Quotes from the EWTN 25th Anniversary Family Celebration in San Francisco

EWTN 25th Anniversary Family Celebration in San Francisco
Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, January 28 and 29, 2005


From the prayer of Mother Angelica at the launching of the EWTN satellite transmissions on August 15, 1981: "O God, Lord of heaven and earth. You alone have accomplished all we have done. May this first Catholic satellite television network be a tribute to the beauty of Your Church."


Crucifix over the stage

From Raymond Arroyo's best selling book: Mother Angelica: The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles:
The misson statement of the Eternal Word Television Network clearly stated its dedication to "the advancement of truth as defined by the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. . . . to serve the orthodox belief and teaching of the Church as proclaimed by the Supreme Pontiff and his predecessors.

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Father Joseph Mary Wolf is one of the original friars in the order created by Mother Angelica, the Missionary Franciscans of the Eternal Word, MFVA. During a pilgrimage in November 2005 to the Holy Land, Father Joseph Mary met Catholic Arabs who live in a precarious situation in Palestinian-owned Bethlehem. They recognized him at the Church of the Nativity and told him that EWTN gives them hope.


Father Joseph hears confession at the SF Civic Center


Father Joseph descends from the stage after Mass on Saturday.

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Michael P. Warsaw, President of EWTN:

Mother Angelica always says that you have to have the courage to do the ridiculous so God can do the miraculous. In 1981, a cloistered 58 year old nun with $200 in the bank and no broadcasting experience started a TV network in a garage. It now reaches 125 million television households in 147 countries and territories. EWTN broadcasts simultaneously in English and Spanish, 24 hours a day. Everything Mother accomplished was based on her trust and faith in God’s providence. Based on her complete and total reliance on God’s awesome providence along with her prayers and sacrifices. Mother Angelica did the ridiculous so God did the miraculous There are all those stories of conversions, the sick and the dying comforted, suicides and abortions averted because of EWTN. We come together to celebrate and give thanks to God. And to thank you our family for your love and support..


Michael P. Warsaw

From the program notes: It is [Mother Angelica’s] suffering and prayers that have helped sustain this Network since her stroke four years ago. . . . It is her hope that this event will save many souls and provide hope for all of those who are affected by loneliness, despair or physical suffering.

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Father Brian Mulhaddy, O.P., Host of EWTN’s upcoming series The Seven Sacraments:

People ask: What does the Church teach [on one topic or another]? But they don’t read the Catechism. .. The source of our faith is not only the Bible but the catechism.

We go to Mass to worship God because He is God, not to fill our emotions.

When someone asks Father Mulhaddy, “What do you think of the DaVinci code?” He answers, “What section do you find it in at the bookstores? FIC-TION!”

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Speaking about the ETWN Media Missionaries: We have $2.1 million a month in expenses. No support from the Catholic communications campaign. We are free as a bird at EWTN because we are not dependent on anyone (bishops or anyone else). Only on the Magisterium. Only on Truth.—Robert Rodriquez, Manager of Volunteer Support.

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Four young men in black tee shirts. The backs of the shirts all read in white letters, “Real Men Watch.” The front each have a different letter, which when they stand together in the right order reads: “E,” “W,” “T,” “N.”


One of the four "real men."

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Father Mark Mary Cristina, MFVA, was celebrant and homilist during the reverential Saturday Mass in honor of the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas.

The goal of all evangelization: it’s the Eucharist. St. Thomas’ teachings were used to defend the Eucharist during the Reformation three hundred years later. Father Mark Mary quoted Flannery O’Connor, who listened to an Episcopal friend go on about the symbolism of the Eucharist, and then blurted out, “If it’s only a symbol, I say the heck with it. But she didn’t say “Heck.”

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Father Francis Mary, MFVA, Host of EWTN's Life on the Rock

JP II brought millions of young people into the public square. B16 will bring them in. [Pope John Paul II] [Pope Benedict XVI]

He calls San Francisco “Assisi by the Bay.” But also, “The Belly of the Beast.” We stand for the good vs. being bad, nice vs. just mean. He spoke about how the friars were all still coming off the previous Saturday’s Walk for Life. Numbers doubled from last year, protesters decreased. We are the Church Militant. We are engaged in Christian warfare. During the walk, the battle showed itself in prayer, silent meditation, saying the rosary, singing.

We will go into the public square and preach the Gospel of Truth. Thank God for the Catholic Church. The sisters here [Cloistered Poor Clare Nuns from Our Lady of the Angels Monastery] are our prayer support. Priest show you the way and feed you: We give you Jesus, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. Our Leader is Our Lady sand she is always pointing to the Boss. Our Lady has risen up this army of young men with vocations. There are a lot of good guys coming through the seminaries. They desire to be conform to the Truth, not nuance or explain anything away.

We love the life of celibacy. Have no intention whatever to get rid of this long-standing discipline. We’ve seen the quote unquote sexual revolution/deformation, the A bomb that hit the family. The answer is not to go have sex. We as a society have this infatuation with the gift of human sexuality. We as priests freely give that up. We don’t hate marriage or women. Spouse and priest cannot both be done.

We in this JP II generation, we love the Church. We cherish its divinely mandated authority. We have a drop dead love for the Church, not for anything less than the Mystical Body of Christ which is the Church.

Father Franciis Mary Cristina

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Deacon Bill Steltemeier: Day 1: When Mother first met him, she said, “How often do you go to confession? He weakly said, “Oh, maybe every 90 days.” He didn’t dare tell her it was more like once every four months. She smiled at him and said, “Try weekly. Or more often.” There are priests hearing confessions on the fourth floor next to the Adoration Chapel. I want all of you to go to confession while you are here. Day 2: Isn’t that a beautiful Monstrance in the Adoration Chapel? It’s been wonderful to see in the Adoration Chapel, tears of joy on the faces of people coming back from confession.

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Raymond Arroyo, ETWN news director and author of best-selling Mother Angelica, A Nun, a TV and a Network of Miracles.

Pope Benedict XVI recently wrote the first encyclical about the nature of love. It’s the primordial creative power that moves the universe. Mother Angelica harnessed some of that energy. Mother Angelica said, “I am convinced God is looking for dodoes. He found one: me! There are a lot of smart people out there who know it can’t be done, so they don’t do it. But a dodo doesn’t know it can’t be done. God uses dodoes.” Every major thing that God wanted her to do was preceded by suffering. When she started the network, she was 58 years old. She had diabetes. A twisted spine. You pay the cost to be the boss. She was following inspiration and the dictates of her spouse. The struggle. The cross. That’s her real story. Her life has become a parable. She wanted to reach people. She did what she did for love of souls, It was never about TV. For God’s sake, be a dodo!

To a questioner from the audience: Don’t look at the big picture. Do the little things. Begin in prayer and sacrifice. Bet the light in your community. Be the light in your family. Be a faithful spouse. Be faithful where you are.



Bob and Mary Jo Wieland, Raymond Arroyo, Roseanne Sullivan at Arroyo's book signing for Mother Angelica: A Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles

From the book: On her visits to at least nine cities between 1979 and 1980, Mother Angelica preached about the promise of television and the need to support her efforts. “And what if you fail,” On doubter asked. “Then I’m going to have the most lit-up garage in Birmingham,” Angelica fired back from the stage.

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A question from the audience on a special edition of former Lutheran Marcus Grodi’s show The Journey Home: “What advice would you give to someone who was where you were?

A: Doug Gonzalez, former minister of the Church of the Nazarene: "If you say 'I will go wherever I have to go to be like Christ,' every road will lead to Rome. Every holy desire is fulfilled in the Catholic Church."

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Dale Alquist, Baptist convert, host of an EWTN show called, G. K. Chesterton, the Apostle of Common Sense, told the audience that he started towards the Catholic Church when he did what any good Baptist would do, went to Rome on his honeymoon and started reading G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton wrote things like, “The Christian ideal hasn’t been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.” “Chesterton,” Alquist quipped, “Is one of the few writers who have more one liners than Mother Angelica.
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Bob Fishman, convert from Judaism: There is a revival in the Catholic Church and EWTN is a great part of it.

He asked his mother one time, “How come Jews don’t believe in Jesus?” In classic Jewish mother style she retorted, “I don’t have to tell you why . This is my house, and we don’t believe in Jesus.”

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Johnette Benkovic, Host of EWTN’s The Abundant Lifespoke, often in tears, about the loss of her son Simon in an automobile accident and her husband Anthony’s inoperable cancerous brain tumor, and she said that God is teaching her family to embrace the Cross, “We must take all of our sufferings as a gift from God. We don’t need to go out and look for sufferings. The closer we draw to God, the deeper the suffering we experience.”


Johnette Benkovic



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Most Reverend Allen Vigneron, Bishop of Oakland, celebrated and gave the homily during Sunday’s Solemn Mass of Thanksgiving. The Gospel (Mark 1:21-28) speaks of the people of Capernaum being astonished at Jesus’ teaching “for he taught them as one having authority.” Bishop Vigneron said, “We give thanks for Mother Angelica, the Sisters, the Franciscan friars. And we ask God’s blessing on all the coworkers. In the economy of grace a natural observance such as the 25th anniversary celebration today is taken up, healed, and perfected. That’s what we’re about here today. We place on this altar all the sacrifices, offer all the good fruit that these good works have borne, as a pleasing offering to the Father. ... We thank God for all have served the authoritative Word, all who have been a voice for the revelation of God’s saving Word. And for all who have been served.”


Bishop Vigneron gives Communion

You Never Know When You Get Up in the Morning Where Your Life Might be Headed By the End of the Day

Thursday 1/26/06

This day I came to work half hour late (every day I resolve to be there at 8:30, and almost every day I'm at least 15 minutes later than that, and even though I make it up by working into the evening, I still regret that I misssed the goal). This sign was affixed to the glass door onto the back parking lot:

Please attend company presentation at the
Hilton at 9:30. Maps at reception.

Then after the painful long wait before my computer allows me to log in and the additional painful long wait before the mail
program (Lotus notes) launched, I found this email.

From Joe Millares [our CFO]
To cyus
Subject Please Attend Company Presentation at 9:30
Date: 01/26/2006 04:18 AM

Good Morning Everyone:

Please attend a Company Presentation at 9:30 AM today (Thursday) at the Newark Hilton, 39900 Balentine Drive, Newark. John and Daniel have an important message for everyone. Please arrive on time. Thank you.

Regards,

Joe M. Millares
Chief Financial Officer
Cyclades Corporation
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Another email from Daniel Delarossa, one of the two co-founders, announced: Cyclades merges with Avocent. In Daniel's email,the news was presented as a way for the company to get more resources to keep growing.

But the reality, when we listened to the Avocent manager whose group Cyclades is joining, is that Cyclades has been sold for $90 million. The two co-founders John Lima and Daniel, will stay for six months, and then they will leave to start another company. Cyclades will be no more.

I asked what's the difference between a merger and an acquisition? And Dave Parry, the Avocent executive, admitted that we were acquired.

The 4 am email was due to the fact that the contract had only been signed at 2 a.m.

Reacting to comment on my comments in my previous blog

KYS wrote: "People can have loving, committed relationships that include sexual intimacy without marriage or children."

TA Dodger wrote: People can love each other without marriage.

But do they? WIthout marriage there is no real commitment. And love that is conditional on an emotion or thrill is not love. Love is an action. It's being there for the other person sometimes even when they can not do us a bit of good.

Gay "committed" couples I've met are promiscuous, with options for "relationships" on the side. If monogamous, their "committments" are usually short-lived.

It's the nature of sexual pleasure (when it is divorced from the bonding and the fruitfulness of engendering a child) to lead to disatisfaction. When the thrill is gone, the person looking for the thrill starts scanning the horizon for someone to regain the thrill with.

If you are a committed heterosexual couple, why not marry? How many movies you see these days show the answer to that question: the person is hoping to find a better partner, and if a better catch comes along the "committment" will be over in a flash, even up to the moment the vows are being pronounced. Or later.

Sure women enjoy intercourse. But they also enjoy being valued for more than orgasmic pleasure. Even the raunchiest woman I have ever met once expressed to me that she feels badly when a man breaks off with her. What she does, she told a group of us out for Mexican at Chili's one noon time, that she goes out and picks someone up. Waiting to see if the man she has a one night stand with is going to call her keeps her from thinking about the loss of the first guy. For even this clearly "sex"-loving woman, the attachment is real and is painful if ended. This woman has since divorced her third husband. To me she is one of a large set of people I've known whose lives show that uncommitted unions lead to an inability to commit.

Intercourse has a biological function and a psychological function, and but the philosophers of sex like Hugh Hefner who helped bring about the overthrow of morality like to pretend it is just an isolated act.

The way we live now:

People are denying the natural law built into their own bodies.

Yes, I'm saying that a bond is created with sexual union, whether or not you like the person or not. Whether or not you are "just using" (what a horrible phrase) that man or woman.

If a woman or a man doesn't want marriage or children, that person should not engage in intercourse, because the natural outcome of the act of what used to be called love is bonding for life and children.

If you really love someone you don't do things that damage them. Having sex outside of marriage is skimming the cream off the top and tossing the rest of the person aside. You are taking that person out of the full context of what they are. You are not building a life with that person and with the to-be-expected lives that are to be born of that union. Everything is conditional, even if you "love." We all know how fast "love" can disappear.

And all of a sudden a conceived child becomes "a by product of conception" instead of a human being. We have made sex our god, and we see that any consequences of worshipping sex are to be endured stoically because they serve the highest goal of life, which is to be free and to have as many orgasms as possible.

Do you know how much you have been brainwashed by the culture you were raised up in? The set of beliefs seem to me to be unreasoned and embraced blindly. THere is no right to have sex. Even for something as mundane as driving is not allowed to people who will not do it responsibly. You don't give someone a car unless they are licensed to drive.

"I don't want to tell you how to live your life any more than I want you to tell me how to live my life."

The Department of Motor Vehicles tells us how to live our lives.The people that make traffic laws tell us how to live our lives. The laws of physics tell us how to live our lives: If you crash into something because you are speeding you hurt yourself and others. These constraints on our freedom are to be desired.

In the same way, by nature intercourse is designed for a purpose and harm comes when the purpose is denied. There are laws about how to live our sexual lives that are for our own good. Sure I want to tell you how to live your life, because it is for your health and happiness. But if you want to keep driving 85 miles an hour without a seat belt four sheets to the wind, don't say I didn't warn you. And if I can, I will try to get your license taken away before you kill yourself or someone else.

There are many people who won't obey any laws because they don't want compromise their freedom. But they are risking a lot.

Freedom is not being free from constraints. Freedom is being free to choose to do the right thing.

Mean New World

Random thoughts some posts I read at http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/01/14/122726.php.

The posts that scoff about the futility of expecting people not to go to bed outside of marriage are denying reality. For ages it was understood in the majority of cultures that sleeping with another person is reserved for marriage(except for the occasional disfunctional cultures dug up by anthropologists like Margaret Mead who were looking for justifications for their own sexual immorality).

Parents used to protect their daughters from unprincipled men that would take their virginity and discard them. Decent fathers used to advise their sons not to take advantage of women by seeking to have the thrill without being willing to give the love and commitment.

Before the sexual revolution, the norms were different than they are now. When something is illegal or recognized as immoral, only those who are on the fringes are likely to do it. Most people live within the values of their society.

Now everything is legal, and the consequences are horrible. I would argue that separating sex from conception and love and that the violence of abortions are root causes behind child abuse, not the lack of available contraception or lack of access to abortion (which some claim). When love and child bearing and any inconveniences on our way to pleasure are perceived in such a negative light, then a child is seen as an object that can be abused when it interferes with our pleasure. Just as other people are seen as objects in the way we live now.

What we do to our children with this Brave New Morality is damage them. Instead of training our children with the age-old morality that physical "knowing" of a member of the opposite sex belongs only in marriage, we encourage our young people not to "repress" themselves. We now teach that people are incapable of self control.

The truth is that people that have sex outside of marriage are playing havoc with their normal feelings. They have to learn how to repress instead a whole other set of associated feelings that come with sexual union without love or commitment.

The hatred of someone who "clings" or is "possessive" is part of that whole mindset. The real crime is to use without love, but in our society the natural feelings of jealousy, along with the desire to want to "own" or keep the other person in our life after we have given ourselves to that person in that most intimate of all acts, these natural feelings are perceived as being evil and we are taught to repress them.

Liberals in these matters give their children permission to freely engage in a heartless coming of age ritual that in many ways is a mutilation of the soul and body that is equivalent to or even worse than genital mutilation.

When a young woman and man have "sex," for the first time, they enter into a physical union that for the health and happiness of them both belongs in a committed relationship. The consequences are harmful psychologically, physically, morally, and spiritually. Breaking up is hard to do.

Learning how to manage the feelings is the rite of passage I'm speaking of, which is wrong because it teaches people to deny their real feelings in pursuit of an imagined freedom, which ironically often leads to slavery.

Women are especially cheated of the full expression of their natural instincts with that kind of relationship. When I was growing up, future thinkers like Hugh Hefner and Isaac Asimov and Isaac Asimov dreamed of a world like we have now, where a person could have intercourse with a stranger without any ties. Women's instincts are for child bearing and love of husband and children, but they are being taught the perversion of their natural instincts is for their good. Abortion, the violation of a woman's natural feelings of love for the fruit of her womb, is for the convenience of people like Hefner, whose vision of freedom is freedom to use women who are always young, never dependent, never fertile, never inconvenient.

Learning how to let go of someone with whom you have the sexual union is painful. Drugs and alcohol and meanness help dull the pain and guilt. Everyone acknowledges that when a "relationship" ends, it is like a little death. It can take six months or often a lifetime to recover from losing a person who is connected to you whether or not you want to admit the connection exists. Our society denies the connection exists, but that does not make it any less real.

The person who is rejected (the dumpee) is always diminished in their sense of their own value. How can that other person have known me so deeply and found me unworthy of love?

A lifetime of making and breaking these bonds has many evil consequences, and one of them is the people who are schooled in immoral sex find it very hard to make real and lasting commitments.

They start with what used to be called love, and don't call it love unless it suits them.

It's like we don't call a baby in the womb a child unless it suits us. A man can be tried for killing an unborn child if he kills a pregnant mother, but society paradoxically says that for a woman to kill a baby in her own womb is not murder.

Words used to deny the reality of love and of life are lies.

Don't laugh at the idea that you can avoid sexual disease and unwanted pregnancies by not having sex until marriage. Don't forget that for ages upon ages humans understood the natural results of intercourse are both a permanent connection with the other person and the creation of new life.

Just because birth control was invented doesn't mean that it is a good thing for the human race. If a pill gets invented that reliably enables people to eat more than they need without the food being converted into bodily nutrition and fat reserves, that won't make gluttony a good thing either.

People bond because they do literally become one flesh, whether or not they even like each other. Separating from that bonding is traumatic, but people accept the pain because it's part of the illusion of freedom that we value so highly. And when the person gets trained into lust separated from love, that person probably learns to be very cavalier about the pain that the pursuit of lust causes in their dealings with other people.

Oh Mean New World that has such values in it.

PS. People often claim that Jesus did not speak out against fornication or homosexual practice, so they claim that Jesus thought it was enough to love our neighbor. Jesus didn't speak against these obvious evils because he didn't have to. Everybody in the Jewish culture of that day understood that fornication and homosexual practice are evil. Jesus didn't speak out against a lot of other bad things like murder or child abuse, but that didn't mean he was saying that we could do these things as long as we were baptized and believed in the Gospel. It was left to the authors of the early Christian epistle to spell these things out, because the epistles were often writing to people from differing cultural backgrounds who may not have been taught God's laws for healthy living. "Shun sexual immorality," St. Paul had to write to the Corinthians, for example, because the Corinthians' culture, like our own, had made sex an object of workship. The Jews had been chastized over the centuries for such practices, and had learned that lesson. At the time of Christ, worship of the True God and expectation of the Messiah was part of the air all the Jews breathed.

Linking to ProLife Blogs.com

ProLifeBlogs"

This link is to meet a requirement for being connected to ProLifeBlogs.
I just want to post the blog I wrote about the prolife march in San Francisco today.

roseannesullivan.blogspot.com/2006/01/march-for-life-san-franciscco

Walk for Life San Francisco 2006--The Carmelite Connection

One of our Santa Clara lay Carmelites, Jim Fahey, is in the second row, tall, with sunglasses, to the left of the burgundy St. Thomas Aquinas banner

The March for Life in San Francisco was thrilling yesterday. The march started at the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero around noon with the skies drizzly and overcast. It ended about two hours later at the Marina Green. Close to the end we crested the top of the wooded hill between Fisherman's Wharf and Fort Mason to be greeted by a beautiful a view framed by trees of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay, and the Marina in brilliant sunshine before us.

Some reported that there were about 15,000 of us, more than double the size of last year's march, and I heard that there were far fewer protesters than last year.

After enduring the pro-abortion hecklers that did show up along the way, especially during a long pause at the beginning of the march when they were in our faces with their bullhorns, signs and insulting chants for 15 minutes, several marchers told me they were reminded of Christ's experience on Via Dolorosa.

Some of the chants follow (my retorts are in parentheses, but we weren't supposed to answer back, so I *mostly* kept my mouth shut):

Get your rosaries out of our ovaries. (We're trying to reach your hearts and souls with our prayers to the Mother of God, not your ovaries.)

If you don't like abortions, don't have one.
(Who actually has a soul so dead as to like abortion?)
If you don't like contraception, don't use it.
If you don't like sex, don't have it.
(If you don't want children, don't misuse the gift of God.)

Christian fascists, get out of town.
(I really have to bite my tongue on this one, since I can think of some names to retort with that would not be charitable.)
When abortion is illegal, women die.
(When abortion is legal, babies, women, men, families
and communities are casualties.)

One sign I saw a lot of called us, "Christian terrorists."

A lot of the pro-abortion protesters dressed in black, looking like Ninja warriors. Some that wore bandanas over their noses and mouths looked like mutant ninja bandits.

Many of them carried coat hangers.

It was odd how many posters were against Bush and Alioto. What did they think? We were going to bring Bush down if they only convinced us to?

A line of police walked between us and the protesters in close formation. There were hundreds of police on motorcycles too. Regina, who I drove up with, wonders why we are the ones who needed to be protected if we're as bad as the pro-aborts think we are. I later read that a pro-abortion news feed claims that some protesters tried to stop the march until the police removed them.

The marchers did not heckle back to the hecklers. Some of us said the rosary or sang quietly. Those who had signs held them up silently. Most of the pro Life signs were simple black and white and they read, "Women deserve better than abortion."

Two teenagers carried a hand painted sign: "We're survivors." I asked them what that meant, and they said, "One third of our generation was aborted!" How true and what a horrid thing to realize.

Many others carried signs that read "I regret my abortion."

I drove up from Santa Clara with two other lay Carmelites (OCDS) who meet at the monastery of the Infant Jesus, Dave and Regina Dittmann and Art (a regular from Our Lady of Peace shrine). We parked at the end of the march route, and we had a disquieting couple of minutes because we joined the march from the front. Suddenly we realized we'd inadvertently started walking with the pro-abortionists on the sidewalk. We quickly ran to join our own side marching down the middle of the Embarcadero, practically colliding with Jim Fahey [who was on the Israel pilgrimage] and who is also an OCDS, who was close to the front of the line. He's 6' 4" tall so he's hard to miss. He was busy with the Bishop's honor guard (that's what I think he said).

I shot a couple of rolls of film. Whenever I stopped to take photos, people crashed into me, so I can't guarantee the photos are going to be in focus.

I started in the parking lot of Our Lady of Peace in San Jose taking photos of our eighty-two year old Santa Clara OCDS member Jean Foord getting ready to board the bus to the abortion walk. She was standing in front of her pro-Life bumper sticker bedecked older model car (an exemplary Carmelite car), holding the sign she brings to all such events. She joins a group praying in front of a Sunnyvale abortion clinic once a month. I also have another photo of Regina and Dave (with Art) similarly in front of the Dittmann's pro-life bumper sticker bedecked 1986 Buick (another exemplary Carmelite car) getting ready to drive up to the march.

Other shots are from right in the middle of the marchers, and some of the San Francisco backdrops and photos of the pro abortion protesters should be good. I will be posting those photos online in about a week. Some of them might be used in a San Francisco Faith newspaper article in March.

(I queried the editor about my writing a piece on the march, but he already had it covered. But he wants to use my planned interview with Jewish convert Roy Schoeman [which he pronounces "Show Man" BTW], so stay tuned for that. The interview won't be in until April, since we can't do the interview by the 30th deadline because Roy has that Florida conference.)

Near the end of the Saturday march, Dave, Regina, Art, and I paused and watched the remaining marchers file past us. We had a brief Carmelite reunion when we ran into Anita Sullins (another OCDS) for a few minutes and then found Father Christopher, our spiritual advisor, Erin (OCDS formation director ) and his mother, Jean Foord. Father had just prayed with and helped a woman who had had a seizure a few minutes earlier.

After they left, for about a half hour from our vantage point near the Marina Green we watched marcher after marcher continue to file down from the top of the hill that separates Fisherman's Wharf from Fort Mason. The numbers were very impressive.

I was startled to see a heavy man towards the end of the line wearing a sign "Gay and Lesbians Against Abortion." Another Carmelite, Marilou Mills, wrote me yesterday to tell me that she teaches with that man who bravely carried that sign. His name is Steve, and he told her he was heckled unmercifully. I'm afraid the heckling was from both sides. I'm sorry that I avoided eye contact with him, and I told her that I think he is a very brave man to stand up against the evil of abortion. I admire his courage.

82 year old Jean Foord might have been among the oldest at the walk. A friend of Regina and Dave's who was there with her husband and four other children is about five months pregnant, so she might have been carrying the youngest, not yet born. (Not a choice either, a child, it must be noted, especially in the context of this day.)

The short course in Carmelite Spirituality: Fr. Christopher explains it all to Holy Cross

Hello OCDS from the Santa Clara Carmel of the Infant Jesus,


This morning at 8:30 mass at Holy Cross Church, Fr. Christopher presided. (I'd last seen him at 2 yesterday afternoon towards the tail end of the March for Life in San Francisco. Most of us OCDS who attended had a brief Carmelite encounter together for a few minutes at the end of the day. More about that in a separate email.)


"Hi, Father Christopher," I said as I ducked past him in the Holy Cross vestibule on my way to the choir loft. "We meet again," he said.


Out of the three readings and the Psalm for today, Fr. Christopher somehow managed to give a homily that was a short course on Carmelite spirituality for the parishioners in the pews, weaving in quotes from our holy mother St. Teresa and from St. Therese, our two women doctors of the Church.


He concluded that we should start with one minute a day, going inside ourselves with God, into that Interior Castle, that faceted crystal full of light. He also compared it to a beautiful garden. The God that we meet there is beyond all of our longings.

After we do that for a minute at a time, we will of course be drawn to spending two minutes, then three and more. And then we will come to know that being with God within us is to be highly desired more than any of our other activities.

We could use that kind of talk as an incentive for us OCDS members to spend our required amount of time in contemplative prayer. How about this for an idea? We could make posters with slogans to bring in new members:

Come to Know the God of Our Longings On One Minute A Day.

Back to Basics: Live the First Commandment First

Hooked on Contemplation: Mysticism For Everybody

As we say Fr. Christopher's homework assignment over and over again, Thy Kingdom Come, we will come to know the rest of it:

The Kingdom of God is within you.

Just riffing on the theme,

In Carmel,
Roseanne

(That reminds me of a quote I once read from a Carmelite Mother Teresa Bilecki. Mysticism isn't sublimated sex. Sex is sublimated mysticism.)

Wedding Prayer

I wrote this wedding prayer off the top of my head when a friend
said she was going to a wedding in Minneapolis and asked me
to send her something.

Creator of the Universe, God of Love, You created marriage as a sign of
Your self-giving total love for us Your people.

Thank You for Jesus's miracle at the Wedding at Cana, where He showed
that Your concern extends even to the smallest details of our happiness.
Be with us too at this marriage feast and fill any empty places in our
hearts with the joyful Wine of Your Presence.

Thank You for the example You set in Your love for us. Give all of us
the grace we need to follow Your example in the unconditional love we take
from you and give to one another.

We ask Your blessings on this marriage. Bless this union of this woman
and this man.

Give their families and friends the grace to support the unbreakable
bond that they
are forming. Be with them as they walk together through the joys and
satisfactions and the inevitable disappointments and sorrows of this
life.

Thank You that Your Love brought us all into being. Bless the children
that will come into being because of their love and Your Love.

Let their first love be for You and let that love guide them to eternal
life in heaven with You.

We ask this with grateful hearts this day through Your Son, Jesus Christ.

Truth: immutable or changing, if changing, to what extent?

On Aug 3, 2005, at 12:58 PM, BB wrote in reply to the email I sent out in July announcing why I left the ILM (see posting dated 8/8):

Hi Roseanne,

Thank you for giving us the piece that was missing. It looks like you spend a lot of energy in discovering and defending
what you think is the truth. Since the Church is the ultimate democracy (withyour consent, I'll smile here), you are perfectly your opinions in whatever way you think is best.

But you put no one else but yourself in the "To" field, which I take as a sign that you don't really welcome discussion.
You see, if the Magisterium is the beginning and the end of the discourse, my opinions, as well as yours, don't count for much. But if Christ is the beginning and the end, and we are the body of Christ, then I, you, the bishop, the teachers, and of course the Magisterium are contributing to the life of the Church, with our prayers as well as our opinions, and the final word
(ouch!) has yet to be written.

If I could discern a character of definitiveness in the teachings of the Church, I would be entirely on your side, and accordingly, I would not even bewriting to you, since my opinion and your don't count. Since I see those
teachings as evolving, I will certainly welcome an open and focused discussion. One very small issue at a time, please!

Yours in Christ,
B***.

------------


--- Roseanne Sullivan wrote:

Hello BB,

Thank you for offering to discuss issues with me.

You have misunderstood me. I sent everyone email using the Bcc because some people don't like having their emails revealed.

I sent it to my own email in the To; line because that is the accepted method. I would love to include anyone in a discussion that would care to be involved.

I welcome discussion. But I can't imagine why you think the Church is a democracy and that the teachings
are evolving.

Jesus taught His disciples, he didn't ask them to vote on what the kingdom of God should be. They had lots of dumb ideas about the subject. He was the one that knew the truth, and He was sent to teach it.

In my faith, opinions don't count when you are dealing with what God wants. What God wants is expressed through the prophets and through His Son, who left His Body the Church with His spirit to guide it.

Jesus didn't leave it so some Italian guy in Santa Clara or some Irish/ Hungarian woman in San Jose would be defining what His truth is by our opinions.

We don't have opinions about the laws of physics. They just are what they are.

In my opinion the ILM could benefit students by teaching them holiness, which includes prayer, and obedience to Church teachings. The teachings are not evolving. The truth is the same yesterday today and forever.

BB, I love you and your family very much. Thank you for writing. I appreciate your reply more thanI can express.

Most liberals who believe the things you wrote are open to everything except someone who doesn't believe what they do.

Thanks for your input and I hope to hear from you again.

Suggestion for the next topic: the Bible is not a collection of stories that "communities" wrote to "express " something that
they wanted us to know about God.

XO
Roseanne
_______

On Aug 4, 2005, at 1:32 PM, BB wrote:

Hi Roseanne,

I see a paradox. On the one hand, we discuss about issues. On the other hand, Jesus has already fixed things so that all discussion is meaningless. Imagine me, an ignorant layperson, engaging in a discussion about the HolyBible and its meaning. Ridiculous, isn't it? What would I try to achieve?

My purpose number one should be holiness, and mine would certainly be challenged by a discussion on the beliefs which hold dear (and which should not be subject to discussion in the first place). To the extent that I can read and understand, my second best option is probably to get formed and informed by the works of the Magisterium (in the hope that,
starting from today, it will never publish any new document, thus showing proper respect for the deposit of the faith).

In other words: before we exercise freedom, we should first be accepting it, and not be afraid of our differences, or of differences in the Church. Don't you think?

Yours in Christ,
BB.

--- Roseanne Sullivan wrote:

Hi BB,

If you want to include the other ILM students whose email addresses I have, here is the list: #Names removed.

What you might try to achieve by discussion about what the Church teaches is how to apply the truths of the Gospel to your life. To deepen insights about what they mean, ah, that's a good thing to do.

People's search for holiness is never helped by people who tell them that they have to make up their faith on their own
(like Parella) and that the things the Church has always taught what the Saviour did and said are culture-bound fictions written by a committee with an agenda to put forth.

Bruno, how can you base your faith on something that is man-made, mutable, ever changing, and on a Church that has been wrong until the 60s generation of priests and nuns and theologians figured out the real truth? What's left to believe in?

A Catholic shouldn't publish any new documents that contradict the valid teachings about what went before. As Pope John Paul II said, "Truth never contradicts itself." And as Pope Benedict XVI writes, theological investigation has to be within the context of the true teachings of the Church.

The Magisterium publishes new documents to clarify points that need clarification, such as the many errors that crept into the seminaries and so-called Catholic universities about what the documents of Vatican II really mean. In spite of what profane Fr. Pettingill and other ILM teachers taught, there is nothing in Dei Verbum that says the Gospels are fictions. To the contrary. Teachers like them are doing what some people accuse the evangelicals of doing: proof-texting, taking phrases out of context to prove their points.

This would be a good thing for the ILM to teach: read the Bible and pray and ask God to make His Word come alive for you. St. Francis did that. St. Augustine did that. Another good thing would be to encourage a respectful reading of all the documents, not just the popular theological speculations, but the doctrines put forth by our Church's leaders. (All available at www.vatican.va)

Since my saviour God Jesus Christ believed that Deuteronomy was written by Moses, except for a cocidil by Joshua, why
would I believe some modern-day theologians who by speculations and guesses in spite of a lack of any real evidence tell us
that they know better?

This summary of what I believe is from an Apostolic Letter from Pope John Paul about St Augustine.

He understood that if faith is to be sure, it needs a divine authority, and that this is none other than the authority of Christ,
the supreme teacher—Augustine had never doubted this(29)-and that the authority of Christ is found in the Sacred Scriptures(30) that are guaranteed by the authority of the Catholic Church.(31)


We should take it literally where the sense of the words indicates that the meaning is literal, and stay away from those
who want to deconstruct the Bible. One of their basic premises is that if the Bible reports a miracle
then that part was made up. In these and other matters, they build a structure of false assumption laid on a framework of erroneous speculations, and the result is a hollow fiction that doesn't make any sense.

The first test of a saint is whether he or she is obedientto the Church.

I suppose you hate all of this, but I'm trying to respondwith what I firmly believe.

In other words: before we exercise freedom, we should first be accepting it, and not be afraid of our differences, or of differences in the Church. Don' t you think?

I am not worried about having any freedom except the liberty that is in Christ Jesus. I don't want a freedom of intellectual speculation that would allow me to come up with a theory equivalent to saying red is black and black is yellow. That's not intellectual freedom, it's nonsense.

I am afraid of the harm that the false teachings are causing the people who hear them. There is a LOT to be said about the
harm those false things are causing.

For one example, when I first came back to the Catholic Church, I saw a blasphemous article written by a religious nun about how "Divorce Should Be a Sacrament" in the liberal Jesuit magazine "America." And only 5 years ago, I saw that a prominent priest in San Francisco was quoted as saying that in his opinion, there is no hell. His opinion is worth less than the paper it's written on.

It is not Sr. Liberal's opinion or Fr. No Hell's opinion that matters. It's what Jesus Christ did and taught and what His Church,
full of the Holy Spirit has continued to teach in His Name.

More apt references to Augustine from JPII:
He understood that if faith is to be sure, it needs a divine authority, and that this is none other than the authority of Christ,
the supreme teacher—Augustine had never doubted this(29)-and that the authority of Christ is found in the Sacred Scriptures(30) that are guaranteed by the authority of the Catholic Church.(31)
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/
hf_jp-ii_apl_26081986_augustinum-hipponensem_en.html

In Christ with you,

Roseanne



8/5/2005 2:53 PM

On Aug 5, 2005, at 2:53 PM, BB wrote:

Hi Roseanne,

Your opinions seem deeply rooted in Greek philosophy. For the Greek (not all of them, of course, but oh well) what changes is secondary and not too good, but what stays the same is really important and good. There follows a description of God who is one, immovable, and... spherical. God needs to be spherical, Aristoteles (son of the rich guy) argues, not to privilege one direction over another.

So if changes are bad, God does not change. And if the Church needs to be good, it shouldn't change either. Logical, isn't it?


> BB, how can you base your faith on something that is man-made, mutable, ever changing, and
> on a Church that has been wrong until the 60s
> generation of priests and nuns and theologians
> figured out the real truth? What's left to believe in?


I actually believe that changes are good. When Aristoteles thinks of change, he thinks about corruption/decomposition, that big issue of mortality. When I think of change, I think of conversion, of hope, of the Kingdom which is growing under our eyes (see the agricultural images of the Kingdom in the Synoptics). I think of Jesus who sees and is moved to compassion by what he sees. Of God who changes His mind and decides not to punish his people, just for once more.

This means that owee, I totally disagree with you. But yes, I am ready to follow your line of thought and see where it leads.
So if I've got it right (do I?), we need to go with the following.

1) The Truth is immutable.
2) The Church teaches the Truth.
3) Whatever the Church has taught in the past is still valid.
4) No newer teaching can directly contradict an older teaching, or it would be
invalid for this very fact.

One document which I love with all my heart is the following.

http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius09/p9syll.htm

I had no luck in finding it on the vatican.va web site, but you probably can. The logical negation of the statements contained here are to be taken as absolute and immutable truths. And it is up to me, and to you, to deepen our
knowledge of these truths and apply them to our lives.


Yours in Christ,
BB.


------------------------------------------

8/6/05 8:55 PM

From: roseannesullivan@sbcglobal.net
Subject: do not be led astray by every strange teaching
Date: August 6, 2005 8:55:30 PM PDT
To: BB@yahoo.com

Hi again BB,

My opinions are based on my strong intellectual assent to the truths of my faith. My faith was given to me
as a gift from God. I have faith in certain things based on what the Church has consistently taught. And I could not
put my faith in a Church that was based on fictions and false attribution of authorship, and I don't have to. If I'm wrong, I'm in good company.

The portion of the Church that believes what you seem to believe is quite like the liberal (non-fundamental) Protestant
denominations. People are staying away from those churches in droves, because they aren't being fed the meat of the Gospels.

ILM teachers believe people should study the Bible. But they seem to mean they should study what the Bible debunkers have been saying about the Bible. I believe people should be reading the Bible to let God's Word speak to them, and not filtering it through an intellectual filter with that kind of attitude of pride about all the secret knowledge we now supposedly have. We now supposedly "know" the "real" writers of the gospel were not the ones named. We "know" they were written far after the fact by "communities." (Have you ever seen anything written by a committee? I have seen attempts, but there is always one author or the whole result cannot not hang together.)

It is mind boggling to think that current theologians actually think therewere all throughout salvation history groups of people who sat down and somehow came up with a bunch of stories. And to think nobody cared for example,when someone wrote under Peter's name that he was an eyewitness of the transfiguration. That is just impossible! Too big of a supposition
to swallow. Why should anyone care about a bunch of stories? We all have better things to do that to read fictions about God by fallible people who had an axe to grind.

It would also be impossible for a critic to go back say forty years and find out by close reading of a certain text who wrote it and why. But we now have people claiming to be able to analyze texts that were written thousandsof years ago and tell us what the authors really meant, and contradict the clear teaching of the Church from the same era.

There is a lot of intellectual pride in people who claim to know better what Jesus meant than the people who were closest
to the events.

As for the claim that people "back then" didn't have the same regard for the truth that we do, and that they were content with stories, even if they knew they weren't true--well that is arrogance and culture-centrism. To thinkthat the people at the time the Bible was written were so far away from our mindset is just an groundless opinion not based on any facts . It seems to satisfy the ones who promote it and the ones who believe it. It seems absurd to me. People's minds have not changed all that much..

Believing these things about the Bible gives leeway to deny the words of Christ whenever a person doesn't agree with them.

One of the most astounding examples of the problem of Catholics thinking they know better than Jesus did happened at a retreat at the Franciscan-run San Damiano retreat house. The priest, I think he was Barry Brunsman, stood up and acted out the Gospel that quoted Jesus saying that divorce was not allowed. I think it was Matthew 5:31-32. He then proceeded to
say casually, "Jesus was not against divorce," calmly contradicting the Gospel he had just repeated, along with centuries of
Church teaching. I asked him later during "spiritual direction" how he could contradict the words of Our Lord immediately after reading them, he said that "a theologian" had said that Christ wasn't against divorce. So the opinion of a theologian had more weight in that priest's heart than the Gospel and the Tradition of the Church.

Since I trust the Church as the literal Body of Christ, I accept doctrines humbly that I might not understand or agree
with. It is the ability of the Catholic Church to interpret what the Scriptures mean based on tradition that drew me back to her. I am certain that Christ made Peter and his successors the head of His Church on earth, and I am grateful because they keep us being led astray by every strange teaching that comes along.

I am heavily influenced by St. Augustine, St. Thomas, St. Francis, St. Peter, St. Paul, the Old and the New Testament. I don't care whether or not St. Thomas made an occasional inane assertion about women or the purpose of marriage. He has my heart because his intellect was tempered in mystical union with Christ. The same for Augustine. If anyone told
me stories of, say, Karl Rahner levitating before the Blessed Sacrament, I might take his authority more seriously. And for the same reason, I love John Paul II, who wrote in front of the Blessed Sacrament and was often found
prostrate face down on the floor in worship.

God does not change His mind about what is right and what is wrong. How can you believe such a thing? Growth is fine, deeper understanding is fine. Declaring black is yellow and red is green is nonsense.

I believe that what I believe is the same as what the great saints have believed. Based on these precepts they achieved holiness. The fruit of truth, the fruit of the Holy Spirit, is right knowledge and right living. I am a novice in the secular Discalced Carmelite order, so the Carmelite saints are very important to me. The great St. Teresa of Avila's dying words were "I am a humble daughter of the Church."

I'm not a Greek thinker, I'm a Christian. And I never believed God was a sphere. I believe that God is everything that is good, intelligent, creative, artistic, lovable, faithful, true, powerful, attractive, wonderful, beautiful, pure, and praiseworthy.
Glory to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.
Not mutable. The same yesterday, today, and forever.

Changes are not categorically bad. But to repeat, the Truth does not contradict itself.

On nonessentials, individuals in the Church have been wrong. But us Catholics who believe in papal infallibiltiy believe that the Holy Spirit kept even the worse Popes from errors when they were teaching dogmatically about faith and morals.

Is it a good argumentative practice to drip with sarcasm?

I don't think I am being sarcastic about the (to-me) fantastic things you believe.

BTW, I don't have any problem with the syllabus of errors.

I do have a problem with people who keep reintroducing the hoary old errors to the faithful century after century.

Today is the feast of the Transfiguration. St. Peter was there with Christ as an eyewitness, and here is he wrote in his second
letter about how the events of Christ's life were laid down:

2 Peter Chapter 1
16
We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming
of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.
17
For he received honor and glory from God the Father when that unique declaration came to
him from the majestic glory, "This is my Son, my beloved, with whom I am well pleased."
18
We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven while we were with him on the holy mountain.
19
Moreover, we possess the prophetic message that is altogether reliable. You will do well to be
attentive to it, as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.
20
12 Know this first of all, that there is no prophecy of scripture that is a matter of personal interpretation,
21
for no prophecy ever came through human will; but rather human beings moved by the holy Spirit spoke under the influence of God.
-------------------------------

Of course, according the NAB, most scholars don't believe Peter wrote those words, which is handy since they do believe that the Bible is made up of "cleverly-devised myths" and is a matter of "personal interpretation" and not "eyewitness" accounts.

Can you tell me more about how you came to be comfortable with a religion and a Godwho is changing?

With you, in Christ, your sister,

Roseanne

Biographical snippet rediscoverd 7/3/2005

On Jul 3, 2005, at 11:20 AM, Roseanne Sullivan wrote to family.

When I was looking for something else tonight, I just found the biographical snippet I included below, and I want to share it with you. I added a lot to it. Mary, you might be interested in this because it tells about my life as a student trying to raise two small kids at the same time.

Hope you are all doing well. Happy 4th.

Love you, Mom/Roseanne

When I started at the U of MN in the Fall of 1975 I was 30, older than most of my fellow-students, and raising two small children alone. My son Liberty had been 4 and my daughter Sunshine was 2 years old when I'd divorced my husband the previous April. I am not proud of the reasons I married or the reasons I got divorced. And I'm not proud of what I put my ex-husband, George, my ex-in-laws, my kids, and myself through in trying to finish the college education that I had started at Brandeis University in 1963 at the age of 17. But I just had to flesh out that part of my life a little bit more because I want you to know I wasn't always on welfare.

I had brought up the subject of divorce to George soon after I found out that the State of Minnesota had a generous program (which was cut long ago) to try to help women get college degrees or other training to help them get off welfare. The program paid for child care. That's the only way I could have gotten through.

Writing this reminded me about another thing that had also precipitated my leaving. I had found out some people I knew from Moorhead State College, where I was taking a class every quarter, were moving out of an apartment I liked and that I could afford on welfare. The apartment was in a nice old wood-framed home about 12 blocks from the college. To qualify for the free child care, I would have to take a minimum of 12 credits. It would be hard to be the sole caregiver for two little ones and take a full load, but I would do it since I had to.

Before we broke up, we had been living in the country, 23 miles from Moorhead, six miles from the nearest town for almost four years. In the living room of our little rented house on the prairie, I told my husband that I wanted to separate so we could work on our relationship. I had wanted to leave before, but I would end up staying because whenever I brought the subject up, he would pay attention to me for a while.

So using some convoluted reasoning, I thought that if I left I would be able to get him to really pay attention. I didn't say that if I left I wanted to pursue the goal of becoming a professional with a college degree that he had not followed. It had been a blow to realize that he was never going to follow that goal. And a big disappointment that he had changed the plans we'd made together without letting me know.

He said quickly, probably because that's what he really wanted, "If you leave, we'll get a divorce." And, I guess because that is really what I wanted to do by that point too, I said, "Fine."

I was telling him about the apartment and about the chance for me to get on welfare and still finish my degree, when Liberty walked into the living room with us, and I told Liberty we would be moving. He run out and brought in his Big Wheel to start packing. George and I were both grieved by Liberty's innocent enthusiasm. Poor little LIberty had no idea of what the move would mean for his life.

If I had known what it would end up doing to the children and to us all, I could never have done it. The common wisdom says that children are better off if warring parents divorce. The common wisdom is a lie. A child from a broken home may live a happy, fulfilled, and productive life, but he or she is still going to be crippled. I think of divorce as an amputation. Sure, an amputee can have a full life. But it's not the same life as he would have had with all his limbs intact. Being two, Sunshine was too little to realize much about what was going on.

A few hours later I went looking for George. I climbed the ladder to the hay mow in the old barn, and I found him lying on his back on a sleeping bag he'd brought up there looking up numbly at the beams of sunlight coming through the many holes in the roof. Swallows darted around among the dust motes dancing in the light. He wouldn't speak to me.

I used that image in a poem later that I wrote for one of my poetry classes without much compunction. I was perversely glad to have experienced such a poignant moment and being able to write knowingly about the inarticulate man not being able to express his grief. Now I realizee that maybe he was up there because he didn't want to express his anger.

I finished a B.A. with a double major in English and Studio Arts in 1979. I was able to afford going to college only by applying for welfare, being able to pay less for food by being able to buy the food stamps (do you know people have to pay for food stamps?), by applying for financial aid and loans, and by living without most things that people in this prosperous nation take for granted.

Not only the material things were hard to come by. My family was 1500 miles away in the East Coast and they had their own problems. With the food stamps, we had plenty to eat. But when I was done paying the rent in my subsidized apartment, buying the food stamps , and paying the utilities, I had about $40 left for everything else, such as clothing and transportation. For one of the kids to lose a pair of mittens was a dreadful loss, every bit of clothing was so hard to come by. And without a scramble to get new mittens right away, frostbitten fingers would have been inevitable.

Robin Brown, head of the English Composition program at the U of Minn in those days, indirectly got me started in the direction of the work I've been doing since 1984. He gave me a job as a teaching associate in composition when I entered the M.A. program. The composition-teaching job --even though it was part time and earned only $9 an hour--paid enough to get me and my family off welfare. There I was, taking a full load of classes, and teaching half time. No wonder I was stressed out.

Robin required all composition teachers to learn to use computers, and to encourage their students to learn how too. There is no way that I can adequately portray to you young folks out there how radical that idea was then. I find the notion of a computer-free past hard to recall myself. I also got started by acting as a T.A. in a computer science writing class.

I earned an M.A. in English with an emphasis in creative writing in 1983, after working with memoirist Trish Hampl on a memoir that, along with some short stories, served as my thesis. After spending another year on courses towards a Ph.D. in American Studies I broke out of the graduate- student coccoon into a technical writing job --which got me and my family finally off of food stamps and out of subsidized housing.

Sad to say, my experience at the U of MN was mostly-friendless, alienated and painful. I remember most of all trudging on biting winter days from one impersonal university office at one end of the campus to another similar office at another end of the campus in the ordeal that was called "registration for winter quarter." I also remember walking home other nights from working late on an art project in that dismal old art building on the west bank, again in the -20 degree cold, walking because I could have frozen to death if I stood for more than a few minutes at any of the bus stops along the long walk home on Central Ave. to Northeast Minneapolis, waiting for buses that never ran on time.

I also remember getting my diploma for my undergraduate degree in Northrup Auditorium, and going up to get the diploma wearing my honors robe, with my son in front of me and my daughter behind. I had nobody there besides them to cheer me on, and I had to take them with me to the stage because I had nobody to leave them with. When we had walked into the auditorium, my son excitedly said that the long walk down the center aisle with all the standing people and flashing cameras on either side reminded him of the award ceremony at the end of Star Wars. It did me too.

I don't remember getting the M.A., a few years later, but I have the certificate here in my office: THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA ON RECOMMENDATION OF THE FACULTY HAVE CONFERRED UPON Roseanne Therese Sullivan THE DEGREE OF Maser of Arts WITH ALL ITS PRIVILEGES AND OBLIGATIONS GIVEN IN MINNEAPOLIS IN THE STATE OF MINNESOTA THE NINETTENTH DAY OF AUGUST NINETEEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-THREE.

Liberty wore my cap and gown while we walked on the bridge across the Mississippi on our way home that day.

(This was mostly written in 2001.) I am now a lead technical writer at Sun Microsystems in Silicon Valley, have been for 13 years.)

I like the detective part of my work. I enjoy using the skills I've honed for extracting hidden information from the brains of engineers and from sometimes-impenetrable design documents. And I can write a procedure for--say-- replacing a disk drive faster and better than just about anyone else. Mine is a noble calling, I feel, as I try to depart from the norm. I wrestle every day with the challenges of trying to create computer manuals that clearly tell readers what they need to know, no more, no less. And the nostalgia I sometime feel for the other career possibilities I once contemplated, artist or fiction writer, is assuaged in part by the goodly pay check I get every too weeks.