random thoughts

*Several years ago I was sitting in a hair salon while one of the stylists told a story about her brother who was talking to his friend, a Rastafarian. The brother implored his friend to see that the Emperor Haile was not the Messiah. The Rasta friend gave the brother an affectionate pat on the back and told him that becuase he was his friend he would let the comment pass. If he were anyone else the Rasta would have to kill him. Some of the ladies in the salon giggled and the stylist shook her head in wonderment and said, "They really do mean what they preach and they'll defend it to the end."
Americans and most Westerners have gotten soft and sloppy about core beliefs. We innocently believe that since we are squishy about religion that everybody else is too.  Nope. I wish more Americans would wake up and realize that we are dealing with people who are not like us.  As Belloc once said:

We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.

 

 

*Fr. Bear helped in the celebration of a beautiful Tridentine wedding in Old St. Mary's in DC. Back in the 90s I would get up take a bus and then a train to Chinatown in DC to go to the TLM at St. Mary's. The neighborhood was rough back in those days and I moved quickly from the train station to the church. Chinatown is fashionable again so things are much better now.


*I've been sick all week and the weekend isn't looking too good either. I'm really looking forward to going to Mass today for the consolation.


*Pray for the Pope. I wish he weren't in Lebanon but he's braver than I am.

*When George Washington was sixteen he wrote out the Rules of Civility and Decent Behavor in one of his notebooks and decided to live by them. Too bad the Duchess of Cambridge never read them. Rule number seven could've saved her and her husband Prince William some embarassment.

*  Have you ever noticed that when there's a conversation about possible societal collaspe that certain guys seem excited by the possibility? My mother is a diabetic and she has no thyroid. I can stockpile food, toilet paper and a little something for personal secuirity. I can raise chickens and grow some vegtables but I can't make insulin or synthetic hormone. My husband takes two medicines everyday and I can't make those either. If access to a pharmacy is cut off for more than an month millions of people are going to die or in my case, be miserable and sickly. Nobody seems to talk about that.


*Katrina Fernandez has decided to stop blogging for awhile. I wish her the best and I hope she comes back as an independent blogger.