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FALL BACK

8/31/2016

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With a view to my re-location to Corpus Christi, Texas for January-August 2016, coming back to Connecticut in the future on for the Fall semesters, . . .
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 . . . I started looking for books to read about anglo/hispanic relationships in the Southwest and Mexico.  The search ending in my library here at Holy Apostles when I  came upon Cormac McCarthy’s Trilogy:  All the Pretty Horses, the Crossing, City of the Plains.
McCarthy appears to be a man with a Catholic background but not a practicing Catholic, unless things have changed since the writing of these books in the beginning of our 21st century.  Just the same there is a Catholic feel to a lot of the writing. There is a great emphasis on the morality of gratitude and love of the needy, even though some things we know are sins seem to be accepted by him. 
A writer with great ability to use descriptions of nature to build toward analogies about the human condition, I find myself, as I read him, wanting to leave the world of my tight conceptual, academic environment for more of the mysticism of nature….at least occasionally. 
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In a way it seems he draws me, also, out of the feminine into a masculine world of mysteries of God the Father.
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In my daily short dialogues, allegedly with Mary, our Blessed Mother, it seemed to me she told me about this:  
​“We want you to be drawn into the deeper mysteries of the faith.  Plunging into the creative heart and mind of God the Father through being out in nature is good, outside of the man-made world, but also contemplative prayer draws you out of your smaller intellectual world. Even if your philosophy is true, you need to let yourself be always drawn into the higher being of the Trinity.”  

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HAPPINESS FOR THE OLD HAG:

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​About 6 months ago I bought an Osterizer.

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My hi-tech friend, Dale, helped me follow the directions, but I put it away for the summer without having tried it again.

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After obsessing for a month about how I wouldn't be able to even figure out if the Osterizer I bought would work for klutz me without Dale’s assistance, with bated breath I dragged it out and read the big ink instructions I wrote to myself but forgot I had written, about how to assemble it and after a few false moves, 
​it worked!
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I ground up my usual left-over stew, which I call garbage soup for fun, into a puree and it tastes delicious even though it looks like vomit .
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SO...  
THIS MEANS THAT WHEN MY SEVEN BOTTOM TEETH GO, I WON'T HAVE TO REMAIN ON A DIET OF ENSURE!!!

(For new readers I have denture on the top but 7 remaining fangs at the bottom with an unpredictable future!)
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I AM chortling with joy!
Hope this makes you laugh, too.
I AM THINKING THAT PART OF MY VOCATION AS AN OLD TEACHER AND WRITER IS TO MAKE YOUNGER READERS HAVE LESS DREAD OF THEIR OWN FUTURES BY PROVING IT COULD BE MORE FUNNY THAN THEY THINK.
Another little joke about this that I like to trot out is: “I used to dread having some painful, long drawn out dying process, but now I think I might just “die laughing.”
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St. Apollonia, Patron Saint of Dentistry, Pray for us,
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Tropic of Connecticut

8/23/2016

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It is boiling hot here in Connecticut, where I returned from my summer travels.
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Every Saturday morning some of us go to pray the rosary outside an abortion clinic in Hartford. I was so moved to see these dear long-suffering apostles out there in this heat, sweat pouring down their faces.
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I came upon this poem by Rita A. Simmonds poem in the Magnificat Year of Mercy Meditations.
I am not good at poetry but this poem seems to me to be a poem of what a woman who is dying feels toward her husband:
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​The weight of your dependence,
the rawness of your pain,
the sincerity of your struggle,
the dignity of your way
has made your soul a spectrum for my life




​I want you to see what I see: 
the smile that waits to welcome me
despite the battle in vain;
The light in dark circles that shines
​at the revelation of a new day.
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​Still, what can buttress the crooked columns
that quaver and crack beneath your sin?
Where is the hand that will close the gap
​that has stolen your wholeness within?



Life is a drama 
and you speak your hope
to an actor whose face you cannot see.
He enters the stage while you turn in your sheets 
​
in tension toward rest or release.
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​If, in broad daylight,
I could play His part,
I would look at you and love you
the iris of His eye,
the tinted window of His Heart.
Do any of you know more about this woman Catholic poet?
Go here to read an interview with the poet: ​http://shirtofflame.blogspot.com/2012/08/poet-rita-simmonds-on-sacrament-of.html
Here is a collection of her poetry:
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A thought that came
to me, I think from
the Holy Spirit:

In your elderly
years think of
yourself less like
the captain of a
ship and more
like a lighthouse!

It gave me
a lot of peace.
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Thank you for your prayers about all of this.

8/8/2016

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Dear readers:  I will be off to a large family wedding so there may be a 2 week hiatus after this one, which is short but very, very, important.
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Amazing grace!  
My twin-sister and I have been in conflict over Church issues for some 40 years.  These conflicts also come because of early sibling rivalry. 
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Both of us have done different healing exercises about this with some improvement.
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This time, it happened that one weekend 3 months ago both of us (one in Connecticut and one in California) happened to each be at some conference on forgiveness. The result was Carla, my twin, suggested that we try for a big breakthrough before our 80th birthday upcoming.  Her inspiration is that we should go to visit a Benedictine monk in the Los Angeles area whom we both know and respect and who loves both of us and talk to him and then each go to Confession about hurts we have delivered to each other.
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I was very skeptical but willing to try. The result was spectacular!  I am sharing here what this monk told me with little explanations in parenthesis so you can get the gist.
Ronda: I tend to put truth above love, and even though I continually pray for grace to “speak the truth with love” when I get angry enough at those who dissent, all the rage comes pouring forth and it is not speaking the truth with love but speaking the truth with hate.

Fr. Philip: The Truth is Mercy. Judgment should be against myself not others.  “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”  You cannot be the one to throw stones.

Ronda: I realize that in throwing stones at my sister, I am kind of scape-goating her since I usually am only with people to agree with me on magisterial teachings. So I am taking out on her my rage at the whole dissenting part of the Church!
​
Fr. Philip: You need to pray to have the mind of Christ.  You should want to save and heal vs. condemn. “Be angry but do not sin.”  “You will be judged on love.”
 I thought since most of my readers are more like me than like my sister on all this that you might want to consider such a general confession in tandem with family members who you are in conflict with over doctrine.
We also agreed that in conversation when we disagree we could just calmly state the disagreement but then stop and not try to throttle the other into agreement!
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We tried it for a day or two and it is good!
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Updates from the western exile

8/2/2016

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Goodbooks Media just published a new book
​you might want to get hold of. It is called Last Flight to the New Jerusalem and is by Esther Le Beau-Kerr.
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Famed TV news anchor, Esther Le Beau-Kerr, wishes to whisk you away with her on a dramatic flight of fancy from the brink of doom to a monastic  Brigadoon in the Berkshires.   Share  adventurous encounters with horrendous loss, transcendent gain, astounding discovery: new life, ancient truth, eternal love.
​This imaginary vagary of desperate escape and  heroic rescue from an apocalyptic catastrophe is especially appropriate during these dire days in a scary era of barbaric brutalities and impending perils, of heathen and hedonist adherence to deadly diabolical ideologies, when scenarios such as the Benedict Option are being bandied about, pondering the practicality of banding together in an exodus from regions of wreck and ruin to idyllic sanctums of reason and rectitude.
Readers may well be inspired to go forth and do likewise.


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Alleged message from Mother Mary to me about  being desolate when I make mistakes, seeing myself as close to senility:
“Aging, with making mistakes about small things, brings greater humility and softness.”
When I mentioned this to my daughter in California, where I am staying. She laughed and said,
“I think every time you make a mistake you get even more frantic about trying to control some other detail!”
Probably both.
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​I am reading this book:  Loved, Lost, Found – 17  Divine Mercy Conversions.  It is a terrific account of miracles connected with Sister Faustina and Divine Mercy. I highly recommend it.


With regard to my plan to spend the Fall semesters in Connecticut teaching at Holy Apostles, but otherwise to be based on Corpus Christi, Gary McCabe, my Marian Catechist mentor, wrote me this:
"Better to own Contemplative Cells in Cromwell and Corpus Christi than to own a whole country in Utopia" (paraphrase of Macaulay)
Meaning: we bear more Fruit when we find our Holy (Promised) Land, prepared for us by God, than when we "move in" to the House of Cards fabricated by and built upon the shifting sands of our ever changing desires.
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Reductio ad absurdum on transgender:
A relative of mine is getting married in the forest, not in a Church. Most of the 150 guests are on the poorer end of the financial spectrum.  So the guests were told to do something creative instead of buying expensive gifts.
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I offered to compose a prayer.  I sent in this cool prayer, but the bride gently told me that since many of the guests are gay or trans-gender would I consider taking Father out of God the Father, and changing father and mother to mother and father.
​I agreed to just God and the other change.

Now we are getting close to the wedding and I happened to be near one of the relatives helping plan the wedding.
This brilliant reduction ad absurdum occurred to me. 
To my surprise, the bride laughed when told of my “joke."
​“To please the trans-gender guests, why don’t you, the bride, wear a tuxedo at the wedding and the groom wear a bridal gown?”
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    Author

    Ronda Chervin received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Fordham University and an MA in Religious Studies from Notre Dame Apostolic Institute. She is a dedicated widow, mother, and grandmother.
    Ronda converted to the Catholic Faith from a Jewish, though atheistic, background and has been a Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Loyola Marymount University, the Seminary of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and Franciscan University of Steubenville. She is an international speaker and author of some fifty books about Catholic thought, practice and spirituality. One of her latest is LAST CALL, published by Goodbooks Media.
    Dr. Ronda is currently retired and living in Corpus Christi, Texas after her years of teaching philosophy at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut.
    You can contact her via e-mail by clicking here or by emailing [email protected] directly.

    Visit her websites:
    here and here.

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