+JMJ+ Greetings, y’all, still in crisis and recovery mode. It may be a while before things get back to a normal-ish schedule here at the blog. But I want to tell you how much I miss the place and your faces that I imagine while I’m writing away in the den in my chair or wherever. Not writing there tonight and that brings me to the topic of my post: said crisis.

I slid out of my chair one day and then next I fell off of a wobbly office chair that I had been using as a scaled-down wheelchair. Yeah, well, there’s a reason they tell ya not to do such things. Cuz you can take a tumble that lands you in the ER and gets you admitted to the hospital, not just for being an idiot, neither, but for also being a bona fide moron who let oneself get so sick that she developed pneumonia without realizing it–well, I guess I’m not the first person to do that. It can sneak up on ya, this growing weakness, this brain fog, this inability to see what others around one are yelling and waving their arms and trying desperately to get one to see. If only one would look!

Interesting, the way I say “one would” whatever, and then nearby a “ya” instead of “you” but that’s the way my mind works. Or doesn’t. Argh.

Oh! And not only have I had growing weakness in my legs but apparently also a growing infection in my legs–a strep infection. I had not known it was possible.

So there you have it. If you follow me on Twitter/X, you maybe have already been following this riveting, breaking story of my rough and tumble (for real!) existence. There are glorious moments in it, too. A priest appeared a couple of days ago (don’t ask when, it’s all one big blur), and heard my confession, anointed me (praise God!), and gave me Holy Communion! My heart! My heart is full, oh, Lord! No matter what else happens, or has happened, or is happening now, the main thing is that state of grace, that preparing for the union that is the heart of the matter of it all and the only reason any of it matters now, ever did, or ever will.

Late have I loved You, again, Oh, Lord, and You have again led me back to You, once again and again and again, I say, again.

And before I go any further, allow me to give a great big shout out to my sister for coming from afar to help me even though I’m sure she did not know what she was getting into and would like now to go back and not answer her phone when it rang this past Friday. Ha! Love you, sister! She’s going through a lot and did not need this on her plate right now. I’m ever so grateful for her and mortified that she’s taking her time to do so. Accepting help is difficult for me, it’s too much like surrender because that is exactly what it is.

I must allow people to help me. I must allow these gentle hands of these good people around me to help me, to do what I simply cannot do for myself right now, and there seem to be things that I cannot seem to do at any time of my life. I’m not going into that right now. Crying into an oxygen cannula was bad enough this morning, at least this is a smaller one at a lesser flow. Crying into that bigger one ended that crying jag abruptly, lemme tell ya!

Depressed? Maybe a little. Mostly humbled. And, yes, depressed, okay, even distressed. Having others handle one’s business can make one feel like a total, abject failure. And it can quickly spiral out of control when too many dear people try to be very and needfully helpful all at once. Something else to deal with. But something meant well and I know it. Lots of good intention here, good hearts, neighbors trying to help neighbors.

Anyway, what I want to say is, I’ll be back when I can, will post as I’m able, hopefully regularly, we’ll see, and most of all, I want to ask you to pray for me and for all those praying for and helping me, and all of those who have revealed the suffering they themselves are going through.

Thank you for reading, commenting if you like, and for being here. I’ll be praying for you. May we be not afraid to help each other become saints, it’s what we’re here for, what we were made for! May His peace be always with you and yours. Forever and ever. Amen. +JMJ+

+JMJ+ Greetings, y’all! I had a spectacular day today and when I tell you why, you’ll see how spectacularly dull my other days must be, and how little it takes to make me feel filled with joy. Well, filled with late lunch/early dinner, anyway. I downloaded an app just to look at a menu and got an offer of a big ol’ burger for free and I didn’t have to wait until a later order to get it, either. What? Amazing, I know! So I got that, and some fries and a big iced sweet tea, and Uber delivered it, and fast. My first time to ever do that. It’s been a long few weeks of dealing with shooting nerve pain in my legs, I’ve had lots of trouble breathing, and I am whooped. All in all I have to say I thought today’s offer was a pretty good deal, a good value, considering. So I went for it, Or somebody else went for it and brought it to me. (See other posts in this occasional series.)

And this brings me to my subject tonight: values—personal, often taken to mean private and hidden away, things. And objective moral standards or objective moral truth. My values may not be your values, but what is sin is still sin and what is evil is still evil. I may value one painting over another. I may value one friendship above another. But all persons are of equal value when it comes to being human persons made in the image and likeness of God, and that God has a plan for each one of them. Those are matters of objective truth, of reality. My personal feelings or thoughts have no bearing on any person’s worth as an image of God, a creature created according to His design.

How much or how little I value any person has nothing to do with that person’s worth before God. Some people try to measure other people’s worth by any number of ridiculous measurements and standards. They think they have to do this because they can’t accept the idea that God has created us in His image and likeness, that’s too religious for them, and they think they live, and must live, in a secular society in a secular age. They think that means being free from religion. Secular priests would like a word. So would Third Order Seculars (like the ones the Franciscans and Carmelites have, and there are others besides). Secular just means living in the world instead of in a convent or monastery, and taking no vows but making solemn promises instead. (There are different terms used by different groups, but that’s basically how I understand it right now.) And it’s not just the laity. Diocesan priests are secular, not part of a religious order, convent, or monastery, but they may also be Third Order Secular.

This idea that secular means that our public life must be free from all hint of religion is false. But we hear it all the time. “Keep your religion at home where it belongs!” “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries!” “Pray where we can’t see you like your book tells you to, you hypocrite!” No, I can be as religious as I can be and still be secular, living in the world but not of it, and being religious while not being a religious. Being religious, an adjective, while not being a religious, a noun.

Too many people have decided (or have been led to think, or to assume without much thinking at all) that the basis of society must be secular and that secular must mean free from all taint of religion. But that’s ridiculous. Man is inherently religious. Look at what happens to people who decide to be free from religion. Their very supposed freedom from religion soon consumes them the way true religion seldom does. True religion leads to human flourishing while false religion can lead to denial of reality and obsession and even worse. Look around. Once a person goes off the rails a little, as time goes on they find themselves way off the rails, indeed. Plenty of that to see in the world right now. “Off the rails” is putting it mildly.

I’m not offering links to studies to back up what I’m saying here. This ain’t no dissertation. This ain’t no disco. This ain’t no foolin’ around. I’m still readin’. I’m still thinkin’. Burnin’ down the house, er, blog.

See other posts in this loosely-themed occasional series, meaning occasionally I’ll post something in it when I have something to say or to work on out loud, as it were. Lord help you if you come along for the ride as I ramble on and make no sense at all while I yammer away. ;)

Thank you for visiting and reading. And may we be not afraid to become saints! God bless you and may His peace be always with you. +JMJ+

Precious Blood of Jesus, save us!
July is devoted to the Precious Blood.

Notes and Links

None this time. Just my own blabbermouth, blabbering. Is it of any value? Mebbe.

Image: First Image by Anali Matheus from Pixabay. I didn’t think to take a photo of my meal. I inhaled it instead. I said I was hungry. I was really hangry! ;) Second image: Photo by Sora Shimazaki on Pexels.com.

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+JMJ+ Greetings, y’all! I’ve been doing more reading, some of it the articles I shared links to last week, on reclaiming language, etc., some of it glancing through some works that I think are going to become important to the subject as time goes on. These authors have been on my to-read list for years now: Tocqueville, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. But for now I’m going back over the already mentioned articles by Iain T. Benson, one by J. Budziszewski, Handling Issues of Conscience in the Academy, and one byVigen Guroian, Awakening the Moral Imagination: Teaching Virtues Through Fairy Tales. Because that’s what this study is (that is what it’s shaping up to be) really about: moral education, and not just for children, for adults, too, since so many of our adults have received far too little moral education and even that seems to be haphazard at best, and really non-existent for far too many. (See other posts in this occasional series.)

How many times have you tried to discuss something with someone who probably pounced on you while you were discussing something with someone else at the time, only to have them virtually shut down the conversation with lines like, “Oh, you’re trying to push your truth on me, that’s fine for you, but I’m not Catholic!” Or “I’m the one who is pro-life because I believe in choice!” Or “How do you know murder is always wrong? Maybe in some cultures it’s not murder at all.” I’m not sure what internal thinking goes on with that last one. I rather think that if I offered to transport him to another culture where he would be murdered in a socially acceptable manner, he would be less than enthusiastic. Unless he is crusading for assisted suicide. And there’s another subject where lack of thinking and reasoning and moral education has led us down a dangerous road. See? Ideas have consequences, real life, real consequences. It matters. What we believe, what we accept, what we hand on matters, and in a practical in-your-face kind of way.

Maybe it seems like I’m all over the place right now and that’s because I am. While this idea is still forming and I’m still casting about, looking to see what there is to see, what I need to think about and research, things are still a bit amorphous and blurry in my mind. I’m just getting the dimmest view of an outline of a something far off, even though the problem itself is very much here now, affecting each one of us, the problem of reclaiming the language and how to handle moral education, the moral formation of kids in school, in the Church, adults in the Church, people living in the secular world where too many think secular means the opposite of or even the absence of religion.

I really am all over the place, aren’t I? Trying to fit too many things into one blog post and managing mostly to mangle all of them. Bear with me while I gather articles and such. The current idea is still taking shape in my wee little mind.

Eternal Father, I offer You the Most Precious Blood of Jesus Christ in atonement for my sins, and in supplication for the holy souls in Purgatory and for the needs of Holy Church.
—From The Raccolta.

July is devoted to the Precious Blood.

Thank you for visiting and reading. And may we be not afraid to become saints! God bless you and may His peace be always with you. +JMJ+

Notes and Links

• Some articles I shared links to last week.
• Awakening the Moral Imagination: Teaching Virtues Through Fairy Tales, by Vigen Guroian at the CERC.
• Works by or about Tocqueville, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, to see more about where we were and how we got where we are now. I’ve tried to read them or about them before and I’ve always ended up giving up. Maybe this time I’ll stick with it long enough to actually learn something.

Image: 1) Holy card depicting the Sacred Heart of Jesus, c. 1880. Auguste Martin collection, University of Dayton Libraries, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. 2) Detail from same.

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+JMJ+ Greetings, y’all! I didn’t plan to do two posts last week, but when challenged to answer some Protestant objections on Twitter/X, I ended up writing a blog post instead of a long, hard-to-write-and-read thread. So I’m going to continue working on something this week and let that second post stand-in for tonight’s post, along with what I’m about to tell you about what I’m working on. (See other posts in this occasional series.)

Now, it may not have escaped your attentiont that I’m one of those people who pays attention to language. And something has been bothering me about the use of certain words in our language for quite a while, though I was not able to put it into words. 

Then yesterday I read something that brought me some much-needed clarity and I’m still reading and thinking about it. There are words that mean one thing to those of us who are Catholic—at least, to those of us who are Catholic and pay attention to words—but mean something very different to non-Catholics, especially those who are not particularly friendly to Catholics and Catholic ideas. 

Some of those words are “values and virtues” and “secular and religious” and one of the reasons I’ve been thinking about this and reading about it is that Catholics have begun to use these words the same way the not-so-friendly non-Catholics do, and this is doing damage to our language and to our education and formation, too. 

Let me give you some links to you can read for yourself and understand more about it while I think and work away. And please share these links with your friends and family who might be interested.

• Values and Virtues: A Modern Confusion, by Iain T. Benson, at CERC. (Catholic Education Resource Center).
• Secularism and the Deeper Questions of Religion and Society, by Iain T. Benson, at CERC.
• Seeing through the secular illusion, by Iain T. Benson, at SSRN (Social Science Research Network).

Those are some of the things I’m reading and thinking about right now. We’ve let our words and terms and thus our thinking get watered down for too long and enough is enough. Time to start noticing every time we hear someone use these words without thinking and when we hear ourselves do it, too. We are where we should start, really. 

If I haven’t made any sense, I will when I write the actual post after I’ve had more time to think and digest the articles I’ve saved. And those articles at those links say it better than I will be able to, anyway. So please do read them, if you care even a little bit about where our culture is going and where even the Church, or a lot of people in the Church, seem to be going, too.

Thank you for visiting and reading. Sacred Heart of Jesus, make our hearts like unto Thine. And may we be not afraid to become saints! God bless you and may His peace be always with you. +JMJ+

Notes and Links

• Values and Virtues: A Modern Confusion, by Iain T. Benson, at CERC. (Catholic Education Resource Center).
• Secularism and the Deeper Questions of Religion and Society, by Iain T. Benson, at CERC.
• Seeing through the secular illusion, by Iain T. Benson, at SSRN (Social Science Research Network).

Image: The Church Spiritual and Material, in heaven and on earth. My title. I don’t know where this poster came from, I’ve found it all over the web. I don’t think it’s under copyright.

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