What I wish I’d heard at Mass – Episode 1

I’ve been thinking for a while about composing my own “homilies” for the Readings of the Mass.

You see, I play organ for a small chapel in a nearby retirement village. The chapels on site are staffed by the elderly, retired priests who reside there. It would be better if we had a Catholic chaplain, but the facility hired a nonCatholic for that job, and, besides, there aren’t enough younger priests to go around as is. (So pray for Vocations!)

Now, I love our priests. They are kind, holy men, loving, generous of spirit, often wise… but I did point out that they are elderly, didn’t I? One of them is slipping more deeply into the “confusion” of being very elderly and frail, a couple of the priests who serve one of the other chapels have physical disabilities that makes it very difficult for them to stand and celebrate the Mass, and at least one was tagged from seminary to be a teacher and never pastored a parish in all his years in the priesthood.

The former professor tends to get excited by various and sundry academic issues (he keeps his mind alert by continuing to study, even into his mid-80s), and his homilies reflect that. The “confused” former parish priest almost always preaches about the Holy Rosary… which is lovely, but the residents there have been praying the rosary since before I was born and they don’t need to be reminded what the various Mysteries are. Do they?

So – yesterday the Gospel reading was Luke 9:28-36, the account of the Transfiguration. We’ve all heard the story before: Jesus takes Peter, James and John up on Mt. Tabor, and there he reveals to these privileged three His full glory …

His Glory. Can you imagine it? Because I can’t. I can barely get my mind around the idea of Jesus Christ as God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity… but just how deep and wide and far that goes is beyond my scope.

I would have loved to have heard more about this, but Father talked about the Rosary, instead (the Transfiguration is the Fourth Luminous Mystery).

And if I’d been offering the homily, I would have used the opportunity to remind anyone listening that there is something dangerous going on in our society – the evangelical and pentecostal tendency to reduce the Second Person of the Holy Trinity to “my buddy, JC.”

Jesus Christ becoming “my buddy JC” – what a travesty! No wonder Christians have gotten careless about moral theology! “My buddy JC” would be one of the guys, no different from myself, maybe swilling beer and chainsmoking – he wouldn’t be offended at a slightly off-color joke (like the attempted or alleged humor manifest in last night’s Oscars presentations?)…  nor would he care if John sleeps with his girlfriend, or Billy gets drunk and verbally abuses his wife, or if Lucy uses contraception and resorts to an abortion when it fails.

Right? And if the kids want to cohabit without benefit of clergy, God doesn’t mind. I mean, after all, “my buddy JC” doesn’t care. Nor does he care of Dan gets trapped in the gay lifestyle, because after all “my buddy JC” is all about love and tolerance and acceptance, right?

Wrong. Dead Wrong.

He’s our Friend, possessing integrity of His own identity and Character, concerned with our wellbeing and available to the most profound intimacy of our relationships.

But he’s not that careless lacksadaisical “Buddy JC” – not at all.

He is, most remarkably and mysteriously, both our most intimate friend AND the Creator of the Cosmos. He laid the rules down, and He calls us to follow Him in them because they are part of the design to bring us to our best selves and our ultimate complete Union with Him in the Beatific Vision.

The Transfiguration jerks us out of our lazy, selfish reduction of “my buddy JC” and into the remembrance that He IS the Great I Am, the Eternal Judge, Born of the Father before all ages…

And, oh, how we do need reminding!

Weight Loss Challenge – Some early observations

This weight loss business is daunting. I feel already as if I’m going to absolutely DIE during the process; that’s how emotionally dependent I am on food. But it has to be done – I don’t want four hefty EMS guys to be required to hoist me on the stretcher that carries me out when I go toes-up.

I realize I’m an emotional eater. This may have its roots in my childhood, when my mom was frequently debilitated by severe migraines and I was left to eat too many “meals” of peanut butter straight from the jar with a spoon. It definitely hit a crisis point during my marriage to the Fairie Prince, when I was learning how to cook, and living with a man who just wanted to be left alone while I was longing for conversation and cuddling (and not necessarily in that order, either!). I would sit and eat while he sat and watched tv with his back to me. A spoonful here, a pinch there… it adds up quickly.

I have also realized that I hate cooking for just myself. It seems so tedious and boring to fix one-serving meals instead of great lovely quantities of things… but if I cook quantities, the leftovers call to me from the kitchen and I’m  back with that one-spoonful-here-one-pinch-there crisis. Or, in the case of a lot of my favorite foods, like soup, a bowl now and another bowl later. It doesn’t do me any good to say, “Put the leftovers in the freezer” because I do not have a freezer; I have a small (4.4 cu. ft.) fridge that fits under a countertop, and it has only a narrow little icebox on top.

Breakfast bores me – well, sort of. I love to eat breakfast out, when someone else is exerting themselves to prepare it (God bless all restaurants that serve breakfast!), but I hate having to prepare breakfast at home. Plus, I have absolutely no appetite for a couple hours after I wake up; in fact, the thought of food makes me feel sick, early.

And, finally, I’m my dad’s daughter, and I’ve developed indigestion, which makes me feel as if I need “a little something” in my stomach more frequently. Dad popped Rol-Aids frequently from my earliest memories of him, but lived on them even more in his later years. Yuck.

So. How to manage this? — I think I’m just going to have to hold my nose and cook little meals, every single day. Blech! – I’m going to go by the store this afternoon and pick up some chops, divide them into freezer bags and stick them in that little ice box section, next to the ice trays. I can thaw out a chop per day, right? Or part of a chicken breast or a thigh. I’m really wanting soup, right now, with our temps dipping into the 20s again (they were in the 70s for the past several days) – maybe if I’m really careful I can freeze the soup in ziplock bags, too? Worth a try.

What I will NOT be doing is eating “diet” foods. Have you ever looked at the labels of the “nonfat” or even “lowfat” foods in the grocery store? Those things are loaded with a bunch of weird toxic chemicals that become necessary to replicate the smoothness or flavors lost when they remove the fats in the foods.  Nope! If I’m going to poison myself, I’m going to do it with real food, not fake chemical compounds masquerading as foods. Yes, I’m going to have to become portion-conscious as never before. But I can manage that with a great deal more cheer than … fat-free yogurt artificially sweetened with Aspartame. No!!! thank you, anyway, but NO!

I already eat whole grains, not white bread and only rarely white rice, so I’m good there.

Exercise: the walking has been hard because of knee pain, but I’m stretching before getting out of bed in the morning (I’ve moved to the daybed which has a foam pad on top of a bunky board, so it’s like sleeping and stretching on the floor, almost) – and I’m using free weights a bit. Soon I hope to be able to comfortably switch to my Total Gym. Yeah, I bought one of those things a bit more than a decade ago. Love it, but in the past couple years have found it harder to get on/off than to actually use it, so it’s still propped up in the corner of the spare room.

Updates will be continuing soon.

Y’all have a good day, now.

Already running up against a wee problem with this weight loss business:

I hate to cook.

Well, I hate to cook for just me. And if I cook in quantity, like soup, I tend to eat and eat and eat… until it’s gone. That’s why I no longer bake cakes unless I have to take one somewhere, by the way. Leftovers call my name real loud.

So. Buy chops? re-bag them up for one per meal and stick the rest in my little freezer compartment? Note: I cannot just “freeze things” because I have a small under-counter fridge with a narrow little ice box; my little ziplock bags of chops would go where an ice tray would fit.

Oh, and I no longer have a microwave, and I really don’t want one. I was only using it to reheat things, and then I began seeing articles about how “nuking” the food actually effects its molecular structure; and that makes me kind of nervous… so I got rid of mine, which was older than my house, anyway.

Bummer.

Dieting

Ugh. Who wants to hear the fat lady talk about dieting? I sure don’t! – Oh, wait, I am the fat lady and blogging is one of the requirements of my participation in the program. Oh, darn.

Well, the program is Dieting Dozen in a Writing to Lose Challenge, initiated by my friend Karina Fabian. So here goes:

NAME: Laura Lowder

WEBSITE:

BLOG:   http://www.lauralowder.wordpress.com

100-word BIO:

WEIGHT LOSS GOAL:  By March 1? I’ll be thrilled with 15 lbs. Ultimately… I’ll tell you later, but it’s a LOT.

FITNESS/APPEARANCE GOAL:  To be able to do something physical for more than 5 minutes without being out of breath, hurting, having to sit down.

LIFESTYLE CHANGE GOAL (optional): See above. Being able to move around without aching and/or needing to catch my breath will be a major lifestyle change.

WHAT’S YOUR INITIAL GAME PLAN?  Eat better – less junk food, more fruits/vegs — and to exercise every day, even if it’s just walking out to my mailbox.

ANY INSIGHT TO SHARE? If I had insights, would I be doing this?

CURRENT WEIGHT: HAHAHAHAHA — NO WAY am I telling THAT number! I’ll admit to being morbidly obese; you’ll just have to be content with that.

CURRENT BODY FAT INDEX OR MEASUREMENTS:  I don’t know yet – will try to get a tape and measure later. – that does NOT mean I will be posting said numbers. Okay?

PHYSICAL CHALLENGES?  Collapsed arches leading to knee problems -

MENTAL/EMOTIONAL CHALLENGES (comfort eating, sugar addiction, particular life stresses) — comfort eater, probably a sugar addiction, too. Started eating to stuff emotions in the very early days of being married to the Fairy Prince.

WHAT DO YOU HOPE FOR FROM THIS GROUP?  Help/motivation/encouragement to take better care of myself.

First target date: March 1

Be prepared to be completely and totally BORED by all this.

There is nothing that can happen to us –

I would not, for all the world, want to seem to trivialize the tragedy of Newtown, CT, but I think I would be mistaken if I did not post this. I have learned its truth over the years, and after my ranting and raging, earlier today, it slips into my conscious thought with soft but victory-promising murmurs:

There is nothing – nothing! – that can happen to us that God will not redeem, that He will not use for our greater good and for His own greater glory.

Human Life – Disposable

I’m still reeling from the news about the school shooting in Connecticut, which I’ve been following all afternoon. One of my piano students is kindergarten-age, for goodness’ sake! And I remember so vividly how sweet and small and precious my own daughters were at that age.

So many people on Facebook are screaming for more gun restriction laws – but just who’s going to have guns, then? I mean, for crying out loud, people, the school was a NO GUN ZONE… and who had the guns there? The criminal. The off-hinged young man who came in and shot up the school and killed at least 26 people, 20 little kids.

No. The problem is not “gun control.” It’s a rotten, selfish attitude that people are here for someone’s personal convenience, are disposable. It begins with the 1960s and the idea of contraception on demand, the idea that we can have our pleasure without consequences, without lifechanging commitment. It grew in the 1970s with the legalization of abortion-on-demand, and the idea that if the contraception fails (or if one is too lazy or selfish to use it) then a little surgical procedure will take care of the problem – the baby can’t even be called a baby any more; it has to be a “clump of cells” or a “fetus”; God forbid we should acknowledge the humanity of the unborn.

It grows with a sense that children can’t be spanked, no matter what they do, because that would hurt their precious feelings. Most of the parents I’ve known who refused to spank their children have tried to present themselves as morally superior to the rest of us, but in reality they’ve just been too damned lazy to deal with their kids. Working in a lawyer’s office, several years ago, I saw the names of some of those unspanked kids of my acquaintance listed on a series of police arrest reports for drug, larceny, and property damage charges. Mom and Dad wouldn’t deal with them as toddlers and preschoolers, so now the court system has to deal with them.

What happened in CT this morning is an extreme consequence of the disregard of personal responsibility. It’s really not so ironic that on the same day, in another abortion capitol, China, a man went through a crowd of school kids with a knife, hurting more than 20 of them.

We must renew our fight against the attitude of children – of people – as accessory objects that can be casually gotten rid of if they get in the way of our personal satisfaction.

Who do you say that I am?

Just a couple weeks ago, the Gospel reading for the day was from Mark 8:27-30. Jesus and His disciples are travelling, and Jesus asks them, “Who do people say that I am?” and they told him, “Well, some say you’re John the Baptist, and some say you’re Elijah or some prophet…” And then He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?”

Imagine yourself among the prophets, being confronted with a question like that. Who do you say that He is?

If, as did Peter, we would impulsively cry out, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God!” then there must be a second question we must demand of ourselves: And what difference does this belief have in my life?”

There is a belief that is an intellectual assent to something. I believe a great many things, but that belief doesn’t change how I relate to those things,  don’t effect how I live, how I treat others, how I go about my daily business.

But if Jesus is Who He claimed to be – one with the Father, the Bread of Heaven, the Bread of Life, the Door… – if He is Who John the Baptist identified Him to be, “The lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29)  -

If He is Who Peter said he is … Then our belief in Him has to be more than a mere intellectual assent, hasn’t it? It must be a belief that requires of us our whole selves – our will, our egos, our ambitions…

Who do you say that He is?
And what difference does it make in your life?

Yes?