Numerical biography meme

I've been tagged by my blogsister Roz, at her other blog In Dwelling, to complete this meme:

What I was doing 10 years ago: Going through a agonizingly bizarre and sudden divorce, nearly completely without faith in Christ to sustain me, but lots of help from friends and family.

5 years ago: Delighted to have found Jesus in my heart, working full-time in real estate management, realizing it was what I was going to end up doing as a career.

1 year ago: Working more than full-time in the same job for the same company, growing rapidly in my relationship in my parish and with my Lord.

Yesterday: Cooking dinner for my mother who is ill and bed-bound, watching a Bob Newhart retrospective on public television.

5 Snacks I enjoy:
Onion dip and chips
Peanut butter on anything edible
Cold pizza
Hot pizza
Nuts in any form

5 songs I know all the words to:
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
all of Handel's Messiah
Another Saturday Night and I Ain't Got Nobody
Wouldn't It Be Loverly
American Pie

5 things I would do with $100 million dollars:
Keep it a secret from all but closest confidantes (I'll keep Roz's first answer)
Wipe out parish’s building debt and make mongo donation to local pregnancy center (and her second answer, too)
Spend a month in Rome
Buy every musical instrument I ever had the urge to play and learn to play them
Invest the rest and live on the income, giving things away whenever I felt like it
(Roz, your answers are too good!)

5 locations to which I would like to run:
England
Scotland
Ireland, specifically wherever my ancestors are from
Germany, specifically wherever my ancestors are from
Poland, specifically (you guessed it) wherever my ancestors are from

5 bad habits I have:
Interrupting others
Gluttony
Fascination with myself
Being nosy
Procrastination, especially about housework

5 things I like doing:
Eucharistic Adoration
Telling jokes, including big-set-up, stand-up jokes
Interesting and witty conversation
Listening to old-time radio, especially Jack Benny
Watching old movie musicals

5 things I would never wear:
Anything with a visible brand name
A really, really expensive watch
"Slut slides" (ultra-high-heeled shoes) (Yes, I know the REALLY dirty name for them, too, thanks)
A vinyl or plasticized raincoat
A backpack, unless it had a tent on it and I was camping

5 TV shows I like: (limiting myself to ones on air now)
The Journey Home (on EWTN)
Whose Line is it Anyway?
Life on the Rock (on EWTN)
America's Test Kitchen
Antiques Road Show, especially when they feature gazillion-dollar surprises

5 biggest joys of the moment:
Trying to do the Will of God in our current family crisis with mom's illness
Losing weight on Weight Watchers
Visiting with my friends weekly at the local farmer's market
Making wonderful new friends and reconnecting with old friends who love the Lord
Watching my tomatoes and pepper plants produce a harvest

5 favorite toys:
Laptop computer
Crochet project I can actually manage
Bicycle
The perfect saute pan
"Bare Escentuals" makeup (their spelling, not mine)

5 next victims:
I'll pass for now!

Good things are bustin' out all over

Excellent things appear to be happening in a Catholic parish in Greenville, SC of all places. This is meant as no insult to loyal South Carolinians, but it's not the first place I'd look for top-drawer Catholic life.

St. Mary's Catholic Church in Greenville has started a Center for Evangelical Catholicism seeking to bring parish members and other Catholics more deeply into true transformation of life through the Gospel. Then, "[h]aving experienced the freedom and the joy of being transformed by the Gospel, Evangelical Catholics pursue an intensive, intentional and radical living out of their Baptismal promises in communion with Jesus Christ and His Church."

This is truly an exciting development. Have a look at their document called "A Simple Way of Life" which is one of the best descriptions of normal devotional life for the lay person that I've ever encountered. And there's a further treat. They're about to begin saying one Mass each Sunday according to the Novus Ordo in Latin, courtesy of one of their own seminarians who is assigned to the parish as a transitional deacon.

Does anybody want to go on a field trip to Greenville?

Really, really short prayers

The first prayer I remember saying as a child was "Jesus, Mary, Joseph: I give you my heart, my soul, Amen." It was a very good prayer for a very little kid, who had yet to be able to remember and recite all of the Our Father, Hail Mary, or Glory Be. To a little kid, the fact that the baby Jesus had a mommy and a daddy was reassuring; Jesus wasn't a ghost or a spirit. He was a real boy, who was also really God, a starting point into the Mystery of the Trinity for a four- or five-year-old.

The Church has a special name for very short prayers: they are called ejaculations. (Yes, there's a ten-year-old somewhere in me too who finds that term hilarious.) The link is full of nice quoted reminders that praising God all day, at all times, sometimes using words, is part of our love affair with Him.

A famous short prayer everybody knows is "My Jesus, Mercy." And the most famous short prayer in the Church, perhaps, is most beautifully practiced in the Eastern Catholic Churches, as well as by our Orthodox brethren, the Jesus Prayer: "Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." Some try and say it timed with every waking breath.

My man St. Francis de Sales says "Aspire to God with short but frequent outpourings of the heart." The Orthodox mystic St. Hesychois, in his Philokalia, says "The more rain falls on the earth, the softer it makes it; similarly, Christ's holy name gladdens the earth of our heart the more we call upon it."

It's not a mantra, because we are not using words to detach ourselves. It's not fruitless multiplication of words, because we aren't keeping count (we'd better not be). We're instead attaching ourselves to Him and most specifically to His Will, of offering whatever the moment is to Him, our resentments, our frustrations, our joys, our sorrows.

I want to grow in the habit of keeping a few beautiful words handy in the front of my mind, to sing or groan or cry them out to the Lord every time I think of Him.

Step on a crack

I saw a penny on the ground this morning, and I didn't pick it up, because it was face down. Well, I really didn't pick it up because it was a penny, and the sidewalk was crowded and I'd have blocked everyone, but my mental eye noted the tail of the penny and remembered.

The rituals of childhood! How many of you:

- grabbed a button to hold if a hearse passed you by
- jumped over sidewalk cracks, or even over sidewalk panels if they had the maker's stamp in them
- tossed salt over your shoulder if you spilled any
- said "padiddle owe me a coke" if you said something at the same time as another person
- parted company if you walked toward a tree, to rejoin after you'd gone around it
- punched your little brother, shouting "slugbug!" if you saw a VW Bug (transparent excuse for punching said brother)

Wasn't there something one did if you saw a car with only one headlight lit? It also probably involved punching little brothers....

More Wisdom

Roz tells us of the happiness in recognizing God's Wisdom in our lives in the post below. Let me add this verse from the Book of Wisdom which I love more and more each year (I may have quoted it here before, but I simply love it, so ssssh and read):

For all men who were ignorant of God were foolish by nature;
and they were unable from the good things that are seen to know him who exists, nor did they recognize the craftsman while paying heed to his works;
but they supposed that either fire or wind or swift air, or the circle of the stars, or turbulent water, or the luminaries of heaven were the gods that rule the world.
If through delight in the beauty of these things men assumed them to be gods, let them know how much better than these is their Lord, for the author of beauty created them.
And if men were amazed at their power and working,let them perceive from them how much more powerful is he who formed them. For from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.

Yet these men are little to be blamed, for perhaps they go astray while seeking God and desiring to find him.
For as they live among his works they keep searching, and they trust in what they see, because the things that are seen are beautiful.
Yet again, not even they are to be excused; for if they had the power to know so much that they could investigate the world, how did they fail to find sooner the Lord of these things?

Wisdom 13:1-9

I found this Scripture when I was in college. I was literally "playing Bible," taking the family Bible, letting it fall open and sticking my finger down on the page. I was searching, hard, for God, and I kept blowing through my college physics and biochemistry studies, coming out the other side, saying "well, He's not there." I wasn't finding Him in the neighborhood church or the rote graces and bedtime prayers at home, because I was blinded by familiarity. Nobody was around me at the time to show me that I could find Him without heroism, that He was closer to me than I realized, waiting for my "Yes," and that I could be guided to the source and summit of all joy by the faith of my childhood.

The people described in this passage aren't sensualists, delighting in the sins of the flesh and in selfish pleasure-seeking. These are earnest seekers, studiers, ponderers. But the effort that it costs them, to delve and dissect and discover, fools them into stopping at their discovery of the things created and thinking they have found the Creator.

They represent a piece of my character and probably yours, too, and they are in for a heck of a surprise when they look at the Hand that puts all the world in motion. I was, and science repositioned itself and became a part of my religious outlook.