Quote of the Day

"The peace promised by Jesus Christ is not bovine placidity, but rather the highest level of tension that is still creative."
- Unknown

John Williams IS the man!

H/T to Andie:

Quote of the Day

"Community is that place where the person you least want to live with always lives... When that person moves away, someone else arises immediately to take his or her place."

-- Peter J. Palmer in Community, Conflict and Ways of Knowing

Forever love: Couple wed 76 years die on same day

From the Richmond Times Dispatch:

LAKESIDE, Va. - Floyd Schooles often vowed, “I do not want to live one day longer than my wife.”

Virginia Harris Schooles died peacefully Thursday at 12:20 a.m., in bed at their Lakeside home. Floyd followed about 10:15 p.m. in the room he shared with his wife of 76 years.

Both were 99.

...

“The night before Nannie died, Granddaddy asked when her funeral was,” said Kennedy, who was with both at the end. “I said, ‘She’s still alive.’ He said, ‘No. No, she’s not.’ Less than two hours later, she died in her sleep. He knew.”

Floyd’s reaction to her death was predictable, Kennedy said. “He said, ‘Why, oh why, couldn’t I go first?’ “

The obituary can be found here. To read the whole article, including a link to a slideshow where you can hear a touching lesson on how to stay married for 76 years, in their own words, click here. Be sure you have a box or two of Kleenex.

Lord Jesus, grant that I and my spouse may have a true and understanding love for each other. Grant that we may both be filled with faith and trust. Give us the grace to live with each other in peace and harmony.

May we always bear with one another’s weaknesses and grow from each other’s strengths. Help us to forgive one another’s failings and grant us patience, kindness, cheerfulness and the spirit of placing the well-being of one another ahead of self.

May the love that brought us together grow and mature with each passing year. Bring us both ever closer to You through our love for each other. Let our love grow to perfection.

Amen.

- Wedding Prayer of the Bride and the Groom for Each Other

Repeating History - UPDATED

Jen F. over at Conversion Diary has some wonderful thoughts in this post-election week:

I tend to be an easygoing, optimistic person who focuses more on my little corner of the world than the macro issues of the day. I tend to want to believe the best about people, and guard against buying into hyperbolic rhetoric that makes generalizations about the activities of certain groups of people being particularly heinous -- so often, upon reasonable analysis, that type of claim pans out to be nothing more than a lame attempt to vilify people you disagree with.

So I wonder:

If were a 31-year-old woman with three little kids in a busy house in Germany 1941, would I have fully understood the evil that surrounded me? As a woman living in 2008 I can see the horror that was going on there, but at the time there were some
awfully sleek lies being told about the situation; it would have been really, really convenient to let myself be persuaded by the lies and just make the nasty little problem go away by telling myself that it wasn't really a problem at all.

...

Recently I was looking through some genealogy documents and noticed that a distant ancestor of mine owned a slave. My own flesh and blood, people probably not unlike me at all, participated in the horror of slavery. Can I be so sure that I would have seen the truth? Or, if I had lived alongside my ancestor, would I have included a human being on the list of possessions I owned? Even if I didn't own a slave myself, would I have shooed the distasteful subject from my mind by surrounding myself with the comfort that all my friends seemed to think it was fine and, after all, it was
perfectly legal? Evil's most powerful tool is that it always works through lies; the lure to tell yourself that something bad is not really bad at all is a powerful temptation, and one that I'm not sure I could have resisted.

Sometimes I think about this, and wonder what advice I would pass along to my own descendants to make sure this never happens again; to help future generations guard against being blinded should they find themselves in the midst of a culture where something terrible is taking place.

Go take a look and see what she has to say!

This has certainly been a historic week. The election of Barack Obama will have ripple effects throughout our society. Less than fifty years ago, President-elect Obama would not even have been able to drink from the same water fountain as me, and now he will live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

I wonder. One hundred and fifty years from now, will they talk about Roe v. Wade the same way we talk about Dred Scott today? I pray it does not take that long.

UPDATE:
Apparently I am in distinguished company by making that analogy. Rocco has the scoop on Cardinal George's address to the USCCB today:

"If the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision that African Americans were other people’s property and somehow less than persons were still settled constitutional law, Mr. Obama would not be president of the United States."

Lord how I want to be in that number ...

Fr. Z over at WDTPRS posted a link to this cathcy little ditty. So, as we come off our sugar high from yesterday, now it is time to reflect upon the "All Hallows" whose "Eve" was last night!

From the Mouth of Babes...

H/T to the Ironic Catholic for this gem. It kinda makes you wonder what the world would be like if we had YouTube back when Jesus was found teaching in the temple!

Bishop to Priests: "Take the Weekend Off"

Rocco posted the following Pastoral Letter drafted by Scranton Bishop Joseph Martino. Not only will it be inserted in every bulletin in the diocese this coming Sunday, but he has also taken the very unusual step of instructing that it be read at every single Mass this weekend "at the time of and instead of the homily." Now, there's a bishop who takes his responsibility as the teaching authority of the Local Church seriously!

Since most of us will not be able to make the trip up to PA this weekend, head on over to Whispers to take a read.

As an aside, Scranton is also the diocese in which Vice-presidential nominee of the Democratic party - Joseph "I cannot impose my views on others unless they involve something other than killing an unborn child" Biden was born.

Hovering Between Hope and Anxiety

I am always amazed at the timelessness of the Second Vatican Council documents. As we teeter on the brink of economic meltdown, endure a brutal presidential campaign, and wonder what the heck is going on in all corners of the globe, we can turn to the Church's teaching. Take, for example, the following.

In no other age has mankind enjoyed such an abundance of wealth, resources and economic well being; and yet a huge proportion of the people of the world is plagued by hunger and extreme need while countless numbers are totally illiterate. At no time have men had such a keen sense of freedom, only to be faced by new forms of slavery in living and thinking. There is on the one hand a lively feeling of unity and of compelling solidarity, of mutual dependence, and on the other a lamentable cleavage of bitterly opposing camps. We have not yet seen the last of bitter political, social, and economic hostility, and racial and ideological antagonism, nor are we free from the spectre of a war of total destruction. If there is a growing exchange of ideas, there is still widespread disagreement about the meaning of the words expressing our key concepts. There is lastly a painstaking search for a better material world, without a parallel spiritual advancement.

Small wonder then that many of our contemporaries are prevented by this complex situation from recognizing permanent values and duly applying them to recent discoveries. As a result they hover between hope and anxiety and wonder uneasily about the present course of events. It is a situation that challenges men to respond; they cannot escape.

- No. 4 from Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World)

Can you believe that was written over 40 years ago?!?! It is well worth a read. So, with all due respect to Deacon Greg and his colleagues in the mainstream media, I invite you to take some time this weekend to turn off the talking heads on the TV and read how some very forward thinking folks in the Church felt we should live out our Christian vocation.

Off to Richmond...

Tomorrow, Katie and I head off to Richmond to begin the academic portion of formation for the permanent diaconate. 48 other men, their wives, pastors and instructors will all be there. Our bishop will celebrate Mass, and then join us for dinner. The next day, our class in The History, Theology and Spirituality of the Diaconate will begin. I have already finished the reading, and my head is awash with thoughts and questions about the sacramentality of the diaconate, what it means to have a vocation, and what has God gotten me into!!! I can only imagine how powerful an experience it will be to gather with so many people who are all involved in discerning a calling to the same vocation!

Jen F. over at Conversion Diary has some wonderful thoughts on this whole topic of vocation. Her thoughts we very helpful to me:

A couple years ago some Catholic readers responding to this post introduced me to the concept of "vocation," that every single person is called to one of the vocations that God has given us -- the most common being married life, the priesthood or consecrated religious life -- and that each of us is to discern to which vocation we are called. What I found most interesting about this whole concept (and, frankly, shocking and slightly disconcerting at the time), is that your life's vocation isn't as much what you do as much as it is whom you serve. This worldview basically said that each of us is put on this earth to serve others, and your vocation is simply a matter of discerning whom you'll serve and how you'll serve them. In other words, there is no living for yourself. There's no optimizing your entire life around what you feel like doing.

...

What I realize now is that I completely misunderstood the concept. I came to see that this worldview is not an expression of absolutes, but of prioritization. To live a life of service does not mean that you never take time for yourself; it means that taking time for yourself isn't the entire meaning of life. It does not mean that you turn your hopes and dreams over to the dustbin; it means you turn them over to God.

It was only very hesitantly that I put this concept into practice in my life. Slowly I began to embrace the fact that the defining purpose of my life is to be a wife and mother, that to serve my husband and my children and my parents and the world around me was what God wanted me to do...that it was even what he wanted me to do far more than write great articles or books or blog posts (even if those articles and books and blog posts were in an effort to bring glory to him). It was one of my first big exercises in trusting God to accept this premise that selfless service of others is objectively a higher life priority than seeking personal gain.