"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
This Thursday, a friend of mine received the Sacrament of Confirmation at a parish here in San Diego…
“Now when the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent them Peter and John, who went down and prayed for them, that they might receive the Holy Spirit, for it had not yet fallen upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then they laid hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit” – Acts 8:14-17
I’m starting to fall significantly behind with my blog. I have a large number of posts in draft, but very few have recently been published.
G. K. Chesterton said “Anything worth doing, is worth doing badly”. I think the point he was trying to make is that if something is important, it’s worth giving it a go, rather than endlessly procrastinating. There is a temptation to leave a task until some undefined, almost mythical, point in the future when you finally feel qualified to attempt it. “Perfect is the enemy of good” might be another way of expressing the same sort of idea. Given my personality, there’s a real danger that all the entries currently sitting in my “drafts” folder will remain there, forever to be tweaked and tinkered but forever found unsatisfactory and remaining unpublished.
I’ve therefore resolved to be a bit braver and to publish more of my thoughts on this blog, even if they’re not formed to my level of satisfaction.
I don’t normally just post links to other blogs, but I thought that it was worth doing this time.
Rachel Held Evans, always with something interesting to say, has just posted a blog entry A Christian’s Guide to Not Being A Jerk on the Internet.
Unfortunately, even on the most well-policed internet forums you still see discussions descending into the same sort of nonsense… 🙁
This is a must read.
This past weekend I was visiting a friend in Washington State and, at the church we visited, saw the following cross hanging above the altar:
Cross at St. Paul’s Cathedral, Yakima
…and this reminded me of something else which I came to understand through studying Greek that I had meant to share…
I recently told this story to a friend of mine. As I was driving home afterwards, I thought that it might be worth sharing here too…
When I was living back in England, my parish had a Hospital Visiting Ministry with which I was involved, run by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. Every Saturday we would hand out free newspapers, identify the patients who would like to receive Holy Communion the following day and spend some time speaking with them. This would be done by two different people every week, each covering half of the hospital.
Out of all the wards we visited, the one I hated visiting the most was the ASU, where stroke victims were treated. I think I disliked visiting this ward more than any other because it was often a very frustrating experience.
I’ve always placed a very high premium on communication, and those in the ASU usually had difficulty with speaking, a common consequence of suffering a stroke. It frustrated them not being able to make themselves easily and fully understood and it frustrated me in not always being able to understand them.
I now have several posts in draft which I will be posting next week once I have had a chance to proof-read them.
However, today I wanted to draw your attention to a really interesting documentary which was recently aired on television and which is now available online.
CBS was granted the extremely rare privilege of being allowed onto Mt. Athos and interview some of the monks there. It is an extremely ancient site of Christian monasticism and has changed little over the course of Christian history and is commonly regarded as the spiritual capital of Orthodoxy.
In a previous post I spoke about one of my favourite people, Archbishop Fulton Sheen. I spoke about how I came to discover him, his sermons and writings, as well as try and describe something of the impact he had upon me.
I think it is appropriate therefore, that in this next entry, I’ve chosen to talk about someone whom I’ve often heard referred to by other people as “The Next Fulton Sheen”.
This person is Fr. Robert Barron.
Fr. Robert is a priest who lives near Chicago in the United States. I first came across him on YouTube while I was still living in England. He is a published author (I finished his book “The Eucharist” this week), but he has also embraced the new media and is using it to extend the reach of his ministry. It is in this sense that he is like Fulton Sheen – he’s a superb communicator and uses all means available to proclaim the faith, although in terms of style he and Archbishop Sheen are very different.