Timely preaching

So, given the end of yesterday's post, Fr. Dave's homily this morning was most appropriate.

It can be so helpful when a message I hear coincides with where I'm struggling.

Another "milestone" that isn't, of course

For about six months now I've been watching my hit count creep toward an average of 9 hits per post. It doesn't matter; it's just an exercise in . . . well, in curiosity, I guess.  And it isn't as if I really have all that many  people who are interested in my thoughts.  All time, 40% of my page views have come from Russia, which I imagine to probably be machine hits, so I don't take the whole statistical exercise as being at all indicative of my "popularity" or, by extension, value.  Anyway, when I first started paying attention I was averaging under 6 hits/post, and ended up passing 6, 7 and then 8 hits per post within a couple months of each other. But the average has been slow to reach this next integer, in part because I've been blogging so prolifically this year - by nearly three times my previous highest number of posts, and December looks as if it will be the first month in which I don't average at least one post per day.

The count has been hovering just below 9 since we got back from vacation, the wonderful trip and family time that was also the reason I didn't write as much this month.  I was a little surprised when  I got up this morning and saw the average was over 9, with enough views to spare that I could do another post without dipping back under it.  I probably have something to actually say, so when I get around to that one the average will dip back under again unless I've picked up a couple more views.  Eh.  I suppose I can live with that.

Anyway, I seem to be having a really difficult time focusing on the positives in my life right now.  The negatives are right in my face all the time, and it's a constant exercise in discipline to turn my attention from them that I just don't seem to always (or even usually, of late) be up to.

I can't afford not to be, though.

From a Christmas sermon of Pope St Leo the Great

Dearly beloved, today our Saviour is born; let us rejoice. Sadness should have no place on the birthday of life. The fear of death has been swallowed up; life brings us joy with the promise of eternal happiness.

So the second sentence above sums up what I was already thinking - how I was judging myself - on Christmas Eve.  I knew that Christ's presence in my life has overcome all the petty things in which I was wrapped up, yet couldn't seem to get beyond them.  Ultimately, the joy of worshiping together finally overcame my frustrations.


In the fullness of time, chosen in the unfathomable depths of God’s wisdom, the Son of God took for himself our common humanity in order to reconcile it with its creator. He came to overthrow the devil, the origin of death, in that very nature by which he (the devil) had overthrown mankind.

And so at the birth of our Lord the angels sing in joy: Glory to God in the highest, and they proclaim peace to men of good will as they see the heavenly Jerusalem being built from all the nations of the world. When the angels on high are so exultant at this marvellous work of God’s goodness, what joy should it not bring to the lowly hearts of men?

The angels' song seems so distant, beyond my reality somewhere.  Sometimes I wish for the opportunity to witness the undeniably miraculous, and in the process I know that I tend to denigrate the circumstantially miraculous which I have experienced.  I sometimes think that it is a matter of my faith not being simple enough - all those who seem to experience this type of encounter seem to be far less complicated than I imagine myself to be.  I envy them, and yet I cling to my own gifts.  "But you should appreciate your own gifts!" you might argue, but it seems to me that there is a difference between appreciating and clinging. The latter has a sense of not being willing to to let go even for the sake of gaining God more fully.  The truth is, I have a hard time praying the prayer of St. Ignatius: Take, Lord, receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all I have and call my own.  Intellectually, I know that what I will gain far outweighs what I might lose, yet I still seem to lack the faith to truly return these gifts to the care of the One who gave them in the first place.

Beloved, let us give thanks to God the Father, through his Son, in the Holy Spirit, because in his great love for us he took pity on us, and when we were dead in our sins he brought us to life with Christ, so that in him we might be a new creation. Let us throw off our old nature and all its ways and, as we have come to birth in Christ, let us renounce the works of the flesh.

Christian, remember your dignity, and now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return by sin to your former base condition. Bear in mind who is your head and of whose body you are a member. Do not forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of God’s kingdom.

Through the sacrament of baptism you have become a temple of the Holy Spirit. Do not drive away so great a guest by evil conduct and become again a slave to the devil, for your liberty was bought by the blood of Christ.

I often find that, after a grace-filled season such as Advent or Lent, I quickly fall back into a less focused approach to life in the immediate aftermath of the great feasts for which they prepare us. This reading helped me this morning to remember this tendency and to choose better, for one day, at least.

Christmas feelings

I felt emotionally blackmailed on Christmas Eve:  You made clear there was only one thing you really wanted this Christmas, even though we'd pretty explicitly agreed (sorry if you don't remember it that way, but we had) that our main gift to each other this year would be our Hawaii trip, and even though you're going to insist on buying that sofa and chair from Sam's by New Year's Eve.  Instead we spent as much as ever on each other.  I had no idea you'd bought me three pair of pants from Lands' End already - even though you say they weren't originally intended to be for Christmas - nor the (very nice) tripod, in addition to the LOTR on Blu-ray on sale from Amazon.

So I suppose it's a good thing you made it so clear that you really had your heart set on a Kindle Fire and that nothing else would do.  And I'm also glad you indicated that you'd rather have the HD model.  If you'd gifted me and I hadn't done the same for you, I'd have felt even worse than I did earlier in the day.  I'm glad you have it, and I hope you enjoy it.

I also felt hurt on Christmas Eve, left over from the weekend:  If there are two things I've come to understand in the intersection of relationships, money, and priorities, it's these: our words reflect our true feelings, and we allot our resources to what's important to us.  So when a daughter says that she isn't willing to "waste gasoline" for her children to spend time with us, there are implications that go beyond the family of six that they're trying to keep fed, housed, clothed and educated.  When she then drove most of the way here anyway because they needed to go to her in-laws' place, and didn't save us the full round trip to her place by bringing the oldest two along with her, it really felt like a matter of adding insult to injury.  It's clear that nurturing her children's relationship with her parents is not important to her.  My bride and I were both deeply hurt, but we went and got the oldest two kids anyway even though we just wanted to curl up in a ball.

On the other hand, I'm glad that didn't completely cloud my judgment:  I was thinking on Christmas Eve about how my grandparents always came to our house on Christmas Day, after having spent Christmas Eve evening with my cousins.  That way, none of us had to "leave our new stuff" on Christmas, or at least, that was how it was explained to us.  I think that maybe it also reduced the stress on the then-current generation of moms and dads to not have to worry about getting everyone (and another round of gifts) rounded up on Christmas day; for my cousins, that would have been a round of gifts from the grandparents for 8 kids who were already squeezing into the VW bus with their parents. So when our oldest asked on Monday if we could come there on Christmas to exchange gifts because she wasn't feeling well, I was emotionally prepared to be open to that suggestion.  And when we were out finishing our shopping on Monday night, I was prepared to be generous with a gift for her and her husband even though history had made clear that they weren't going to reciprocate.  But I feel as if we may be pressuring them a little just by our generosity, and need to ask if they'd just rather not exchange gifts at all among the adults, even as much as I'd hate not giving to them.

Perhaps that openness helped with the resolution of my funk:  When I know I should be feeling thankful to God, and I'm just. not. because of all the aforementioned issues, my recognition of my bent perspective can become another obstacle to getting past it all and back in touch with God's love. The should gets in the way of itself.  But midnight Mass was so uplifting, and being part of the music ministry helped me enter into the worship.

More than hypothetical

So, our daughter unapologietically took financial advantage of us for nearly a year.  When we suggested it was time for her to get financial counseling so that she could meet her financial responsibilities, including to us, she announced that she was suddenly able to afford to move out.  Now that she finds herself in legitimate financial straits, what course of action truly benefits her best?

My initial evaluation was that it would probably be best for her if we give her the one of the most important gifts a parent can give a beloved son or daughter: the gift of being responsible for herself.  This isn't a matter of being pig-headed about her lying in the bed she's made, with a hint of bitterness.  Working though her own issues to arrive at her own best solution still strikes me as the best thing we can do for her.

Yet she's going to be car-less if she doesn't do something.

But it will be important for me to not feel pressured into paying for decisions I don't agree with, too.  I'm not going to help her pay Brownie's IT double to rebuild her transmission what our mechanic would charge her for a junkyard transmission, just because she wants the perceived security that comes with the former.  If she was footing the bill for that security herself, then it would be her decision to make.

Quick hits from Christmas 2012

This may be the first of several posts as I process some of yesterday, finally.

I'm fairly sure it was mostly because of playing it for the first time after hearing Fr. Satish' homily at midnight mass - which dealt heavily with the comparing and contrasting events surrounding Jesus' birth with those of Newtown - but may have also been due to the pre-service being less hectic yesterday morning, but When He Comes hit me pretty hard at Christmas 9:00 mass.  I had to fight back tears as we sang: "When He comes, the children of ages will die nevermore," then somehow managed to make the transition to Can You Hear the Christmas Bells without losing control of my voice.

I've wanted to play on Breath of Heaven for as long as we've been doing it, but they didn't publish chords with our arrangement, plus my voice has always been needed in past years.  Now that we have four other voices on each men's part, I looked up the chords online.  They were in the wrong key, but only by a half-step, and I think they only had one or two chords wrong, both of which I recognized and figured out right away.  I ended up just memorizing it rather than writing the chords onto the music (which I'll likely regret the next time we pull it out).  Oh, it was wonderful!

The mass setting we're using this year is well suited to the classical, which I also think fits better with the violin and bowed bass, so I didn't have deal with nearly as much switching between guitars as on Christmases past.

The other new piece we did which was a big hit was Rise Up and See the King.  What a fun piece!  I think it would have fit better in Advent, but that also made it appropriate for the beginning of our prelude music. It wasn't originally on the menu for morning mass, but it was so fun and so well received that we rearranged things to include it. (We really didn't need to do Gesu Bambino again anyway, even if we do use the first choir arrangement of it I've ever really liked.)

I may have teased Teri just a bit over her suggestion that she might have lost her mind if I'd done 5:00 mass, too, this year (i.e. "oh, it's too late to avoid that!").  The truth ended up being that, with the way things worked out, I'd have likely lost mine if I'd committed to it.  (yeah, too late for that, too.)

Mele Kalikimaka

All day long I was feeling ungrateful for all God has done for me.  I couldn't for the life of me shake the depressed feelings I was having, or the negative thoughts I was battling.  I knew I should be thankful, this day of all days, for the gift of God's love.

It turns out all I needed was to go to such a wonderful Mass!

(I FINALLY got to play Breath of Heaven!  But we had so much great music, and Fr. Satish offered a wonderful set of reflections on the birth of the Son of God.)