We had our first day out on mountain bikes today. It was a beautiful spring day with temperatures in the sixties.
It had rained a bit yesterday, so the trails were a bit muddy at times, but nothing too awful.
Overall, we did 11.59km.
First Day Out
g
Dill Soup
Congaree
A Long Letter
@ 11:51 And here’s where the email gets to be tough to hear. And I hope it deeply sobers every person in the room. “I had four members in a PM tell me just last week how confused they are about prophecy. I directly asked brethren if they were keeping up and understanding what is being taught in the Series. Their frank responses are sometimes sobering. Many brethren are excited about the Series. But I would not be surprised if at least 10 to 20 percent of brethren in my area are confused to the point where they do not even listen to the Series anymore.They just blow it off.” Astounding. And then he talks about a recent trip to a place that he visited, and that confirmed it.
@ 13:26 I very much appreciate this letter. “The reasons they are confused may be many, but I think there are three common issues. Number One: They don’t have literature and reference points they access to review, which outline the basic elements of prophecy. Think of all the charts and booklets we had to explain the Big T.” You know, the Millennium and the Seven Seals we thought preceded it. “And when I was a new member, I thought it was rather complex. Many changes in our understanding is Number Two. This caused many to stop taking notes to prevent the current understanding to get ingrained into their thinking because it will change again.”So they just stop taking notes.
@ 14:14 “Some have even said that it helped them.” Not taking notes anymore. Depends on how you mean that. They could listen better, or they could just tune it out better. I don’t know, maybe both. “The effect is that when an easy part or basic truth is explained, unrelated to prophecy, they don’t take notes, causing the understanding to slip easier. New brethren have zero background and have to,” so this is Number Three. “You have to sorta just figure out how to learn on the fly unless someone takes several hours to bring them up to speed. And in this context, I think sometimes the sermons come so thick and fast that it sometimes just goes over the head of not only new brethren, but also some existing members.”
@ 15:21 “Now, I referred all brethren to the ‘How God’s Kingdom Will Come—Not What You Think!’ World to Come video to help them solidify the different comings of Christ. I have and will refer them to your recent sermon if they’ve not studied it yet. If you know of other material we can refer them to, please let me know. I’ve mentioned this to the Headquarters Ministry in the past, but I find brethren who struggle with the Series difficult to pastor. Several refuse to talk about the Series and will even walk away from a conversation or fellowship containing it.” Astonishing. But there are such people.
@ 16:25 “I started to mention the issues in pastorate reports from more than two years ago, and sometimes I feel like it’s getting worse. Sometimes not.”
@ 16:35 “We all have found some elements of the Series hard to follow, too. But I never want to give brethren the impression that I am in any way undermining the Series or our father in the gospel. Yet at the same time, I fully appreciate the obligation I have towards the sheep God has put in my care. I just try my best to communicate what I see on the ground back to Headquarters. It’s been a challenging task to keep many of the sheep glued to it and excited. It remains awkward to balance. If Friday comes and goes,” Well, it did, fortunately. And it went. It came and went, and I get to give this sermon. “I look forward to exploring (rather urgently) ways to help those who are not actively following the Series anymore. Any ideas will be welcomed. Recently, I mentioned to the Headquarters Ministry how I may want to give a sermon on the Series one day. Maybe two parts just to help their understanding of basic elements. The three iterations, the Seventh and Eighth Head, timing of resurrections, et cetera. You already covered several parts of it. Thanks again.” And how I love reading the last part of that. That’s a proactive pastor.
Window
Homes with windows like this used to be ubiquitous in southern Poland.
Lipnica, Summer 2022
High Jump
The Girl won first place in the high jump today.
Crossing Over
Talent Show
Clerical Education
I’m currently reading The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession by John Cornwell, and it’s enlightening and depressing, as one might imagine. The crux of the argument is that confession has been damaging in a lot of ways throughout history, but it has been most damaging in the last 100 years to children. When Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto (Pope Pius X), at the start of the twentieth century, mandated that first communion and first confession shouldn’t happen at age fourteen but rather age seven, he opened a door to the potential emotional abuse of children. Seven year olds don’t really have a good conception of what “sin” might be, and they get conflicting ideas from various people. Therefore, we’ve had several generations of cradle Catholics who have grown up suffering from guilt over the silliest thing, tormenting themselves mentally about “sinning.” For instance, one young boy was terrified that he was going to hell for breaking the pre-communion fast because he’d opened his mouth to catch some raindrops in his mouth on the way to church.
“But wouldn’t these priests hearing these confessions realize this and apply the child psychology they’d learned in seminary to help teach these kids what the church considers sin to be and how to deal with guilt constructively?” one might ask.
Child psychology classes? What are you thinking? That’s not what the pre-Vatican II seminarians learned.
What did they learn?
It was taught that to break the fast and receive the Blessed Sacrament, as we have seen, was a mortal sin. The textbooks enlarged on the circumstances in which the fast might or might not be broken. The rule admitted, it was pointed out, of no exception, and it extended to the smallest quantity of food or drink taken as such’.
So what does it mean to ‘eat’ or ‘drink? The thing consumed must be ‘taken exteriorly. So it is not a violation of the fast, for example, ‘to swallow blood from the gums, or teeth, or tongue, or nasal cavities’, although it would be a violation of the fast to swallow blood flowing externally from the exterior parts of the lips, or from a cut finger, or from the nose, or to swallow tears, unless in each case only a few drops entered the mouth and were mingled with the saliva.’ To violate the fast, moreover, requires that a substance ‘must pass from the mouth into the stomach, so that the fast is not broken if liquid is taken into the mouth, as an antiseptic or for gargling, and is not swallowed. A third condition insists that violation of the fast occurs by the action of eating and drinking, and inadvertence ‘has no bearing on the matter even if it is a ‘drink given to a patient during sleep?
Davis declares that the ‘divines are still disagreeing whether a ‘nutritive injection’ is food, but certainly the introduction of soup or milk through a stomach pump is not allowed, whether the injected liquid be intended to nourish or merely to flush.’ Turning to the vexed question of nail-biting, Davis reports that he believes that this does not affect the fast, but biting off and swallowing pieces of finger skin might do so, if the particles were more than the smallest and not mixed with saliva.’
Such useful information.
My hope is that in the sixty years since Vatican II there has been a change. Surely there’s been a realization that some basic psychology might be necessary. When I look at a seminary’s course offerings at random, though, I don’t see that. I see courses like this:
- CHUR 501 The First Millennium: Patrology (3)
- LITY 501 Introduction to the Liturgy (3)
- MORL 501 Fundamental Moral Theology (3)
- SCRP 501 Introduction to Biblical Studies: Wisdom & Psalms (3)
- SYST 501 Revelation, Faith, & Theology (3)
- ORDN 501 1T Formation Seminar: Celibate Witness (0)
- PAMU 501 Pastoral Music I (0.5)
- PFED 502 1T Field Ed Placement: Catechetics & Teaching Ministry (1)
- PFED 599 Pedagogy seminar (0)
Or like this
- CANL 601 Code of Canon Law (3)
- CHUR 601 Modern & Contemporary Church History (3)
- SCRP 601 The Prophets (3)
- SYST 605 Protology & Anthropology (3)
- ORDN 601 2T Formation Seminar: Personal Conduct/Character of Priest (0)
- PAMU 601 Pastoral Music II (0.5)
- PFED 601 2T Field Ed Placement: Health Care or Social Justice Ministry (1)
Or this:
- HOML 701 Models of Preaching (3)
- LITY 701 Deacon Practicum (1)
- SCRP 701 Luke & Acts of the Apostles (3)
- SYST 707 Ecclesiology (1)
- SYST 709 Ecumenism (1)
- SYST 711 Mariology (1)
- ORDN 701 3T Formation Seminar: Parish Admin/Human Resources (0)
- PAMU 701 Pastoral Music III (0.5)
- PFED 701 3T Field Ed Placement: Evangelization or Parish Ministry (1)
All very practical. All very helpful. All a bunch of lofty-sounding nonsense.
With each passing year, my disgust at the Catholic church grows.
Soccer Walk
Tuesdays are long: first school, then chess club, then a rush to the soccer field to switch cars with K so she can give L my car for her to drive to volleyball while I wait with the Boy at soccer practice. I usually talk a walk and/or run. And since my knees have been troubling me again, it’s more likely the former than the latter.
As the last few soccer seasons have progressed, so has the area around the soccer complex.
The red line is the route of my walk.
The central shaded area is now apartments — it has been for a couple of years. The large shaded area to the right is now completely bare, stripped of all trees with sewage lines and curbs ready for a new housing or apartment development. The triangle to the left is the latest development victim: it’s only been cleared in the last few weeks.
But still on that walk/run, one can find views like this.
Krakow 2001
Bloom
First Meet
The Girl had her first meet today. As in, the first meet of her life, not just of the season. It was a monster all-day meet, with 35 schools competing. She took third in the varsity high jump.
Three Pairs of Shoes
The Girl has taken up field sports — javelin, discus, shot put (?!), and high jump. Today, here throwing shoes arrived, slick on the bottom to allow for maximum spin.
“Now I have three pairs of shoes to take to meets,” she laughed. That doesn’t count whatever she might wear to the meet.
Views from a Walk
An Apologist’s Response
While discussing the difference between the Old Testament god and the vision of the Christian god we see in Jesus, a social media commenter suggested I read Dr. Jeff Mirus’s “Making Sense of the Old Testament God” in which he attempts to “make God’s ways under the Old Covenant easier to understand” as a reader had requested. He concludes his introduction by admitting that he “can only do [his] best,” which seems to be a tacit admission that there really is no way definitively to reconcile these two visions of the Christian god and that it’s a matter of faith.
Mirus begins by suggesting that there’s not such a disparity between the seemingly harsh god of the OT and the loving god of the NT. There are two ways he does this. First, he argues that there are many passages in the OT that show a deity in line with what we see from Jesus. Fair enough. But he then suggests that Jesus had a harsh streak himself: Jesus’s “denouncing hard-hearted Jewish leaders, lamenting those who lead others into sin, rebuking the wealthy, condemning hypocrites, and foretelling disaster for unbelieving communities” were harsh elements of “Our Lord’s effort to wake us up.” He then quotes Matthew 11:21-24 in which Jesus does a lot of “Woe to you”-ing. Yet there is a big difference between genocide and harsh words. There is a chasm between rebuking someone and stoning them. This is like saying Truman was as harsh as Stalin because he yelled at people.
As the article develops, so does the offensive weirdness of Mirus’s logic. Regarding the harsh nature of the OT god’s commands to slaughter so many people, he suggests, “Finally, we must not forget the decisive separation of the sheep from the goats—those who will be sent into eternal fire.” He is literally saying that the acts of cruelty we see from the Christian god in the OT pale in comparison to hell. In other words, “Yes, our god was pretty cruel in those times, but just think about how cruel he’ll be toward you for eternity in hell!” There are elements of our god that are even more appalling than what we see in the OT, so this god is really actually good. This is another example of how Christians seem to suffer from Stockholm Syndrome: the very god that “saves” them is the being that creates the conditions from which they long to be saved!
Mirus then deals with a second “misconception [..] that the Old Testament authors thought of God’s will in exactly the same way as we do today.”
This gets at the tension between the obvious fact that humans wrote the Bible and yet Christians claim that their god inspired the Bible. Where does divine authorship/inspiration leave off and human creation begin? In saying that “the Old Testament author thought of God’s will” in any way that could be discernable in the text is to negate the divine authorship. Surely what the human authors thought would not interfere with the divinely giving knowledge of the reality of the situation. But this very idea that somehow the Biblical authors’ own ideas got inadvertently mixed in with the divine revelation gives apologists the room they need to excuse the OT god of any wrongdoing.
Mirus continues by asserting that many of the abuses in the Bible are not God’s responsibility: “It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that everything recounted in the Old Testament is the will of God.” He then relates the story of Jephthah, who made a vow to sacrifice the first thing that came out of his door if his god would grant him military victory. When Jephthah returns home, his daughter runs out to greet him, which necessitates him slaughtering her as a sacrifice to his god.
Mirus argues that this is all on Jephthah and that we cannot hold the OT god accountable for this. That might very well be a good point that solves this dilemma, but it does nothing for the seemingly-countless times this god does indeed command people to do awful things. It’s a softball pitch intended to make readers more confident in the Bible and Mirus’s argument.
In dealing with the OT god’s commands for genocide, he asks, “Is there a significant difference between reading what God has done to this or that person or this or that people in the Old Testament, either directly or indirectly, as compared with the manner in which He appoints our lives, including the circumstances and agencies through which we will die, and which He alone both knows and contains within His own Providential limits?” In other words, our god is in control of how we die anyway, so does it really make him such a monster to kill us in this manner or that manner? He is, after all, a god: he can do what he wants! He made us; he sustains us; it’s his choice.
First, imagine saying that about your own infant child: “Surely I can kill this child. I made her. I sustain her.” What wretched monster would think like that?
Second, apologists can use this line of reasoning to excuse any action they undertake, no matter how horrific
Spring at School
Moon
Sunday in the Yard
We mowed again today: yesterday’s mowing was not sufficient because the height of the grass required us to mow at the mower’s highest setting yesterday. And since we don’t have the sharpest blade in the world, it just pushed some of the grass over and cut the rest.
Today we mowed again. And pulled weeds. A lot of weeds. And put down fertilizer.