An Aid To Memory

Today is Halloween, also known as All Hallows Eve. It begins an intriguing part of the life of the Church. It is the bane of fundamentalists and misused by some pagans, but it still remains the Eve of All Saints Day. Many Christians, including myself, take part in the festivities but also pray against the evil commonly associated with the night.

I always enjoy Halloween. I feel like it is a chance to be a kid again. Tonight my family and Jennifer and I are dressing up as Wizard of Oz characters as we hand out candy to the trick-or treaters. I forgot to carve a pumpkin this year…working full-time does that I guess. Happy Halloween to all my readers.

Today Jennifer and I took a trip to the Hocking Hills area of Ohio. It is well-known for beautiful scenery and excellent hiking.

This year, the autumn is a bit muted. I have noticed that in my area, the Fall is about a week or two behind last year. Maybe it has been the extended dry spell that happened this last summer. Either way, the Hocking Hills area’s Fall is muted as well. The colors are not as vivid, and the trees seem to be mostly green and skeletal. The photos show the color we saw.

We started the day by visiting an Amish buffet. While it is not run by Amish now, it serves "down-home" food, like mashed potatoes and stuffing. I always look forward to eating there, and it has become an important part of my tradition of visits to the Hocking Hills.

This year, like last year, I was armed with a camera (and a girlfriend with a camera). Ever since I got my new camera, I have been trying to capture common moments of my life a little more. With Wal-Mart’s 19 cents/print service (that I can send from my home computer), taking images of my life has never been easier. I find that I don’t have many photos of the mundane things in my life. I don’t have any photos of my friend Dave and I from 1996-1999, yet we hung out almost every weekend during that time. I wish now I would have taken some photos.

So I have decided now to take photos of everything, and give them my own "touch" in the process. Happy Fall!

The photos:
Top: a scene by a road on the way home
Second: waterfalls
Third: water sprinkling down from rocks above
Last: spring water, near my home

A few interesting threads/posts going on over at Titus One Nine and All Too Common on the issue of whether Anglicans are Catholic. It makes for some interesting discussion.

Sarah Sevick, a 19-year old freshman at a Catholic University in Texas, has filed an Americans with Disabilities Act complaint because she is not allowed to keep her ferret in her dorm or bring her to class.

She claims that she suffers anxiety attacks, and the ferret has a calming effect, so therefore she should have to right to bring her ferret anywhere she wants, including into the classroom. Amazingly, a local ferret shelter owner supports this insanity. He disagrees with the University’s assessment that ferrets can be dangerous to other animals and are not trained as service animals. On the first point he is right to a large degree: ferrets are no more potentially harmful than most dogs. However, on the second point the university is clearly correct. Ferrets are not trained as service animals. In fact, ferrets are hard to even train to do basic things, like use a litter box or refrain from destroying everything they come across. Regardless, you can’t just bring an animal to class because you want to!

A little common sense to Sarah: First, if you really want to live with a ferret, live in a place that allows ferrets. Don’t complain about the rules that you already knew about when you moved in. If you want to own a ferret or any pet, move into a place that allows it. I love cats, but that does not mean I have the right to have one in an apartment that does not allow them. Second, just because the ferret has a "calming effect" doesn’t mean it has to go everywhere you go. Personally, if I had to sit next to a stinky ferret, who is probably using the corner of the classroom as a toilet, I would need some kind of medicine (or animal?) to calm me. So I would have to bring in my cat to counter the effects of your ferret, and then someone else may have to bring in their pet acaconda to deal with the effects of my cat, and then your ferret may get eaten, which would really cause anxiety. Ok, joking aside, even if we classify anxiety attacks as a disability, taking a ferret with you wherever you go is not the answer, nor is wasting the government’s (and University’s) time and money.

File this under "ridiculous." Or maybe under "you have way too much time on your hands" is more appropriate. It is trivial complaints like these that make it harder for people with real disabilities who need animals for assistance to get what they need. Plus, how much is the school going to have to spend to deal with this?

Upcoming Church Holidays and what is on ChurchYear.Net:

Halloween, October 31-Halloween Prayers
All Saints, November 1-All About All Saints Day, All Saints Day Prayers
All Souls, November 2-All About All Souls Day, All Souls Prayers
Advent, November 27-All About Advent, Advent Prayers,  Advent Wreath

ChurchYear.Net is a site my brother and I run with the help of a few friends. Our goal is to provide plenty of Church Year resources (for Christians of all churches) as well as other resources related to prayer and the liturgy. If you enjoy the resources we provide, we always appreciate links.

It seems that Anne Rice has found Jesus, returning to the Catholic Church of her youth. The link takes you to a recent interview with Rice. From now on, this famous writer of vampire and softcore S&M encounters, will only write books that are "for the Lord." For those who have not read her books (I have not), at least two of them became famous movies, including "Queen of the Damned" and "Interview with the Vampire."

Rice is currently writing a book about Jesus as a 7-year old, from his perspective. She (quite correctly I suspect) suggests that many fans may be disappointed with her decision to only write "for the Lord." In this interview, she admits to "loving" the "Passion of the Christ," reading a book by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins (although disagreeing with their vision), and even calls Jesus "the ultimate supernatural hero…the ultimate immortal of them all."

Interesting.

There is a good article by Christine Rosen that asks, Women Dominate America’s Pews, Is that a Problem? The answer I think, is "yes." When a whole gender is dropping off from church attendance in droves, we have a large problem. If this was reversed, and women were not attending church, certain groups would be up in arms, holding boycotts, and developing some "theology" to correct it. Where are the "masculinist theologians"? When are classes on the masculine interpretation of Scripture going to be offered? When is the offensive quote of Jesus about gathering Jerusalem like a hen going to be exised from the Bible so men no longer get offended by the feminine imagery? Ok, I got a little started here…

My favorite observation of the whole piece:

Interestingly, Mr. Murrow notes that, among the major Christian denominations,
it is the mainline churches that suffer the largest gender gaps in church
attendance. These churches, still pilloried by feminists for their patriarchal
pretensions, have in fact become spiritual sorority houses. It is the more
conservative denominations, such as the Southern Baptists, that have the most
even ratios.

[note: I think the same is true of race and class. Even though many mainlines like the Episcopal church talk about diversity, most are still educated, upper-class, white folks. If you want to see real diversity, even though they don’t always talk about it, go to a Pentecostal or Catholic Church.]

So…Where are all the men? According to the article, in churches like the Catholic Church that have dimensions emphasizing spiritual rigor and competition. Where are men not? In lovey-dovey, feel-good, bland churches, both liberal and conservative. I don’t have all the answers, but I think we have a problem here. This is probably the fifth article I have read on this topic since I have started this blog, so even without the information presented in this article, we seem to have a real problem.

Hat tip: Canon Kendall Harmon

My drug of choice lately has been NTN Trivia. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it is a nationwide trivia competition played at bars and restaurants. Each bar has the trivia boxes that you use to answer the questions that appear on various TV screens in the bar. They have in-bar and national rankings. I used to play NTN trivia a lot back in 1997 when I first went to college. I even amassed over 250,000 "Player’s Plus Points." Each game you play gives you 500-1000 points, so you can tell I played quite a lot, since all of those points came in a 8-month time period.

A local wings place has the trivia, and I just can’t resist the lure of hanging out with Jennifer, playing trivia, and eating spicy-garlic wings. Just so you know, my handle is sthil, short for my patron saint, saint Hilary. Last light I won most of the games we played, except the Sci-fi trivia…I bombed that one! If you are interested in trivia, I suggest you click on the link above and find a local place that has it. It’s pretty darn fun.

The image on the left gives you an idea of how NTN is played. This is the local rankings for one particular game. I am not on there yet, even though I did beat the guy at the top, TOMHH, twice last night.

Autumn has to be my favorite season. We have All Saints Day, All Souls Day, Halloween,  and Thanksgiving that fall within Autumn. Advent begins in the Autumn as well. Plus, where I live, the leaves start turning colors, the weather gets crisp, and the air just seems to smell differently. I took a few photos yesterday and the day before, specifically trying to capture some of the uniqueness of the Fall on film (well… in digital memory!).

This is one I took at night with a nearly full moon illuminating the sky. I had to set the shutter speed to around 8 seconds to get the same color/light that I saw with my own eyes. I had to set up a tripod to accomplish this. Afterwards, I kept asking myself why the clouds were blurry. Then it hit me: it is because the clouds were moving, quite quickly, and within the 8 seconds the shutter was open, the clouds had moved. Nonetheless, it is a neat effect. I only wish I had captured more of the home and water tower below.

This is an autumn evening scene I took. I didn’t have to use a long shutter speed because it was evening and there was some natural light. I had to adjust the speed a tad because the auto-mode was coming out too dark.

Well, as you can tell, we have been having some very beautiful autumn nights and evenings. I have been saying for about a month now that I am ready for Fall. Now I guess it is here!

Clicking on the images will result in a bigger image with better quality.

Today is the feast of St. Ignatius of Antioch, the first century bishop and martyr, who wrote numerous letters to churches around AD 105.

Ignatius has a special place in my heart. As an evangelical protestant, reading Ignatius was quite a shock. His emphasis on the episcopacy and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist was troubling. His strong affirmation of Christ’s deity and humanity against the Docetists was intriguing. To see such an early, clear, and darn-near Apostolic witness to these ideas made me rethink many of my assumptions about Christianity. Plus, he was a martyr. He took his ideas about Christ’s humanity and the Eucharist very seriously, and lived them out even in his death.

Ignatius is not loved by everybody. Some see his obsession with martyrdom as psychologically abnormal. I see him as dedicated to Christ at all costs. Some believe that he invented the Episcopacy and by combatting Gnosticism he destroyed an "inclusive" church that was in touch with its feminine side. I say it would be hard for one man to invent the Episcopacy. As to him destroying an "inclusive" church, the 1st and 2nd centuries AD were not the 1960s. Also, many scholars have made the case that it was the Gnostic sects that were truly exclusive because of their belief systems where special saving knowledge was given only to a few people within a spiritually elite group. Ignatius’ argument for the historical and material Jesus against Gnostic speculation turns out to be quite inclusive upon closer inspection.

If it weren’t for Ignatius’s testimony, I doubt I would be Catholic. I am sure his witness has led many to the faith. Today we honor a great bishop, hero, and martyr.