Ditch Doc

To all my evangelical-off-the-cuff-praying friends: The Lord already knows you are speaking to Him. Your prayers are not made more efficacious by your use of His name as a comma.

This morning, my Dad left me the following voice mail:

“Happy Sts. Cyril and Methodius. It’s out. Talk to you later.”

The liturgy is the primary way by which we come to know God. God is three Persons. So go ahead and adjust the language, music and symbolism of the Mass to make them totally understandable on the first go. But only if you have previous experience of coming to know, completely, three people in the space of an hour. If, on the other hand, you’ve found that even your non-divine friendships continue to deepen for as long as they last, then give me a liturgy that I can chew on for eighty years or so.

On Thursday, I found out that one of the reported revelations at Medjugorje was a request by Our Lady for those who are able to fast on bread and water every Wednesday and Friday.

On Friday, this was the menu:

Breakfast: French Toast

Lunch: Cheese Bagels

Dinner: Pizza Bread (But no sauce!)

Pasta’s kind of bready, isn’t it?

In some communities there is an absurd phenomenon similar to a theological sandwich: The youngest and the oldest, who are in agreement, are like slices of bread. The age group in the middle reminds us of mayonnaise.

Sometimes I tell people they should learn about Christianity, if for no other reason, then at least so they can understand their own cultural background. I still think that’s true, but I’ve just been reading St. Thomas a Kempis, and now I wonder, if your cultural learning about the idea of Christ doesn’t lead you to worship the man Christ, what was the point?

It will do your soul great good to go and see this movie. The filmmaker waited sixteen years to be allowed into the Carthusian monastery of la Grande Chartreuse to film the lives of the monks. The result was 162 nearly silent minutes of footage, all filmed without a crew or artificial lighting. There’s no soundtrack and no narration, and only one short interview, from which the interviewer’s voice has been deleted so as not to spoil the Carthusian-ness. You might leave the theater with a better understanding of monastic life, and I’ll bet you’ll go through your whole next day a lot more slowly and quietly.

A few months ago, I was on an air-vac with a dear friend, a nurse, when she noticed me turning my Rosary ring. She thought it was good that I prayed, but admitted she didn’t get it. The other day though, I was walking past the nursing station when she called out: ”Hey, I heard you got a couple of interviews! I’ll start praying for you.” Before I could answer, a devout Sikh nurse drawing up a medication looked up with a big smile and announced “I already prayed!”

I heard this one from a holy Fraternity of St. Peter priest, and I have pretty strong traddy leanings myself, so I think this one won’t offer too much offense:

Q: How many Traditional Catholics does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: CHANGE??

My mother tells this story from BC’s north coast. She was teaching a class on archives, of which a hereditary chief of the Nisga’a nation was a member. Mom said he had the sort of regal bearing that makes you feel honoured to be in his presence. As the weekend progressed, it came to light that he had once been an alcoholic, but had dried up and become a protestant minister. In casual conversation, another member of the class asked him about Europeans uprooting native religions and replacing them with Christianity. “Well, I don’t know about that,” he bridled. “All I know is what Jesus did for me.”