Thank You, Sgt. Maupin

For the last several years, I have carried a reminder on my Opinions homepage to readers to pray for the return of Sgt. Matt Maupin. Word has now arrived that DNA has confirmed that Sgt. Maupin’s remains have been found. God bless him, and may he rest in peace. And God bless his family, who have never ceased to hope that he would be returned alive.

Click the link in the title to go to his page on Yellow Ribbon Support Center.Many thanks to these patriots for keeping the yellow ribbons flying.

Know Thyself

Great Fast passed quickly this year. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. But it seemed as though the numerous “fish days” came and went without much notice, and the gentle ticking-off of the various Sunday memorials of the steps toward the big day moved forward without disruption or complication.

I try, through each Great Fast to add at least one character improvement, with varying degrees of success. As we grow older, these thing seem to become more necessary, and we realize just how far we have yet to go, how much we have left to improve or purify. Breaking old, long-standing habits and replacing them with new, more edifying traits is no easier for the old than for the young, so we often find we haven’t made the kind of progress we had hoped.

Frequent Confession for an old widow is a desirable routine, and hardly anything to cause the priest to gasp in shock. I suspect the confessions of old women are a lot like those of cloistered nuns, which one priest likened to “being stoned to death with popcorn.” But I try to keep up the practice, simply because it does me so much good. Time was when Joe and I went on a very regular, monthly basis, knowing the spiritual benefits we received were worth any effort or inconvenience.

Self-improvement isn’t really about learning how to get organized and being more decisive on the job, learning how to use a day-planner, or using sticky-notes. “In all thy gettings, get wisdom,” the Scriptures tell us. And, “Know thyself” wasn’t written as a sales slogan. Learning to examinine myself with a critical and objective view has been one of those attributes that took many years to acquire and learn how to use. Being aware of my shortcomings, being willing to correct them as well as I can, and reminding myself of the resolution to do so took many years to learn and assimilate.

Inner dialogue is one of the tools we have at our disposal that can be a mixed blessing. We can listen to ourselves rant and demand fairness, special treatment, or light punishment, or we can hear ourselves praying, or, perhaps, saying, “Ouch! Try again!” or giving others the benefit of the doubt. It’s always our choice, but the way we choose says a lot about our ability to self-correct and mature.

It’s always been the complaint of wise heads that we are “…too soon old and too late smart.” The fact that youth is wasted on the young is an obvious one. It is a plaint heard often, which means simply that “If I had my brains and experience, and HER young, agile, strong body, what COULDN’T I do?”

But life is not designed that way, so we must waste that youthful strength and endurance on being young and strong, and wait until we are old to gain our wisdom. Great Fast every year gives us the opportunity to add a bit more wisdom, even as we creak, wrinkle, and gray. Every chance to know myself better moves me that much closer to wisdom, and to Heaven. It took me many years of trial and error, but I have finally realized that my goal is finally the correct one: I want to get to Heaven. And, luckily, I don’t have to be a spring chicken to get there.

Fitna Video

The “Fitna” video by Dutch MP Geert Wilders is back up on Hot Air. If you haven’t seen it, you must. But please remember, NO CHILDREN.

Quality Viewing

I found some great links over the weekend. This has to be the most informative one….

I also found at least one rather interesting photo…

Easter Best

From 2006. May God bless you today, and fill you with Easter joy!

‘Tis The Season

HAPPY EASTER, HAPPY EASTER, HAPPY EASTER!!

‘Nuff Said…

Meanwhile, at least since the Supreme Court’s decision in University of California v. Bakke in 1978 — and obviously long before that, or there wouldn’t have been a case or controversy for the court to consider — it has been legal for the government to discriminate against whites on the basis of their race.

Consequently, any white person 30 years old or younger has lived, since the day he was born, in an America where it is legal to discriminate against white people. In many cases it’s not just legal, but mandatory, for example, in education, in hiring and in Academy Award nominations.

Ann Coulter

And…

Then answer this, senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright’s rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

Charles Krauthammer

Zebra Suits

The politically-corrected among us have issued memoranda that say we shouldn’t use Barack Obama’s middle name. This can only be because they know it’s a handicap to his run for the White House. But it’s been a long, long time since I did (or didn’t) or said something in deference to political correctness, so I’m not only going to use it whenever I refer to Mr. Obama, but I’m going to emphasize it, and they can just deal with it. But that’s not what this post is about.

I’m having a bit of a problem here. If my memory serves me correctly, Barack HUSSEIN Obama is half White, is he not? Is that White half of him his “evil twin?” And, why is it so many half-White people never identify with their White ancestry and heritage? Is it shame? Or, have they discovered that they can get a lot more attention from others by dumping on the White side of their inheritance?

And, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Pastor Jeremiah Wright even much lighter in color than Barack HUSSEIN Obama? How much of that hated White blood must he have in his veins?

This kind of racial posturing/pandering/hypocrisy/baiting really gets my dander up. What the hell? Are the White ancestors of these men to be despised? Are they despised by them? How do Barack’s White relatives feel about his continual dancing attendance around Wright’s altar of racial hate and bigotry? (Or, am I not supposed to be seeing these things or asking these questions?) How about Pastor Wright’s obviously extremely close relationship to White ancestors? How do these guys get away with this kind of fakery?

I’ve heard of snake-oil salesmen, but these men, with their hatred of half their heritage, should be ashamed of themselves. Perhaps, in a perverted sort of way, they are.

Maybe it’s BECAUSE of their White ancestry that they feel like they have advantages that their darker-skined brethren don’t have. Maybe their guilt about this advantage makes them hate themselves, and by extension, their White ancestry. Stranger things have happened. (And, they talk about “White Guilt??”)

But it’s not cute, it’s not funny, and all it does is pander to an ignorant segment of the population, while pissing all over the rest of us. And Barack HUSSEIN Obama wants to be President of my country? Excuse me, but I think NOT.

I don’t want to wish them any bad luck, as the saying goes, but I hope they choke on the bones.

On second thought, maybe they have already been disowned by their White relatives because they are such north ends of southbound skunks. Either way, they are liars, charlatans, and loudmouthed haters dressed up in zebra suits, and anybody who swallows their melodramatic rants are dupes.

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PLEASE ADOPT PINKY

Great Nuns I Have Known

One of the things my mother did that I will always thank her for was to bring me into the Catholic faith. My dad worked out of state, so it would probably not have been done had he been home. He was highly placed in the local Mormon heirarchy, and I’m sure he wouldn’t have tolerated any such insubordination from any of us, including mom.

Eventually, of course, the opportunity arose for her to invite us kids to join her in her quest for religious freedom. All of the younger kids went with her, leaving only the older boy to take care of things in the LDS church.

We were baptized, but before we could receive Holy Communion, we had to receive instructions. That meant catechism classes. They were presented in one or another of the parishoners’ homes since there was no centrally located place for lessons.

The catechism classes were taught by a pair of little sisters of St. Francis of Assisi, Sister Mary Consuela and Sister Mary Walburga. Each week, we would go to another home, be taught by the sisters, and receive our instruction in the Faith this way. Sr. Consuela was a petite, tiny little thing, her English strongly influenced by her Mexican heritage. Sr. Walburga, though, was a tall and pale, pretty lady of Irish extraction. Together, they taught the faith to a whole generation of Central Utah Catholics. Great little nuns.

The next great nun in my life was Sr. Mary John Berchmans. Wow! If there was ever an embodiment of the usual run of nun-jokes, it had to be her. She taught the seventh and eighth grades in the first Catholic school in Utah Valley, and she was tough. She had to be, because she had 52 kids in her classroom. And she kept total control at all times. She was one of those people who are never at a loss–for words, actions, or ideas. Sister had been a missionary in China when the Japanese invaded. She and her companions had spent the duration of the war in concentration camps, surviving on whatever living things they could capture or trap, usually rats or maggots. There wasn’t a hulking eighth grader who dared to challenge her authority, and pranks and practical jokes on her were unthinkable. Wow. A GREAT nun.

Then there were the Good Shepherd Sisters in Helena, Montana, who taught and trained me during my high school years. Foremost among these had to be Mother John. Her name was Sr. Mary John Bosco, after the Salesian priest in Italy who befriended the homeless boys in his city, attracting them with his acrobatics and juggling. Mother John was a short, plump little Italian fireball with snapping black eyes and a short fuse. Just right for keeping headstrong teenaged girls in line. She was our “mother” the whole time I was in that school. The last truly Great Nun in my life. Her companion was Mother Jane (short for Sr. Mary John Vianney), a tiny little old lady with a klaxon voice and ferocious temper. She supervised the big laundry where most of the girls worked when they weren’t studying or in classes. It was always a good idea to stay on the good side of Mother Jane. Mother Bl. Claude, Mother Agnes, Mother Columba, Mother Clementine: one after the other, great women who chose to live life humbly and in cloister. Every one of them left me with some permanent and positive change, whether I wanted it or not.

Each of these women brought a different gift to her professed life, and they all behaved with modesty, sobriety, and great strength of character. I’m sure they are all gone now, and I hope each one of them received the Heavenly reward they so richly deserved. God bless them all. I wish I’d had the wits to thank them each, individually, before they passed out of my life.

By and large, many of today’s professed nuns are less than exemplary. The modern nuns I have known were pushy, bitter feminists or ditzy Gaia-worshipping New Age syhcophants.
It’s hard to wish to pattern one’s life after the likes of women whose object of worship is the earth or “the environment.”

But there is an encouraging trend afoot. Apparently, the orders of nuns who dropped their regulations and traditional discipline are having a hard time recruiting new members. Most of these moribund orders will disappear before too much longer. But the orders who have steadfastly retained their traditional dress, behavior, and prayer life are growing by leaps and bounds. Just as the seminaries whose charters focus on faithful adherence to the traditions of their founders and their obedience to Rome are bulging at the seams, so too the religioius orders of strict observance.

Great reason for hope for the Church, even though wherever we look around us these days, things seem to be unravelling at a headlong clip. As long as these convents continue to produce nuns of the quality and staunchness of the Great Nuns I Have Known, I will continue to hold out great hope for the Church in America.

Palm Sunday

In the Catholic Church, East and West, today commemorates the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on the back of a young donkey. Between this Sunday and the next, Jesus will have been betrayed, arrested, scourged, denounced, lied about, crowned with thorns, traded for a traitor, and driven through the streets filled with cursing, spitting, jeering mobs who, less than a week earlier, had been waving branches and shouting, “Hosanna to the King! Hosanna to the Son of David!” He will have been driven with whips to a bare, rocky outcrop outside the city walls, stripped, nailed to a crossbeam, and hung up between two thieves, to yield His Spirit in about three hours; removed, and buried in a new tomb donated by a secret follower.

(Unfortunately for those whose evil put Him there, He didn’t stay there for long…)

Father blesses the palm branches and willow catkin branches to be distributed to the people in commemoration of the palmfronds waved by the crowds of Jerusalem when Christ entered the city. These fronds are taken home to join our icons in our prayer corners for the coming year.

The Bible tells us there were huge crowds in Jerusalem, people from all over the countryside who had come to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. These crowds welcomed Jesus as if He was a conquering general, waving their branches, shouting “Hosanna!” and throwing their cloaks on the ground before Him. It didn’t take them long, of course, to realize that the humble man riding the ass would not rise up (in the military sense) and lead them in throwing off the yoke of Roman rule. As soon as the fickle crowds figured out that He wouldn’t be kicking Herod off the throne or running Pontius Pilate through with his own sword, they turned on Him, spitting on Him and stoning Him as He carried His cross through the streets.

The crowds are just as fickle today. If you haven’t seen the beatings the Christians and Religious Jews have been taking in the public arena in the last few years, you must have been living on a deserted island a thousand miles from nowhere.

The believers, collectively called “The Church” have taken it manfully, of course, seldom fighting back with any telling response. Those spokesmen who have tried to rouse The Church have been castigated, mocked, and often ignored by the very people they have been trying to defend.

Sadly, when we do try to stand up to the anti-religious forces, we are at a serious disadvantage, since so few of us actually know enough about our faith to respond effectively.

We need to learn that the forces gathering against us are frequently ill-informed, as well, cherry-picking and using bombast to intimidate us. This is the time when we must renew our efforts to become well-grounded in the Biblical truths we need to overcome these attacks. Not by just reciting some verse or two, but by standing courageously on the knowledge of the facts, learned, studied, and taken to heart. Duelling verses does not accomplish a thing, and waving the Bible isn’t nearly as useful as actually studying it, understanding the deeper messages presented, and taking them to heart.

And, the next time you hear some benighted, anti-war, surrender-chic soul say, “What would Jesus do?” You can tell him, “He would make a whip of cords, overturn the tables of the moneychangers, and drive them out of the Temple. He would call the hypocrites ‘whitewashed tombs,’ and ’sons of snakes,’ and refer to the king as a ‘vixen.’”

How little we really understand of what we think we know of the Faith. No wonder we are so ill-prepared; such easy targets. For our whole lives, most of us have been deprived of meaningful teaching by crackpots and change-agents who know that ignorant believers are easy targets for superior rhetoric and debating skills. By handing on to us a religion of compromise and warm fuzzies, they defeated us before the battle was even joined, and today, their gladiators come into the arena armed to the teeth with rhetorical weapons against which we have no defense.

Jesus went silently to His death because He knew the Plan, and knew what was on the Other Side. But that doesn’t mean that He was a wimp who never fought back, never confronted the hypocrites, or never acted to defend the truth.

I keep my palm frond bouquet all year, to remind me that the King of Glory didn’t arrive in a battle chariot, but seated on a humble donkey. The truth doesn’t need to be defended, it needs to be confidently deployed.