Part 2: Why It Takes Me Four Hours or More to Leave for Work in the Morning

The iMac is lagging about a minute behind in showing my keyboard input as usual. Time to finally get around to buying that new iMac, since the one I spent thousands on in 2004 is now obsolete. Now that the Lion OS is finally released and the new iMac is available, no more excuses. I'm going to buy the new iMac loaded in hope that I won't run out of memory or disk space in my lifetime. Today In the meantime, performance is dismal, and that's only one of the things that slows me down as I try to work on my myriad of tiny projects before I leave for work. I woke up at a 6:30, but here I am still sitting at 8:40, well past my goal of 8 a.m. arrival at work, yet again. P.S. Arrived at work at 10:15.

What did I do before leaving the house? I ask myself. Prayed a lot for and about my children. I unpacked the 2nd suitcase, did dishes (mostly Liberty's) from last night, found clean sheets to leave out for the bi-weekly visit by my cleaning lady, met her at the door, exchanged a kiss of greeting, and shared photos from my trip with her. Asked about her upcoming trip to Peru and marked on the calendar the date for her next visit.

Took some cool-washed clothes out of the washer, hung underwear, and started a load of darks. Filled the watering can while warming up the water to wash my face (takes a long time for the hot water to make its way to the bathroom sink, and I hate to waste the water, so I fill up the watering can while running the water and waiting for the warm). Watered orchids. Glued the head back into Jadis's clay sculpture where it had come loose. Worked on glueing the veil of my mask of Our Lady, and sketched in more details on the nose and eyes. Took a photo of both and uploaded them to Facebook.

Read an Ignatius press article. Ate a chunk of leftover meatloaf and a peanut butter and honey sandwich with my coffee while reading today's prayers in Magnificat. Packed blueberries and a banana to bring to work. Washed the breakfast dishes.

On Facebook, read a note from niece Mary, then posted about the the annual Perseid Meteor Shower, nicknamed the Tears of St. Lawrence, and posted the famous quote from St. Lawrence whose feast is today in the new calendar (I think I'm done on this side, you can turn me over). Called EWTN to update my credit card for my monthly donation. Read the Northside Neighborhood group digest. Looked up the date for the St. Philomena Mass at Five Wounds and marked the calendar. Finally after Irma came, I got dressed and left for work.

And so the time goes.

Why It Takes Me Four or More Hours to Leave for Work in the Morning

Today I woke up at 5. Reasonable enough, since I'm still oriented towards East Coast time after my two-week vacation in Massachusetts ended on Saturday.

New resolution (old one actually, not actualized yet) is to get to work by 8.

I picked up a few things to put away from my suitcase (still unpacking). Then straightaway, I went to the computer, breaking another resolution.

Found a photo I took of a pastel painting I did at the Worcester Art Museum, brought it into Photoshop, couldn't make the clone tool work as usual, filled in an empty corner of the cropped photo with two colors lifted with the eye dropper and painted them in with the paintbrush tool. Posted the edited photo on Facebook.

Tried to make it my Profile picture but (probably because my MacOS version doesn't support the latest Flash), found that I couldn't.

Read the daily email digest from the Northside San Jose neighborhood group. Back to Facebook. Read some posts on my home page. Reassured those who had read my post about being stuck in the work parking lot last night with a dead battery that I got home safely. Tried to remove the tags identifying me on some unflattering photos is my niece Mary's photo album. :-) Couldn't do that either.

Remembered that Liberty attached the battery charger and I have to disconnect it and put back the battery cover before I leave for work.

Wrote a critique of Fr. Z's article about being persecuted by a NCR reporter [Ms. Z] and edited my text down trying to get it to stop being truncated at Facebook.

Wandered into the kitchen. Happy that my son, Liberty, did his dishes from yesterday. Mixed up makings for meatloaf tonight. Prepared a head of celery for snacking.

Back in my home office, I looked up recipes for fried polenta. Back in the kitchen, I cooked up some TJ's uncured beef bacon and slices of prepared polenta with onions and garlic, and olive oil.

Strained mold off TJ's maple syrup (never saw mold on maple syrup before).

Finally got a spiritual moment in by picking up a copy of Magnificat to read while eating. Read about St. Terese Benedicta of the Cross's feast day today in the new calendar,the readings for today's Mass, and two articles, one about the garish modernist cover painting of the Madonna in a garden and another about a painting about John the Baptist.

Back to my office, realized I should write the check for the parking ticket I got for using the cell phone while driving a few weeks ago. Remembered I have to call the man from the automatic gate company to schedule his repair, and to call the reupholsterer about the furniture wheels he ordered for me. The new floors are getting scratched by the Victorian furniture.

Wrote this. Oh, what time is it? 7:44. Looks like the dream of being at work at 8 is unreachable for yet another day.

Attention span, where art thou?

P.S. Now I've got to wash up from all that cooking and food prep, make the bed, get dressed and on my way. Note to self. Don't forget to call the gate guy. What happened to the gate opener? Write Liberty a note asking him. Give him the gate guy's phone numbers. Find the other note I wrote to Liberty about the glue that is missing that I was going to use to finish my Mary mask and glue Jadis's clay piece. Oh, and put a cool load in the wash, I'm running short on underwear. Do what I can to finish putting stuff away from the trip. Write and mail that check for the ticket. Call AT&T about the expiring credit card for autopay. ...

Only Goodness Gives Extras: Sherlock Holmes Is Transported by a Rose

In the rectory garden at St. Margaret Mary Church in Oakland

Last night, I was watching one of the Sherlock Holmes mystery shows from the 1980s that star the marvelous actor Jeremy Brett. To my surprise, right in the middle of investigating a case in a country house drawing room, the Sherlock Holmes character became entralled by a rose, and began for a few minutes to talk about religion (of all things!) and to ponder the generosity of Providence. Unexpected, to say the least.

In this scene, Sherlock Holmes, as written by Arthur Conan Doyle, showed a fine appreciation of how God's creation of flowers gives a clue that God's care for us goes beyond merely providing for our necessities.

Following is a description of the scene as I saw it, with quotes from the book.

Holmes's gaze was caught by the sight of a red rose in a vase. He picked the rose up, focused his intense attention on it, and exclaimed in a reverent tone, "'What a lovely thing a rose is.'"

"He walked past the couch to the open window and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green. It was a new phase of his character to me, for I had never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects."

"'There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion,'" said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "'It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance.

"But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.'"
Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty"

I found the above quote at Quotes from Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

And this You Tube clip shows the scene from the show, which omits some of the lines I quoted above from the book.

That passage struck me of course. Similarly, when I see flowers, I love their beauty so much that I glimpse God's beauty. It is a kind of shorthand for me to say it this way, that when I look at a rose I invariably feel that I am looking at the face of God.


When I was photographing these roses, a woman who hangs around St. Margaret Mary Church in Oakland stuck a Holy Card in the frame

A World Where Culture Matters

I'm reading An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz, which is a collection of essays about the Nobel-prize-winning poet that was edited by Cynthia Haven.

I've come to know Cynthia Haven because she has written articles about the St. Ann Choir, and I also consider her one of the "Friends of the St. Ann Choir," which is a casually intersecting set of individuals who attend the Masses where the choir sings at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Palo Alto, go to the sung Sunday Vespers at the St. Ann Chapel where the choir started, and perhaps occasionally share in the good wines and good eating at the choir dinners.

Cynthia and I have had a couple of pleasant lunches together at an English tea room in San Carlos, and we see each other sometimes at choir-related events.


Cynthia's black hair appears red in the bright sunlight that streams through the tea room window

Cynthia currently writes for the Stanford News, and as a freelance journalist she has had her writings published in an impressive list of publications. In our encounters, I heard from time to time from her about how hard she was working on her job, her blog, and especially on compiling the book of essays, in what she has referred to in print as a "not always a kind process of herding contributors against a deadline gun."

A much-appreciated result of my contact with Cynthia in general and of my reading of these essays in particular is that a little window has been re-opened for me, a window into a world where culture matters.

In the other world I inhabit while working for computer companies in Silicon Valley, the type of intellectual achievement most of the people around me value is of the technological and wealth-making kind. I have greatly missed that other world, the world where cultural intelligence is important. I missed it so much that at one point, after I had spent 10 years writing system administration manuals at Sun Microsystems, I remember getting a crush on a young engineer in my group only because he had actually read a book. A work of literature. On his own. Without anyone making him do it.

"Oooh, Dave, you actually read John Updike!" she squealed, smitten.

But back to the main topic. Although Milosz was born in Lithuania, he is known and honored as a Polish poet. He grew up speaking Polish in a milieu where poets were perceived as prophets.

I had previously become impressed with the importance the Poles give to literature when I had read that Pope John Paul II opposed the Nazis as a young man by writing plays and performing them clandestinely with a theatre company. Can you imagine people of any other nationality doing such a thing and thinking that way? Can you imagine an American thinking that playwriting and performing could be seriously considered to be a form of resistance if an evil empire occupied our country?

Only a Pole ....

I was impressed.

In one of Haven's Stanford blogs, I found this quote from Canadian poet, Peter Dale Scott, who confirmed my sense of the difference between the Polish and American view of culture when he said, "... intimacy with Milosz reinforced a contrast I had already felt in Warsaw: of the contrast between Poland — a powerful culture with only a perilously established state – and America – a powerful state with only an incipient and perilously established culture."

My use of the words "Only a Pole..." " is a reference to the use of these same words (albeit in a denigrating sense) in the title of one of the essays from Haven's book. That essay tells about how after Milosz defected to Paris in 1951, a member of the U.S. State Department commented that only a Pole would have been so careless as to defect to France, rather than to the U.S., where he would have had a much better and safer life.

Milosz did end up in the U.S. eventually, then spent 30 years teaching at U Cal Berkeley, until the fall of the Iron Curtain enabled him to go back to Poland and to his native language.

From Haven's collection of essays, I learned that Milosz too has what now I think of as a typically Polish belief in the salvic power of poetry. In one of his poems he wrote, "What is poetry which does not save?"

I'm glad to have gained that glimpse back into that other world where the life of the intellect is valued so highly that the identity of the nation and of its citizens is perceived as dependent on what its poets and playwrights and other writers write.

That the inhabitants of that world are not deluded in their belief about the power of ideas is vividly illustrated by how much the intellectual support of Pope John Paul II and Czeslaw Milosz meant to the workers in the Solidarity movement who struggled for freedom in the shipyard in Gdansk. On the monument to the workers who lost their lives in that struggle, according to one writer, are "icons" of Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, and Czeslaw Milosz. And on the monument is a stanza from Milosz's poem "You Who Wronged": "Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date."

Postscript:
Let's remember there was also something, no not something, but Someone, Someone else at work in that victory over godless communism. I believe that if there truly is salvation in poetry, it must derive from the true source of salvation, Jesus Christ. Milosz wrote of the spirit that speaks through a poet. I submit that if that spirit is good, it is the spirit of God, the spirit of Truth. And I just know that the prayers by the Pope were as important as any other factor in the victory over the Communist state by the steelworkers.

Monument to the Fallen Workers in the Gdansk Shipyards, not to my taste but I understand and sympathize with the sentiment (What do you call that school of architecture, which seems to be the same school that shaped the also-ugly but inspiring Nowa Huta church?)

First Comes Being and Then Comes Nothingness (Not!)

See below for my letter this morning (5/22/2011) to the Editor of Vanity Fair, where Christopher Hitchens is an editor and regular columnist.

Editors: Even if you don't print this email, will you please forward it to Christopher Hitchens?

From what I've read, Christopher Hitchens' take on the massive campaign to pray for his conversion seems to be that those who are praying for him expect that the prospect of death might drive him to accepting Christianity out of a craven fear of hell.

He seems to believe that to face death without capitulating to Christianity would a heroic act. In that, he echoes Jean Paul Satre's existentialist stance, that the atheist has to be brave enough to accept the doctrine that the universe and his own life within it is meaningless. First comes Being, and then comes Nothingness.

I am one of those who pray for Hitchens from time to time.

I want to explain that our prayers are not that he fold out of fear. But that he be given the gift of faith. And that he comes to what St. Paul wrote is the "surpassing knowledge" of God's love for him.

I was converted at 18 to the religion of atheism from Catholicism, convinced by the dynamic duo Satre and Simone de Beauvoir and by other atheists that religion was a crutch.

Then in my mid-30s, I was given the gift of faith, which led me back eventually to the Catholic Church. Somebody prayed for me, I could feel the prayers, and I am grateful for the effects. And so I want to pass it on, to Hitchens and anyone else who hasn't received such a priceless gift.

True religion is not a crutch, even though it is a comfort. I believe in Catholic doctrine because I tried on just about everything else there was to try, and the alternative belief systems are seriously flawed. For one example, it surely is illogical (and self-evidently ridiculous) to hold as an article of faith (as atheists do) that this universe that works according to marvelous laws and is filled with awesome wonders came into being somehow without any cause out of nothing.

As a parting thought, I wonder if Christopher knows that there is a Catholic holy card you can buy for 25 cents at this web site. A jpeg of the holy card back and front is attached to this email.

The Christopher means "Christ Bearer." I pray that with the love and prayers of many people who pray for him as one who despitefully uses us, may it be so.

Roseanne Sullivan

Hospice Care: Back Door to Euthanasia?

A friend's husband died yesterday at home, the day after a visiting hospice nurse announced that he would die in a day or two. Let's call him Bill.

Bill's do-it-yourselver family had decided to bypass the funeral home. His body was washed by his wife and the hospice nurse and is "resting comfortably on a mattress on the dining room table."

I don't have a problem with the home viewing. I think it's great actually. I would do that myself, if I had someone die at home and the help I needed to pull it off.

But I do have a problem with how he died.

At the web page set up for Bill at CaringBridge.org, I was disturbed to see today that the wife's closest friend commented how happy she was that Bill's sufferings were "shortened."

That set off a red alert for me.

For a long time, I have suspected that hospice routines are often euthanasia in disguise.

And so I googled "hospice euthanasia."

One account I came across occurred in a hospice (not in home care). A newly-admitted man (I'll call him Joseph) had a bedsore and was eating the day he was admitted. They would not give Joseph antibiotics to continue to treat his bed sore and refused to give him food or water (ostensibly to prevent aspiration). And without medical necessity, according to the RN who was a friend of the family and present at the bedside, they started giving him large doses of morphine.

When the wife protested that her husband had eaten breakfast on the day he was admitted without any problem and she saw no reason why he would not be allowed to eat, the hospice nurse told the wife that she [the wife] just didn't get it, her husband was going to die in three days. She callously said this in the man's presence.

The RN who wrote the article reported that the hospice nurse's confidence in her prediction was due to long practice. The hospice nurse knew that three days was about how long it takes a person to die of dehydration after they start terminal sedation.

Reading this, I recalled that the hospice nurse at my friend Bill's home predicted Bill's death in a day or two. I now suspect she was able to do so because it's all part of the normal hospice procedure. She too knows how long it takes a person to die of dehydration. Bill had been taking a lot of morphine for quite some time. He had gotten a head start with the dehydration since he hadn't been able to drink water for days. He was already starving, since he hadn't been able to eat for weeks, and he was skin and bones.

When I wrote an email a few days ago to his wife and asked about tube feeding, because it might make him more comfortable (it could provide water along with the nourishment), she replie, "No feeding tube. Bill is dying, and neither of us cares to prolong the process any longer than necessary."

The truth about dying is that our lives and our deaths are in the hands of God. He made us and we live and die according to His will. To take our own lives is called suicide. To take another person's life is murder. The 10 Commandments are still in effect whether we believe in them or not.

Royal Wedding Thoughts

The failed marriage of virgin Diana to non-virgin, non-faithful Charles is being used as an example of why people should have sex before they marry. In reality, Charles' love for Camilla, which included adultery with her, a married woman, while he was a married man, was the much more likely cause of the failure of his marriage to Diana.
The virginity of both parties would have increased the chances of real love to develop between the two. As Diana said, there were three people in her marriage. On the other hand, the cohabitation of Kate and William is no guarantee of the success of their marriage, and to my mind may very well contribute to the possibility of its failure.


I remember a Playboy survey in the 1970s that surprised the magazine no end. People who had one partner only and who waited until marriage to have intercourse reported a much higher degree of satisfaction than people who had multiple partners and didn't wait.

But Charles was the only partner in his marriage to Diana who didn't wait. Charles had been encouraged by his Uncle Montbatten to play the field before he picked a suitable virgin to marry. Charles' playing around (in other words, fornication) led him to a unsuitable bond with Camilla, who was not considered suitable for a king's wife (for good reason, I say). When Charles went away on a trip, Camilla accepted that he wouldn't marry her, and she married someone else, but the connection continued because Charles and she were hooked on each other.

Because of this kind of powerful bond that often forms whether or not you want it, my advice to non-believers in traditional morality, and to scoffers against sexual self-control--just for practical reasons--is, "Do not have intercourse with someone you wouldn't marry. You may become attached in a way you don't want." I have known and heard of many, many people who have spent years attached to partners who they knew from the start they didn't want to marry. They say that breaking up is hard to do, for a good reason.

We play with the force of marital love, which is from God and is life-giving, while separating it from its real fruition and completion. And we and suffer many ills as a result, just as little children would do if they gorged on sweets for the pleasure of it day after day instead of real food for the nourishment of it, until they got sick.

I am sorry for girls like Kate who give themselves away to men like William. They have to use contraception as part of the modern courtship, that's a given. So they are locked for years into what I call "guy sex," intercourse with enforced sterility and intimacy without unconditional love. And they live with dread of the possibility of pregnancy during those times of no-commitment, and they experience great pressure to abort any "by-product of conception" that might arrive unwanted on the scene. Women wait for years in "relationship" limbo, making an awful gamble, in hopes the man will make a commitment to them. I don't know how women can routinely bear these risks.

They called her "Waity Katie."

At least one school friend reported that Kate was a virgin when she met William. Kate was dedicated to William for years until he broke up with her, and she admitted during one of their engagement interviews that the break-up was very hard on her, even though they got back together after a couple of months.

As one commenter said, Kate got her Handsome Prince in the end, but many girls like her do not. Then they have to begin the search again, with the odds mounting against them and their biological clocks ticking.

Just by chance, I only just now read a 40 something journalist's article on her sorrow about not having kids, which included her life history of one uncommitted "relationship" after another. By the time she found someone to father children with her, she was around 40, and then had two miscarriages. That "relationship" broke up too. Her story is not at all uncommon.

I think of women like that journalist as "relics," like widows, but with no status. Relics of the guy-sex revolution. Nothing to show for all the love and years of their lives that they gave, nobody to recognize the griefs associated with the series of attachments that ended like little deaths, without the permission of society to mourn.

I suspect that Kate has some wounds from the long wait before the breakup, the breakup itself, and then the added long time that passed before William's proposal, wounds which may not be healed by the marriage. And those wounds added to other getting off on the wrong foot aspects of a marriage that was embarked upon in a state of rebellion against God's plan for marriage may lead to much unhappiness between them as time goes by.

---

The woman across the table from me gushed, "Charles and Camilla have suffered so much. They deserve to be happy together after all these years." Surprised, I retorted, "They should be doing penance for adultery." We never met before that night, and she hasn't much liked me since. At one point, she told me "we are not of the same kidney." Indeed.

The woman who spoke was a convert to Catholicism, so I was surprised at her tolerance for the affair of the couple under discussion. To her mind, all seemed to be justified under the name of "love."

Where do you start to explain the facts to someone like that? First of all, the C&C relationship started with fornication. After Camilla married, it continued with adultery. And when Charles married, their continued affair was based on betrayal on both sides to their marriage vows. If Camilla's marriage was valid in the eyes of the Church, her divorce did not end the marriage. "What God has joined together, let no man put asunder." She would still be married in the eyes of God to Parker Bowles.

When the widowed Charles "married" the divorced Camilla in a civil ceremony, it was not a valid marriage. Even if the Parker Bowles marriage wasn't valid, a civil ceremony does not a valid marriage make.

To unpack my remark that they should be doing penance, I meant that whatever they would have to suffer because their love is invalid should be offered up as penance for their sins. Because they cannot validly marry, they are obliged to live chastely separately, and purify themselves, in preparation for the judgment we all have to face after death. That is what is meant by making amends. They cannot undo the betrayals of their spouses or take away Diana's hurt about not being loved, but they can accept their own sufferings as partial recompense for the harm they have done. That would be the Christian way to go.

Royal Wedding Thoughts

The failed marriage of virgin Diana to non-virgin, non-faithful Charles is being used as an example of why people should have sex before they marry. In reality, Charles' love for Camilla, which included adultery with her, a married woman, while he was a married man, was the much more likely cause of the failure of his marriage to Diana.

The virginity of both parties would have increased the chances of real love to develop between the two. As Diana said, there were three people in her marriage. On the other hand, the cohabitation of Kate and William is no guarantee of the success of their marriage, and to my mind may very well contribute to the possibility of its failure.


I remember a Playboy survey in the 1970s that surprised the magazine no end. People who had one partner only and who waited until marriage to have intercourse reported a much higher degree of satisfaction than people who had multiple partners and didn't wait.

But Charles was the only partner in his marriage to Diana who didn't wait. Charles had been encouraged by his Uncle Montbatten to play the field before he picked a suitable virgin to marry. Charles' playing around (in other words, fornication) led him to a unsuitable bond with Camilla, who was not considered suitable for a king's wife (for good reason, I say). When Charles went away on a trip, Camilla accepted that he wouldn't marry her, and she married someone else, but the connection continued because Charles and she were hooked on each other.

Because of this kind of powerful bond that often forms whether or not you want it, my advice to non-believers in traditional morality, and to scoffers against sexual self-control--just for practical reasons--is, "Do not have intercourse with someone you wouldn't marry. You may become attached in a way you don't want." I have known and heard of many, many people who have spent years attached to partners who they knew from the start they didn't want to marry. They say that breaking up is hard to do, for a good reason.

We play with the force of marital love, which is from God and is life-giving, while separating it from its real fruition and completion. And we and suffer many ills as a result, just as little children would do if they gorged on sweets for the pleasure of it day after day instead of real food for the nourishment of it, until they got sick.

I am sorry for girls like Kate who give themselves away to men like William. They have to use contraception as part of the modern courtship, that's a given. So they are locked for years into what I call "guy sex," intercourse with enforced sterility and intimacy without unconditional love. And they live with dread of the possibility of pregnancy during those times of no-commitment, and they experience great pressure to abort any "by-product of conception" that might arrive unwanted on the scene. Women wait for years in "relationship" limbo, making an awful gamble, in hopes the man will make a commitment to them. I don't know how women can routinely bear these risks.

They called her "Waitey Katie."

At least one school friend reported that Kate was a virgin when she met William. Kate was dedicated to William for years until he broke up with her, and she admitted during one of their engagement interviews that the break-up was very hard on her, even though they got back together after a couple of months.

As one commenter said, Kate got her Handsome Prince in the end, but many girls like her do not. Then they have to begin the search again, with the odds mounting against them and their biological clocks ticking.

Just by chance, I only just now read a 40 something journalist's article on her sorrow about not having kids, which included a life history of one uncommitted "relationship" after another. By the time she found someone to father children with her, she was around 40, and then had two miscarriages. That "relationship" broke up too. Her story is not at all uncommon.

I think of women like that journalist as "relics," like widows, but with no status. Relics of the guy-sex revolution. Nothing to show for all the love and years of their lives that they gave, nobody to recognize the griefs associated with the series of attachments that ended like little deaths, without the permission of society to mourn.

I suspect that Kate has some wounds from the long wait before the breakup, the breakup itself, and then the added long time that passed before William's proposal, wounds which may not be healed by the marriage. And those wounds added to other getting off on the wrong foot aspects of a marriage that was embarked upon in a state of rebellion against God's plan for marriage may lead to much unhappiness between them as time goes by.

---

The woman across the table from me gushed, "Charles and Camilla have suffered so much. They deserve to be happy together after all these years." Surprised, I retorted, "They should be doing penance for adultery." We never met before that night, and she hasn't much liked me since. At one point, she told me "we are not of the same kidney." Indeed.

I was surrounded by Catholics at that dinner table, current and former members of the Gregorian chant choir that I sang with, except for the husband of the woman who spoke so sympathetically about the Charles and Camilla "relationship." The husband was a member of a group who attended choir dinners in the unofficial status of "choir friend." The wife, let's call her Miriam, had dropped out of the choir years before, but would sing at Vespers from time to time. She was a converted Jew, and since I knew she was a Catholic now, I was surprised at her tolerance for the couple under discussion. All seemed to be justified to her mind under the name of "love."

But then, I have seen the same lack of good Catholic formation in the sprinkling of converts that started out as choir members and became believers. But that's another story. Maybe it's due to the fact that people who love the traditional music of the Church but who are selective about the Church's doctrines and moral teachings attrack converts who become Catholics in their image.

Where do you start to explain the facts to someone like that? First of all, the C&C relationship started with fornication. After she married, it continued with adultery. And when he married, their continued affair was based on betrayal on both sides to their marriage vows. If Camilla's marriage was valid in the eyes of the Church, her divorce did not end the marriage. "What God has joined together, let no man put asunder." She would still be married in the eyes of God to Parker Bowles.

When the widowed Charles "married" the divorced Camilla in a civil ceremony, it was not a valid marriage. Even if the Parker Bowles marriage wasn't valid, a civil ceremony does not a valid marriage make.

To unpack my remark that they should be doing penance, I meant that whatever they would have to suffer because their love is invalid should be better offered up as penance for their sins. Because they cannot validly marry, they are obliged to live chastely separately, and purify themselves, in preparation for the judgment we all have to face after death. That is what is meant by making amendment. They cannot undo the betrayals of their spouses or take away Diana's hurt about not being loved, but they can accept their own sufferings as partial recompense for the harm they have done. That would be the Catholic way to go.

A Few Posts About Lilacs and Forsythia from my Facebook Page

March 28, 2011: Lilacs and Forsythia, Out of Their Element, Like Me

On the green strip between my sidewalk and the street are two lilac bushes and a forsythia bush that are each only about 40" tall after about six years. The lilacs don't thrive in this hostile environment where it just doesn't get cold enough for them, and once again they are putting out just a few small purple blossoms. The forsythia is cheering me too with a few yellow flowers. Both the forsythia and lilacs remind me of home in Massachusetts on this chilly rainy California spring day.

Last year about this time we were burying my aunt in West Roxbury, MA and St. Joseph's cemetery fence was lined by bright golden forsythia. I have been in that cemetery many times as a child visiting my father's and grandparents' grave with my family, but I never was there in forsythia time before. The effect of the forsythia in beautiful contrast with the tall pine trees that surround the cemetery was lovely to see.

Even though nothing else was blooming yet, I was delighted to see forsythia was abundant in one yard after another as I drove around.

And I remember bright summer days in Fargo where the alleys behind all the neat houses were lined with an abundant richness of blossoming purple and white lilac bushes.

As I back the car quickly down the driveway after an ordeal of late nights and stressful days at work, a glimpse of those bushes brings me a nostalgia rush and puts a totally spontaneous smile on my tired face, before I back out onto the street and head for the freeway.

April 5 Post

The daffodils have come and gone, but I brought a vase full of lilacs and a sprig of forsythia to my cube yesterday. This is the first year my lilacs have been big enough to have that wonderful lilac fragrance. All day at work, I was living part in 2011 and part in other lilac springtimes of my life because of how scent is such a powerful evoker of memories.

John Michael Hey said we should call it "Loaded Sunday"

Today I read a blog from a friend whose son dances in a troupe of Morris dancers. They danced yesterday for May Day in a commemoration of pagan May pole dances, which is held in a small town in Massachusetts every year. Small children come to the town common wearing flowers in their hair and dance with the ribbons tied to the May pole. It must be cute. But.

My May day was loaded in a Catholic liturgical sense. This year May 1 fell on the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, plus it was Dominica in Albis, the day that newly baptized take off their white robes, plus it is Divine Mercy Sunday, a great feast of God's tender love for us, plus it was the day Pope John Paul II was beatified. (I started planning to go to Rome to be there, but my boss said there was too much work for me to take the time off.)

Liturgically it's the beginning of the month dedicated to the Virgin Mary. So there was a procession around the block with torches, and incense and lots of little boy acolytes in black cassocks and white albs and Canon Moreau in a biretta and a white and blue cope with an image of Mary on the back. They crowned two statues of Our Lady with flowers and sang songs, such as:

O Mary we crown thee with blossoms today!

Queen of the Angels and Queen of the May.

Bring flowers of the rarest

bring blossoms the fairest,

from garden and woodland and hillside and dale;

our full hearts are swelling,

our glad voices telling

the praise of the loveliest flower of the vale!

I remember and like the song from singing it at May processions at Notre Dame Academy in Roxbury, Mass., in my childhood. But there are those who think of it as one of the exemplary manifestations of sappy church music from before Vatican II. One holder of this opinion is my friend, Chris Garton-Zavesky, father of five boys, teacher, and composer, and member of my schola. Chris fumed about how it much it sounds like a carousel song, as we drank coffee in the break room after Mass. His oldest son, Nicholas, must have heard this tune from his father before (so to speak), since he was able to chime in with Chris' sing-song parody. Chris says that the song cries out for a new setting, one that would truly honor Our Mother in Heaven. I think Chris will be the one to do it too, in his copious spare time.

One humorous note is that I overheard someone telling one of Chris's sons, one of the acolytes, that he had given the wrong cope to Fr. Moreau. It was the short one, made expressly for tiny 84 year old Fr. Otellello. But I hadn't noticed it looking odd at all, myself.

May processions and popularity contests. I remember the year my two blond, blue-eyed sisters and my blond, blue-eyed cousin the same age were picked to be in the May procession, while dark-haired somber me was not. It wouldn't have bothered me much except for my sister Martha's gloating. She had her blond goddess self-importance nailed, down to the mockery of those less exalted, even at six years of age. Ah, but I loved the procession anyway on that sunny spring day, as the chosen girls processed to the statue in their white First Communion dresses wearing flower crowns, and I sang my heart out to my heavenly mother with everyone else. It boggles my mind to realize now that those devout sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in their black and white habits within 15 years would have thrown away their habits, and would be doing liturgical dances wearing pants suits, and throwing bad pottery instead of teaching school. Ah, but that's another story.

And here is another one. Lilacs bloom in May in Massachusetts, so one time when my mother was coming to visit us at my aunt and uncle's house after years when I didn't see her, I made a May altar in the bedroom where she was going to sleep with me. On a card table decorated with lavender crepe paper, I put a plaster statue of Our Lady (I wish I had it now), and a vase of lilac and white lilacs from bushes in the back yard. As it turned out, when she came, she said it was very nice, but she was allergic to lilacs. So out they went.

Sometime about 15 years ago, it pained me to hear my cousins and uncle, in their unsentimental way, had ripped out the lilac bushes. To me, they were the glory of that old tar paper sided house in Hyde Park.

It's because I miss lilacs so much out here in California, where they only grow with a struggle. And the little bushes I do have bloomed early in April and the blossoms are now spent.