The Arrow's Path

 Father, look with love upon your people, the love which our Lord Jesus Christ showed us when he delivered himself to evil men and suffered the agony of the cross, for he lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. — Amen. -Closing prayer from the Office of Morning Prayer, Catholic Breviary. 

I have discovered in the last year that I love board games. I had to largely give up video games because I have been getting occasional migraines, and sometimes starting at flashing computers screens can trigger them. When I say board games, I do not the moldy oldies that everyone has played (and probably hates) like Monopoly or Clue , but a lot of the new wave of games that have been published in the last 10 years that are amazing. Many even come with Solo player modes now where you can play by yourself. There are some really amazing ones out there like Terraforming Mars and Spirit Island . I discovered a really fun one last week. It's cheap and small called Beaver Creek . It is a bit hard to find, but you can find it as of this writing on gaming sites like boardgamebliss.com or the Jungle River (I don't advocate buying from the 'Zon, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do to find some items.) This game is sort of a combination of Jenga and Pick Up Sticks . Y...

    The significance of the palms in the reading from Mark’s Gospel (11:1-10) that we heard at the beginning of Mass is not merely symbolic. The palms carry profound spiritual meaning for us as followers of Christ. Palms were a symbol of victory and triumph in ancient times, often waved to honor heroes and conquerors. As Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah, the crowds recognized Him as their victorious King, the one who would deliver them from oppression and usher in the Kingdom of God.     The palms, however, not only represent victory but also humility. Jesus, the Son of God, chose to enter Jerusalem not on a    magnificent steed befitting a worldly king, but on a humble donkey, embodying the humility and meekness that characterize His kingdom. His choice of transportation was a deliberate proclamation of His mission: to bring salvation not through earthly power and might, but through sacrificial love and hu...

 

😅 I have no use for Luther, but credit where credit is due to LutherSatire.

     So, I finally went to the movie theater and watched the Cabrini movie. I was a little disappointed. It's well filmed and the cinematography is good. It's worth seeing if you like period dramas. I do not see a reason you have to catch it in the theater. In fact, I think it would be better to wait until it comes out on streaming or DVD (Do they still make DVDs? asking for a friend...) I say that because it's like 10 minutes longer than Dune 2, which I am not sure how or why that is even possible. I dislike films that go over 2 hours. I very seldomly encounter a film that needs that sort of length, and this film did not. So, unnecessarily length is my first gripe.     My other gripe is the lack of theological substance. Now, I was not expecting it to be overly preachy. This was a general audience movie theater film and not a documentary from EWTN. So, I get that. They were trying to make Cabrini's story accessible to all crowds, not just the religious Ca...

 I moderate a Facebook group for Catholic Converts. Someone posed a question today for the ground that I thought was very good. " What was the one thing you learned in RCIA that made such an impact on you, that you knew you had made the right decision in becoming Catholic?" The following was my answer... I don't know if it was so much actually in RCIA but in my personal conversion process as I was doing serious research on what the Catholic Church actually taught. My spiritual director at the time had given me a copy of the Catechism and told me to read it through and see if there were any "deal breakers" and go from there.    There was one series of sections about Catholic social justice in the middle that honestly scared me. Coming from the Episcopal church as clergy where terms like "social justice" were code words for extreme political agenda that were used to bludgeon opponents, I very much feared that that would be the deal breaker. B...

So, finally got around to seeing Dune 2 , which is a designation I don't care for. It's really not a sequel. It's just the continuation of the first movie, which stopped right after the Harkonnen attack House Atreides on Arrakis. Really, the first film only got to the very start of the good part of the novel when Paul Atreides first encountered the Fremen on Dune. So, really "Dune 2" is just the good part of the first novel. SPOILER ALERTS: I AM GOING TO NOW DISCUSS THE FILM. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.  I had mixed feelings about going to see this movie. I did not particularly care for the first one, but Dune is one of my all time favorite Science Fiction novels. I have read the entire series, as well as the expanded prequel universe his son wrote, the Butlerian Jihad trilogy being by far the best of his son's work. They got progressively worse as they went along after that.  Really, the first 4 original Frank Herbert novels are all amazing in their own right. Th...

  In 1890, a poem was published in England by a homeless man named Francis Thompson. He had submitted the poem to a magazine at the urging of a Catholic priest who had been counseling him for his chronic opium addiction and recognized the beauty of the man’s writings. The editor of the Catholic magazine was also so impressed with the poem that he went into the streets and searched out this homeless poet and found him lodging at a halfway house. The poem, entitled “The Hound of Heaven,” quickly became one of the most famous religious poems in the English language and had a profound impact on later writers like JRR Tolkien, GK Chesterton, and Robert Frost because the poem tells the story of a human soul who tries to flee from God. The soul thinks that it will lose its freedom in the company of God, but ultimately finds that only true freedom can be found in God’s loving embrace. This theme is at the center of today’s Mass readings. In the reading from 2nd Chronicles (36...

The podcast Journey to the Stage did a great interview with poet Malcolm Guite. Here is part two . He talks about poetry and Tolkien, etc. I had the great pleasure of meeting Guite when I was in Cambridge. He's a lovely chap and a true English National Treasure.