the radio or read my writings don’t even know that I’m a convert until it’s pointed out to them.

I don’t wear my conversion on my sleeve, because I don’t think it’s anything to be particularly proud of. It is a miracle of God’s grace, and the credit for that goes to him, not me. On my part, I just want to be a faithful Catholic now that I am one.

So when I read about the critic’s linking me to Gerry Matatics, I just rolled my eyes. Not all converts to the Catholic faith are cut from cloth made of the same unstable molecules as Gerry Matatics. Such cloth may be an important asset for Mr. Fantastic and the Fantastic Four, but there are converts and then there are converts.

I was particularly struck by the critic making claims about me that are just loony and that in no way reflect my views.

I mean, I believe that "pro multis means for the many",
I believe that "the Mass of Pius V was never abrogated" (certainly if you include the Missal of 1962 as an expression of it), and I believe that "Protestant Churches are not
true churches" because they lack validly ordained bishops. The technically correct terminology for them is  "ecclesial communities," which is the language used for them in various Church documents.

So I was very pleased to see Mark rebutting these claims and citing posts on my own blog in refutation of them.

A big CHT to Mark!

But he did give me one compliment too many. In response to the critic’s claim that I had changed my view on the translation of pro multis after Cardinal Arinze wrote a letter clarifying its translation in the liturgy, Mark writes:

So: according to my reader, Jimmy Akin held a private opinion but altered it when it seemed to him that the Magisterium was against him. Wow! That *is* evil! See how converts just blend in with Real Catholics[TM] by submitting their judgment to the teachers of the Church? They’re like chameleons!

While I wish to be quite submissive to the authoritative teaching of the Magisterium, I can’t claim that I changed a private opinion in this case.

Somehow in rad trad circles I got the reputation of changing my mind on the translation of pro multis, when in reality I always supported a literal translation of it like "for many."

Why?

Because I’m a student of languages, because I prefer literal translations to dynamic ones, and because that’s what the literal translation of pro multis just is.

I’ve certainly made no secret of my disapproval of all kinds of squishy translations–even "official" ones–of Bible verses, Church documents, or liturgical texts. This one is no different. I prefer and always have preferred a literal translation of the original text.

Thus upon my first hearing of the letter from Cardinal Arinze dealing with the subject, I wrote THIS:

Hallelujah!

This is something I’ve really been hoping and praying for. I’ve even
thought about writing Cardinal Arinze and imploring him to do this,
because the release of the new translation of the Mass is the perfect
opportunity to do this, and with B16 in office, the pope would have the
sensitivity to the issue to realize how much benefit this change would
be.

I was therefore DEE-lighted when a reader e-mailed this story from Catholic World News:

Pro multis means "for many," Vatican rules

[SNIP]

The only reason that there has been any confusion regarding my view of the translation of pro multis is that some rad trads have been running around babbling that the translation of pro multis as "for all" renders the consecration of the Eucharist invalid.

It doesn’t.

And so, as an author writing on liturgical subjects, I’ve made exactly the same points that Cardinal Arinze makes in section 2 of his LETTER:

2. There is no doubt whatsoever regarding the validity of Masses celebrated with the use of a duly approved formula containing a formula equivalent to "for all", as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has already declared (cf. Sacra Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei, Declaratio de sensu tribuendo adprobationi versionum formularum sacramentalium, 25 Ianuarii 1974, AAS 66 [1974], 661). Indeed, the formula "for all" would undoubtedly correspond to a correct interpretation of the Lord’s intention expressed in the text. It is a dogma of faith that Christ died on the Cross for all men and women (cf. John 11:52; 2 Corinthians 5,14-15; Titus 2,11; 1 John 2,2).

Yet for some reason, certain rad trads have represented me as holding a different interpretation of the matter than Cardinal Arinze and then changing it when his letter came out.

This is pure, unadulterated horse leavings.

I have always held that pro multis is best represented with a literal translation, and devoutly wished that the Church would change the approved English translation to reflect this, while also holding the points that Cardinal Arinze makes above.

So before everyone congratulates me on being willing to submit my judgment to that of the Church on this point, allow me to note that this is one compliment too many. I’ve always held the views I do on this subject and was delighted to see the Church endorse them.

I also advise critics to read my writings more carefully next time, and not to trust unreliable sources.

(P.S. Also thanks to Mark for spelling my last name right.)

Hey, Tim Jones, here.

From my Blog – Old World Swine;

I’m not a morning person. I’m really not. Waking up for me most days is something like coming out of anesthesia after surgery. This has sometimes made me feel like a slacker when I hear others talking about how they are up at 4:00 am every day for prayer, Bible reading and a brisk walk, while I am drooling into my pillow.

I have tried doing my personal prayer time first thing in the morning as soon as my feet hit the floor, but the main feature of the exercise turned out to be simply the fight to keep my eyelids from dropping. It was a constant, very physical struggle against sleep. So, eventually I quit worrying about praying like other people and started to look for ways I could pray when I was actually fully conscious.

One way that I have done this is to pray in the car. Normally, I spend a couple of hours a day driving, and instead of listening to a CD or the radio (the stone-age kind… just AM and FM, so choices are limited) I’ll sometimes pray, usually the Rosary. Of course, traffic doesn’t always cooperate and I’m often interrupted.  I don’t know if it’s Christmas shopping traffic or what, but the freeway has been a bit more of a white-knuckle experience, lately. It’s also kind of spiritually deflating to hear yourself say "…Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in – WHAT ARE YOU DOING??!! MERGE!! I’M TRYING TO LET YOU IN!!!!" (this really happened). Talk about heading back to the old spiritual drawing board…

Lately I have been doing my private prayer mostly at night, when everyone else has gone to bed. I still make some brief prayers through the day, including a morning offering, but for more considered meditation, I’m finding the late evening works well for me. As a family man, it also has a very fitting Watchman on the Walls sort of feel to it. This schedule means that instead of catching a late night classic movie – by myself – (which I love), I have to turn off the Idiot Box. I’m thinking this can’t help but make me more human while also increasing IQ points. A double whammy of sanity.

The point is that there is no BEST time to pray. What works for some may not work for you. The goal should always be to move closer and closer to praying continually, and through this to move closer and closer to Christ.

What works for you?

My car is a wonder of modern American disposable engineering. A cheap compact with no frills and over 140 thousand miles, it astounds and delights me every time the engine cranks over (I am part Scot).

Lately, in addition to various other mysterious signs of aging, the speedometer just stops working at random. Mostly it works, but it can cut out at any time.

Now, when this happens, I noticed that I do one of two things; I either drive whatever speed "feels right", or I (consciously or un-) begin to adjust my speed to fit in with local traffic. This being the second car that I have been blessed to own having this defect, it struck me that A) maybe it was no accident, B) that a speedometer is an apt analogy to the human conscience, and C) that it was something out of which I could probably squeeze a blog post.

Of course, there may be many of you suggesting that D) maybe I should get the stupid car fixed, but given the actual value of the car, and the cost of pulling the dashboard and trying to find the problem (I have serviced my own car, like, twice in the last decade-and-a-half), it’s nearly prohibitive. It’s not really dangerous… just an irritation. Besides, I can often fix it by pounding on the dash just right… but I do plan to have it fixed as soon as possible.

But back to the conscience metaphor… The conscience (like the speedometer) is an internal guide that tells us how we’re doing. We are given external guides (like road signs and Revelation) against which we can pretty reliably measure how well we are keeping The Law. But our consciences are not infallible. Sometimes they are defective. In a few instances, maybe they just never worked right at all. In the case of a defective conscience, a person will naturally tend to do one of two things… either they will do whatever "feels right" (whatever they want), or they will conform to the pressures of their immediate society.

We really need the external law, too (the road signs, Church teaching), or the reading on the speedometer becomes nearly meaningless. Following your conscience does NOT mean just doing whatever "feels right". The conscience is made to conform to an authoritative standard. If a policeman tickets you for driving 75 when your speedometer was reading only 62, there is no appealing to the defective instrument… the cop wins. If the church tells you that fornication is a sin, you have no defense in noting that, personally, you have no big problem with it. Your speedo is out of whack. Period. You are bound by your conscience, but your conscience is bound by The Law.

A defective conscience can – and should be – fixed.

Thing is, though, that I have received a few minor traffic tickets in my life, and in none of these instances was I driving a car with a bad speedo. The problem was, I had been ignoring a perfectly functioning speedo. I’d lay odds that this is the case in the vast majority of speeding violations. People just aren’t paying attention… they are driving whatever speed they like, or they are going with the flow, or their mind is elsewhere, they are distracted.

For most of us, the conscience is working fine (or close enough), but we often ignore it. We can develop the habit of ignoring it.

One last thought… when you drive according to the traffic laws as faithfully as you can, you become like a living, moving representation – a personification of the law – to other drivers. You’re the living law, just as we are all meant to be a living Catechism for those around us. That doesn’t mean you won’t be honked at… just try to avoid the fast lane.

That’s it. Just something I pulled from random mental notes from a busy week. Tawk amongst ya-selves… got any good car stories?