Well, dear friends, we are reaching a new period in my old age where I can’t remember what I wrote to you before or only thought I wrote, so just skip anything repetitious repetitious repetitious for you!!!
My daughter, Diana, came up with this amusing image – when we are in a state of pique over something we shouldn’t flounce as we depart…whether it is leaving a job or a relationship!  I thought, I shouldn’t even flounce in thought about such matters.

Though self-flagellation has gone out of style, many of My children drive themselves like racehorses. 

They whip themselves into action, ignoring how exhausted they are...My invitation never changes: Come to Me all you who are weary....rest peacefully in My Presence.

It seemed to me that Mary was telling me, using my lingo as she so often does in other alleged locutions to people in the past and present, that obsessing about the future is a form of being a drama-queen. If I was more meek I could day by day ask to be an instrument of love. My holy family will let me know what I must do when it is the right time. “This is not the right time. We know it is a big cross for you to trust vs. to plan! It is a form of “wealth” and pride.

On the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, in the Office of Readings,  St. Bernard says that even though Mary knew beforehand that Jesus would die on a cross and that he would resurrect, she still had intense sufferings…

Breakthroughs come even to 79 year olds!
​ I had a difference of opinion with a dear admired friend about an important matter. I was afraid he would reject me. I got the grace to hang-in without the usual amount of splutterings and drama-queen shows of anxiety. In a few days he compromised. 
This was so healing!

Give a little credit to the other side of the Church?
I am always complaining about what I call “the other side of the Church.” By this I mean those who dissent on some doctrines and morals. However, today I thought of something positive.

Here was the occasion:  It happens to be about 90 degrees in Connecticut where I live and work.  The A/C broke in our large seminary chapel. This Sunday it seemed to be about 100 degrees even with a big fan. Now the Holy Mass preceded by Morning Prayer usually runs around 1 ½ hours.  The seminarians and sisters were sweltering, as well as the priest and the concelebrants, as well as us others. 

I thought: “The priests on the other side of the Church, who are sometimes more concerned with the horizontal than the vertical, as it is put, such a priest would surely bring the Mass and the people to our air-conditioned cafeteria even though it is not a “sacred space.”

With a view to my re-location to Corpus Christi, Texas for January-August 2016, coming back to Connecticut in the future on for the Fall semesters, . . .

 . . . I started looking for books to read about anglo/hispanic relationships in the Southwest and Mexico.  The search ending in my library here at Holy Apostles when I  came upon Cormac McCarthy’s Trilogy:  All the Pretty Horses, the Crossing, City of the Plains.

McCarthy appears to be a man with a Catholic background but not a practicing Catholic, unless things have changed since the writing of these books in the beginning of our 21st century.  Just the same there is a Catholic feel to a lot of the writing. There is a great emphasis on the morality of gratitude and love of the needy, even though some things we know are sins seem to be accepted by him. 

A writer with great ability to use descriptions of nature to build toward analogies about the human condition, I find myself, as I read him, wanting to leave the world of my tight conceptual, academic environment for more of the mysticism of nature….at least occasionally. 

In my daily short dialogues, allegedly with Mary, our Blessed Mother, it seemed to me she told me about this:  
​“We want you to be drawn into the deeper mysteries of the faith.  Plunging into the creative heart and mind of God the Father through being out in nature is good, outside of the man-made world, but also contemplative prayer draws you out of your smaller intellectual world. Even if your philosophy is true, you need to let yourself be always drawn into the higher being of the Trinity.”  

​About 6 months ago I bought an Osterizer.

After obsessing for a month about how I wouldn't be able to even figure out if the Osterizer I bought would work for klutz me without Dale’s assistance, with bated breath I dragged it out and read the big ink instructions I wrote to myself but forgot I had written, about how to assemble it and after a few false moves, 
​it worked!

I ground up my usual left-over stew, which I call garbage soup for fun, into a puree and it tastes delicious even though it looks like vomit .

SO...  
THIS MEANS THAT WHEN MY SEVEN BOTTOM TEETH GO, I WON'T HAVE TO REMAIN ON A DIET OF ENSURE!!!
(For new readers I have denture on the top but 7 remaining fangs at the bottom with an unpredictable future!)

I AM chortling with joy!
Hope this makes you laugh, too.
I AM THINKING THAT PART OF MY VOCATION AS AN OLD TEACHER AND WRITER IS TO MAKE YOUNGER READERS HAVE LESS DREAD OF THEIR OWN FUTURES BY PROVING IT COULD BE MORE FUNNY THAN THEY THINK.
Another little joke about this that I like to trot out is: “I used to dread having some painful, long drawn out dying process, but now I think I might just “die laughing.”

It is boiling hot here in Connecticut, where I returned from my summer travels.

Every Saturday morning some of us go to pray the rosary outside an abortion clinic in Hartford. I was so moved to see these dear long-suffering apostles out there in this heat, sweat pouring down their faces.

I came upon this poem by Rita A. Simmonds poem in the Magnificat Year of Mercy Meditations.
I am not good at poetry but this poem seems to me to be a poem of what a woman who is dying feels toward her husband:

​The weight of your dependence,
the rawness of your pain,
the sincerity of your struggle,
the dignity of your way
has made your soul a spectrum for my life

Do any of you know more about this woman Catholic poet?

Go here to read an interview with the poet: ​http://shirtofflame.blogspot.com/2012/08/poet-rita-simmonds-on-sacrament-of.html

Here is a collection of her poetry:

Dear readers:  I will be off to a large family wedding so there may be a 2 week hiatus after this one, which is short but very, very, important.

This time, it happened that one weekend 3 months ago both of us (one in Connecticut and one in California) happened to each be at some conference on forgiveness. The result was Carla, my twin, suggested that we try for a big breakthrough before our 80th birthday upcoming.  Her inspiration is that we should go to visit a Benedictine monk in the Los Angeles area whom we both know and respect and who loves both of us and talk to him and then each go to Confession about hurts we have delivered to each other.

I was very skeptical but willing to try. The result was spectacular!  I am sharing here what this monk told me with little explanations in parenthesis so you can get the gist.

Ronda: I tend to put truth above love, and even though I continually pray for grace to “speak the truth with love” when I get angry enough at those who dissent, all the rage comes pouring forth and it is not speaking the truth with love but speaking the truth with hate.

Fr. Philip: The Truth is Mercy. Judgment should be against myself not others.  “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”  You cannot be the one to throw stones.

Ronda: I realize that in throwing stones at my sister, I am kind of scape-goating her since I usually am only with people to agree with me on magisterial teachings. So I am taking out on her my rage at the whole dissenting part of the Church!
​
Fr. Philip: You need to pray to have the mind of Christ.  You should want to save and heal vs. condemn. “Be angry but do not sin.”  “You will be judged on love.”

 I thought since most of my readers are more like me than like my sister on all this that you might want to consider such a general confession in tandem with family members who you are in conflict with over doctrine.

We also agreed that in conversation when we disagree we could just calmly state the disagreement but then stop and not try to throttle the other into agreement!

Goodbooks Media just published a new book
​you might want to get hold of. It is called Last Flight to the New Jerusalem and is by Esther Le Beau-Kerr.

Famed TV news anchor, Esther Le Beau-Kerr, wishes to whisk you away with her on a dramatic flight of fancy from the brink of doom to a monastic  Brigadoon in the Berkshires.   Share  adventurous encounters with horrendous loss, transcendent gain, astounding discovery: new life, ancient truth, eternal love.
​This imaginary vagary of desperate escape and  heroic rescue from an apocalyptic catastrophe is especially appropriate during these dire days in a scary era of barbaric brutalities and impending perils, of heathen and hedonist adherence to deadly diabolical ideologies, when scenarios such as the Benedict Option are being bandied about, pondering the practicality of banding together in an exodus from regions of wreck and ruin to idyllic sanctums of reason and rectitude.
Readers may well be inspired to go forth and do likewise.

When I mentioned this to my daughter in California, where I am staying. She laughed and said,
“I think every time you make a mistake you get even more frantic about trying to control some other detail!”
Probably both.

With regard to my plan to spend the Fall semesters in Connecticut teaching at Holy Apostles, but otherwise to be based on Corpus Christi, Gary McCabe, my Marian Catechist mentor, wrote me this:
"Better to own Contemplative Cells in Cromwell and Corpus Christi than to own a whole country in Utopia" (paraphrase of Macaulay)
Meaning: we bear more Fruit when we find our Holy (Promised) Land, prepared for us by God, than when we "move in" to the House of Cards fabricated by and built upon the shifting sands of our ever changing desires.

Reductio ad absurdum on transgender:

A relative of mine is getting married in the forest, not in a Church. Most of the 150 guests are on the poorer end of the financial spectrum.  So the guests were told to do something creative instead of buying expensive gifts.

I offered to compose a prayer.  I sent in this cool prayer, but the bride gently told me that since many of the guests are gay or trans-gender would I consider taking Father out of God the Father, and changing father and mother to mother and father.
​I agreed to just God and the other change.

Now we are getting close to the wedding and I happened to be near one of the relatives helping plan the wedding.
This brilliant reduction ad absurdum occurred to me. 
To my surprise, the bride laughed when told of my “joke."
​“To please the trans-gender guests, why don’t you, the bride, wear a tuxedo at the wedding and the groom wear a bridal gown?”

Here I am in Southern California, Fountain Valley, visiting my daughter Diana in her beautiful rented home with Jacuzzi and swimming pool and funny, fun-loving warm-as-toast Diana and family.

Coming from Corpus Christi I was wondering how to describe how different Southern California is from Corpus Christi in spite of similarities -  such as warm weather, proximity to the ocean, and lots of Hispanics and Asians.

First off, whereas Corpus Christi was once farm land, then a little city, and then suburbs branching off it; as the old joke goes: Los Angeles is just freeways joining together suburbs.


Besides that, however, I like to think that all of Southern California has been influenced by Hollywood in this way:  Every other person acts as if they are auditioning for something.  Examples, 70 year old Eucharistic ministers dress glamorously and wear 3 inch heels;  many elderly men dye their hair; the cantor at Church sings as if he was Caruso; the waitresses stand in a poised position taking ones order for food as if hoping to be noticed!   A mother of young children comes to Sunday Mass in short shorts, but to increase the modesty of the look has a 2 inch border of lace on the bottom of the shorts.
Is that ever fun????
​
I can’t wait to see how Jim Ridley finds graphics for the above paragraph.

However, in this same Church, all 5 weekend Masses as packed. The 7 AM Mass has a full parking lot.  People stand around the walls if they come late the Church is so full.  It has Vincent de Paul to help the hungry, 24 hour adoration, half way houses for pregnant women, 12 step support groups, groups praying at the abortion clinic, coffee and donuts every morning after weekday Masses which are attended by 200 people a day!   

Reading a book of “spiritual wisdom” where God becomes a kind of  archetype….I am thinking, it is a kind of castrating of God, making him impotent, just a symbol not a power.

I WILL BE TRAVELING FROM CORPUS CHRISTI, TEXAS TO CALIFORNIA TO STAY WITH MY DAUGHTER, DIANA, A FEW WEEKS. THERE MIGHT BE A HIATUS ON BLOGS.

A great saying from Augustine:
​“Love the truth more than you hate the error.”

I am planning on teaching at Holy Apostles only in the Fall semester and living in Corpus Christi January-August each year.  I have been looking for some kind of Catholic literary, artistic, intellectual retirement colony to live in. I haven’t found such a thing.  But here it is like such a colony in that the older Catholic or our ilk live near each other, help each other in all kinds of ways, and often find ourselves at the same daily Masses in a variety of Churches.
​
(During the interim, while patiently awaiting Ronda's next blog, why not read the latest Goodbooks publication by an author Ronda discovered several years ago and with whom some of you might be familiar.  Esther Le Beau-Kerr's LAST FLIGHT TO THE NEW JERUSALEM)

Many of you have gotten an e-mail from me about a series of booklets I want to find a publisher for entitled Why I am Still a Catholic!  If you are reading this and want to write such a booklet, about 25 single spaced pages, write me at [email protected] and I will send you more information.

A kind of prayer-poem I wrote:
2nd Childhood
A toddler
          tethered by a leash
Grinning takes small steps…
          pitches forward toward the ground…
To be jerked back by the father’s hand.


Leash of grace
 at our final fall…
Draw us back into the Father’s heart.

I read a wonderful book called The Woman Who was Chesterton, by Nancy Carpentier Brown, about Frances, the wife, of our beloved intellectual hero, G.K.  I highly recommend it. She was a wonderful, holy woman.

Chiara Corbella Petrillo: A Witness to Joy, by Simone Troisi and Christiana Paccini is a book about a contemporary Catholic married woman whose first baby ; died of being without a skull, the second of other maladies 38 minutes after birth, but then saved the life of a 3rd child by postponing cancer treatment for herself. The cancer killed her a year after the birth of the 3rd child.  
It is an amazing pro-life story.  All this was done with struggle, but with great joy at the same time because of total confidence in God’s providence.

A while back I wrote you about this great breakthrough I had to accept that even if I had to wind up in a euthanizing non-Catholic nursing home where no one brought me the Eucharist, God alone would be enough. 

Starting January 2017-August 2017,
​I will be residing in an absolutely beautiful guest apartment at a convent of the Society of the Body of Christ
​in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Not only will it be warm all the time (you who know me know that avoiding the cold is my second priority after attending daily Mass), but it is 3 blocks from the wonderful Ridley family of goodbooksmedia fame, 3 blocks walk to a Church, and 2 blocks to the beautiful bay area. 

I am also surrounded by wonderful literary and philosophical devout Catholics such as Al Hughes and Francette and Michael Meaney, Debbie and Steve Wang, Paula Kapusta, and other old friends from my previous teaching at the Society of Our Lady of the Trinity college here years ago.

I will be continuing some on-line teaching, but here mostly, hopefully doing talks, retreats, etc. in the area.

Please join in profusely thanking God for this answer to my prayers and needs and wants!!!
​Smile.