Only in Chicago...

Only in Chicago would the major paper run a full length sports-related interview with the ousted governor, awaiting trial for attempting to sell a U.S. senate seat. Whatever his many, many, many, many, many faults, two traits that Rod Blagojevich does not lack are an insane (perhaps literally) amount of self-confidence and a larger than life personality. Unfortunately, he's not a White Sox fan...

The hilarious interview discusses the parallel and seemingly intertwined fates of Blago and Cubs. You can't make this stuff up people.

A few hilarious quotes:

*"Next year is going to be a better one for both me and the Cubs. I expect big years from both me and the Cubs in 2010 -- both of us are going to have winning years."

*"There are lessons from baseball. Lessons in leadership. Baseball is a metaphor for life in so many ways. There's always tomorrow. One day you win, another day you lose."

*"I was sitting in box seats at the time and, by the way, I paid for those tickets myself."

*"I tried to make the case that the Cubs were doing so good because I was the governor. Look at my record as governor, and look at the Cubs, right? Last year we both got hijacked. I had a worse year than the Cubs."

Thanks, Rod, for stickin' around to make sure we still have something to laugh about. Priceless.

As one commentor put it, "Rod, wearing his crown of ineptitude." Sadly, a most apt description.

Black History Month

I happened to checkout the First Things blog today, which I seldom do since we subscribe to the print edition, and found a dandy of an article about Black History, President Obama, and civil rights. The piece is by Lawrence D. Hogan, a professor of black history at Union County College. He makes the wonderful, and what ought to be obvious, point that the true principal of the civil rights movement -- advocacy for the civil rights of the marginalized in our society -- simply cannot possibly include support of abortion.

I know that Mr. Hogan's thesis cannot be popular with many of his peers in higher education, for whom the election of the first African-American President seems to have trumped the glaring civil rights problem of electing a president whose positions of exploitation and destruction of the weakest and most vulnerable among us -- the unborn -- are a glaring denial of the most basic of civil right, the right to life. As Mr. Hogan so aptly put it, "A persistent voice sounds a warning that demands to be heeded: 'Never side with those who do cross the line [of objectifying the weak among us].' That “never side” warning was deepened as I studied and read and taught and wrote about so many places in history where an awful price was paid by those who were categorized and denied—and by those who did the categorizing and denying."

So, this Black History Month, let us celebrate the progress made by our society in moving beyond legislated racial discrimination; and let us celebrate the heroes who effected this great and much needed change. But, taking our cue from the likes of Frederick Douglas, let us demand with the same urgency and tenacity the equal rights of all under the Constitution of this great country, irrespective of color, creed, age or size.

A Response to a Question

Yesterday one of my student workers and I were chatting during the late afternoon doldrums and he asked, "So, what do you do now that you're done with school?" The irony of the question, of course, was that I was sitting at my desk at work as he asked me that question. (I work fulltime, my friend, did you forget?) Though, I knew the real essence of his question was about all that 'free' time that I now have.

I hemmed and hawed about a response, before realizing that I do more or less what I've been doing for the past 4 years, except that I don't go to class and I don't turn papers or take tests. I go to work for 40 hours a week like most people do; I Enjoy my evenings and weekends with Stephanie and our friends; I fill my spare time with reading, Mass, working out/Frisbee, cooking/eating, games and conversation.

And yet, this innocent inquiry also somehow managed to provoke in me those primordial human questions: what am I doing here? What am I doing with my life? Why?

I think, in a sense, what defines a person is how they go about answering these questions -- in their formulation of a verbal response, but even moreso in their actual lived out response.

Last Sunday the second reading at Mass was from I Corinthians 12-13, which is St Paul's great hymn to love. That chapter (13), as many of you know, was Gramps' favorite chapter in Scripture; I read from it and talked about it in relation to his life at his funeral. So, needless to say, it has profound resonance with me. But, as Fr Rudy preached about love it dawned on me that true love provides for an utterly simple and yet utterly profound response to those questions that were raised in my mind (and moreso in my heart).

"If we have not love we are a clanging gongs or clashing cymbals." As Fr Rudy pointed out, the Christian vocation is to bear witness to our Faith with our lives, with selfless, Christ-like love. The Christian vocation is to be conformed to Christ by living like him -- by being filled with his spirit. We are the branches, He is the vine; we grow and bear fruit by employing his vitality, his grace. This is the crux of Paul's message in the whole of his letter: "If you are Christians, O Corinthian church, why aren't you acting like it? Why aren't you living out your voaction?" Or to put it differently, "Do you not realize that none of your religiosity matters if you throw grace away, living like the pagans you once were only under the guise of Christianity?"

Several times in the last few months I've been presented with the question, 'are you living life like you want to become a saint?' After all, becoming saints is the Christian vocation. Its easy to be mislead into preconceptions of what a saint should or shouldn't be and do: 'a saint should pray five hours a day and a saint shouldn't watch football.' But these categories, of course, fall short. The real question of sanctity, as St. Paul so beautifully illustrates, is love. Do I love God more than myself? Do I love God more than all the attachments of my will to earthly things. Do I honestly prefer God's will to my will?

These questions demand concrete, lived out responses, not just fuzzy reminisces of childhood prayers and sunday school songs and a lifetime of good intentions and good will. That's why the penitential seasons of Lent and Advent are so important for us. They are special seasons of the liturgical year in which we test ourselves and our wills; our 40 days in route to the Promised Land in which God helps strip us of our old Egyptian ways and retrains our eyes on Himself in all things.

So, to answer your question, my young friend, I'm trying to become a saint, in my own humble, awkward, often faltering way.

Happy Groundhog Day!

Did you know, gentle Lector, that the origin of "Groundhog Day" is an ancient German Christian tradition in which on the feast of Candlemas (now more commonly known as the Feast of the Presentation -- Luke 2:22-40) if a hibernating animal saw its shadow it would return to hibernation for another six weeks, meaning six more weeks of winter, but if conversely he did not see his shadow, he'd stay out and everyone would enjoy an early spring. The custom, brought to Pennsylvania by the same Germans, has grown in popularity as our culture has grown more secular, filling its need for Holy Days with secular "Holidays", and the religious customs of Candlemas have all but disappeared.

Irregardless, a happy Groundhog Day to you all. Sadly, that 'Seer of Seers, that Prognosticator of Prognosticators' saw his shadow and all my friends and family in the North must endure, at least according to Phil, six more weeks of winter.

Without further adieu here are some of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite movies, Groundhog Day:

5. [After Phil has driven the truck he has stolen off a cliff to kill both himself and Punxsutawney Phil]

Larry: He... might be okay.

[The truck explodes in a fireball]

Larry: Well, no. Probably not now.

4. Rita: You speak French?

Phil: Oui.

3. Phil: When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn't imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.

2. You want a prediction about the weather, you're asking the wrong Phil. I'll give you a winter prediction: It's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life.

1. Piano Teacher: Not bad... Mr. Connors, you say this is your first lesson?

Phil: Yes, but my father was a piano *mover*, so...

(Quotes courtesy of IMDB.COM)

Some Somewhat Disjointed Thoughts on Conversion, etc.

My sincerest apologies for my prolonged absence from the blogosphere -- holiday travels and a busy spell at work have conspired to keep me either occupied or away from my computer.

+ + + + + + +

Resultant upon a conversation that I had with some family while we were home for the holidays, I've been thinking recently about religious conversion. Many Christians, of all denominational stripes, tend to think of conversion as a one time event -- whether that event be sacramental baptism or 'accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior'. However, experience tells us that conversion is not nearly so simple. We do not come to believe or get reborn in baptism and then suddenly lead holy and virtuous lives. Rather, conversion is indeed an ongoing process.

Some very kind friends gave me Thomas Merton's autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain for Christmas this year, and much to my delight he spends much time treating this very subject.

Remembering the day of his baptism, Merton realized that he had assumed that, with this sacramental and supernatural event having taken place, he could go on living as he always had provided that he avoid serious sin. He came to find out that conversion entails so much more.

Conversion is literally a turning towards, which of course implies a turning away from. It doesn't mean that we turn away from the world altogether; rather, just that we no longer engage it with the same eyes, the same ears, or the same hands, etc; or to use a Pauline notion, that we understand things not with the 'wisdom of the world' but with the 'Wisdom of the Cross'. This engagement is both intellectual and volitional -- it means reshaping our wills in the image of Christ.

Experience tells us that this is very much a process, indeed a lifelong one at that. We might be misled into thinking that intellectual conversion is tantamount to a total conversion; but, what folly we engage in in doing so! Our wills, though flooded with the grace sufficient for reformation and the intellectual knowledge of the noble grounds for doing so, are still habitual.

"But I did not clearly realize all this," Merton remembers. "Because of the profound and complete conversion of my intellect, I thought I was entirely converted. Because I believed in God, and in the teachings of the Church, and was prepared to sit up all night arguing about them with all comers, I imagined that I was even a zealous Christian."

As I read about his baptism and entry into the Catholic Church -- that is, his 'conversion' -- it helped me to see the same assumptions in my own conversion(s).

It had struck me as a bit odd the first time I heard Fr Maguire (during the petitions at Mass) pray for the deeper conversion of ourselves -- assuming that by 'ourselves' he referred chiefly to the likes of me and not to the likes of him. But, I've since realized that even saintly Christians are ever in a process of conversion, of turning the gaze of their hearts and minds more and more solely on the Christ who animates and vivifies them.

A further wrinkle is that this process (which is tantamount to growth in virtue -- both theological and natural) is the only way for us to find true happiness:

"Without [the virtues] there can be no happiness, because virtues are precisely the powers by which we can come to acquire happiness: without them, there can be no joy, because they are the habits which coordinate and canalize our natural energies and direct them to the harmony and perfection and balance, the unity of our nature with itself and with God, which must, in the end, constitute our everlasting peace."

So, 'Let us pray for the ever deeper conversion of ourselves!'