Renovation

Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will like a wise man who built his house on rock.  The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house.  But it did not collapse; it had been set solidly on rock.  And everyone who listens to these words of mine but does not act on them will be like a fool who built his house on sand.  The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house.  And it collapsed and was completely ruined.
Jesus Christ, Matthew 7:24-27

 

Two of my brothers-in-law have been at our house this week completely replacing our central heating system - furnace, pipes and radiators.  My wife and I have been helping them a little, trying to keep the house reasonably clean, getting our two kids ready for school in the mornings and feeding and entertaining them, and preparing lessons for our teaching jobs.  It's been dusty and noisy and a little bit stressful.  OK, a lot stressful.

By the time this post goes live Friday night, all should be finished save for some repainting where they had to knock out some wall for the new pipes. 

Renovation can be painful (emotionally AND physically - those furnaces are heavy!) but the final result is worth it.

Confession of our sins can be likened to a renovation of our souls.  I've also heard it described as like a house cleaning for the soul.  It can be uncomfortable, even painful, but the sweet relief afterwards is beyond words.  Our sins are forgiven and our right relationship with God is renewed.

Catholics and Orthodox go to a priest for confession.  We believe that after we make a full confession of our grievous sins to a priest, Jesus grants us absolution through that priest.  The priest is a vessel for God's graces.  Even if he's a terrible scoundrel, as an ordained priest he is a channel for Jesus' absolution.

Another good thing about auricular confession to a priest is just that - it's auricular.  We have to physically speak our sins to another person.  That can be really uncomfortable, believe me.  But speaking our sins aloud can bring home to us just how ugly our sins are.  Also, a good priest can counsel us to help us deal with our weaknesses that lead us to sin.

Catholics are encouraged to examine their consciences before confession.  One effective way to do this is to reflect on the Ten Commandments and ask ourselves how we have sinned against God and our fellow man by breaking any of these commandments.  I think Protestant Christians will find this useful too when examining their consciences before Christ. 

It's been a long while since I've been to confession and I really need to go.  It's difficult for me to confess in Polish, which is the reason it's been so long.  However, I recently learned through one of my students that there's a priest in Jędrzejów who speaks English.  I dropped by that church the other day and discovered that he hears confessions on Saturday evenings.  I intend to go to him soon.  My soul needs some serious renovation.

A useful guide to examination of conscience

I am the Lord your God.  You shall not have strange gods before me.  Did I willfully or seriously doubt my faith?  Did I worship idols in my life by putting false gods over my duties to God and other people - idols such as my own free time, money, sports, music, etc.?

You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.  Did I curse using our Lord's name?

Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day.  Did I miss church on any Sunday?  Did I keep the Lord in mind on Sundays?  Did I keep that day in His honor? 

Honor your father and your mother.  Did I disobey my parents or lawful superiors in important matters?  Did I respect and honor my parents as I ought to?

You shall not kill.  Did I hatefully quarrel with anybody, or desire revenge?  Did I consent to, advise, encourage, or actively take part in an abortion?

You shall not commit adultery.  Did I willfully look at indecent pictures or watch immoral movies?  Did I engage in impure jokes or conversations?  Did I commit impure acts? 

You shall not steal.  Did I steal or damage another person's property?  Have I been honest at work or in my business relations?

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.  Did I tell lies.  Did I slander anyone?  Did I judge others rashly in serious matters?

You shall not covet your neighbor's wife (or husband).  Did I lust after another's wife or husband.  Did I dishonor my wife or husband by comparing them negatively with another's wife or husband?

You shall not covet your neighbor's goods.  Was I envious of other people's possessions?  Was I dissatisfied with the things that God has blessed me with?

Courage - Be Not Afraid!

Catherine de Hueck Doherty had an interesting life, to say the least.  She was born Ekaterina Fyodorovna Kolyschkine in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia in 1896.  Her parents belonged to the minor nobility and were Russian Orthodox.  Her father was posted to Egypt as a diplomat by the Russian government and Catherine went to a Catholic school in Alexandria, Egypt.

Her family eventually returned to Russia and in 1912, at age 15, Catherine married her cousin Baron Boris de Hueck.  It wasn't a happy marriage.

At the outbreak of World War I, Catherine became a Red Cross nurse at the front where she witnessed the bloody horrors of war firsthand. 

When the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, she and her husband, as members of the nobility, were under threat of imprisonment, or worse.  They barely managed to escape to Finland where they nearly starved.  They eventually made it to England.  There Catherine was received into the Catholic Church in 1919.

Catherine and Boris emigrated to Canada where she bore their only child, a son, George.  Catherine took on various jobs and finally became a travelling lecturer throughout North America.  Since they were cousins and their marriage was unlawful according to the Catholic Church, their marriage was annulled.  (Catherine later married Eddie Doherty, a reporter, in 1943.) 

In Canada, the de Huecks were prosperous again but Catherine felt dissatisfied with her life.  She was moved by the Scripture passage from Saint Mark's Gospel, "Arise, go sell all you possess, take up your cross and follow Me."

In 1932 she did give up all her possessions and for the rest of her life she worked with the poor, initially with a soup kitchen in Toronto, but eventually throughout the world with her apostolate 'Madonna House.'

Catherine died in 1985, aged 89, in Combermere, Canada.  Her cause for canonization has been taken up in the Catholic Church.

I recommend visiting the website www.madonnahouse.org.

When you have an inferiority complex - and who of us hasn't - you say things like, "I just don't believe that what God made is good.  Look at me, I'm a louse."  Don't dare to challenge God like this.  Everything he made is good, including yourself.  Don't listen to that serpent who is giving you apples that look red on the outside and are full of inferiority complexes on the inside.  Don't eat that apple, or else you are going to go down into a pit prepared by Satan for you for your whole life.

How can you have a wrong image of something or someone that God touched?  God touched you and he created you.  You passed through his mind and you were begotten.  Anyone of us that passes through God's mind, anyone of us that God touched, cannot be this horrible person we think we are.  No!  Each one of us is beautiful - we're beautiful because he touched us.

Sometimes this is very difficult for us to accept.  We look at ourselves and say, "He made us in his image, equal to himself in a manner of speaking, heir to his Son?  This just can't be.  He hasn't looked into my heart.  He doesn't know what I'm made of!"  We say those silly things because our evaluation of ourselves is very poor.  We haven't looked at ourselves with the merciful, tender, compassionate eyes of God.  So we walk in despair half the time.  As a result, the ability to realize that God is both in our midst and in us - a realization that is the fruit of faith - fades and disappears.

This is the main reason, it seems to me, why the Father sent his Son to us, why the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us as one of us.  The Father, having given us the fantastic gift of faith, wanted to help us accept this awesome gift.  He sent his Son Jesus Christ so that we, unbelieving, might believe.  We are like children; we need to touch.

Every human being is a mystery.  The mystery of man enters into the mystery of God, and bursting forth with great joy, comes faith and understanding.  When faith is there, all is clear, and a love relation with God enters into your heart.  When you have faith, it is such a simple thing to accept his love, even if you do not understand why he loves you.

extract from Re-Entry Into Faith: "Courage - be not afraid!" by Catherine de Hueck Doherty.

Catherine with Pope John Paul II

 

 

Autumn

bracken ferns

Autumn can be a melancholy time of year.  As I begin typing this post on a Tuesday morning, it's dreary and pouring down rain outside.  Summer is over and life seems to be slowly dying.

When I was a kid I didn't like school and so fall made me sad.  If summer meant freedom, fall meant the return to the dull routine of school.

chrysanthemums

Yet, for all that autumn has its rewards.  Nature puts on a final, dazzling display of colored leaves before the dark and bare days of November.  It's also the time of ripened apples and nuts and here in Poland it's the time for finding mushrooms in the forest.

I took the first 5 photos on this post.  The mums are in our garden and the other shots are from the forest nearby.

For sports fans fall brings the excitement of pennant races, playoffs and the World Series in baseball.  (There's also that twinge of sadness for teams simply playing out the schedule with no chance at post-season play.)  It's also the beginning of the football season.  For me, one of the most beautiful and thrilling sights is the Green Bay Packers wearing those green and gold uniforms on a sunny Lambeau Field on an autumn Sunday afternoon.

The picture below is scanned from my book, The Packer Legend: An Inside Look by John B. Torinus.  The caption doesn't mention it but I think that's Forest Gregg, number 75, on the turf in the background.  He was a great player and later coached the Packers in the mid-80s.  This book was given to me for Christmas in 1985 by my parents.  I've managed to hold on to this book all these years.  This fall I'm re-reading it for the umpteenth time.

 

 

 

I love the Peanuts comic strips and TV specials and autumn often reminds me of them.  Maybe it's because two of the three best Charlie Brown TV specials are fall-themed.  Those of course would be It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (with the other one of the three best being A Charlie Brown Christmas.)  Who doesn't think of Lucy van Pelt holding the football for Charlie Brown to kick, then snatching it away at the last moment, when they think of autumn?

In Autumn when the woods are red
by Robert Louis Stevenson

In Autumn when the woods are red
And skies are grey and clear,
The sportsmen seek the wild fowls' bed
Or follow down the deer;
And Cupid hunts by haugh and head,
By riverside and mere,
I walk, not seeing where I tread
And keep my heart with fear,
Sir, have an eye, on where you tread,
And keep your heart with fear,
For something lingers here;
A touch of April not yet dead,
In Autumn when the woods are red
And skies are grey and clear.


Consummation
by Randall Peaslee

Fall's fires softly glow,
     Burning bush and tree;
Bedraggled ships go sailing slow
     Across a concave sea.
Liquid air will flush and tear
     Flickering flames aloft,
Until the color-fevered year
     Extinguishes itself.

Elementary, my dear Watson

Everyone connects that expression with Sherlock Homes.  But, did you know that this expression never appears in any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories?  This line was first used in connection with Sherlock Holmes in a 1929 film The Return of Sherlock Holmes and then was used extensively in a Sherlock Holmes radio series that ran from 1939-1947.

About 9 years ago at a flea market in Fort Worth I bought a book titled A Treasury of Sherlock Holmes, selected and with an introduction by Doyle's son Adrian.  I don't remember what I paid for it, probably just a couple of dollars.  Until recently I only dipped into it a few times and maybe read 3 or 4 stories.  Detective fiction didn't appeal to me, or so I thought.  G. K. Chesterton wrote that there's a widespread bias against detective fiction in the sense that it's not generally considered serious literary fiction.  That was probably more true in Chesterton's day than now, but I have admit that same notion colored my own thinking about the genre.

Well, if necessity is the mother of invention, invention's got a sibling named 'discovery.'  As I've written previously I don't have easy access to new books in English.  Recently I pulled down my Sherlock Holmes book from the shelf and started reading it.  Wow - to discover what I've been missing all these years!  The Hound of the Baskervilles is just fantastic.

It's interesting reading these stories and finding casual mention of things considered normal at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, when these works were written.  Holmes is a private detective and not part of any official police force.  After he's nabbed a villain and the villain is about to confess his crimes, a Scotland Yard detective present will quickly remind the criminal that he has the right to remain silent and anything he says can be used against him in court.  This right was firmly established in British common law by the 17th century.  I think Americans today don't realize how much of our legal traditions are British; for example, trial by jury, which doesn't exist in most other European countries outside Britain.

Another interesting thing to me is Dr. Watson's possession of his old army revolver.  Watson had been a doctor in the British Army (he served in Afghanistan - plus ça change . . .) and upon discharge he retained this firearm.  Holmes also possesses a revolver (and remember, he's not a police officer).  The right for individuals to bear arms goes far back in British and European history.

Dr. John Watson

I recently read that after Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland in the 17th century, Catholics in Ireland were denied the right to arm themselves, among other rights.  This was regarded as a denigration of their full rights.  I would add, it was a denigration of their full responsibilities, too.  It used to be assumed that the primary responsibility for policing belonged to the people of a community.  New York City didn't have an official police force until the middle of the 19th century (and the city is much older than that).  This is important to remember in the ongoing debates over gun laws.  It's fundamentally a moral issue.

Getting back to detective fiction, I've downloaded a book of G. K. Chesterton's 'Father Brown' detective stories as well as Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles in which she introduced her Hercule Poirot character, both from Dodo Press on The Book Depository website.  I went on a travel reading binge last summer and so I guess the autumn will belong to detective fiction.

Hercule Poirot

Honor & Shame

September 1, 1939 is one of those major dates in world history.  It was, as most everyone knows, the date Germany invaded Poland and the start of World War II.

When looking at historic dates it's easy to see each as another in a series of dates: September 1939 the war starts; May 1945 the war ends . . . But what about the nearly 6 years in between?  And for Poland, 1945 was the beginning of more than four decades of national humiliation under Soviet communist dominance.

A Polish girl mourns over her sister who was killed by machine

gun fire while gathering potatoes in a field, September 1939

But the future was unknown in the autumn of 1939 and in the summer of 1945.  I try to imagine myself as a Pole at the end of 1939.  What's it like when your country is invaded by a people who view your race as human trash?  What's it like when your town mayor, chief of police, university professors, lawyers, journalists and others of the professional class are rounded up and taken away who-knows-where?  Or, are shot in the street as an example?  And the town's Jewish population is rounded up and rumors about their ultimate fate aren't pleasant?  And later on many of the priests and other clergy are likewise rounded up and sent away?

Many individuals either acted honorably or shamefully during WWII.  The human heart is a complicated landscape and despite boasts to the contrary, neuroscientists will never succeed in fully comprehending the human brain: its thoughts and emotions and desires.

Pre-war Poland was a mosaic of Catholics, Jews, Lutherans, Orthodox, nationalists, socialists, democrats, etc.  Some Poles hid Jews at the risk of their own lives.  Some Poles assisted the Germans in locating Jews in hiding.  A few Poles even took the opportunity to slaughter their Jewish neighbors.

Polish civilians taken prisoner

There quickly formed an active Polish underground army.  They carried out sabotage, espionage, assassinations, and attacks on the German military.  The Germans typically retaliated by killing Polish civilians.  In cities such as Warsaw and Cracow the Germans would suddenly close off a street, select 100 of the Poles they found there (or just take all of them), line them up against a wall and shoot them. 

This happened frequently enough that if you left home to go to work or go shopping, you couldn't be sure you'd ever return home.  If you were on a bus or walking down the street and the Germans suddenly blocked off the street, you knew what was in store.  You probably thought of your family at home who would begin to grow nervous when you didn't return home, who would think the worst as the hours passed and you still hadn't come home.  Eventually they'd make the grim journey to the place where the Germans collected the bodies (your body) for the next of kin to claim.

The symbol of the Armia Krajowa,

the Polish underground army

If you were with the underground army you knew what happened each time you struck a blow against the Germans.  There had to be a whole lot of soul searching amongst the Polish fighters hiding in the forests.

That was the reality.  Nobody knew how long the war and the national nightmare would last.  In countries like France, a person could accommodate himself to the German occupation and live a relatively comfortable life.  Many Frenchmen chose that option, to France's everlasting shame.  But because of Hitler's racial views of the Slavic people (Poles, Slovaks, Russians, etc.) there really wasn't a long-lasting option of comfortable accommodation with the German regime.  Poles were to be used as slave labor with the fate of eventual liquidation.  As that understanding dawned on the Poles, I think resistance in some form or other was the only honorable option, even if it meant shocking violence to a fellow Pole walking home from work.


Seamus Heaney

The Irish poet and Nobel Prize for Literature winner Seamus Heaney died August 30th at the age of 74.  The first poem I ever read of Heaney's was 'Mid-Term Break' in a Lit class at college and I was hooked.  The poem deals with the death of his four-year-old brother Christopher, who was hit by a car, while Seamus was at school.  The final four lines are especially arresting:

Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple,
He lay in a four foot box as in a cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

My favorite Heaney poems are his early material.  I think he tended to repeat himself later in his writing career.  But all in all I really like his poetry.  This is one of my favorites, from his first collection Death of a Naturalist.

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging.  I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The course boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper.  He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf.  Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.