Coming Clean

The Sun setting behind the line of trees
Toddler laughter chasing, kicking, throwing
The younger teaching the older new skills and new fun
- Swings flying boys up to the moon
An embracing love, simple presence, happy being
Prayers for a memory that anchors a lifetime

New job by normal metrics is going well. Staying on or ahead of schedule. Slowly learning the business and able to help other people out with their walk. No stress.

But I find the Blues trying to tug me down. First, I’m not in the thick of things. I don’t mind avoiding the politics that entails at.all. But I miss the perspective, the freedom, and the responsibility that it brings. With time I’ll likely get pulled into the inner-circles more, but for now … I feel under utilized and a bit lost in the woods.

Second, and more importantly, I had a lot of friends at the old job. I had a regular lunch bunch of 4 co-workers with a not-uncommon crowd of 10. We were young, we were smart, we all had a lot in common. It was good. Now, there are only 2 co-workers I see with regularity, and while we get along fine, it’s not the same camaraderie. Add to that that I don’t have much of a social life outside of work due to kids, church, and giving my wife a reprieve from child care … and I find myself feeling rather lonely.

Didn’t expect that. Wonder how I’ll fix it.

What to do with an unyielding son?

… I’ll let you know if I ever figure it out …

Geof sent out this tweet yesterday:

…”spiritual but not religious” is greatly akin to “intelligent but uneducated”.

This is very much true.

Intelligence and spirituality are our potential, what we are capable of. Education and religion are the mold in which we let them be formed. With the wrong education and religion, our intellect and spirituality will suffer – just as with the right fit, we will flourish.

And that takes effort and discipline – a will of self to make these things important and to seek out what it is we need. Without them … while we may remain spiritual and intelligent … we won’t having anything significant in both our understanding and contribution to the world except that which we ignorantly, haphazardly, though quite capably stumble upon.

Go to college. Go to church(es). Learn who you are, where and what you need to be.

When I first took a job with LMCO, it was up in DC, and what I remember the most is a distinct lack of stuff to do. While I was hired to write and maintain software, it was really a job in avoiding insanity by finding something – anything – to occupy your time that wouldn’t get you in trouble. Thus I found myself doing a lot of wandering and talking. When that got old, I taunted a beta fish that we had put in a giant plastic bear container that once housed a ridiculous number of animal crackers. But perhaps most exciting: I, along with my co-workers, became an uncanny slinger of rubber bands.

The rubber bands really were a true source of pride. I could hit someone two cubes away by aiming via the reflections off the sprinklers. When you have as much time to stare at them as we did, you can actually figure both the position and the identity of the source of the sprinklers’ reflections. In fact, though he could never prove it, I shot my manager over a cube wall after he came in to tell us to cut it out.

Probably the worst offense, though, was the shooting of the Potted Plant. The Potted Plant was brought in by an engineer who had long since left by the time I had arrived. We gave it water maybe once a month, and, by genetics that we are apt to feel impossible, it has survived to this very day. To top it off, the Potted Plant has survived many a marksman’s attempts at bringing it down.

So, when one day a particular engineer actually managed to take a leaf off the Potted Plant, I took umbrage. Or rather, the Potted Plant took umbrage. And after everyone had long gone home for the day, the Potted Plant exacted its revenge by stringing up the engineer’s favorite stuffed green Frog. He left a little note scribbled in dirt reading “Don’t Let This Happen to You”, signed with a wilted leaf tucked into a rip in the paper.

Unfortunately, I cannot provide a report on the engineer’s initial response when he found his dear Frog near death the next morning. However, I can report that by the time I arrived, the Frog had made his way to my coffee cup, whereupon he was sitting and reading what looked like a newspaper. As I arrived at my cube for the morning, the engineer reached across and gave a tug on a draw-string in the Frog, at which the Frog began to vibrate.

After a good 10 minutes of hearty laughter, I went and washed out my cup. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust the Frog – but I wouldn’t put anything past an engineer. After that, we moved the Potted Plant and the Frog into opposite corners of the cube for fear of future engagements and/or retributions; however, I have heard that a Cold War replete with espionage and sabotage has continued between the factions of the Frog and Potted Plant ever since.

So, the other night, I was hanging out with one of our parish priests after a 3 hour Easter Vigil Mass. We started in on the topic of homiletics, and at some point the good priest goes off on a tear about how sometimes the Holy Spirit can just take hold of you and by the end you don’t know what you’ve said.

There’s a reflective, glowy pause, after which I pipe up: “Yeah, and neither does the congregation.”

In general, when folks talk about giving up something for Lent, it tends to be a vice or vanity. The television goes off in our house, as do the game systems. We become more mindful of our sweets. And this is when my parent’s home becomes particularly popular – they do not come from a faith tradition that observes the Lenten liturgical season, and so we allow the kids to take a Lenten reprieve when there.

In Lenten seasons past, I tried to set aside more time for prayer and meditation – time to draw closer to God. And I probably should have done the same again this year. Time is at more of a premium these days than it ever has been before – regular prayer time being limited to meals, boyhood bedtime, and Mass – and setting aside that time would have meant all the more. But I decided against it, looking instead to improve on some inner-discipline. Part of me has guilt – I’ve backslidden in my spirituality! – and part of me shrugs and says I’m just at a different place in life than I was in years past. The latter is certainly true. The former … I’m always ready to believe that’s true if someone wants to deliver a spiritual 2×4 to the back of my head to make the point.

This year I identified a sin in my life that has been a particular plague upon my soul, and I decided I would suffer it no more except through perseverance. And so, after talking with my wife, that is what I set out to do.

I wonder what Jesus had in mind when he said, “My yoke is easy. My burden is light.” Perseverance in goodness does not at all feel that way. And the perseverance itself begs questions of the whole experience – why this moment of hell? Why not end it by giving over and getting on with more important and interesting matters? What good fruit comes from this mortification? What is the end of this mean estate that I suffer?

Honestly, I don’t know that there’s a satisfying answer. All there is … is that I believe in Jesus. And Jesus suffered all to conquer all so that I might join with Him in all that I am and to share all that He has attained. And so, I give myself over to the good so that Jesus prevails in me and I in Him.

But that isn’t satisfying. It is poetic. It is beautiful. But my sin speaks so much more eloquently to me. “Take, revel, and return when you want more.” The Lord’s Supper isn’t so hedonistic. “Take and eat. Take and drink. Do this in memory of me.” He didn’t ask to be laid aside until we approach His table again. And growing up in a culture where the former is supreme and the latter is viewed as a form of insanity … it makes holding to the latter in fullness and earnestness difficult.

I’m glad to say that I fared fairly well, though admittedly not perfectly. And my precious wife has bore with my struggling – and at times irritable – spirit with the grace and love that called me to marry her. As for TV and games and sweets – we probably did the worst there. First of all because we didn’t do it as a family. I wasn’t willing to give up TV this Lent. I’m a jerk. And the kids would have gone nuts if they lost both TV and sweets. I think next year, though, we will give it up as a family. We should bear our children’s burdens if we are going to place it on them. It’s wrong to do otherwise. And, for giving up the TV, we still did a lot of TV viewing this year – it’s just really hard with 3 boys to keep them from killing each other when trying to clean, pay bills, budget, cook, etc etc etc.

During my Lenten Reconciliation, I confessed my sin, the struggles surrounding my sin, my desire to do away with it. And for now, while I cannot escape the near occasion of this sin, I feel cleansed of it – a first in a very long time.

I confess to Almighty God
And to you, my brothers and sisters,
That I have sinned of my own fault:
in my thoughts and in my words;
in what I have done
and in what I have failed to do.
And I ask blessed Mary, ever Virgin,
All the Angels and Saints,
And you, my brothers and sisters,
To pray for me to the Lord, Our God. Amen

Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee,
and I detest all my sin because of thy just judgment,
but most of all because they offend thee, my God,
Who art all good and deserving of all my love.
I firmly resolve with the help of thy grace to sin no more
and to avoid the near occasion of sin. Amen.

“Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. … The holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.” Luke 1:31-35

Virgin Mary, Theotokos, God-Bearer, Mother of God. Could she rightly and nobly hold these revered titles from time out of mind if the child that resided within her womb was not actually God as she bore Him?

It may seem an odd question to ask, but if we take the questions being asked today regarding embryonic stem cell research, particularly as it relates to Christian morality and ethics, it begs the question – at what point did Jesus become a person with all human (and divine) dignity?

Most Christians would sputter that the question is non-sense – clearly Jesus was fully divine at the moment of His conception within His virgin mother’s womb. And if we are to assert Christ’s divine personhood within His mother’s womb, then we must also assert his humanity. And thus we’re left to turn the question back around upon ourselves – if Christ was divine (and thus human) at the moment of His conception within His mother’s womb, then why should we not accord the same dignity to others who move through the same human embryonic state of being just as He did?

The Christian ethic is clear – embryos must be accorded the same dignity as any other person if for no other reason than that of Christ, who shared in our humanity from conception to death.

The Spirit of Catholicism by Karl Adam

Clips from the intro to the intro

“The truth shall make you free” (John viii, 32).

What is Catholicism? By that question we do not merely ask what is that characteristic quality which distinguishes Catholicism from other forms of Christianity; we go deeper than that, and seek to discover what is its governing idea and what are the forces set in motion by this idea. We ask what is the single basic thought, what is the essential form that gives life to the great structure which we call Catholicism? Regarded from the outside Catholicism has the appearance of a confused mass of conflicting forces, of an unnatural synthesis, of a mixture of foreign, nay contradictory, elements. And for that reason there have been those who have called it a complex of opposites.

…

We Catholics do not quarrel with the methods of the religious historian, so long as he keeps within his proper limits, within the limits of historical data and proved historical fact, and so long as he does not claim in his classification of religious types to pass decisive judgment upon the essential nature of the religious structure which he has under examination. We Catholics acknowledge readily, without any shame, nay with pride, that Catholicism cannot be identified simply and wholly with primitive Christianity, nor even with the Gospel of Christ, in the same way that the great oak cannot be identified with the tiny acorn. There is no mechanical identity, but an organic identity. And we go further and say that thousands of years hence Catholicism will probably be even richer, more luxuriant, more manifold in dogma, morals, law and worship than the Catholicism of the present day. … It is quite true, Catholicism is a union of contraries. But contraries are not contradictories. Wherever there is life, there you must have conflict and contrary. Even in purely biblical Christianity, and especially in Old Testament religion, these conflicts and contraries may be observed. For only so is there growth and the continual emergence of new forms. The Gospel of Christ would have been no living gospel, and the seed which He scattered no living seed, if it had remained ever the tiny seed of A.D. 33, and had not struck root, and had not assimilated foreign matter, and had not by the help of this foreign matter grown up into a tree, so that the birds of the air dwell in its branches. … But we refuse to see in these elements thus enumerated the essence of Catholicism, or even to grant that they are “structural elements of Catholicism” in the sense that Catholicism did not achieve historical importance save through them. For the Catholic is intimately conscious that Catholicism is ever the same, yesterday and to-day, that its essential nature was already present and manifest when it began its journey through the world, that Christ Himself breathed into it the breath of life, and that He Himself at the same time gave the young organism those germinal aptitudes which have unfolded themselves in the course of the centuries in regular adaptation to the needs and requirements of its environment. Catholicism recognizes in itself no element that is inwardly foreign to it, that is not itself, that does not derive from its original nature.

… is yet another scripting language.

Why?!

Mostly because that’s what my boss says.

So, what’s going to be cool about this new language? Honestly, I’m not sure – but this is what we’re shooting for:
- extensible syntax
- extensible graphical editor (so people won’t have to be mindful of syntax)
- extensible run-time (to support extensible syntax)

This is most definitely going to be a niche thing. It’s geared to get non-programmers programming the basic flow control and information design that they are already responsible for on a daily basis. I work for a call service after all – this is what they do.

One nice carrot on this thing is that after deployment and 6 months to a year of solid running, I can release it open source.