Today's word

chivy \CHIV-ee\ - 1. to tease or annoy with persistent petty attacks  2. to move or obtain by small maneuvers

Well, yesterday's actually . . . 

Sts. Peter and Paul

The first two readings yesterday for the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul struck me with an insight I wasn't expecting.

The Acts reading recounted Peter's miraculous delivery from prison; when he was expecting the worst, he found himself set free in a highly unexpected way. It teaches us about the power of intercessory prayer, and helps us see that sometimes the answer we need comes in ways we don't anticipate. There isn't any particular indication that Peter was expecting to escape his expected fate; based on what had already been done to James he must have been preparing to meet a similar fate. Yet the believers of the community did not cease praying for an answer, and there was no denying the divine source of the one provided.

St. Paul's second letter to Timothy has a very different tone. Apparently its Pauline authorship is debated among scholars, but nonetheless, the focus of the subject's trust in God is very different from the first reading. In this case, St. Paul's reliance on the providence of God is not so much about being delivered from his imprisonment and pending fate, but about being strengthened in the midst of his circumstances. It is more important to St. Paul at this juncture that he remain faithful than that he be delivered from judgment and death. This is rooted in his profound trust in God for his eternal destination and his profound appreciation to Jesus Christ for providing his salvation and his ministry.

It seems to me that we mostly pray for the first kind of deliverance, when our focus should be more on the second. If we truly trust in God for eternity, then we will know much more peace about our circumstances. Sometimes God will provide for those needs as we desire, while at others our lives will give testimony to God's greatness in ways other than we might choose for ourselves or our loved ones. God will sometimes use remarkable means to deliver us through our circumstances, but that deliverance will only sometimes be an actual changing of those circumstances, and far more rarely in clearly miraculous ways.

Theology's insufficiency

I have just read an outstanding explanation of the concept of the Holy Trinity.

And immediately upon completing it, I found that the desires of my heart were no more turned toward God than before I started it.

This illustrates the warning that Pope Francis has issued to theologians not to allow their theological pursuits take the place of their relationship with God. The two things are very different. I can know all about someone without being at all connected to them in relationship.

What Jesus never said:

Neither do I condemn you. Keep sinning.

Today's words

freegan \FREE-gun\ - an activist who scavenges for free food (as in waste receptacles at stores and restaurants) as a means of reducing consumption of resources

Once I mentally pronounced this I had a pretty good sense of what it must mean.

poutine \poo-TEEN\ - a dish of French fries covered with brown gravy and cheese curds - chiefly Canadian

Had just heard this word from my cousin a couple weeks ago while he was ragging on his distant almost-step-relatives-in-law. Nice etymological options.

ab ovo \ab-OH-voh\ - from the beginning

This one makes sense from its etymology. (linked from "poutine")

A gentler Father's Day

It has been good. Affirmation from my daughters has hit the mark. The prayer of blessing came with an appropriate reminder that everybody - everybody - has things they wish they'd done differently. It has been devoid of the usual insistence that my worst moment outweighs everyone else's in favor of the belief that God's grace is greater than our worst moments.

A Father's Day glimmer

What better lesson, other than loving God, could a parent hope to teach their child than how to respond when they've done something terrible?

More unbinding

In Jesus' name, I renounce condemnation and self-judgment.

More on dreams (moron dreams?)

All you need do is peruse some of my other postings with this label to gain a general sense of what I think dreams are and aren't useful for. But just as sometimes some of our dreams - I am skeptical of the words "all" or even "most" here - can be analyzed to reveal some of our own unconscious feelings about ourselves, sometimes they can also uncover attitudes of which we might otherwise remain unaware.

So this morning's dream featured people I really know, or used to, and a situation which never happened. In real life, our circle of high school friends was more than a little casual when it came to dating one another. The fact that we'd previously dated someone's friend didn't keep us from dating them. My marriage is evidence of this; early in my high school sophomore year I "went with" my wife's best friend for a while. It never became very serious, though, and we "broke up" before very long. Soon my wife and I started going out, and our relationship would be on-again-off-again through high school. My best friend dated the same girl through most of our sophomore and junior years, though. She was a year ahead of us, and they broke up at the end of the year as she prepared to graduate. In the ensuing summer we had a group trip to Fort Miles, DE, which my best friend couldn't attend, though his ex did. My future wife and I were off-again, and I made a play for Sue, which she gently rebuffed with a kind suggestion that she might have been interested were circumstances different.  

In my dream, though, I was confessing to my wife in the present that we had in fact been together intimately back then. She asked why, and I explained that the only reason I could give her was the only one a teenaged boy would ever need: she was willing. In my dream, there was a recollection of our intercourse, or at least of the occasion and setting of it. 

But the thing that was really revelatory for me in this dream was the underlying attitudes about sexuality which I long-ago internalized.  I still carry around so much of society's approach even as I still strive to consciously reject it in favor of what I say that I believe to be a better and healthier way.

Crosses and resurrections

It's amazing how failing can lead to victory.

Athletes experience this all the time: a team loses in the playoffs and wins their championship the following year. This is often partly the result of personnel changes or being healthier during the playoffs, too, but they inevitably talk about the lessons they learned in the previous year's heartbreak. In our personal lives, too, failure can lead to growth in ways we don't anticipate. I am so much emotionally healthier at 54 than I was at 34. I have a friend who is learning by necessity some of the lessons he just couldn't take to heart when he was in a less restrained physical and personal environment. Sometimes it is nothing other than the humility of facing our shortcomings that opens us up to seeing ourselves - and as a result, our relationships - in a fresh and transforming way.

We should not be surprised by this. The greatest victory we can ever know came through the abyss of apparent defeat.

Today's word

perdure \per-DUR\ - to continue to exist : last

This makes sense from its roots and etymology, even though it's new to me. 

A problem I don't have

I just read an article about the trend of politicians deleting items from their Twitter feeds and websites that were posted prior to their having all the facts on their subject. The latest example concerns the recently released POW who has been in the news, who some politicians anointed as a hero before learning the murky circumstances of his capture.

I sometimes delete posts from my Facebook page (rarely) or from here, but my reason for doing so isn't usually the same. Usually it's just a matter of realizing that the particular thoughts I've expressed are potentially hurtful to someone. Increasingly, I tend to realize this prior to posting them in the first place. On rare occasions, though, I just need to know that there's at least someone, somewhere in the world who knows what is on my mind before I delete a post.

Keeping it real

A good protection against introspection and self-pity is to talk out loud to Jesus rather than just think about it. Talking to Him keeps it in perspective. Sometimes it is better to talk to Jesus in the presence of your friend than to talk to your friend about the problem. Often when I feel that something is not right in a conversation, I stop it and have the person tell Jesus about it. It drives away self-pity, self-justification, blame-casting and any wrong kind of dependency on me. It quickly exposes whether the person is looking for attention or really seeking Jesus. - Neal Lozano, Unbound, A Practical Guide to Deliverance

I can't think of a better way of accomplishing this. A person would have to be pretty jaded and incredibly insincere to keep playing someone while addressing Jesus.

Today's words

Today: a treat for etymology fans, though no new words in here for me.

charlatan \SHAHR-luh-tun\ - 1. a pretender to medical skill : quack  2. one making usually showy pretenses to knowledge or ability : fraud, faker

Starting with today's WOTD, with an etymology I found fascinating

Then there was this link to Top Ten Words With Remarkable Origins, Vol. 2.

The Surprising Origin of "Flap"

and Believing One's Own Hype

At dinner Friday night, I mentioned to my youngest (first-) cousin how far back my disillusionment with his brother went. He had already pointed out how, for his siblings and even his mom, it was is if they'd already lost him a decade earlier, when he withdrew from everyone so he could keep spending hours every evening at his favorite bar, drinking and gambling his life away. I could definitely understand how he felt. But when I said that I started feeling distanced from him when he started insisting that he be called Flap, my cousin's eyes lit up.

"Oh, yeah," he said. "I'd completely forgotten about that. That came from your father's shirt!" His wife was more confused than I was, so he explained the part of the story that I didn't know. Apparently, after my dad killed himself, my mom passed along some of his clothes to my nephew. I don't know if he was the only one who got them; if so, maybe he was just the one they fit best. At any rate, one of them was a shirt (t-shirt? athletic shirt?) that said FLAP on the front of it. So people started calling him that. "Wow. I never thought about it, but geez, no wonder that would have bothered you," he concluded.

I explained that I was previously unfamiliar with that part of the history of his brother's nickname. I certainly don't remember seeing my dad in that shirt, but then again, if it was something that he wore for athletic events, I wouldn't have necessarily ever seen it. Most of his leagues had been after-work engagements, and we never much attended. By the time he died, his vision problems from his car accident the autumn after I turned 12 had kept him from any further athletic endeavors for a couple years. I think I remember hearing that my cousin's nickname was somehow related to a shirt, but I don't think I ever knew the connection with my dad. How ironic that two tortured souls who ultimately destroyed their own lives in their addiction to alcohol would share the same shirt.

At any rate, when I mentioned that, no, it was just that "Flap" had always struck me as more like a put-on that my cousin engaged in, his baby brother immediately nodded in agreement. "Like a persona that he presented," he completed my thought with precision. What we didn't say was how the distance that this persona unavoidably put between Dave and everyone else in his life was its precise purpose.

Matt went on to mention that he'd always felt a little bad for his oldest brother, who always seemed to be outshined by his next-younger brother's "golden boy" status, using the exact phrase I mentioned in my previous post as being more of a negative influence on Dave's life, a curse rather than a blessing. I think that maybe he shared some of something like that in common with my dad, too, who could never live up to the high expectations set by his youthful athletic success and, I think, became disappointed with the rest of his life.

Today's word

Well, sort of. It wasn't from one of my usual sources, but was based on something I read from a recent interview that I haven't had a chance to rant about. And it isn't a "word" so much as a "term."

Civil disobedience - Refusal to obey government demands or commands and nonresistance to consequent arrest and punishment. (Concise Encyclopedia entry)

It seems to me people are lately ignoring the second half of this in favor of the mere dictionary definition -"refusal to obey governmental demands or commands especially as a nonviolent and usually collective means of forcing concessions from the government" - but it's this willingness to bear the consequences which distinguishes 20th century heroes like Ghandi, King, and Mandela from this recent news maker and interviewee. The key attitude must be "I believe in what I am doing so thoroughly that I am willing to go to jail for doing it."

The interviewee seems, rather, to suffer from delusions of heroism.

I am blessed to know people in the pro-life movement who have gone to jail for their actions. In each case, it turned out that they hadn't really broken the law, and were merely being persecuted. But they were willing to bear this persecution in consequence of the actions in which they so thoroughly believed. And even when those consequences were proven to be unjust, they maintained a peaceful heart toward their persecutors.

The Communion of Saints

I love this tenet of our Catholic faith.

While I was at my cousin's funeral on Saturday and throughout these surrounding days, I have been praying for other family members both to welcome David home in Christ and to pray for us who are left behind. I picture my mom (Dave's godmother) and dad and sister, our grandparents, David's dad, our uncle, and many more, all behind Christ welcoming their beloved family member home whom they have watched struggle in time from their own healed and whole place in eternity. I find myself asking David to join all of these loved ones in praying for his family members, especially the ones who struggle to forgive the hurts for which he was responsible, especially his mom, siblings, ex-wife (who still loves him, I believe, despite everything) and son. I even find myself asking the departed siblings I know to pray for David's siblings, including my sister Karen and the siblings of friends who I also join in praying for their family who still miss them so much.

The richness of knowing that we are still united in the Holy Spirit beyond death does not detract from my approaching Jesus with these intercessions, as I know that all of their prayers still reach the Father only through the Son by the Holy Spirit. But knowing that we are united now, that I don't have to wait until I join them in eternity to be with them, is a great gift.