Uncommon Sense

Should we look at this from a right/wrong perspective?  Or should we do what is in the “best interest” of the American public?  That really isn’t the full range of choices we face.  Have we really become that stupid?  Rescuing the crooks who got us into this mess isn’t going to solve anything.  I want heads on platters.  I want execs and CEOs doing jail time.  I want assets seized.  In a free market economy (play by the rules or there is no game) you go out of business because you deserve to go out of business.  It is a matter of right/wrong.  The bailout is wrong.

To the answer, “if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?” I propose the following answer:  Evidently not.  The liturgical landscape of the future changed this past Wednesday, without a creak, a crash, or a boom, when BXVI summarily dismissed the remaining Piero Marini appointees of the office of liturgical celebrations and replaced them with solidly traditionally thinking members.   This is huge news, and it sort of went under the radar this weekend.  The California Catholic Daily picked it up on Sunday at noon. 

After a cost/benefit analysis between the two blog sites, I’ve decided to go with WordPress.  It is open source.  I don’t have to slip them a Hamilton every month.  ‘Nuff said.  I like the designs at WordPress better, too.  I’m having a bit of trouble switching my previous posts into the new blog, but that will work itself out in the next few…whatever…minutes, days, weeks.  I don’t care.  It’ll end up here eventually.  In the mean time, welcome to the new format.

Since the motivation for one of these poems stemmed from a previous post, I thought I'd bare my artistic soul and let you have a gander at my failings in verse.

The first was written several years ago, and is about my oldest son when he was four. We used to own this old white Escort wagon, and we had gone out somewhere, me in a hurry and him with a fist full of his little plastic dinosaurs.

I didn't want them scattered all over creation, and told him to leave them in the car. He put them on the dashboard. 

Well, it was hot that day, and the windows were up.

The poignant moment for me wasn't that he cried when he saw that his dinos were now a multi-colored puddle of liquid plastic, but that it might have been sadness over the loss of the love he had invested in them. He really loved playing with those dinos. They were easily replaced at the dollar store, but the image stuck in my head for some reason and the poem wrote itself. 

The second one is a collection of images from playing in the woods behind the house I grew up in with a childhood friend who died in his twenties under tragic circumstances. It is a memorial, in a way, of those happy days, still tinged with sadness that we so easily lose our childhood innocence.

Its getting dangerously close to autumn, and that means “projects.” This was one of those project weekends.

I started painting the shutters over a year ago. I got all of them done except for the back of the house, then I got, ahem, “called to Texas” for a few months.

Well, the last of the shutters are now wearing the latest in fashionable blue and Madame is very happy. Happy because I got off of my lazy butt and did some work on the house.

And oh, I did a lot of work on the house. In addition to the shutters, I replaced all the worn or otherwise hinky looking window screens, and even even got the front porch painted the rest of the way.

Yes, it too has been sitting there half painted for over a year. But ah! The neighbors have nothing to complain about anymore, except maybe for the fire pit we installed in the back yard over where I cut the cherry tree down.

I cannot tell a lie, I really did cut down the cherry tree. It had been a nuisance ever since “one of the kids” tried to climb it when when they both were small, and split the thing in two.

We tried to mend it but over the years the rend became more and more unsightly. Out I came with the ax and in a matter of a few well placed blows it fell to the ground with a creeking whoosh.

Not quite. It took me more like two hundred blows to fell the sucker which almost made me pass out, and when it did finally fall over it was because I pushed it. It didn’t make any particularly cool sounds, either.

What is uncommon about the sense of this post? Learn from me my fellow counter-weighted, ring bearing bipeds…when the wife drops hints about the exterior of the house, she isn’t suggesting hypotheticals, she’s telling you to get off your butt and work on the house and yard.

Which we should do with relish anyway, shouldn’t we? I think so.

Reason one, cheap land, should have a wide appeal for many, especially those who live where real estate is unreal estate. The second reason is closer to my heart, the parish church.

St. Charles was glorious in it’s heyday before the wreckovators came in after Vatican II and installed orange carpet and painted the ceiling mud brown. Don’t even ask, I don’t know. Maybe it was on sale because nobody else would buy it.

Certainly, no crew from “Total Makeover – Ecclesiastical Edition” was involved. Take a look at the first picture, it is from the 1930’s. I’m not sure if they had “applique” in those days, so I’m assuming that the images to either side of the crucifix are frescoes. The ceiling was ornate and the detail work was amazingly delicate. Now this is what a Catholic church is supposed to look like.

According to whom? Why, people with uncommon sense, of course.

I have another picture of the church from 1964, and not much had changed. the altar rail had been painted white, the adoring angels on the outside pedestals of the high altar were gone though the ones directly to either side of the tabernacle remained.

If you really want to see it, let me know. But for now it will suffice to introduce picture number two, or what St. Charles Borromeo in Peru, Indiana looks like today.

Yeah, I know that the unwieldy and, shall we say, uncomely Advent wreath is blocking out a lot of the altar view, but it does show off the neon orange carpet and the brown ceiling.

And so I give you reason number two for moving to Peru. A lot of potential to work with. You see that someone had the foresight to suggest they put the altar out in the nave and wrap some pews around it to the right and left, thereby leaving the high altar undisturbed.

When somebody goes to that length to assault the Catholic sensibilities of the average parishoner, suggesting something completely unheard of and one might say “discontinuous” with tradition, they sometimes leave a base or two uncovered. In the end, it is pretty easy to reverse the ill conceived work of perhaps well meaning but destructive persons.

Another pretty church in the diocese also had the misfortune of enduring such an arrangement. I spoke with the holy priest several years ago after he was installed as pastor, and he didn’t hesitate to bring up the subject of the altar arrangement.

After a campaign to institute perpetual Eucharistic adoration and months and months of down in the street pastoral work, he implemented a church renovation plan that ended up with the results captured in picture number three. So you see, we could have similar results here in Peru with St. Charles.

I say that it wouldn’t take much, but it say it with tongue in cheek. But I’ve seen it happen, right down the road in Kokomo at St. Patrick’s, where the third photo was taken from.

And yes, if you move to Peru, you can tell people that you live just north of Kokomo, and they’ll think you’re in the Florida keys.

St. Charles Borromeo is my domiciled parish, to use a canon law term. And I attend some weekday Masses there, but I attend the parish of my childhood in neighboring Wabash.

Once you get here, we’ll figure it out. Stay tuned for reason number three.

Today, I'm picking up where I left off in an earlier post (Auburn).  Don't freak out because there are some pre-conditions.  I'm not going to let just anybody move here.  But if you're Catholic and serious about it, if you have a desire to simplify your life and basically get off of the fast track and onto the Nickle Plate Trail, if you don't have a fear of "glad poverty" and you want to live in a small Midwest river town where you could walk to work, school and church, and are interested in transforming a town into a place where everyone (like us) would want to live, then consider my list carefully.  You think I'm joking, but I'm not.  You don't have to build an Ave Maria to have Auburn.  All you need is enough like minded families to band together, pray and work.  If we're going to build up a civilization of love, a small town in the Midwest is as good a place as any to start.  So humor me!

Reason number one:  Dirt cheap real estate.

Want to live in town within walking distance of church and work?  Here's what $100,000 will get you. 

Want to live in the country?  Add 22 acres to the above and add another hundred grand.  You could raise your own beef, pork and chicken, and have a garden big enough to feed the entire parish. 

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 I went to Mass this morning at St. Bernard’s.  That’s BER’-nerd for those of you 
who don’t live around Wabash.  To the rest of the world, its ber-NARD’, as in the dog.  But not in Wabash.  BER’-nerd.  I don’t know why, unless folks were of the impression that the local non-Catholic population would think the church had gone to the dogs.  I for one would be proud to explain to everyone that the dog was named after the Saint, and not the other way around.  But I digress…

Mass was moving, not so much because of the way it was said, or the music selected, or the attendees.  It was moving for spiritual reasons that far tranend space and time.  I was connected in a way that rarely happens, to me at least.  Just a simple realization that in that place, I was united with every soul who had ever attended, or will ever attend Mass.  I was connected to the Church triumphant, suffering, and militant.  I was as connected to St. Paul as I was to some far flung congregation this very day.  I was connected to all those dwelling in the presence of God, bathed in the light of Christ’s glory.  Because I was there, separated from divine rapturous obliteration only by the thin sacramental veil. 

I was feeling down because I’m worried about so many things and my heart has been heavy lately, but by the end of Mass, I believe some seed fell on fertile soil somewhere in my soul.  My heart lightened, not of my own doing I’m sure, and the words “just shine” pierced through the fog I’d been in like a ray of stinging sunlight on an autumn morning. 

Good and bad things are going to happen.  God is in charge.  I won’t go through anything that wasn’t designed for my good.  People are more important than things.  You were created to love God and spread that love like a flame.  Just shine.

So I will.

I got home and changed into some cycling clothes and hit the Nickle Plate Trail, rode to Bunker Hill and back, and on the way this guy said hello to me from the side of the road.  Does anyone know his name? 

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