Your day will not be complete until you've seen all of these

Behold the tasty meatcake!

An Anglican liturgy for the Blessing of a Minivan.

Musings on liturgical rage:

What exasperates and maddens me about liturgical abuses is that the Mass given to us by the Church is so supremely, eminently DOABLE. Almost any priest not in a concentration camp or on a battlefield can do what the Church asks him to do with perfect compliance. It's all there: wear this; say that; bow here; now elevate the host -- the dimmest clergyman in the poorest parish on earth can score 100% every time, and thereby offer a pleasing sacrifice to God.
That means that the departures happen for a reason. The innovator wants to jack us around for motives of his own, which he does not "covenant" with us. We almost never hear complaints about inadvertent omissions by celebrants trying to do it right; it's the deliberate changes that infuriate.

A fascinating blog about past versions of the future.

The Blog of Unnecessary Quotes, fighting a quixotic and noble campaign.

And finally, food for thought from Flannery O'Connor:

The Church’s stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands and with all of us being materialists at heart, there is little wonder that it causes unease.

Praying the Psalms

Speaking of the Liturgy of the Hours (below)...

Jews in ancient times didn't just read the Psalms but prayed them. Jesus, an observant Jew, prayed the Psalms from the Cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" and "Into Your hands, Lord, I commit my spirit." The early Christians started praying the Psalms as the prayer of Christ whenever that seemed to fit.

Most of the Liturgy of the Hours is praying Psalms. At first I had difficulty with certain Psalms, the ones that say I'm sick, please heal me! or Enemies are gonna kill me, please smite them! Couldn't really pray those when my life was going just fine. But then I read a little booklet pointing out that this is the prayer of the whole Church, something you pray not just for yourself but for everyone. Plenty of people in the world are sick or seriously persecuted. So now if I get to a Psalm that's too heavy for my own situation, I'll pray it for those who do need it. Often it ends up becoming the most important part of the Hours for me. I'm very bad at remembering to pray for other people, and this helps.

Today's daytime prayer, for example, had extracts from Pslam 59, and when I prayed it I thought of two groups: the many women and girls who are sold into sexual slavery, and the Chaldean Christians in Iraq who are being targeted for extermination.

Rescue me, God from my foes;
protect me from those who attack me.
O rescue me from those who do evil
and save me from blood-thirsty men.

See, they lie in wait for my life;
powerful men band together against me.
For no offense, no sin of mine, Lord,
for no guilt of mine they rush to take their stand.
Awake, come to my aid and see!

O my Strength, it is you to whom I turn,
for you, O God, are my stronghold,
the God who shows me love.

O God, come to my aid
and let me look in triumph on my foes.

That was followed by Psalm 60, and the opening lines make one think of recent disasters in Myanmar and China:

O God, you have rejected us and broken us.
You have been angry; come back to us.

You have made the earth quake, torn it open.
Repair what is shattered for it sways....

Good stuff! I appreciate the Psalms a lot more now. I actually used to think them pretty boring, and I didn't know why so many people spoke of them as one of the best parts of the Bible, but now I'm getting it: the Psalms teach me to pray in ways I wouldn't come up with on my own.

Protestants praying the Liturgy of the Hours

Very cool! That's from boundless.org, a site for college students that's put out by Focus on the Family. I think I would have loved the Hours myself as a Protestant. I always wanted to know more about church history and how past Christians thought, and the great majority of the non-Biblical readings in the Office of Readings are from before AD 500 (though there's a fair selection of medieval authors and a very few from more recent times.) The one thing that drives me crazy about the breviaries is that they don't print the dates of those non-Biblical readings. In most cases they're so old; it would be great if people knew that!

My mom's another Protestant who likes praying the Hours. I don't think she stresses about doing all the prayers, readings, antiphons and hymns in exactly the prescribed order on the prescribed day. It's pretty hard to work out by oneself, though Googling will turn up some sites that can help. I learned by following the priests and other parishioners at my church, where we have the Office of Readings and Morning Prayer every weekday morning. (The two of them together only take us about 25 minutes.) That way I was also able to look on with someone else who owned the breviaries, until I was certain I'd actually do it consistently and I dared to spring for the four-volume set myself. One can also find most of the readings for each day at universalis.com; that would be another way to start praying the Hours without paying $140. Anyone getting the four breviaries is gonna wanna get a St. Joseph Guide for the current year as well; that tells what pages you're on for each day.

Serra Retreat Center

Some Franciscans in Malibu (California) run a retreat center, beautifully landscaped with amazing views. I visited the place today with two friends, and we agreed it wasn't nearly as Catholic as one could wish. (An informational bulletin board about St. Francis of Assisi celebrated him for being, of all things, "ecumenical".) But it was lovely. There was a chapel set on a hill with glass walls to show off the canyon and the ocean beyond.

We toured the place and hit the gift shop, and then split up for a few hours to pray in our chosen spots. It occurred to me what a blessing it is to have friends who like to do that when we visit a church or retreat place. The only real regret I have about a pilgrimage to Mexico I took at this time last year is that we saw so many churches with glorious histories but barely had time to linger in any of them. One ought to have an entire day at least just to pray in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It was amazing to be there with the tilma right up front.

Dear Lord, please remind us how cool we are

Discovered on the lectern of a Eucharistic chapel at the Serra Retreat Center today: