Seen any Christmas lights yet?

On Wednesday night I saw that a house near ours had its lights up. These were icicle lights; no mistaking them for Thanksgiving decorations or Halloween holdovers. Then the very next night I saw a lit-up wreath on someone's door. Don't these people know how to procrastinate? Also, our first Christmas catalog of this year arrived in... August.

Stop the madness!

First Things has a poem called "Advent Carol" in its latest (December) issue:

Advent's dreary. Let's start living
Christmas now! Wear red and green!
While we're at it, skip Thanksgiving!
Deck the halls at Halloween!

Update: So I just received the December issue of Martha Stewart Living, with a bunch of Christmas recipes, and I thought I'd better clarify that of course I never meant to include cookie baking in my rant. :)

I grok Spock

Last week my friend Heathre learned from the Twitterverse that there'd be a screening of Star Trek IV on the Paramount lot in Hollywood, where much of the movie was filmed. I have such useful friends. :) She got a group together and so last Saturday I got to see my favorite Star Trek movie in a theater for the first time. It holds up well, just as funny as ever.

Kirk: "You're not exactly catching us at our best."
Spock: "That much is certain."

What has changed is that the movie no longer looks like the crew of the Enterprise visiting our own time. Now it looks like the crew of the Enterprise visiting that strange and colorful world of the 1980's, which is the primitive past to us as well as to them!

AND! Leonard Nimoy was there and answered questions for almost an hour afterwards! I haven't been to all the conventions like some who are better fans, so all of his stories were new to me. Did you know that he's the one who came up with the Vulcan salute? And you know where he got it from? Once as a boy he was in an Orthodox Jewish synagogue, and the Kohanim, men from the priestly tribe of Levi, got up and blessed the congregation. They were calling out the blessing very loudly-- "May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you and give you peace!"-- and as they did people threw their prayer shawls over their heads and everyone was supposed to be bowing with eyes closed as the glory of God descended, but little Leonard Nimoy took a peek and saw the priests making that sign with their hands. Apparently they do this because the shape of it vaguely resembles the Hebrew letter shin, which is the first letter of Shaddai, one of the names for God.

I'm sure that's old news to all true Trekkers, but I thought it was cool. :)

Deliciously Evil Pumpkin Muffins

My friend Linda from church is a great person to know, not least because she gave me a recipe for pumpkin muffins a little while ago. Would you like to see it? :)



I know, I know, but it would take quite a while to type it up, so I'm just gonna slap a picture of the recipe up there.

I made these a few weeks ago right after I got the recipe. They were great and I took them to work. I set the very large tupperware container filled with two layers of mini muffins on the table in the break room. About ninety minutes later I returned and the muffins were nearly all gone. But there was a piece of notepaper on the top of the container, on which somebody had scrawled two words:

"DELICIOUSLY EVIL!"

I believe that's the best recommendation I can give to these scrumptious little muffins, which I made again today. So let's get going, shall we?

The ingredients: a can of pumpkin and lots of other stuff to dress it up. :)




We begin with white sugar, brown sugar, and pumpkin.




Mix all that and then add eggs and oil and water.




QUIZ TIME! All you self-described bakers, I have a QUIZ for you! Check out this picture:



And tell me, what are these seven different substances? If you know much about the ingredients-- especially the spices-- likely to go into pumpkin muffins, you might be able to guess even without looking at the recipe. But if you correctly identify all this stuff only after looking at the recipe, I'll still be decently impressed.

My favorite spice, incidentally, is the one at twelve o'clock. The one at six o'clock is a close second. All of them are good.

We add the spice mixture to the pumpkin mixture:




A promising batter is starting to form (how do you like that action shot?)




You can make this recipe with raisins, but look how pretty the dates are!




Mixing in the dates.




Also the chopped pecans.





Mini muffin pan lined with baking cups. I have a good feeling about this.




Yes, this is headed in the right direction.




Oh yum (as I save some batter to eat out of the bowl). I ask you, how do you top that? You can't! You can't top this pumpkin muffin batter!




Oh, wait. Yes you can. With streusel! Flour, brown sugar, pecans, butter, and cinnamon! (Out of curiosity, how many of you saw the bad pun coming?)




Mix it all together and eat it out of the measuring cup for lunch sprinkle it on top of the muffins.




Now this is what I'm talking about!




Bake those suckers at 350°F for about eighteen minutes. They come out looking like this:




Are they any good? Let's take a closer look.





I don't know, can you really tell without a taste test?





You know how you get to the end of someone's recipe post, and there's a picture of the delicious final creation, and it looks so yummy, and you just wish you could be there with the cook and taste whatever she just made, but alas, you can't because it's just a picture you're viewing on the internet, but boy, it would be nice to take a bite? I feel that all the time. You know that feeling?

Well, MWAAHAAHAHAAAAA!




Today is not your day, but is MY day! Oh yes! Today I eat pumpkin muffins! Meditate upon that as you gaze up my nose!




Pumpkin muffins.




Yum.

What should I read next? Also: Catholic names

So I'm about 2/3 through The Curé d'Ars, a big fat biography of St. Jean Marie Baptiste Vianney by Abbé Trochu, and I'm loving it. If I have time I'll make a post with some of my favorite quotes from the book. But eventually, no matter how long this book is, I will come to the end of it. And because I can't allow my long to-read list to shorten, I've already bought several more books in the meantime.

I think I have my choice narrowed down to five that I might tackle next. They are:

St. Thomas Aquinas by G.K. Chesterton
St. Francis of Assisi by G.K. Chesterton
The Story of a Soul by St. Therese of Lisieux
The Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila
Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales

The first two are on the list because I'd like to know more about them both and I've heard that Chesterton's biographies are insightful. The next two are because those are the two great cloistered Carmelite nuns of the past that seem to have the most influence on Carmelite spirituality today. And the last one is on the list because some religious congregations follow the spirituality of St. Francis de Sales and it would be good for me to know a thing or two about his thought, not least because he's my confirmation saint. :)

This is off topic, but we need some more names in the Catholic tradition. Look, I just listed five saints up there and they only have three different names between them. It's a lovely mark of humility that everyone who enters religious life wants to take a saint's name, but it means you end up with a hundred Saint Francises and a hundred Saint Gregories, and every other female saint is some variation of Teresa or Catherine, and everyone, male or female, ends up with some form of Mary in there, and the result is that you'll never be able to remember the name of the religious you just met because all the names are alike!

And that reminds me of Thomas Merton's autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, in which he contemplates joining a large congregation of Franciscans. I have to quote it for you:

Turning over the pages of Butler's Lives of the Saints, I had looked for some name to take in religion-- indeed, that was a problem over which I had wasted an undue amount of time. The Province was a big one, and there were so many Friars in it that they had run out of all the names-- and you could not take a name that was already taken by someone else. I knew in advance that I could not be a John Baptist or an Augustine or Jerome or Gregory. I would have to find some outlandish name like Paphnutius (which was Father Irenaeus' suggestion). Finally I came across a Franciscan called Blessed John Spaniard and I thought that would sound fine.

I considered the possibility of myself running around in a brown robe and sandals, and imagined I heard the novice master saying: "Frater John Spaniard, go over there and scrub that floor." Or else he would put his head out of his room and say to one of the other novices: "Go and get Frater John Spaniard and bring him here," and then I would come humbly along the corridor in my sandals-- or rather our sandals-- with my eyes down, with the rapid but decorous gait of a young Friar who knew his business: Frater John Spaniard. It made a pleasant picture.

Merton ended up joining a Trappist congregation where he got no say in it at all; they simply assigned him the incongruous name of Louis. By that time he didn't care. I loved his book, not so much for what it revealed about Merton as for what it revealed about me. That man had my number!

But back to the five books, have ya'll read any of them? What do you think?

Naturally I'll probably end up just reading whichever one seems most attractive at the moment I finish the last sentence of The Cure d'Ars. That's how these things go. :)

Dies Irae on All Souls' Day

Priests are normally supposed to say just one Mass per day, but on All Souls' Day they can say three, the better to pray for the souls in Purgatory. My parish has five priests-- you do the math. :) It's pretty darn busy.

But this morning I was at Thomas Aquinas College for their 7 am TLM. Fr. Raftery, the Dominican priest there who likes the older liturgy, came out in black vestments-- first time I've seen such a thing in person. He then reeled off three Masses back to back. (It's nice in the old missal; there are different readings and prayers for each one.) After ending one with "Dona eis requiem," he and the altar boy would go down to the foot of the altar and immediately begin the next with "Introibo ad altare Dei..." Most of the congregation stayed through all three-- no one was still receiving Communion by the third Mass.

The liturgy for All Souls' Day includes Dies Irae, a Latin hymn from the 1200's . The words and a literal English translation are here. I think it's great; my only problem was that I've seen Amadeus, so of course I couldn't read Dies Irae without thinking of the scene where Mozart works on his Dies Irae on his own deathbed:



Confutatis maledictis
Flammis acribus adictis
Voca me cum benedictis
Oro supplex et acclinis,
Cor contritum quasi cinis:
Gere curam mei finis.

When the wicked are confounded,
Doomed to flames of woe unbounded,
Call me, with Thy Saints surrounded.
Low I kneel, with heart submission!
See, like ashes my contrition!
Help me in my last condition!

Great scene. :)

The Feast of All Saints

I've always thought of it as a day to honor those who reached the heights of sanctity, but what stands out to me on this All Saints' Day is the call to become saints ourselves. Today's Office of Readings has a fine sermon by St. Bernard on that theme:

Come, brothers, let us at length spur ourselves on. We must rise again with Christ, we must seek the world which is above and set our mind on the things of heaven. Let us long for those who are longing for us, hasten to those who are waiting for us, and ask those who look for our coming to intercede for us.

Which reminds me of St. Paul:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

And St. Peter:

Just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: "Be holy, because I am holy."

And one more from St. Paul:

You are the temple of the living God, just as God has said:

"I will dwell with them and walk among them.
I will be their God
and they shall be my people."

Since we have these promises, beloved, let us purify ourselves from every defilement of flesh and spirit, and in the fear of God strive to fulfill our consecration perfectly.

Those are exactly the kind of passages I used to resist thinking about, except for the short length of time it took to explain them away. Surely my own self-centered way of life was all God expected of me. If he wanted anything more he'd send me a sign, right? It didn't occur to me that those Bible passages might themselves be the sign; I read the Bible every night but I sure wasn't planning on being changed by it. I was a lukewarm Evangelical in those days, and I figured we're all just hopeless sinners covered by Christ's righteousness, with no merit of our own nor any way to please God by ourselves. So all this stuff about striving and becoming holy and running a race and fulfilling our consecration, all that just meant living a reasonably good life while having faith in Christ who would do the rest for me, right? I'd tell myself this and then, with an uneasy conscience, I'd dismiss the subject.

But now I think those passages mean exactly what they say, and if I miss that, then no matter what else I might accomplish, I will have failed at life. We really are supposed to be every bit as zealous as the apostles who wrote the New Testament. It's not meant to be a rare choice for the elite. Holiness is what God wants of all of us. And... this is the part I didn't even believe till I became Catholic... it is actually possible. With God's help we can, in fact, become holy. Not just sinful people who appear holy in God's sight by a kind of legal fiction because we've appropriated the merits of Christ. By God's grace we ourselves can be holy. People have actually done it!

It's so helpful to remember the saints, celebrate their feast days, learn about their lives, hear sermons about them. I read somewhere that the Holy Spirit is the author of two books: the Bible and the lives of the saints. He speaks to us through the saints of what is possible, what our lives could be if we don't settle for less.

To reach the same conclusion by a very different approach: if you've ever wanted to ask me, "Rachel, what's wrong with the world and what do you plan to do about it?", this article by Peter Kreeft could be my answer. The point he works up to is that we all need to become saints.

But all this gets overwhelming when I'm faced with the huge gap between my high calling and my low way of living. I want to be a saint!-- and I just spent another day kind of doing nothing... I'm going to be holy!-- right after I'm done checking YouTube...

That's why I loved the sermon I heard a few weeks ago at Thomas Aquinas College. It was very short; the Dominican priest climbed up to the pulpit and mostly quoted from St. Francis de Sales for a few minutes, and then climbed back down and got on with the TLM he was saying. But his few words made a huge impression on me. Patience and courage, he said. Those are two key virtues for the reform of life, because after striving to overcome sinful habits, and still being full of imperfection, we may become discouraged and give up. For us, perfection may consist in continually striving to overcome our sins. We give in far too easily to discouragement. So patience, and courage. Every day, strive for conversion.

Now how can I end this post gracefully? To the 1962 Missal, quick!


Almighty and everlasting God, Who hast enabled us to honor in one solemn feast the merits of all Thy Saints: we beseech Thee, that, with so many praying for us, Thou wouldst pour forth on us the abundance of Thy mercy for which we long.

Attention NBA fans:

There's lots of talk about the Lakers, Celtics, Magic, and Cavaliers, but I trust you're rooting for the San Antonio Spurs this year. If not, you will be grievously disappointed. A word to the wise is sufficient.

Last night's game was Halloween night, and someone had snuck a bat into the area. The poor bat went flying about the court, interrupting play several times. The referees and the team mascot (a big stuffed coyote) tried unsuccessfully to catch him. Finally this happened:



And the Spurs won, too.

Happy Halloween!

Apparently the celebration of this holiday is spreading from America to Europe and encroaching upon All Saints' Day, somewhat to the concern of the official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano. There's an article in the latest edition headlined "Hallowe'en's Dangerous Messages", which quotes a Spanish priest as saying, "Hallowe'en has an undercurrent of occultism and is absolutely anti-Christian.... Parents should be aware of this and try to direct the meaning of the feast towards wholesomeness and beauty rather than terror, fear and death." Fine with me; if I had kids I wouldn't want them seeing some of the gruesome evil-looking displays people are building on their front lawns now. So instead, here are some pictures I got in an email forward today.













The teabag is adorable but I think I must give the edge to the turtle. :)

Here's how Halloween went for me when I was a kid. On the appointed day I'd wait impatiently for sundown, then pull on that pink ballerina dress (a hand-me-down from my sister) that got tighter every year. Halloween was not a holiday that inspired my mom, so my siblings and I didn't usually have new costumes or fancy plastic buckets to put our candy in. Instead we yanked the pillowcases off our pillows to use as candy sacks. That was the far superior method anyway; you can hardly fit anything in those silly little pumpkins.

Once everything was ready, the four of us set off together to troll the neighborhood (our parents were cool enough to let us go without them). We knocked wherever a light was on. Almost all the houses participated, and when the people weren't home they often left bowls of candy on the porch for us to help ourselves. We'd keep trick-or-treating till weariness overcame greed. I remember being so tired and footsore, and wondering if I'd even make it home, and yet there was always regret when I thought of the streets we hadn't gotten to. But we'd limp home with our heavy pillowcases and gratefully sit down on the living room rug. And then came that glorious moment of dumping out our sacks and gazing upon our mountains of candy, and sorting the loot, and trading for our favorite kinds (mine were Kit Kats and Smarties.) Halloween candy lasted my siblings till Thanksgiving. I seem to recall that mine disappeared faster than that.

Around age fifteen I gave up trick-or-treating with regret. By that time even I had to admit that I was too darn old for it, but I never outgrew that thrill of getting free candy at every door. What a fun custom for a neighborhood to have. :)

Catastrophe On Ice

My friend Heather and I went ice skating today in celebration of her birthday. I last tried this about sixteen years ago; Heather tried it for the first and only time about twelve years ago.

So we got to the rink, laced up our rented skates, and cautiously began to shuffle our way across the rug. Heather said our awkward walk reminded her of Imperial AT-ATs, and all we needed was some Ewoks to string rope in front of us and make us fall. Heather's a bit of a nerd.

As we inched closer to the rink entrance, we passed a man going the other way. "You can make it!" he encouraged us. If they're saying that before you even get on the ice...

I compulsively crossed myself before stepping onto the rink. We both began to slide forward, very cautiously, holding the wall at all times. Some little kids were on the ice as well, doing jumps and spins and backwards skating and heaven knows what else-- I couldn't watch them for very long without getting off balance.

After a while we both found our ice legs and managed to let go of the wall and skate a bit faster. We tired out well before the kids did, though. It was lots of fun to mess around on the ice, and just as fun to get the skates off our tired feet afterward and sink into the soft seats of Heather's car.

I'd show you photographic evidence of all this, but neither Heather nor I felt inclined to document our display of gracefulness. :)

A Case Against Blogging

Well, great. Stefan McDaniel writes in First Things' On the Square:

Someone recently encouraged me to write more, because “words aren’t lifeblood. Words are cheap.” Words are certainly held cheap, and the blogosphere has drastically lowered the going rate....

The blogpost is biased toward speed, brevity, and cleverness. It thus hands the public square over to bullies, sophists, and clowns....

Furthermore, even good blogging threatens to worsen our already bad relation with the written word. Several excellent bloggers have told me that they find it much harder than they once did either to follow sustained written arguments (especially when not tricked out with flashy rhetoric) or to make such arguments themselves; they have grown impatient with writing that does not meet bloggy criteria.

The scary thing is, I think there's something to this. I've noticed that even when I have all sorts of good books I could be reading, and even though on the web there are plenty of thoughtful, informative, interesting articles.... I somehow end up cruising around the same silly sites again and again, hoping they're updated. icanhazcheezburger and Cake Wrecks and Photoshop Disasters and such are pretty entertaining, but I don't want to be spending so much time on them. And at the same time I'm so impatient about following a sustained line of thought, even if it's, say, a trenchant and beautifully written sermon by John Henry Newman.

Eh, I'm bored with this subject. Check out these stormtroopers on the anniversary of the Death Star explosion!