An interview with a vocations director

   I thought this was interesting: an interview with the former vocations director of the Nashville Dominicans. Their final tally this year was 27 postulants (to see pictures, go here and click on Postulants 2010), so they know something about attracting women to religious life.  Here's an excerpt:

Sister Hopkins: The Dominican Sisters in Nashville understood that it wasn’t a matter of recruitment but of exposure.  As a vocation director, I made it a point always to respect the delicate interior struggle through which most people must pass. My job was not to make a good sales pitch, but to convey the beauty of our life and to expose young women to it through a visit or retreat experience. I had to help those who had the inclination, but struggled with uncertainty, realize that the simultaneous fear and attraction they felt was normal...

What our world needs is more Mother Teresas, people with zeal, humility and a fearless love. Over the past 20 years I have seen the numbers of women inquiring into the religious life grow both in numbers, quality and openness. Given the fact that our culture is not supportive of such ideas, nothing short of grace can explain it.

She talks about things we can do to promote vocations, but I'd agree with her that it comes back to God calling.  The relgious orders I've visited seem to understand that.  None of them tried to convince me that I was called to join them-- they just told me about themselves and let me see how they live.

Catholic, Orthodox report promising progress on unity

This is really cool!  Everything else I've read suggests that unity is long way off, so probably the people directly involved in these talks are too optimistic, but still it's lovely to read:

"There are no clouds of mistrust between our two churches," Orthodox Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon told a news conference. "If we continue like that, God will find a way to overcome all the difficulties that remain."

Did Cardinal Ratzinger or somebody say that when it comes to Catholics and Orthodox, there's nothing lacking for unity except unity?  I can't find the quote.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her

I was moved by this story I just read:
Canadian Dad Sacrifices Self to Save Wife, Unborn Child in Car Crash

Fr. Barron with a story that makes a great point

H/T romish internet graffiti
I just learned how to make the embedded video start right at the start of the story. :)  Check here if you want the details.

I should be ordering my trousseau

But first: a fun mindless game of Chain Reaction!

Congrega nos!

Sometimes I feel that the "mutual enrichment" the Holy Father talked about should be mainly one way...


H/T Fr. Z and A Minor Friar

   Also, for the feast of St. Augustine, a comic book of his life (in Italian, alas).
H/T The Hermenuetic of Continuity

   If you're waiting for a link to make you feel nauseated...
H/T Domine, da mihi Hanc Aquam! (Which means "Lord, give me this water!")

Saint Louis

It's the feast of Saint Louis (1214-1270), King of France.  Here's a letter of advice he wrote to his son and heir.  It's almost unbelievable that a king could write like this!

A game that made me waste time

Here's the game. You knock tiles off the board by clicking a square where you have a clear path to two (or more) tiles of the same color. Mistakes knock time off the clock. My highest score after five or six attempts is 90.

I'll be very busy at work for these two weeks-- heck, nearly working full time-- so the world will be somewhat deprived of my bloggy wisdom during that time. It's amazing how well everyone gets along without it.

Incidentally, this blog gets spammed with a lot of comments from spambots, advertising various dubious links. That's why I have it hold comments for my approval on all posts older than two weeks. The other day I got a spam comment that I almost wanted to approve. It said, "I'm currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia and being forced to post spam comments on blogs and forum! If you don't approve this they will kill me. Please send help!"

I probably would have approved it if it hadn't been accompanied by some rather inappropriate ads.

If you like dogs, this'll make you happy

A video of dogs.

When I see them surfing, riding in a motorcycle sidecar, catching frisbees, and swimming underwater, I think that it's amazing what dogs will do to be close to their humans.

Three random things

I have a lot of stuff to do... many emails to answer, for one... but first, some short links!  Here's a property Mel Gibson just sold, and I must say he's got good taste in houses.  I really like that old English half-timbered look, and with Gothic arches too!

Second, just read the bizarre opening sentence of this article.

Finally, I must post a poem I came across in an old book.  The poem was written around 1910 by a student at Eton, the very posh boarding school in England for boys age 13-18 that was founded six centuries ago by King Henry VI and has produced many famous leaders and writers.  The main thing to remember is that the writer of this profound poem was high school age.  He addressed it to one of his teachers.

I, who have made you songs in terza rima,
I, who have droned you dirges for a cat,
Aye, and could sing lamenting for a lemur,
(Well may you wonder what I'm aiming at),

I, who have dabbled in the dreams of Dante,
I, who have gibbered of the Golden Age,
I, though my brain be fatuous and scanty,
Though I be not a prophet or a sage,

I, who of old (the nominative pendent
Is just a joke-- there is no verb at all)
Like some bright planet in the sky resplendent,
Clad in a cloud, empurpled in a pall--

I, who at last have altered my intention,
And like the rain upon the drooping herb,
Gentle geranium or gaudy gentian,
Send you the crowning mercy of a verb,

I, who am I, and no one shall deny it,
I, who am I, and who shall say me nay?--
Yes, on the house-tops and the hills I cry it,
I have forgotten what I meant to say.

Macarons' New Popularity Worries Fans

Little did I know I was stepping into the middle of a passionate culture war:

Mon Dieu! Will Newfound Popularity Spoil the Dainty Macaron?
Parisian Treat Goes Mainstream; McDonald's Recipe Has Provenance 

Once the preserve of high-end French patisseries such as Ladurée and Pierre Hermé, macarons are showing up at retailers like Whole Foods, Trader Joe's and Starbucks. Even McDonald's is selling a scaled-down version in its McCafés in France, backed by ads showing two hands holding the tiny treat like a hamburger.
Instead of celebrating, however, fans of the meringue-like pastry have been whipped into a frenzy.
"Macarons are not meant to be mainstream," sniffs Laetitia Brock, a native of Paris who has been blogging about French culture from Washington for the past six years...Her negative blog post about the trend elicited a tempest over the tea cake.

There's some useful background in the article, as follows:

The word macaron comes from "the Italian maccherone and the Venetian macarone (meaning fine paste), from which macaroni is also derived," says Larousse Gastronomique, the encyclopedia of French cooking....  The English spelling is "macaroon," but the French confection is not to be confused with the dense chewy treat made with sweetened coconut.

A post to throw out some recent links

Horrific recipe cards from 1974. These literally made me laugh until my sides ached.

Also via Sancte Pater is a story about Voyager 2 still going strong. I had thought it was kaput when I heard a few months ago that it was transmitting gibberish back to Earth, but engineers were able to fix the problem-- a flipped bit.

Cool fact: my father, Don Gray, was chief navigator of Voyager 2 during its heyday, which means he was head of the big team of people calculating the equations that would save power by slingshotting it from one planet to another.

Quotes from Benedict XVI on the traditional Latin Mass, reminding me that I love him and want to read a lot more of his writings and speeches, because I'm impressed whenever I do. He's intelligent, understands the motivations of others, and writes in an irenic, measured way, yet without pulling any punches. His long speech from 1998 surprised me in parts, for example when he says, "the disappearance of the old liturgical books was of no importance in many countries and caused no sorrow."

Elizabeth Scalia and Jennifer Fulwiler have similar takes on church sex abuse scandals: good and evil living side by side. Jesus said something about that too.

Martyr priests of the Mexican Revolution. One little detail that stood out was a soldier who refused to participate in a firing squad to execute one of the priests. He was executed himself. I'm sure none of the soldiers knew they'd face such an agonizing choice that day-- God grant me the grace to be like the one who had conviction.

Reminds me of a story, I can't remember from where, about a group of Christian martyrs in the very early centuries. It was cold and snowy, and Roman soldiers forced them into a lake to freeze to death. They also built a fire and said that anyone who denied God could come get warm and save his life. One of them did, but the rest were so joyful about dying for their faith that one of the Roman soldiers suddenly declared himself a Christian and threw himself into the freezing lake with them.

Naughty boys in 1909.

Bed in Summer

I'm so tired and I'm getting up very early tomorrow, but how can I go to bed when it's still so bright outside? It makes me recall this poem from my childhood:

Bed in Summer

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

-Robert Louis Stevenson

On a completely unrelated note, I really liked this post from Brother Charles on asking one of his older confreres for a blessing.

Four quick links

This is a video of a smart German shepherd leading an Alaskan state trooper to his family's house when they needed help. (Got it from Hithah's blog.)

This makes me glad I'll probably never be the subject of an interview-- click on Tips, then on Fifty-Three Ways to Improve Your Reporting.

This makes me very grateful to whoever programmed it. Midi files of Durufle's Requiem-- they've been indispensable in learning my part.

This list of Iceland jokes will not be quite as funny if the volcano messes up any of my travel plans. :)

Bonus video proves heels are pretty high (or else she's weak from dieting? Poor girl.)

Sistine Chapel, anyone?

Takes a while to load. Use a scroll wheel to zoom in and out, click and drag to rotate. Incidentally, the choir singing in the background reminds me of the one that sings at St. Therese in Alhambra at the TLM every Sunday at 1 pm. :) They do that kind of lovely music.

Someone's got to arrest Deepak Chopra!

For causing the Baja quake.

He's a fraud, of course, but wouldn't it be funny to see his reaction if the police pretended to take him seriously? :)

Happy Pi Day!

Swiss Guards

I know they're 500 years out of style, but I think the uniforms are awesome. :)

Merry Happy Candlemas Groundhog Day! (Also, William Blake and Arthur Miller)

I posted about today a few days ago. Today's Office of Readings had this:

The Mother of God, the most pure Virgin, carried the true light in her arms and brought him to those who lay in darkness. We too should carry a light for all to see and reflect the radiance of the true light as we hasten to meet him.

It was written by St. Sophronius, who died around A.D. 451, so the candlelight procession for this day is older than that. If you want to read the whole excerpt, someone posted it here.

I'm leaving town tomorrow and won't be back on the internet till Monday, so make sure nothing fun happens till then! I'm bummed about missing the rain that's predicted for this weekend. Now here's some randomness I simply must post before I go:

Last night my cat was all cuddled up to me as I lay in bed and I thought, "How comforting." Then this morning I read this!

Want to waste time on a site that's pointless and weird?

I always thought if given the chance I'd wish for more wishes.

You know the Shel Silverstein poem about Noah and the Ark? I think he must have read C.S. Lewis, because I was reading my Lewis poetry book yesterday and found a poem that uses the same idea in a completely different way. "I see one creature more / Belated and unmated there come knocking at the door..."

Incidentally it's ironic that the publisher chose an illustration by William Blake for the cover of Lewis' book, since another of Lewis' books, The Great Divorce, begins by taking him on:

Blake wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If I have written of their Divorce, this is not because I think myself a fit antagonist for so great a genius, nor even because I feel at all sure that I know what he meant.

But in some sense or other the attempt to make that marriage is perennial. The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable "either-or"; that, granted skill and patience and time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain.

This belief I take to be a disastrous error. You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys; on one journey even your right hand and your right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind.... If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.

So yeah, it's funny that the publisher uses Blake. But now I have to blather a bit about my first exposure to Blake when I was in college. We studied Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, and pretty soon I had a visceral dislike of his work and I didn't know why. His poems were interesting and evocative; I memorized several of them and I was glad we were learning them. But they seemed to be pushing a worldview antithetical to my own. It was nothing I could put my finger on... until we moved on to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I didn't understand most of it, but at least one scene seemed pretty clear: the one where the bigoted angel explodes because he can't handle the truth uttered by the polite and intelligent demon from Hell. What was interesting to me was that I'd gotten that feeling all along from studying Blake's other work. I sensed that he was preaching something dangerously wrong, even though he was just talking about innocent little lambs and tigers burning bright. In retrospect, I think what I hated was that his Songs of Innocence were songs of ignorance. "So if all do their duty they need not fear harm," sings the little chimney-sweep who's in for a world of abuse. I think that was Blake's idea of Christianity-- either pie in the sky, or else an oppressive force, "binding with briars my joys and desires," and harmful either way. He probably cut sin from his vocabulary and substituted enlightenment. The 60's probably loved him; I'm sure it's no accident that he was relatively obscure in his own time but became very popular a century later.

Actually I also felt a visceral dislike of Arthur Miller after reading his plays (like A Streetcar Named Desire). When the news recently came out that he refused to live with his Down's Syndrome son and forced his wife to give up her child to an institution instead, I was unsurprised. "The man who could write Death of a Salesman is capable of anything," I thought. I'd had zero knowledge of Miller's personal life (except for something about Marilyn Monroe) and no basis for judging him. I was just certain that if he'd written those plays, he couldn't be a pleasant person. There's something so inhuman about Willy Loman and the rest of Miller's characters, like they're just shells of real people. Like Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited, but he was just one of Evelyn Waugh's characters, whereas Miller seems to write everybody that way.

Of course Blake and Miller were great writers. They'd never have gotten such a rise out of me if they weren't. I suppose there must be people who find themselves hating Lewis or Tolkien or other writings I find very congenial. Have any of you ever felt like that about an author or a book? You really disliked it even though you couldn't easily say why? Like you felt the author was wrong on some fundamental level?

Well, I can't ramble forever. See ya'll next week!

I'll have to turn my comments to the moderated setting for now because I get a lot of comment spam on this blog. Although some of the spam I delete is kinda fun. Almost poetic. "Good day, sun shines! There have were times of troubles when I felt unhappy missing knowledge about opportunities. I was a dump and downright stupid person. I have never thought that there weren't any need in large starting capital.
Now, I'm happy and lucky..."

Interesting effects of the Pill

I was in college when I first heard about the sweaty t-shirt research. Our immunology professor was teaching us about MHC genes, which code for proteins that present foreign antigens to immune cells as part of protecting our bodies from invading viruses and such. Theoretically it's advantageous to procreate with someone whose MHC genes are dissimilar from yours, to give your children a robustly diverse set of immune genes with which they can tackle a greater variety of potential threats.

So, scientists had a group of men wear t-shirts for a while, and then they gave the shirts to women to smell. The women picked out the men they thought they'd be attracted to, based only on their scent. And it turned out they'd picked men with dissimilar MHC genes to their own. Isn't that crazy? They could tell by the smell!

Well, more recently I found out what happened when those same women starting dosing themselves with the hormones in the birth control pill. They began to pick the wrong men:

After taking the pill, women shifted toward preferring genetically similar men. Women who did not take the pill slightly increased their preference for genetically different men....

The question, of course, is what happens when a woman taking birth control pills marries a man to whom she's attracted -- and then stops taking the pill.

Herz says marriage counselors who have never heard about these studies tell her that the No. 1 complaint among women no longer sexually interested in their husbands is that they can no longer stand how he smells.

And women aren't the only ones influenced in this way. Men are more attracted to women who are ovulating, and the scent of them triggers a testosterone surge. Pill users don't get that invisible pheromonal advantage in the middle of the month, since the Pill stops ovulation. This has a bearing on the next article too, in which a scientist speculates that the Pill is responsible for the shift from the masculine movie stars of the sixties to the baby-faced stars of today. Women prefer more masculine-looking men when they're ovulating, so it's a reasonable theory that a nation with more Pill usage and fewer ovulating women would begin to prefer less masculine-looking movie stars. I wonder if that's also why beards have fallen so far out of fashion?

Even the environment is affected by all this. Male fish in our rivers are becoming feminized, and studies have linked this to all the female hormones in the Pill that eventually seep into the water supply. Which leads to a disturbing question: if all the extra estrogen does that to male fish, what is it doing to male humans? According to research I remember but am too lazy to look up, infertility is a much greater problem than it used to be, even after accounting for the higher average age of marriage, and the human male sperm count has been dropping for decades.

Environmental problems and t-shirt studies aside, I wouldn't use the Pill not only because it's a contraceptive but because it's an abortifacient. That is, it not only acts to prevent ovulation (and thus conception), but when breakthrough ovulation occurs anyway and the resulting egg is fertilized, it's unable to implant in the womb because of how the Pill's hormones affect the lining of the uterus, so the embryo dies instead. That information needs to become much better known, since it's very pertinent to the decision of anyone who believes that life begins at conception!

But anyway, I find all this research fascinating. How do you like knowing how much you're affected by your hormones? Or better yet, by invisible, odorless pheromones, wafting from someone else's body, right up into your nose? I've encountered this whenever I live with other young women and we find our cycles synchronize... and it's just weird!