The Diary of a Country Priest

"Dear God, I give you all, willingly. But I don't know how to give, I just let them take. The best is to remain quiet. Because though I may not know how to give, You know how to take... Yet I would have wished to be, just once, magnificently generous to you."

"The Diary of a Country Priest" by Georges Bernanos.

I do not know how to give. The humility of this prayer is heartbreakingly beautiful. After all, it is not that I may give to Him, but that He might have me. That His will might be done, not that I might do it. That He may rejoice in making me what He wishes, not that I might become that.

Of course in actual fact the two are inseparable. He cannot make me what He wills unless I become that, and one of the things that He wills that I become is joyful, full of life. Nor is it wrong to desire fulfillment, to desire to be united with Him and to taste the joys at His right hand for ever more. As C. S. Lewis puts it, "A man is not mercenary for wanting to marry his beloved." Marriage is what the beloved is for (in a limited, human sense.) In a much deeper and more fundamental sense, Heaven is what I am for. It is not mercenary greed but deepest humility and gratitude to desire to receive all that God desires to give.

But it is very wise, and touching, and childlike, that this priest could see only his inability to give, and see the solution in God's utter ability to take. It is like the man who sees his lack of humility, and has finally come to realize not simply his lack, but his inability to supply that lack. He might be tempted to despair, but if he does then he has not learned the still deepest truth, that God's grace is sufficient unto us. God created us to receive everything that we are incapable of doing for ourselves. In other words He created us to receive Him. The proper response to that glimpse of our own powerlessness is joy, gratitude that we could provide God an opportunity to do what He delights to do, to give us what we lack.

"Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me." 2 Corinthians 12:9b.

Anyway, read "The Diary of a Country Priest," prayerfully and with gratitude, and pray not to be made like the humble Cure', but made into whatever God wishes to make you.

Meals

 The first thing I did upon arriving at the hotel room for the evening (after showering) was to prep for tomorrow. Make sure my pack is ready, the ropes are bagged, and food and water are restocked. My lunchbox contains a small summer sausage, half a block of cheese, a pound of baby carrots, some raw red peppers, two apples and two granola bars. Two 1 liter nalgene bottles of tap water and a 3 liter camelbak complete the nutritional requirements of yours truly for a full day of hiking, climbing and miscellaneous such frivolities.

For supper this evening I am eating a half a loaf of bread with cheese and banana peppers on it, and a block of ham weighing about a pound. I am hungry as all get out, and they are absolutely delicious. They also have the advantage of requiring next to no preparation at all. I microwaved the bread and bought the ham ready to eat. I just cut a chunk off with my pocket knife and there we are. I don't even have a plate in the hotel room so I set the ham on top of the bread to keep it off the table. For drink I have a one liter nalgene bottle of tap water (Boulder is such a trendy little town, I'm pretty sure the water is organic.) I can eat and type, listen to music, chat, read, do anything I want. There is no one in the world to consult in the matter except myself.

But it occurred to me as I was going through the minimal preparations for eating, that this is rather a barbaric way to live, no matter how much Handel I listen to while I eat. Forget utensils, forget dishes, tablecloths, place settings, even a dining room. I am eating at the hotel room computer desk. Are any of those things necessary? No. Certainly not. I can enjoy them with the best when they are available, but right now I am in hunter-gatherer mode.

But I feel like there is something missing in the hunter-gatherer approach. I wouldn't even really call that a meal. Most of the time I eat when I get the chance, and don't eat when I don't get the chance. No regular meal times. That is understandable in the field, but it bleeds over into the rest of my life. On a weekend there is no particular reason why I shouldn't eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, instead of just grabbing whatever is convenient. There is no reason why I shouldn't cook something good, instead of eating raw fruits and vegetables and pre-cooked meats. (Which are a better choice for food-on-the-go than some other things, but still...)

What I find when I think about it is that I have reduced eating to a matter of caloric intake. I need energy to fuel the machine so I take in energy. I have to function at a fairly high level physically so I make sure that at least most of the food I take in is not garbage. It keeps me alive and healthy, but in walking from the refrigerator to the computer desk I got the feeling that something was missing. I remember when I was kid fuming and muttering under breath at being made to set the table, talking back to my Mom about which side the knife and the fork should go on, asking why we had to use the good glasses which were so much more bother. Wouldn't plastic do just as well? Why not just use paper plates?

It's ironic. My mother learned (whether she liked it or not) that you just can't have nice things with a house full of kids. Plates and cups will get broken, silver will get lost, and most of the time there just isn't time to do things the fancy way. Nowadays, although she can maintain the nice, matching dinnerware that was an inevitable casualty in our younger days, she is as likely to go casual as I am. But I have learned something as well. It was undoubtedly a woman who invented dinnerware and tablecloths, placemats and napkins, and all the other accoutrements of fine dining, and there is a value in these things that is not readily apparent to me, but real nonetheless.

Taken altogether these "extras" have a message. They take eating and raise it from the realm of refueling, and make it into something special. To put it another way, they recognize and make visible the specialness that is inherent in the act of eating. These things turn a biological necessity into a ritual, which can become a means of bringing about relationship. They raise it from the level of animal need, to the level of human community. This is undoubtedly the biggest reason why I neglect all of them most of the time. They just don't make sense when you are eating alone. This is the same reason why I never make pizza for myself. It just doesn't make sense. If I want pizza for myself I'll order it. But for my friends and family? I'll spend an entire day preparing a meal that will be eaten and gone in a few hours, because they are worth it. The meal becomes a means to something greater.

Eating alone is only half of what it should be. It is a lame, crippled thing. Eating should be shared. It should be special. It is worth time and effort to make it so.

So if you have the ability, eat with your family. Prepare food for them, or cook it together with them. Add in some music or a good movie. Take whatever time it takes and consider it time well spent.

If you don't have that opportunity and you must eat alone, realize that you are never alone. Eat with God. Take the time to thank Him for the food He has given you, and share the meal with Him. He longs to share it with you.

Wheat Farmers and Weed Exterminators

A few weeks ago I went to an evening Mass at the Catholic Center in the Citadel Mall in Colorado Springs. The Catholic center is a small chapel and Catholic resource center run by a small group of Franciscans, affectionately referred to as “Mall Monks.” (Mall Monks for the win! You can check them out here.)

The gospel at this Mass was Matthew13:24-30 the parable of the wheat and the weeds. The monk who was preaching the homily said, with a twinkle in his eye, “Are you more of a wheat farmer or a weed exterminator?”

You know how every once in a while you hear a single sentence or a phrase that hits you like a lightning bolt out of a clear blue sky? This simple question was like that. In less than the time it took to realize what I had heard I experienced a complete refocusing of my outlook (which was a little bleak at that particular moment.) It might seem strange that I could experience the effect of an idea without really processing it, but I find it happens to me quite often. My mind leaps to a conclusion, and only later am I able to trace it backwards and find out where it came from and how it makes sense.

In every heart there is a hopelessly confused profusion of growing things. Some of these growing things are fruitful and beautiful. There are fruit trees, vegetables, flowers, wheat, shade trees, all manner of life. There are also weeds, brambles, nettles, toadstools, fungi and all types of poisonous, useless, or just plain nuisance plants. They exist in such close proximity to each other that their leaves, branches and even roots intertwine. It is beyond the skill of any human gardener to sort them out. According to the parable, it is beyond even the skill of angels!

I have long had a tendency to look at that wild tangle, or the surface level of tangle which is all I can really see, and see only the weeds. My inclination is to get out my hoe and pruning hooks and start hacking away at everything I can get my hands on, but even in regular gardening that isn’t how you do it, except in the most desperate cases. But that is not how God manages things.

You see, here is the thing about weeds. The devil didn’t invent weeds, he just sowed them in the wrong place. That’s what makes a weed a weed, not the fact of its existence but where and when it grows. No one considers ordinary grass a weed, until you see it growing up between your young corn stalks. The grapevine that is slowly strangling the life out of the purple Lilac by the corner of the barn is only a weed because it is wild and untrained. Properly nourished and in its rightful place it produces fruit and wine to cheer the hearts of gods and men. The Scotch thistle that is horrendously out of place among my beans is achingly beautiful waving in the wind in the pasture on a cloudy day. Even the toadstools and fungi are necessary and good and even beautiful in their proper place. The devil cannot create a single living thing, with all his cunning and power all he can do is take something that was already in existence, alive and growing by the grace of God, and encourage it to grow where it is not wanted.

God, rather than ripping that poor plant out of the ground, allows it to grow. He’ll even start pruning it, which causes no end of frustration to the plant in question, in an effort to make it fruitful. The bruised reed He will never crush. He encourages the growth of all that is beautiful, fruitful and life-giving, or even potentially so, until the very end.

Grow the wheat. Wheat is a plant, just as hardy and just as alive as any weed. The quack grass that sucks the nutrients out of the soil and starves the wheat doesn’t have to be the strongest thing alive. No matter how often you chop it down with the hoe, it will grow back because the root is still there and still alive. But wheat has roots as well. Let the wheat grow. Fertilize the wheat, bank it up with dirt, protect it from the neighbor’s marauding cows and water it. It will grow. It will become strong and it will do your work for you. It will suck the soil dry and leave nothing left over for the quack grass. Prune the fruit trees and build a beehive. Train the string beans to climb their strings and trim the wandering watermelon vine.

Don’t obsess over the weeds. Just bear much fruit. No doubt at harvesting time there will be any amount of dried stalks and old tangled vines and rubbish to toss into the fire, but that is not what God is interested in. He is interested in the sheaves, the bushels, the pecks, the jars and crates and sacks of good things that are our return to Him for all the good things He has given us.

For He came that we might have life, and have it to the full!

The Power of the Powerless

I remember reading a story about a rather wealthy Indian lady who volunteered to work for Mother Teresa for a day, back in the years before Mother Teresa was an international celebrity. This Indian lady arrived at the clinic, which was a house for the dying, and was instantly overwhelmed by what she saw, heard and smelled. I know how she felt, too. Walking into a place like that is an instant sensory barrage of horror and evil. The evil, ugliness and pain are all very sensory phenomena, with their accompanying groans and screams, odors and wounds. The peace and love that the patients experience for the first time in their lives is much harder to see. The sight of raw flesh of a beggar who got run over by a truck is easier to notice than the fact that his wounds have been painstakingly cleaned of dirt, maggots and infection;  emaciated arms and ribs of a man who should weigh 70 kgs but instead weighs barely 30kgs hide the fact that he has just received the first good meal of his life, spoonfed by a woman who has dedicated her life to loving him; the smell of a human being in total kidney failure when his uric wastes are oozing through his pores on his skin disguises the fact that he has just been bathed today for the first time in his life. All of these things are a shock to the system. Even a trained and experienced medical practitioner can be overwhelmed walking into such a scene. Where do you start? What do you do? But this rich lady was a lay person, just an upper caste woman who had a kind urge and decided to volunteer for a day. I can only imagine what she must have been feeling as she stood there, surrounded by the obvious horror of human suffering. She must have been terrified, bewildered, filled with sorrow and helplessness. She must have wanted to turn around, run right back out the door, and never come back.

Fortunately there was something else at work, subtly, quietly, faithfully hidden under the obvious horror. Mother Teresa took this lady by the hand and led her to the most heartbreaking patient of all. A newborn infant was lying on a cushion, alone. Perhaps his parents had abandoned him, or perhaps they were dead. This was not a healthy baby. He was lethargic and emaciated. He did not cry or flail his tiny arms around. He did not startle the way a normal baby should, or grasp with his hands, or even suckle when a nipple or finger was put to his lips. He just lay there with his arms and legs spread out limply around him, breathing with the halting, abrupt, shallow gasps of a baby for whom simply breathing takes too much energy to be worthwhile.

Mother Teresa led the rich lady to this baby and told her simply to pick the baby up and hold him and love him for the few minutes or hours he had left to live. The rich lady protested that she couldn't possibly do that. It would surely break her heart. Mother Teresa only repeated her invitation, and went about her work. Left there in front of the dying infant the rich lady made a choice. She reached down and took that baby in her arms and held him. For the rest of the day she did nothing but love that baby as hard as she could until finally he died in her arms. And her heart broke, but not with anguish as she had expected. It broke with love.

I read this as I was in the first half of the SF medic training course, and it forever changed my view of medicine and healing. As healthcare providers we are trained to save lives. Our thought and energy are bent on staving off death for as long as we can, prolonging life, reducing pain, preventing or mitigating disabilities. All true healers have this goal, but all of us inevitably face the truth that our patients are going to die. Put it off as long as we can, prescribe what we will, in the end death will win. We can only delay it. Sometimes we can delay it for years. Sometimes only for minutes. Sometimes the patient is already dead, but their body just hasn't figured that out yet.

Faced with this truth, each health care provider, from the lowest EMTB to the Surgeon General (who generally does very little surgery from what I hear) has to find his own way of dealing with it. Some choose to ignore it. Some simply shrug their shoulder and move on. Some stop caring eventually. But in Mother Teresa's radical and almost unforgiveable request I believe I have seen the only true way forward. We must look deeply into the horror of death and see past it to the subtle, patient, silent work of love which is operating underneath the horror and pain, stronger and older and wiser than them. In the truly authentic Catholic approach to healthcare there is the acknowledgment that the patient will die, and the deeper knowledge that love is stronger than death. Even if the patient will only live for a few seconds, those few seconds can be lived with dignity. They can be filled with life and love and peace, if someone is brave enough to let God use them to be that gift. Such moments are never wasted.

All of this went through my mind when I saw this video by Tammy Ruiz a Registered Nurse who specializes in Perinatal Bereavement and Perinatal Hospice. I am not at all ashamed to admit that I couldn't watch the full video without tears in my eyes. The work she does is beautiful, heroic and necessary, and alas, all too rare.

Please watch the video and pass it on particularly to any medical proffessionals who are involved in birth and perinatal care. Pray for Mrs. Ruiz and the continuation of her vocation, which is truly a call within a call. Take the time to celebrate life in whatever way you can. This is a solid, concrete answer to the culture of death and a joyful affirmation of the infinite value of every single human person, no matter how small.

Go here to read Mrs. Ruiz's own words on her work.


(The Title of this post is taken from the title of the amazing book by Christopher De Vinck.)

For an Awesome Young Lady

Once Upon a Time, I wanted to do a project. It was Christmas and I was going home on leave, but I wanted to do some kind of cool thing. I also had a cousin that I hadn't gotten anything for, and as I am her confirmation sponsor, I thought it ought to be something that some thought and effort went into. So I thought to myself, "Why not make a box? How hard could it be, right?"

Accordingly I bought some lumber. The original idea was to make the thing out of cedar, but the cedar wood at the hardware store was kind of cheap and grainy looking. The red oak, however, was smooth and crisp, hard and solid. It had a weight and smell to it that spoke to me, and as for the feel? Well, I'm a pretty tactile person, so I do not exaggerate when I say that I fell in love with the feel of it. So it was a match. I bought the wood and lugged it upstairs to the woodshop in the top of the shop.



Conscious of safety at all times, I ensured I had emergency medical equipment on hand in case of an emergency involving power tools.

 Also, on a job like this it is critical that you keep your strength up. Running the risk of passing out from hunger while operating powertools is simply irresponsible. So I made sure I was provisioned up. Then I ate my provisions in the first two minutes. Several more supply runs had to be made throughout the duration. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, you know?

 I measured twice...

 And cut once...

 And repeated a few doxen times, and voila! (That's French for, "It's not as easy as it looks, and there were some setbacks and a steep learning curve, but I managed to do it anyway, and decided to put it in montage format to condense the story-telling." That's really what voila means.)

 I decided to use a combination of glue and mechanical fasteners (dowel rod pins in holes in the planks.) The forms I built to keep the holes consistent weren't perfect so there was a little error. Some of the seams were really good, others were horrible. A little bit of sanding with a belt sander fixed that, but whenever I set up my own workshop, I think I'll probably use a disk sander instead.

 Once I got the holes drilled and was ready to pin the sides and bottom together I had to build frames so that I could clamp them. Otherwise there is too much gap and the seam ends up ugly with lots of glue bulging out. They still ended up like that. More sanding.

 This is the bottom of the chest.

 Once all the sections were set and sanded I had to put them together. The corners were all cut at a 45 degree bevel but I only had two large clamps. I tried using kettlebells to weigh it down, but they didn't put anywhere near enough pressure on it.

 So I used slats of wood, ratchet straps, and twine to jury rig 24 separate clamps, one for each corner and direction. It looked crazy but it worked. If i ever really get into woodworking I'll need a bunch of those long clamps.

 Starting work on the top.

 I took a break over Christmas day to enjoy the day. I sauted up this mushroom dish, which turned out to be really good. I don't know why the picture ended up on it's side though. It isn't on it's side in the folder I uploaded it from. Oh well. It's probably gremlins. If you're using a laptop I suggest you turn that on its side for optimal viewing. If you are using a desktop you could probably turn the monitor on its side, but lying sideways on the desk might be easier. While you're doing that I'll jot down the recipe as closely as I remember it.
2 things of white mushrooms
2 things of baby bella mushrooms
1 thing of oyster mushrooms
1 thing of shittake mushrooms.
First you heat the pan with olive oil just covering the bottom, and toss in the shittakes. Mince up 5-6 cloves of garlic and add them. Three or four heaping spoonfuls each of basil and oregano, and couple of tsps or tbsps (whichever is smaller) of ground rosemary. Then the oyster mushrooms (the shittakes should be getting rubbery by now if you've been adding things quickly. Throw in a bunch of thyme and sage and keep stirring. The heat should be on the lower side of medium by now. The baby bellas go in next,
 and the whites can go in shortly after. Now I would keep stirring for a while, but you're going to need to add salt (and I like just hint of pepper as well) so you'll just have to keep adding, stirring and tasting unti it is just the right amount. You want it to bring out the flavor of everything else, not take over. When its done you should eat it while it is still hot. It probably wouldn't be good leftover.

There should always be food and family. Whoever invented those two things would have my vote if He was running for president of the universe.

 Back to work, putting the top together.

 You can tell I was wearing the headphones while I used the belt sander. My entire head is covered with sawdust, except for the one strip right across the middle. If it looks like my mouth is hanging open it's because I'm singing along to some L'Angelus.

 Top and bottom done, mostly, but not attached to each other. Getting them to line up, while I was pretty close all things considered, still tooks some creative sanding.

 Inscribing the lid. I borrowed my sister's woodburning kit, and after I finally figured out how to use it, it went pretty well.

 This is the inscription, traced and partially burned.

 Spille half my varnish. Oops.

 The varnishing was the hardest part. The darn stuff wouldn't set. It's supposed to be applied in temperatures between 50 and 90 degrees farenheit, but the weather took a turn for the arctic. It hardly got above ten degrees I think, that whole week, so I had to keep the stove going in the shop constantly. As you can see, the shop isn't fully weatherproofed yet (my brother is working on it.) The warmest place was at the top of the stairs with the trapdoor to the upstairs shut. So that's where I stashed the pieces while they were drying. That was a tricky bit of work, trying to move heavy pieces, wet with fresh varnish, without smudging them or dragging them through the dust. It worked, sort of.

 Layn wanted to do a project.

 Archie and the cat. "Dude, it is too dang cold out. How about a truce. I won't tell if you won't."

 All finished from the back.

 All finished from the front.

 It's even finished on the inside!

This post has been burning a hole in my pocket since December, but I could post it until it arrived because I didn't want the surprise spoiled. Totally worth the wait. :-D.