Order in Variety

Fr. Obih is a priest from Nigeria. While our regular pastor, Fr. Danel, is on an Italian pilgrimage to see Padre Pio et al, Fr. Obih is filling in.

This evening I served Mass for Fr. Obih. Mark one in the universality column for the Latin crowd: the north-Atlanta American suburbanite assisted the visiting African priest, and the unrehearsed ceremony went off without a hitch.

Chieftains

WHAT: The Chieftains, Ireland's official musical ambassadors
WHEN: Saturday, February 28, 2009, 8:00 PM
WHERE: The Fabulous Fox Theatre, Atlanta

I saw the Chieftains perform a few years ago at Chastain Park. They're back in town this weekend; I'd planned to go, but ran into a complication with the arrival of out-of-town company. Missing the show will be a good little sacrifice to offer up for Lent.

Forty-three albums of traditional Irish music in forty-four years: not a bad run at all.

Social Web Sites Cause Brain Damage?

Source

According to neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, social networking web sites are causing alarming changes in people's brains. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Bebo shorten attention spans, diminish the ability to communicate and concentrate, encourage instant gratification, and make people more self-centered.

Interestingly, these same problems (along with increased frequency of ADD, criminal behavior, drug use, teenage pregnancy, depression, and suicide) also occur more frequently in single parent homes.

I also recall reading the remarks of a British jurist who observed that young people make bad jurors because they have such short attention spans. Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge of Draycote is of the view that Gen-Y folks are so used to information presented on a screen that they are unable to listen to complex arguments in a courtroom.

At the same time, social sites seem to provide an advantage to business. Perhaps the breakdown is social technology as business tool vs. social technology as social mechanism?

Fr. Damien

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Pope Benedict will canonize 10 new saints this year, five in April and another five in October. One of the October saints is Fr. Damien de Veuster.

Fr. Damien de Veuster
Photo taken two months before his death

Fr. Damien was chaplain for the Molokai leper colony in Hawaii. Born Joseph de Veuster in 1840, he took the name Damien and went to Hawaii in 1864 to join his fellow missionaries of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. About 10 years later he started caring for leprosy patients on the Kalaupapa peninsula of Molokai island, where about 8,000 people had been banished during an epidemic in islands.

Father was a heroically generous soul who sought out those who had been abandoned and left to rot (literally). The forgotten ones on the leper colony were demoralized and lived in despair (at times even dissolutely), but the good priest reminded them of their dignity and told them that the Son of God had died for them as well. Fr. Damien labored hard to cultivate a culture of life on the island, especially through the Church’s liturgy: the magnificent Catholic Latin High Mass was a beloved hint of Heaven to those suffering people. At the end of his life he contracted leprosy himself -- a cross he bore generously, uniting it with Christ's suffering on Golgotha.

In the 19th century the colony was accessible only by sea just a few times out of the year; sometimes the lepers were just thrown overboard near the shore because there was no place for the ship to land. Even today a boat docks at the site of the colony only twice a year (planes make it a bit more accessible).

In 1936 Fr. Damien's body was exhumed and returned to Belgium (though in 1995 his right hand was returned to his original grave in Hawaii). The woman whose miraculous healing served as the final proof of Fr. Damien's sanctity had stage 4 cancer; she'd prayed to Fr. de Veuster for help, and after seven years her prayers were heard. (Aside: not that a saint answer prayers; when you ask for a saint's help, what you're doing is asking him to intervene on your behalf before the throne of God).

Fr. Damien's canonization has been expected for some time.

Subtlety

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U.S. astronomers spotted a huge explosion in space. Scientists calculate the blast to be stronger than 9,000 supernovae.

The Kepler Supernova
20,000 light years from earth
A million-trillion times as bright as earth's sun

Gamma rays -- which are released by an eruption of this sort -- are able to penetrate matter. Said astrophysicist Frank Reddy of NASA, "These things don't stop for anything -- they just bore through and that's why we can see them from enormous distances."

After His Resurrection Christ walked through a solid door to stand beside His Apostles in the upper room. The quality of a Resurrected body that allows it to pass through solid objects with ease is called Subtlety.

I'm not suggesting that a glorified body in Heaven -- one in which the body is perfectly in tune with and subject to the soul -- is like a gamma ray. I'm just pointing out (perhaps for the sake of those who like those who like empirical support for a proposition?) that with the gamma rays escaping a supernova we have an example in the physical universe of one thing being able to pass through another with alacrity.

For the record, in addition to subtlety, there are three other attributes of Resurrected bodies in Heaven:
* Impassibility: incapable of experiencing physical pain or corruption
* Agility: free and swift movement -- with the quickness of thought, in fact
* Clarity: to shine with a brilliant radiance and beauty

Important to Whom?

I was having lunch one day with a woman who said that her mother was struggling to find meaning in her life after the youngest child in the family had gone off to college.

"My mother has nothing in her life to give her value," she said, slurping on a straw. "She's never done anything of real meaning."

I haven't chatted again with this individual, in part because I wonder how much I'd enjoy another conversation with someone so obtusely selfish.

The mother in this case had been the stay-at-home variety who'd looked after several children -- which meant that there were a number of years when the mother was the most important person in the world to a bunch of little ones. That one of the little ones would grow up to be the oblivious individual sitting across the table from me was disappointing -- after all, it's sad when a person looks on others as existing mostly to gratify one's ego, but to escape adolescence and still be thinking that way about your own mother? What a clueless way to go through life.

Stimulus Plan Variation

I do not like the stimulus plan being pushed through congress: it awards money to people who made a number of bad decisions without obliging them to correct what caused the problems to begin with.

Having accepted that money is going to be given out as part of a stimulus plan, one wonders how matters would go if the funds went to pay off mortgages instead of being handed to the banks? Then the banks would get their money, and homeowners -- whom the money originally came from anyway -- would have paid-off homes.

Would you triage recipients: those who are not in arrears and have kept up their payments get the funds first? Perhaps limit it to primary place of residence?

Still, such a plan would be unfair to the people who have been responsible managers of their mortgages -- about 90% of homeowners -- to help those who have been less than prudent. And it's unfair that people who bought too much house or made imprudent purchase decisions should be excused from the consequences of their greed and stupidity. Would it still be better than just giving money to banks and having the homeowners lose out anyway?