Great post about Lent.

From John Heard at Dreadnought:

It has always seemed too easy that a month or so of fasting and abstinence can result in the kind of spiritual payoff that a faithfully kept Lenten vow represents. Nothing, I was shocked to discover as a child, feels better than a clean heart trilling on Easter morning. It is like ten post-confession glows. But I guess that is what the Divine Mercy means. Lent changes lives.

That doesn't help, however, at the outset. Lent is meant to be hard. It is hard. I find Lent a serious challenge. I had great trouble writing this column. Once you start in on Lent you open yourself up to serious criticism. Only, the judge isn't some easygoing colleague or loving spouse, it is the Lord of the Universe and you've been a miserable young bastard.

So, sordid details get parsed. My suffering is compared with His suffering and the gap between the two, the way His exceeds mine in magnitude, complexity and positive impact, causes even more squirming. Lent, if there were no point to it, would be the nastiest period in the calendar.

But there is a point.

There's that glow.

And near the very end of Lent we might stumble blinking into Holy Week, a time that climaxes the heady ritual. None of it, however, will compare with the tension and beauty, the chiaroscuro pageant at play inside the Catholic who takes the Lenten discipline seriously.

This is what is so hard to explain to non-Catholics. There is something remarkable about Lent that makes all the pomp secondary. As incongruous as it sounds, most of the Catholics at a Maundy Thursday Mass have their heads down as the procession passes. Magnificent watered silks, great clouds of incense, candle-flare and gilded wonders glide past, almost unheeded. Our eyes are fixed on an interior vision of Christ.

What is going on in the head and heart, the things that stir in the soul are, rather, what overwhelms. Like the Blessed Sacrament, most often veiled or hidden in churches, or the ostensibly crushing fact of the crucifixion we hail, look in Catholicism for those things that are hardest to catch sight of: there you'll find her riches.

As always, RTWT.

Holy aspirated coffee, Batman!

My first link from the Anchoress!

Reminds me of Tim Allen describing when he knew he'd finally made the grade on The Tonight Show: Johnny Carson invited him to take a seat after his routine.

I am not worthy...

[H/t and thanks to Julie at Happy Catholic, too.]

That's right.

Crossan was the one who said Jesus' body was probably eaten by dogs or crows. You'd have thought that he might have objected thusly in the interview. Perhaps he did, but I have yet to see him quoted as protesting Jim Cameron's cavalcade of whimsy.





"By the end of the evening, I hope that you, too, will embrace the good news of following an obscure taciturn sorta-but-not-too-Jewish cynic peasant sage who somehow crossed (rimshot!) the Romans and ended up as animal waste products despite the fact that one of the few sayings in the "canonical gospels" that is accurate is "Render Unto Caesar." Not that it will get you tenure and regular TV spots come Lent, but no one ever said life was fair."

Bad things happening to good people.

Melanie and Dom Bettinelli have suffered a miscarriage.

Prayers and sympathies--I am so sorry.

"Honey--looks like we're gonna be Jewish now."

Oh, James "King of the World" Cameron, noted director of the celluloid milestone Piranha Part II: The Spawning, has found the body of Jesus. OK, he had help.

Just in time for Easter, of course.

I'm really going to miss BLTs.

But while the hypothesis is classic deep stupidity wedded to Barnum, it isn't the dumbest thing you will hear in connection to this story.

Nope. Far and away the stupidest thing you will hear (and I already have--some degreed twit from DePaul has weighed in accordingly) are self-described Christians nattering on about how this, if true, doesn't affect their "faith" one iota.

That sort of "Christian" belief is a hectoring Unitarianism with a liturgial bent. Not to mention intellectually void and unmoored from anything preached by Christians before the 1600s. Faith in a decayed corpse is not the faith for which millions have died and continue to die for today. Not to mention it's not the faith that built and still operates hospitals, (an admittedly dwindling number of) universities, food pantries, schools, clinics.... But it's nice to see that worshipping an ossuary is no bar to maintaining a tenured sinecure at a university in the Catholic tradition.

Why does this matter? The bodily resurrection of Jesus--as opposed to the post-lightsaber chopped Obi-Wan Kenobi--undergirds our life on this earth. What happens in the body has meaning. We don't rise from "this crude matter"--it is transformed. If the body is something discarded on the way to something better, then that dramatically changes our perspective. Katy bar the door--experiment as you like, in all the near-infinite permutations of the term, both inside the lab and out. A Christian's faith would not be "diminished" by finding the remains of Christ, it would be destroyed. That the professor doesn't even regard the hypothetical as "diminishing" suggests that that his faith is in something else.

Ah, well. At least misery loves company. When Ramadan comes around, we'll have to sit through the usual debunking deluge of splashy media documentaries, books and magazine covers reinterpreting Mohammed, too.

Flu.

What a delight.

The Briggs Beer Cannon.

Just see it.

Dr. Zaius! Dr. Zaius! Dr. Zaius! Dr. Zaius! Dr. Zaius! Dr. Zaius!
O, Dr. Zaius!

[Obligatory subcaptioning for the pop culture-impaired: click here.]

A trend we need to keep a close eye on: Chimpanzees are making weapons now. You know, before we're driven underground and start worshipping ICBMs.

Keep your hands where I can see them, you damn dirty ape.

Feel free to add your own Hestonisms in the box below.

Ask and ye shall receive.

Yesterday, a Boston Globe sportswriter wrote an impassioned plea for the return of old time hockey--Dave "The Hammer" Schultz style.

Later that evening, the Buffalo Sabres and Ottawa Senators weighed in with their own endorsement.

I concur--all you have to do is say "March 26" or "turtle" to a Wings fan and the wolf grins start splitting faces.

[H/t to Mark Sullivan for the Globe link.]

Yes, alive and all that.

Just busy. If I have nothing to say, I try not to say it.

For Lent, we are doing the Full Trad, which has increased my appreciation of Sundays by several orders of magnitude. It could be worse--I could have tried to pull the Coffee Monkey off my back. Yeah, that would have lasted five, maybe six hours. Remember Londo's Keeper in the fifth season of Babylon 5? That's a good analogy to my relationship with java.

Dale's doing better, but he's suffering from periodic night panics, which are painful to behold. We think it has to do with his awaking from anasthesia and not finding us there. We eventually get him calmed down, but it's rough.

From the "This One Goes To Eleven" Department: That's quite the impressive bit of ballot box stuffing there, lads and lasses. I maxed out at 11 votes, in funniest Catholic blog. My response is simply to quote Wat from A Knight's Tale:

Betray us, and I will fong you, until your insides are out, your outsides are in, your entrails will become your extrails! I will w-rip!.... All the p!.... ungh! Pain! Lots of pain!

Good thing I don't get bitter, eh?

Tuesday Morning Galactica.

Good news--BG has been greenlighted for a fourth season, though the number of episodes is still up in the air.

Brief thoughts--the last two episodes seem to be more standalones than arc-related, but I think there will be payoffs down the road: Apollo's shaping up into a real leader as CAG, Zarek's warning about a trial for Baltar, Helo's still-ambiguous place in the crew, rifts between the Colonials based on ethnicity (with Capricans at the top and Sagitarons on the bottom, and the others in between).

One question: what is the "canonical" status of the deleted scenes? Did they happen, are they do-overs, or (here's where I lean) are they a mixture of both? From my partial perusal of the deleted scenes in Seasons 1 and 2.0, the last makes the most sense. There's certainly some interesting stuff in them, especially related to the mythology. Plus, any easter egg info on the DVDs would be welcome.