I ended my last post on a self-query about the nature of presenting one's faith, and this theme recurred last night when we had an informal discussion with Archbishop Bohan, and the question of witness to the Faith came up, and again this morning in his conference where this came up again.
This has left me in a rather contemplative mood concerning my attitude towards sharing my faith online.
First, to examine what my actual practice has been, I tend to veer towards privacy, I suspect. Not in the sense that I keep my faith private, for I certainly make it well known that I am Catholic, and I would say indeed that, for most people who know me online, I am "The" Catholic--online, if not in their "real" lives. Partly, this is because I am a seminarian, but I would like to think that it's also because I am, and have always been, very knowledgeable about the Faith, and willing to spew it out to anyone who asks.
Nonetheless, I've always been a bit concerned about the fact that I really do try very hard not to offend the sensibilities of those who are not Catholic. On the one hand, it's very easy to justify this attitude to myself, given the knee-jerk reaction that any good Catholic tends to have towards fundamentalist evangelicals. Although there are many good, fervent believers in that stream of Christianity, with better prayer lives than I and more admirable faith, as a general way of life, they tend to be very simplistic--and rather "in your face."
Largely, I think this trend in Evangelical Christianity stems from its earlier American roots and a rejection of the intellectualism available in the Catholic and older Protestant traditions--a rejection more based in the fact that, as a grassroots, lower-class movement, the early evangelicals were not all that well-educated themselves, and so when encountering the "high-fallutin'" theologies of the other traditions, moved towards simplicity as their chief argument against them.
Now, as a Catholic, I come from a faith that can be put into very simple terms. This is a part of the beauty of it. One does not need to be a vastly intelligent academic to be Catholic, and the roster of the saints is full of some incredibly simple individuals. At the same time, however, the simplicity of the Faith does not limit it, and instead of being a tradition highly suspicious of science and reason, we are, I date to say, the most eminently rational religion in the world.
Lest I have the "Galileo episode" and "evolution" thrown in my face as evidence against the eminent rationality of the Catholic Church, I wish to clarify my position to the extent that, although the Catholic Church past and more presently, has found issues (justified to an extent in the case of evolution and unjustified ultimately in the case of Galileo) with various scientific and other rational theories, the issues presented have been themselves academic, rational issues, and not the simplistic Bible-thumping of the fundamentalists. Although not everyone may agree with the conclusions of our arguments, it would be idiocy to do us the indignity of saying that our arguments are unacademic and unreasonable.
Anyway, getting back to my original train of thought, as a Catholic I have a natural instinct to shy away from in-your-face evangelising--or proselytising, as it should really be known. Add to this the fact that I am a typical Canadian as well--and we have a very "don't rock the boat" mentality--and you get someone very much disinclined to go advertising his faith.
My approach, therefore, has always been to simply have an evangelisation of presence, of example. To borrow the phrase associated with St. Francis of Assisi: "preach always; use words if necessary." Archbishop Bohan's concluding message to us was much the same: "To those who know you, but do not know God, you must act in such a way that they will see God in what you do."
It was, of course, rather affirming to hear agreement with my own position, but I still wonder whether, perhaps, I might not be rather too complacent in my attitude. It is not that I think my approach is wrong, but rather that my application of it is poor. If the best way to evangelise is to demonstrate in my own day-to-day life what an awesome life it is to be in communion with God, in service to His church, and to be keeping His commandments; then I really ought to actually live my life in communion with God, in service to His church, and keeping His commandments. More importantly, I should not just keep my Christianity hidden away in a back pocket somewhere, just one aspect of me among many, no more obvious than my Tolkien affectations or my LEGO geekiness. Instead, it should be clear in everything I do that "I am a Catholic Christian. Jesus is the centre of my life, and He should be the centre of yours."
That last statement is one that I find hard to say. Not hard to believe! Hard to say. I have no trouble at all acknowledging that Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, and that no one can come to fulfilment save through Him, but I instinctively shy away from judging anyone for anything--which is good.
What I think I need to realise more firmly here is that, in saying "you need to come to Jesus" is that I am not judging someone. Really, I'm not. I know perfectly well that there are all sorts of reasons someone hasn't come to God, and I'm entirely too aware of my own shortcomings in that field to be feeling "holier than thou" about it in any way, but I'm so timid about the idea of appearing judgemental that I won't even express what, ultimately, is an expression of love.
Seriously.
Jesus said "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. If you believe in Me, you will not perish, but have Eternal Life."
God wants everyone. everyone. every single last person ever. to come to Him and love Him. He loves everyone with a passion so intense that He sent His only son to come and die for us. Not because we deserved it, for we certainly didn't, but because we needed it.
And although I am far from being holy enough that I actually feel, in the fibre of my being, that everyone should become Catholic out of my own love for them and concern, how can I possibly look at those around me, whom I love, and say that I do not want them to know Jesus?
I can't.
I may be weak and human and so unable to rouse myself yet to saintly passion for the conversion of the whole world, but I would be so utterly inhuman and remiss indeed if I did not desire that those I already love to know God and come to share eternal life with Him. If I may express it in the most banal of terms, Heaven will not be as awesome a place if all these atheist friends I love deny themselves the chance to go there, and it pains me to think that they are cutting themselves off from the source of eternal life.
It pains me more than if they were taking knives and slicing through their jugulars.
Moving out of one's comfort zone is hard, but I think it is a lot easier when done for love. As the Bible says, "for a good man, one might actually dare to die." For these good atheists, I might actually dare to live a better life myself. If I cannot rouse myself for my own sake to live the Christian calling, perhaps I can do it for love of them.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Subcreator
I've had a little more time this afternoon since Archbishop Bohan's conference than I did yesterday night, due to the time it takes my computer to turn on, and to email my parents about important stuff, so I've also had a little more time for his words to fade a bit from my mind--or to phrase that in a more flattering way, for the truly important parts to come clear.
Mostly, the Archbishop focused this afternoon on the "second creation" account in Genesis. Having come across a document in the Archives this summer that argued very passionately in what I consider to be the "Catholic fundamentalist" tradition, against the "two Creation accounts" thought regarding Genesis, I don't know how much credence I want to give either way to that idea... I certainly find myself put off by fundamentalist-Catholics, but on the other hand I'm wary of the "four sources" mentality that puts forward the "two Creation accounts" in the first place... so I'll go with a more spiritual middle ground and say God put forward them both with different purposes in mind.
Anyway, the compositional origins of the text are unimportant to what the Archbishop was saying...
Basically, distilled to its finest, His Grace was focusing on the relationship of God and humanity (perhaps the ongoing theme, if one recalls my last post), and how it was originally extremely intimate, familial--God and His created shared "one breath." He also focused on Man's creation "in the image and likeness of God" and this beautiful gift as, likewise, the source of our sins and woes ever since.
In essence, the Archbishop's words hit home, bouncing off the big red button labelled "that is so true!" Our desire to be like God, to be free from God, and in this modern, secular society to be free from any authority at all; is directly rooted in our nature "in the image and likeness of God." As the Archbishop pointed out, however, we tend to forget that we are NOT God, and go crazy with wanting to not only be in His image, but to be completely free of Him as well.
We can't do that. The created cannot freed itself from its reliance on the Creator. That is, if nothing else, completely embedded in Thomistic metaphysics, and the contrary opinion is behind all the self-destructive trends, past and present. In particular, though, I was definitely nodding away and hitting that big red button with regards to Archbishop Bohan's mentions of the western society we live in. We really do, as a culture, refuse to accept the boundaries laid down by authority. Certainly, this is endemic with regards to Divine Authority, as a glance at the issues of homosexual "marriage" and regular Church attendance--to say nothing of adherence to the teachings of the Church on other issues like contraception--will show without fail. However, this attitude is also prevalent in issues outside of the Church, but is true of society in general. We question the government's authority, we refuse to obey its laws (speeding...), we rebel against our parents, our teachers, and the institutions, such as the military, that emphasize discipline and authority are facing troubles recruiting.
It occurred to me, however, that this same disordered desire to "be like God" must, in fact, be a corruption of something good, if I want to adhere to the philosophical position put forward by Augustine, that evil, if it exists, must be the corruption of something good, since existence itself is good. It also occurred to me, moments later, that Tolkien had placed a great deal of time and effort into the idea of "subcreation." (I should mention, in the interests of full disclosure, that I have not been reading any great, theological literature so far this retreat, so much as I've been reading Tolkien. In my defence, I think there's no lack of applicable material in that particular field, however.)
Tolkien's idea of art as subcreation, however, also struck me immediately as ordered to a completely different end than the selfish desire to "be like God." To begin with, the very prefix "sub-" reminds us that Tolkien realised the place of subcreation as subsidiary to that of God's primary creation. Furthermore, although Tolkien continually repudiates the idea that his works have any allegorical meaning, and attempts to drive home the idea that they are stories told for the sake of the story, it seems nonetheless clear to me that Tolkien is not writing "art for art's sake."
This is borne out clearly in the "applicability vs. allegory" issue, since Tolkien goes to great lengths to show that, although not allegorical, and faithful firstly to its own inner consistency, the best story would be one that could be applied to any universal human situation. This is the "truth" that he speaks of in "On Fairy-Stories" as being contained in said stories. It is not a truth of "this is what actually happened" but a truth of "this is true of life."
By being "true to life," although Tolkien's subcreation is internally coherent first and not allegorical, it lacks any real kinship with the idea of "art for art's sake," which taken to its extremes divorces the artistic product from any representation of reality. Tolkien's work is stylised, but it remains a mirror for reality, whereas the grossest of modern art is so far removed from its origins it no longer represents anything, but has purpose only in the act of creation--and an act of creation is pointless and disordered if it has no purpose beyond itself.
And so we come to the end of my intertwined Tolkien and retreat train of thought... there was a great deal more in what the Archbishop said that I would have liked to have recalled, but I did not take notes--I should have, though, since he kept saying stuff that set off all checkmarks across the board.
It's at times like this, though, that I'm glad I have this extra blog. I don't want to get all preachy to people, and while I hope I've avoided "preachiness," I am definitely treading in the waters thereabouts... and in this philosophic mindset, I begin to wonder if maybe I shouldn't be a little "preachier."
Then I think about fundamentalist-Catholics....
Mostly, the Archbishop focused this afternoon on the "second creation" account in Genesis. Having come across a document in the Archives this summer that argued very passionately in what I consider to be the "Catholic fundamentalist" tradition, against the "two Creation accounts" thought regarding Genesis, I don't know how much credence I want to give either way to that idea... I certainly find myself put off by fundamentalist-Catholics, but on the other hand I'm wary of the "four sources" mentality that puts forward the "two Creation accounts" in the first place... so I'll go with a more spiritual middle ground and say God put forward them both with different purposes in mind.
Anyway, the compositional origins of the text are unimportant to what the Archbishop was saying...
Basically, distilled to its finest, His Grace was focusing on the relationship of God and humanity (perhaps the ongoing theme, if one recalls my last post), and how it was originally extremely intimate, familial--God and His created shared "one breath." He also focused on Man's creation "in the image and likeness of God" and this beautiful gift as, likewise, the source of our sins and woes ever since.
In essence, the Archbishop's words hit home, bouncing off the big red button labelled "that is so true!" Our desire to be like God, to be free from God, and in this modern, secular society to be free from any authority at all; is directly rooted in our nature "in the image and likeness of God." As the Archbishop pointed out, however, we tend to forget that we are NOT God, and go crazy with wanting to not only be in His image, but to be completely free of Him as well.
We can't do that. The created cannot freed itself from its reliance on the Creator. That is, if nothing else, completely embedded in Thomistic metaphysics, and the contrary opinion is behind all the self-destructive trends, past and present. In particular, though, I was definitely nodding away and hitting that big red button with regards to Archbishop Bohan's mentions of the western society we live in. We really do, as a culture, refuse to accept the boundaries laid down by authority. Certainly, this is endemic with regards to Divine Authority, as a glance at the issues of homosexual "marriage" and regular Church attendance--to say nothing of adherence to the teachings of the Church on other issues like contraception--will show without fail. However, this attitude is also prevalent in issues outside of the Church, but is true of society in general. We question the government's authority, we refuse to obey its laws (speeding...), we rebel against our parents, our teachers, and the institutions, such as the military, that emphasize discipline and authority are facing troubles recruiting.
It occurred to me, however, that this same disordered desire to "be like God" must, in fact, be a corruption of something good, if I want to adhere to the philosophical position put forward by Augustine, that evil, if it exists, must be the corruption of something good, since existence itself is good. It also occurred to me, moments later, that Tolkien had placed a great deal of time and effort into the idea of "subcreation." (I should mention, in the interests of full disclosure, that I have not been reading any great, theological literature so far this retreat, so much as I've been reading Tolkien. In my defence, I think there's no lack of applicable material in that particular field, however.)
Tolkien's idea of art as subcreation, however, also struck me immediately as ordered to a completely different end than the selfish desire to "be like God." To begin with, the very prefix "sub-" reminds us that Tolkien realised the place of subcreation as subsidiary to that of God's primary creation. Furthermore, although Tolkien continually repudiates the idea that his works have any allegorical meaning, and attempts to drive home the idea that they are stories told for the sake of the story, it seems nonetheless clear to me that Tolkien is not writing "art for art's sake."
This is borne out clearly in the "applicability vs. allegory" issue, since Tolkien goes to great lengths to show that, although not allegorical, and faithful firstly to its own inner consistency, the best story would be one that could be applied to any universal human situation. This is the "truth" that he speaks of in "On Fairy-Stories" as being contained in said stories. It is not a truth of "this is what actually happened" but a truth of "this is true of life."
By being "true to life," although Tolkien's subcreation is internally coherent first and not allegorical, it lacks any real kinship with the idea of "art for art's sake," which taken to its extremes divorces the artistic product from any representation of reality. Tolkien's work is stylised, but it remains a mirror for reality, whereas the grossest of modern art is so far removed from its origins it no longer represents anything, but has purpose only in the act of creation--and an act of creation is pointless and disordered if it has no purpose beyond itself.
And so we come to the end of my intertwined Tolkien and retreat train of thought... there was a great deal more in what the Archbishop said that I would have liked to have recalled, but I did not take notes--I should have, though, since he kept saying stuff that set off all checkmarks across the board.
It's at times like this, though, that I'm glad I have this extra blog. I don't want to get all preachy to people, and while I hope I've avoided "preachiness," I am definitely treading in the waters thereabouts... and in this philosophic mindset, I begin to wonder if maybe I shouldn't be a little "preachier."
Then I think about fundamentalist-Catholics....
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Stand-in
I have just--and I literally mean just about "just"--come from the first conference of the annual opening retreat of the seminary year, and while I've had an exciting enough weekend moving back in, my muse has refused to enthuse at news. On the other hand, however, it responds to the lightest of touches from thought-provocations that occurred during Archbishop Bohan's first conference.
The chief thought, and the one I'm recording here, has to do with relationships. In speaking of our own relationships with Christ, the Archbishop noted that we generally only allow a very small number of people into our "personal space," emotionally speaking. We only allow a very few to come close enough to "touch us." The point of this, of course, is that if Jesus is to touch our lives, we must allow Him to be that close, to be within our very person, our personal space.
This thinking, however, sent me off on a tangent relating to how this connects to the sort of relationship priests have with their people. The thing that set me off was thinking that, in general, most of the people we allow to be really close to us, in our personal space, are people who allow us into theirs in return, and from a certain logical perspective, this is necessarily so. Looking at physical objects, if you move one into contact with another, it is impossible for only one to become close to the other, but both must become proximate to each other.
This rule of thumb, however, does not seem to hold much water when it relates to the relationships of priests, since priests are very often invited right into the heart of people's lives--often under the context of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, but in a broader sense as well. Unless they have had reason to think otherwise, people tend to be remarkably open and trusting of priests, and will confide in them, spill their woes to them, and ask help from them--often without hesitation. And it is most certainly not the norm for the priest to respond in like kind to his people, and, indeed, if the priest does have such close friends, his relationship is then entirely that of an individual person, and not that of a priest, particularly.
What this concludes with, then, is an out-of-the-blue, unexpected affirmation of the understanding of the priesthood that explains the role of the priest within the Christian community as that of an alter Christus. The priest, in a sense, is open to such remarkable trust because he stands in persona Christi. Likewise, however, the priest does not return this closeness because it is not a closeness that is shared with him as a person. The reciprocity of the closeness comes into play in the relationship of Christ and the Christian. Though the priest is a stand-in for Christ, he is most certainly not Christ himself.
Most definitely, this is no new doctrine... but it is always cool to have a familiar belief come at you from an angle which you never considered, and when the divine mysteries manifest themselves again and again in situations you'd never considered, it is, of course, nothing other than marvellous.
The chief thought, and the one I'm recording here, has to do with relationships. In speaking of our own relationships with Christ, the Archbishop noted that we generally only allow a very small number of people into our "personal space," emotionally speaking. We only allow a very few to come close enough to "touch us." The point of this, of course, is that if Jesus is to touch our lives, we must allow Him to be that close, to be within our very person, our personal space.
This thinking, however, sent me off on a tangent relating to how this connects to the sort of relationship priests have with their people. The thing that set me off was thinking that, in general, most of the people we allow to be really close to us, in our personal space, are people who allow us into theirs in return, and from a certain logical perspective, this is necessarily so. Looking at physical objects, if you move one into contact with another, it is impossible for only one to become close to the other, but both must become proximate to each other.
This rule of thumb, however, does not seem to hold much water when it relates to the relationships of priests, since priests are very often invited right into the heart of people's lives--often under the context of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, but in a broader sense as well. Unless they have had reason to think otherwise, people tend to be remarkably open and trusting of priests, and will confide in them, spill their woes to them, and ask help from them--often without hesitation. And it is most certainly not the norm for the priest to respond in like kind to his people, and, indeed, if the priest does have such close friends, his relationship is then entirely that of an individual person, and not that of a priest, particularly.
What this concludes with, then, is an out-of-the-blue, unexpected affirmation of the understanding of the priesthood that explains the role of the priest within the Christian community as that of an alter Christus. The priest, in a sense, is open to such remarkable trust because he stands in persona Christi. Likewise, however, the priest does not return this closeness because it is not a closeness that is shared with him as a person. The reciprocity of the closeness comes into play in the relationship of Christ and the Christian. Though the priest is a stand-in for Christ, he is most certainly not Christ himself.
Most definitely, this is no new doctrine... but it is always cool to have a familiar belief come at you from an angle which you never considered, and when the divine mysteries manifest themselves again and again in situations you'd never considered, it is, of course, nothing other than marvellous.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Weekend Woes
This weekend just past started a bit sooner than I was planning, when I came back into my room from brushing my teeth at 6:45 am to see that I'd missed a call on my cellular phone. Checking the message, I discovered it was from home, and my grandfather (who was in the hospital) had had a couple of seizures that night and was doing quite bad. They were calling the family in.
So I finished dressing, ate a rushed breakfast, called the Archives to say I wouldn't be in, threw my luggage into the car (I was already planning on going to Olds for the weekend, but not until after work), bought gas, and was off to Red Deer.
Arriving there, I joined Oma, my dad and his four siblings, two of the daughters-in-law, and one of my older cousins in the hospital, all of us having arrived expecting the worst, and after seeing Opa, I'm inclined to think it was well-warranted at the time. Opa looked pretty bad on Friday morning.
He ate breakfast on that morning though, and seemed to have stabilised after a rough, rough night. A bit shaken, the extended family broke up around noon. I went home and picked up my planned weekend a few hours early.
Meanwhile, my next oldest brother has been "moving" this month. It's been something of a glacial process because he really doesn't like change and he got talked into moving out a month early, while the rental market was still pre-back-to-school, so while he has a place and has been slowly moving stuff there, he's not exactly budging from Olds all that fast.
Anyway, I got caught up in this when he decided he should probably get a second load of stuff up to Red Deer while I was home, thus utilising my slave labour, helping him haul a truckload of boxes and a couch up two flights of stairs. Let me say that I'm glad I'm not around to "offer" any further assistance.
Not only is my brother moving to Red Deer, but our pastor of eleven years has been transferred to one of the parishes there, to the heartache-laden trauma of my nine-year-old sister, whose distress I've attempted to allay somewhat by telling her about the new priest (who I know somewhat from St. Albert), but she has more less refused to be consoled. Personally, I give it about a month before she discovers that Fr. Maurice is an awesome priest, but in the meantime I'm just as glad not to be at home this week.
We stopped in to visit Opa again before leaving Red Deer on Sunday, after unloading my brother's stuff and going for supper, and he looked amazingly better--almost back to normal. Weak, yes, but talking and sitting up and eating (in his own words) "to beat the ban".
This is the problem, if I may call it that, with calling the family in where Opa is concerned... he's got more lives than the average cat. He survived a colostomy six years ago that came right on the heels (>48hrs) of an aneurysm surgery, which is as nasty as an open heart surgery. They actually sent him home to die a month after that, but no sooner had he gotten back into his own bed and started drinking some iced cappuccinos than he began to slowly recover.
His problem right now is dialysis... His kidneys are almost completely shot, after a couple years of kidney trouble, and he started that this week, after getting the stents earlier this year, and I think (from the sounds of it) that the chief problem this week was the shock to his system, which is supposed to be really nasty to begin with. You also tend to lose some blood in the process, because the cleaning breaks down some of the blood cells. Whatever the case, it gave us quite the scare...
The thing is, it's only a matter of time. Opa's in sound mind and about as active as his increasingly limited stamina will permit, but his kidneys are simply the only organs that have actually failed. At age 85, everything else is worn out and who knows how close to following suit. All it takes is one little push and the whole system will cascade.
Personally, I don't think that's such a bad scenario. At 85, no one can say he's not had a full life and he's avoided senior's homes and such completely. If he slides into the afterlife in the next few months I'd call it more of a perfect ending than a tragedy, though definitely liable to cast a blue cloud over the family for a while. In the meanwhile, however long Opa has, I'm a little bit jumpier over his prospects than usually, and I'll be eyeing the voicemail suspiciously for a while. If I don't have cause to go home until Thanksgiving, that's probably a good sign indeed.
So I finished dressing, ate a rushed breakfast, called the Archives to say I wouldn't be in, threw my luggage into the car (I was already planning on going to Olds for the weekend, but not until after work), bought gas, and was off to Red Deer.
Arriving there, I joined Oma, my dad and his four siblings, two of the daughters-in-law, and one of my older cousins in the hospital, all of us having arrived expecting the worst, and after seeing Opa, I'm inclined to think it was well-warranted at the time. Opa looked pretty bad on Friday morning.
He ate breakfast on that morning though, and seemed to have stabilised after a rough, rough night. A bit shaken, the extended family broke up around noon. I went home and picked up my planned weekend a few hours early.
Meanwhile, my next oldest brother has been "moving" this month. It's been something of a glacial process because he really doesn't like change and he got talked into moving out a month early, while the rental market was still pre-back-to-school, so while he has a place and has been slowly moving stuff there, he's not exactly budging from Olds all that fast.
Anyway, I got caught up in this when he decided he should probably get a second load of stuff up to Red Deer while I was home, thus utilising my slave labour, helping him haul a truckload of boxes and a couch up two flights of stairs. Let me say that I'm glad I'm not around to "offer" any further assistance.
Not only is my brother moving to Red Deer, but our pastor of eleven years has been transferred to one of the parishes there, to the heartache-laden trauma of my nine-year-old sister, whose distress I've attempted to allay somewhat by telling her about the new priest (who I know somewhat from St. Albert), but she has more less refused to be consoled. Personally, I give it about a month before she discovers that Fr. Maurice is an awesome priest, but in the meantime I'm just as glad not to be at home this week.
We stopped in to visit Opa again before leaving Red Deer on Sunday, after unloading my brother's stuff and going for supper, and he looked amazingly better--almost back to normal. Weak, yes, but talking and sitting up and eating (in his own words) "to beat the ban".
This is the problem, if I may call it that, with calling the family in where Opa is concerned... he's got more lives than the average cat. He survived a colostomy six years ago that came right on the heels (>48hrs) of an aneurysm surgery, which is as nasty as an open heart surgery. They actually sent him home to die a month after that, but no sooner had he gotten back into his own bed and started drinking some iced cappuccinos than he began to slowly recover.
His problem right now is dialysis... His kidneys are almost completely shot, after a couple years of kidney trouble, and he started that this week, after getting the stents earlier this year, and I think (from the sounds of it) that the chief problem this week was the shock to his system, which is supposed to be really nasty to begin with. You also tend to lose some blood in the process, because the cleaning breaks down some of the blood cells. Whatever the case, it gave us quite the scare...
The thing is, it's only a matter of time. Opa's in sound mind and about as active as his increasingly limited stamina will permit, but his kidneys are simply the only organs that have actually failed. At age 85, everything else is worn out and who knows how close to following suit. All it takes is one little push and the whole system will cascade.
Personally, I don't think that's such a bad scenario. At 85, no one can say he's not had a full life and he's avoided senior's homes and such completely. If he slides into the afterlife in the next few months I'd call it more of a perfect ending than a tragedy, though definitely liable to cast a blue cloud over the family for a while. In the meanwhile, however long Opa has, I'm a little bit jumpier over his prospects than usually, and I'll be eyeing the voicemail suspiciously for a while. If I don't have cause to go home until Thanksgiving, that's probably a good sign indeed.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Same Old, Some New
It is now the third time since I started this blog that I'm logging in to post and report that, although my team had some good games, we ultimately lost out completely in the World Bunnock Championship tournament in Macklin, Saskatchewan. Every year, all sorts of diverse descendants, in-laws, and friends of the Russian-German pioneers of that part of the country flock back to their ancestral homeland to compete in what, on face value, looks like a really silly game.
I can now add a sixteenth notch to my non-corporeal belt in recognition of sixteen such world championships attended (out of a total of 16), but despite seven years or so of attempting it, I'm still waiting for the first notch to indicate winning something. Anything. Even the bottom prize in the "D" Consolation event is beyond reach it seems.
The irony in the whole issue of doing equally abysmally for each of the half dozen years or more that I've been playing is that I've definitely improved in skill, and my team was good in general this year. Actually, all my family played well, despite less practice than ever. We all lost out, totally, though. It wasn't that we didn't win ANY games, it was that we never won them back to back; you'll never advance in the tournament if you can't win back-to-back.
Still, it was a great weekend, as always. My brother, sister, cousin, and I played together, the first year I've been on a team entirely in more-or-less my peer group (I'm the oldest of the team, but a four year, six day gap between my and my sister beats previous years with the younger siblings and parents), and it was our cousin's first time playing at Macklin. We had a good time--especially teasing my sister!
As good as it was, it's hard for the most part to come up with particulars about the weekend that stood out. For me, a part of what makes the tournament so attractive is its sameness from year to year. It functions as something of a reunion as you get to see the same parcel of cousins (some more, some less) that quite often you don't get to see otherwise. It's part pilgrimage, in that the Saturday night Mass is always one of the religious highlights of the year for me, and gathered as half the congregation is from across western Canada, there's definitely a similarity. No, if it weren't for an unexpected connection, there'd be little particular to this year to note, other than the fact that it was extremely windy all weekend. I enjoyed that, since it really cooled off the heat, which would have been extreme otherwise, but it made it a little dusty and some people really didn't care for it.
However, my Macklin report does not end there because, in fact, I was to be surprised to make an unanticipated connection back to the Eucharistic Congress.
Now, it really shouldn't have been all that unanticipated, since I had run into a couple in Quebec who had Macklin roots, and indeed the husband had claimed to have been to all the tournaments as well--and indeed, once he said he was from Macklin, I immediately recognised him as one of the Stangs (distant relatives. More importantly, since that's true of everyone in the tournament, a rather prominent name in the Bunnock field). So I wasn't entirely unsurprised when I caught sight of him later on Saturday afternoon. He didn't recognise me at first, but the guy sitting beside him, who I did NOT recognise, had also been at the Congress, recognised me, and we renewed our acquaintances briefly, and that was that.
I should also mention that on Saturday morning I noticed a priest walking around sporting a Belgian flag. At the opening ceremonies at noon, he was put front and centre as an international guest, and, while interested, I didn't think too much of it, since we've had Australians, Japanese, and British players turn up before. The fact that Fr. Fredrick was, in fact, a priest, was a bit surprising, but I didn't think about it, since this was Macklin and the whole town is Catholic (or so the majority makes it feel. These are my ancestral roots, after all).
It was a surprise, therefore, to be coming out of the pew at the end of Mass on Saturday evening and to look back and see another face from the Eucharistic Congress. There was no mistaking her, however, since I had spent a week close enough to floor that I'd become familiar with seeing the same volunteers everyday, and since the St. Joseph's seminarians had been the only group of pilgrims to eat at the same cafeteria as the Youth Service volunteers, I was quite confident.
So in a rather unlike-the-usual-shy-Michael approach, I went over and asked if she had been at the Eucharistic Congress as a volunteer and upon an affirmative answer, I introduced myself, and asked what she was doing in Macklin. Her companion (if I recall aright, one of a group of CCO (Catholic Campus Outreach)-related people there) had recognised me from the Congress, though I had to confess I didn't recognise him (at least not at the moment, though in hindsight I do think he was familiar, though certainly not enough to have said where from... if not Macklin).
Anyway, it turns out that she had been coming to Macklin for three or four years, having been dragged out via the CCO connection by the same Stang that I had already run into both in Quebec and in Macklin. The Eucharistic Congress connection went farther, however, because it turned out that Fr. Fredrick was himself out in Macklin as a result of the Congress, having been loaned to the Archdiocese of Quebec and having met the volunteers at the Congress. He had come out to Saskatoon for some of his summer holidays, and it was apparently decided that he simply had to come out and try Bones (I agree, he simply had to try).
Though it didn't absorb great chunks of my weekend to any extent, this chance encounter really made my weekend--quite possibly because of the above-mentioned pilgrimage aspect I associate with Macklin. To discover a connection back to the spiritual highwater mark of my summer, as well as to see that people like CCO employees and Eucharistic Congress volunteers love the tournament as much as I do is totally awesome, if only because it means I'm not crazy.
It also meant that, on Sunday night, I was able to get the right connections to find out about the extra-ordinary Mass on Monday morning. Extra-ordinary in the sense of "out of the ordinary", since Monday is pastor's day off, so there's normally no Mass, but Fr. Fredrick was willing to do one. I wouldn't have known otherwise, however, and since it wasn't a regular Mass, I wouldn't have known the time if I hadn't been able to make contact on Monday morning.
As it turned out, that was almost as awesome a Mass as the Saturday night one. There was pretty much the full musical complement--more than a typical weekday Mass, certainly, and probably a special tribute to the occasion, and because Monday was the Feast of St-Jean-Marie-Baptiste Vianney, I was extra-pleased to be able to get to Mass, since he's both the patron saint of pastors (and so something of a favourite saint for this seminarian) as well as the saint whose name I chose for Confirmation. Fr. Fredrick is also quite a funny preacher. Rather quiet and dry, but still making jokes in his slow English. If he were really fluent, I suspect he'd be hilarious.
So all in all, it was an awesome weekend. I drove my cousin back home, since she's from the Edmonton area, and my family was headed back to Olds. Then I got stuck at my aunt and uncle's for most of the evening, only getting home at midnight last night, but that wasn't so back. I love spending time with family, and this is a branch of it I haven't been around as much as I'd like (which is actually true of every branch, I think...). We also stopped in on the way back to visit Grandma, which was also good, since it's been a few months, and my cousin is off to Ontario for the next year and so this is probably the last such visit for a while.
What with meeting the Eucharistic Congress connection and having a cousin there for the first time, I took to thinking to myself on Sunday afternoon about what it would be like to have the different Barrow-downers out there, but as much as I think all Barrow-downers would enjoy playing Bones (objections to the idea of playing with parts of dead horses notwithstanding), I don't think the tournament would work for all of them. Although, to be honest... I've seen people dragged out there that loved it, despite the odds. Still, I think I know enough about some 'Downers that I could probably generalise...
The Finns, I decided first, would end up loving it. This struck me as momentarily odd, because the tournament is rather redneck in some aspects, but the more I think about it, the more I agree--but they'd have to be there en masse.
Rune would really like it. You get to randomly meet people all day. There's lots of partying and drinking (though I do suspect he'd consider the beer quality rather indiscriminate) and an active, party atmosphere. Just as long as he didn't talk politics...
Jay, I don't think, would like it. Maybe with the right crowd to hang out with he'd enjoy observing some of it, but I really can't see him getting into the spirit of it that much. And I don't think it's the fact that he's Hindu (though the tournament is definitely, as a rural Saskatchewanian event, pretty whitewashed), so much as the fact that he's an Oxford intellectual.
Fea would dislike it for similar reasons as Jay, though not the same. There would also, I think, be an element of dislike for being around the large crowds all the time, and where the boorish redneckness might amuse and inflame Jay, I think Fea would just dislike it generally.
The Phantom is also hard to picture at Macklin... though I could see him enjoying it well enough if he had a team of his friends. And I can definitely see him being the accomplished player.
Mithalwen is the sort who would enjoy it if it was her family... but it isn't, so I really can't see her getting into it... though I think I could be wrong. It's also possible that she'd really enjoy it, if playing with a team of friends.
This is about where I stopped... not so much because I couldn't do mental analyses (right or wrong) on any other 'Downers, but because I think I got distracted or had a game to play or something, and I never picked up the thread again. I would now, but I'm just a bit too tired. What with getting home at midnight and having my usual early morning before work, I was really sluggish today...
I can now add a sixteenth notch to my non-corporeal belt in recognition of sixteen such world championships attended (out of a total of 16), but despite seven years or so of attempting it, I'm still waiting for the first notch to indicate winning something. Anything. Even the bottom prize in the "D" Consolation event is beyond reach it seems.
The irony in the whole issue of doing equally abysmally for each of the half dozen years or more that I've been playing is that I've definitely improved in skill, and my team was good in general this year. Actually, all my family played well, despite less practice than ever. We all lost out, totally, though. It wasn't that we didn't win ANY games, it was that we never won them back to back; you'll never advance in the tournament if you can't win back-to-back.
Still, it was a great weekend, as always. My brother, sister, cousin, and I played together, the first year I've been on a team entirely in more-or-less my peer group (I'm the oldest of the team, but a four year, six day gap between my and my sister beats previous years with the younger siblings and parents), and it was our cousin's first time playing at Macklin. We had a good time--especially teasing my sister!
As good as it was, it's hard for the most part to come up with particulars about the weekend that stood out. For me, a part of what makes the tournament so attractive is its sameness from year to year. It functions as something of a reunion as you get to see the same parcel of cousins (some more, some less) that quite often you don't get to see otherwise. It's part pilgrimage, in that the Saturday night Mass is always one of the religious highlights of the year for me, and gathered as half the congregation is from across western Canada, there's definitely a similarity. No, if it weren't for an unexpected connection, there'd be little particular to this year to note, other than the fact that it was extremely windy all weekend. I enjoyed that, since it really cooled off the heat, which would have been extreme otherwise, but it made it a little dusty and some people really didn't care for it.
However, my Macklin report does not end there because, in fact, I was to be surprised to make an unanticipated connection back to the Eucharistic Congress.
Now, it really shouldn't have been all that unanticipated, since I had run into a couple in Quebec who had Macklin roots, and indeed the husband had claimed to have been to all the tournaments as well--and indeed, once he said he was from Macklin, I immediately recognised him as one of the Stangs (distant relatives. More importantly, since that's true of everyone in the tournament, a rather prominent name in the Bunnock field). So I wasn't entirely unsurprised when I caught sight of him later on Saturday afternoon. He didn't recognise me at first, but the guy sitting beside him, who I did NOT recognise, had also been at the Congress, recognised me, and we renewed our acquaintances briefly, and that was that.
I should also mention that on Saturday morning I noticed a priest walking around sporting a Belgian flag. At the opening ceremonies at noon, he was put front and centre as an international guest, and, while interested, I didn't think too much of it, since we've had Australians, Japanese, and British players turn up before. The fact that Fr. Fredrick was, in fact, a priest, was a bit surprising, but I didn't think about it, since this was Macklin and the whole town is Catholic (or so the majority makes it feel. These are my ancestral roots, after all).
It was a surprise, therefore, to be coming out of the pew at the end of Mass on Saturday evening and to look back and see another face from the Eucharistic Congress. There was no mistaking her, however, since I had spent a week close enough to floor that I'd become familiar with seeing the same volunteers everyday, and since the St. Joseph's seminarians had been the only group of pilgrims to eat at the same cafeteria as the Youth Service volunteers, I was quite confident.
So in a rather unlike-the-usual-shy-Michael approach, I went over and asked if she had been at the Eucharistic Congress as a volunteer and upon an affirmative answer, I introduced myself, and asked what she was doing in Macklin. Her companion (if I recall aright, one of a group of CCO (Catholic Campus Outreach)-related people there) had recognised me from the Congress, though I had to confess I didn't recognise him (at least not at the moment, though in hindsight I do think he was familiar, though certainly not enough to have said where from... if not Macklin).
Anyway, it turns out that she had been coming to Macklin for three or four years, having been dragged out via the CCO connection by the same Stang that I had already run into both in Quebec and in Macklin. The Eucharistic Congress connection went farther, however, because it turned out that Fr. Fredrick was himself out in Macklin as a result of the Congress, having been loaned to the Archdiocese of Quebec and having met the volunteers at the Congress. He had come out to Saskatoon for some of his summer holidays, and it was apparently decided that he simply had to come out and try Bones (I agree, he simply had to try).
Though it didn't absorb great chunks of my weekend to any extent, this chance encounter really made my weekend--quite possibly because of the above-mentioned pilgrimage aspect I associate with Macklin. To discover a connection back to the spiritual highwater mark of my summer, as well as to see that people like CCO employees and Eucharistic Congress volunteers love the tournament as much as I do is totally awesome, if only because it means I'm not crazy.
It also meant that, on Sunday night, I was able to get the right connections to find out about the extra-ordinary Mass on Monday morning. Extra-ordinary in the sense of "out of the ordinary", since Monday is pastor's day off, so there's normally no Mass, but Fr. Fredrick was willing to do one. I wouldn't have known otherwise, however, and since it wasn't a regular Mass, I wouldn't have known the time if I hadn't been able to make contact on Monday morning.
As it turned out, that was almost as awesome a Mass as the Saturday night one. There was pretty much the full musical complement--more than a typical weekday Mass, certainly, and probably a special tribute to the occasion, and because Monday was the Feast of St-Jean-Marie-Baptiste Vianney, I was extra-pleased to be able to get to Mass, since he's both the patron saint of pastors (and so something of a favourite saint for this seminarian) as well as the saint whose name I chose for Confirmation. Fr. Fredrick is also quite a funny preacher. Rather quiet and dry, but still making jokes in his slow English. If he were really fluent, I suspect he'd be hilarious.
So all in all, it was an awesome weekend. I drove my cousin back home, since she's from the Edmonton area, and my family was headed back to Olds. Then I got stuck at my aunt and uncle's for most of the evening, only getting home at midnight last night, but that wasn't so back. I love spending time with family, and this is a branch of it I haven't been around as much as I'd like (which is actually true of every branch, I think...). We also stopped in on the way back to visit Grandma, which was also good, since it's been a few months, and my cousin is off to Ontario for the next year and so this is probably the last such visit for a while.
What with meeting the Eucharistic Congress connection and having a cousin there for the first time, I took to thinking to myself on Sunday afternoon about what it would be like to have the different Barrow-downers out there, but as much as I think all Barrow-downers would enjoy playing Bones (objections to the idea of playing with parts of dead horses notwithstanding), I don't think the tournament would work for all of them. Although, to be honest... I've seen people dragged out there that loved it, despite the odds. Still, I think I know enough about some 'Downers that I could probably generalise...
The Finns, I decided first, would end up loving it. This struck me as momentarily odd, because the tournament is rather redneck in some aspects, but the more I think about it, the more I agree--but they'd have to be there en masse.
Rune would really like it. You get to randomly meet people all day. There's lots of partying and drinking (though I do suspect he'd consider the beer quality rather indiscriminate) and an active, party atmosphere. Just as long as he didn't talk politics...
Jay, I don't think, would like it. Maybe with the right crowd to hang out with he'd enjoy observing some of it, but I really can't see him getting into the spirit of it that much. And I don't think it's the fact that he's Hindu (though the tournament is definitely, as a rural Saskatchewanian event, pretty whitewashed), so much as the fact that he's an Oxford intellectual.
Fea would dislike it for similar reasons as Jay, though not the same. There would also, I think, be an element of dislike for being around the large crowds all the time, and where the boorish redneckness might amuse and inflame Jay, I think Fea would just dislike it generally.
The Phantom is also hard to picture at Macklin... though I could see him enjoying it well enough if he had a team of his friends. And I can definitely see him being the accomplished player.
Mithalwen is the sort who would enjoy it if it was her family... but it isn't, so I really can't see her getting into it... though I think I could be wrong. It's also possible that she'd really enjoy it, if playing with a team of friends.
This is about where I stopped... not so much because I couldn't do mental analyses (right or wrong) on any other 'Downers, but because I think I got distracted or had a game to play or something, and I never picked up the thread again. I would now, but I'm just a bit too tired. What with getting home at midnight and having my usual early morning before work, I was really sluggish today...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)