Blog by-the-Sea

I'm going to change my blog a bit for the future.

My blogging has been lighter for the past year, and I think it is likely to remain so at least for a while.  I am going to stop doing weekly blog posts on each of the Holy Father's General Audiences and Sunday Angelus mini-homilies because it became too high a percentage of the total number of posts.  There are other sources of articles about each of the Pope's talks, including Zenit and Asia News.  I have concluded that my posts on those talks are redundant of the fine work done by those news sources, and that they therefore do not serve much of a purpose.

I hope to continue doing a post on each of the Pope's international journeys and other major events.  I also want to continue doing collections of links for Christmas and Easter Masses, as I did again this year.  I also plan to continue with posts on the Carmelite saints, pro-life issues, and other things from time to time.

My hope is that the blog will continue to serve its intended purpose without taking as much of my time.  If you want to know when there is a new post, there are a couple of options.  One is to sign up to receive the posts by e-mail.  Another is to follow me on Twitter.  Each time there is a new post, a Tweet is automatically generated on Twitter.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to everyone.  I was in the San Francisco Bay Area for Christmas Day, back at 1:00 a.m. this morning, and thankful to have a restful week-end to enjoy a few days of Christmas at home.

My Feast of St. Teresa of Avila Will Be a Bit Late This Year

I wouldn't ordinarily have let the feast day of St. Teresa of Avila pass without comment.  I just got home today from 10 days spent in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, mostly visiting friends and family.

Yesterday was my nephew's graduation from Marine Corps Boot Camp at Parris Island, and then I had to pack everything and get ready for this morning's flight.  The day before that was Boot Camp "Family Day". Somewhere in there -- actually, on Family Day -- was October 15, which is the feast day of St. Teresa of Avila.

Here's a photo from Family Day of me, my brother, and his two sons, including the new Marine.  From what I'm told, this is all he has wanted to do for years. 

The first part of my trip included visiting friends and attending a high school reunion in Alabama last week-end.

The week in between was planned as a vacation in Savannah, but I came down with a cold on Sunday and spent part of the past week sick in bed.  Then unexpected matters at work took up a major portion of my time on Tuesday and Wednesday.

In the process, I still managed to get my Wednesday weekly audience post done, but sadly, nothing yet for Thursday's feast day of St. Teresa of Avila.

I am planning to spend some time tomorrow afternoon reflecting on her feast day belatedly.  Perhaps I will have something to post about it then.  I'm back at home now and pleased to be able to catch an episode of EWTN's "Teresa de Jesus" series.

A Day in Paray-le-Monial: The Place of the Apparitions of the Sacred Heart

Here is another travel diary entry from my trip in January.  The day after I went to Ars, I went to Paray-le-Monial.  The Basilica of the Sacred Heart there was originally built for a Cluniac monastery.  A block or two away is the Visitandine Monastery where St. Marguerite Marie Alacoque lived.  Her apparitions of Jesus' Sacred Heart draw many pilgrims to Paray-le-Monial each year.  In January, both the Basilica and the Visitandine Monastery's Chapel of the Apparitions were quiet.  Here is the day's travel diary:

"He to whom there is no need to say anything knows what we desire (Wis. 7:27, Mt. 6:8).  We know that he can do everything. . . . It is enough for us to have brought his power here, to have given his holiness a reason, and we prefer to wait patiently upon his will rather than impudently to ask what he will not perhaps wish to do.  Perhaps what our deserving lacks our modesty will supply?"

- St. Bernard of Clairvaux, On Humility and Pride

On a Tuesday morning, mid-January, I was concerned about the weather for the drive from Lyon to Paray-le-Monial, which goes through hills at a higher altitude further from the city than the previous day's drive to Ars-sur-Forman.  Three different weather reports agreed it would rain.  One of them warned that fog was likely and mentioned a "minimal" chance of heavy snow.

What none of them mentioned was a chance of a beautiful, sunny day.  The air was cool and crisp, but not terribly cold, and the drive was scenic and otherwise uneventful.  I didn't see clouds begin to gather until on my way back to Lyon late that afternoon.

Along the way, I passed the turnoff to Cluny, where the original monastery once was for the Cluniac reform in the Benedictine Order.  However, that monastery has been rebuilt over the years, unlike the church from the Cluniac monastery at Paray-le-Monial, which still stands nearly a millineum after it was built.  Only the church remains from the original monastery, and it is massive.  The monastery was built in the 10th or 11th century, and the church was built in the 12th century, around the same time when the Cistercian St. Bernard wrote his book quoted above.  The large church, built on the initiative of abbot St. Hugh of Cluny, is now called the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, and it is part of a Catholic retreat center operated by the Emmanuel Community.

The Catholic Encyclopedia says of Paray-le-Monial that "The Cluny monks were, 999-1789, lords of the town."  In 1678, the Visitandine nuns arrived in the town.  In the nearby Chapel of the Visitation, part of the Visitandine Monastery, St. Marguerite Marie Alacoque lived in the late 17th century.  She spoke to Jesus who frequently appeared to her as her Director, and who confided to her the mission to establish the devotion to His Sacred Heart.  Since 1873, Paray-le-Monial has drawn increasing numbers of pilgrims each year, now numbering around 400,000, largely made up of people with a devotion to the Sacred Heart.  On the day when I was there in January, there were only a few.

I thought about St. Bernard's words while I was there.  I had a strong sense there of the presence of the Holy Spirit, and thought about the lives of the monks, unknown, their names not remembered, who lived their lives there over the centuries, chanting the hours in that place where the slightest sound resonates so loudly that they would have to have kept very still in times of prayer to maintain silence.  The basilica is also known for its "mystical light", created by architectural design.

There must have been unknown saints there through the centuries, the kind remembered on the Feast of All Saints.  What they did that affects us today is what they accomplished by their lives of prayer and not action, and what they accomplished in building and maintaining the basilica over the centuries, probably maintenance done in boring manual labor while in meditation.

I looked all around the inside of the basilica and then sat down in a chapel with the reserved host.  The crisp air smelled and felt so good that I breathed it in deeply a number of times, clean and crisp, like the cool sunny day, and somehow quietly healing.  After a while, I walked through the basilica again and took pictures.  There were only a few other people around, so that there was a lot of solitude there, and it was very quiet. 

From there, I walked over to the Chapel of the Visitation.  A young couple were there for a while, looking at the place where St. Marguerite Marie Alacoque's body rests in the chapel.  Later, a nun came in alone and sat down a few rows behind me.  I don't know from which order.  The Visitandine nuns who live there came into their choir near the chapel, where we could see them, and chanted the office mid-afternoon.

I left around 3:00 p.m. and went and walked through the garden by the basilica before heading back to my car.  I looked around for somewhere to have lunch but found nothing open that late in the afternoon, so I headed back to Lyon to return my rental car.

Picture: Statue of St. Marguerite Marie Alacoque in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Paray-le-Monial.

A Day in Ars: A "Meeting Place for the Humble"

I devoted a day to Ars during my January trip to France.  I did not blog much about it at the time, and I thought I would post now what I wrote back then for a few friends, with the attention on Ars at the beginning of the Year of Priests.  I say that I devoted a day to it, and not that I spent a day there, because a winter rain storm led to traffic problems that complicated the drive, since I was unfamiliar with the roads.  The confusion of the morning ultimately added meaning to the day, and a little bit of humor.

"Man is a beggar who needs to ask God for everything. . . A pure soul can ask everything from God, even miracles, and he will refuse him nothing."

- St. Jean Marie Vianney, the Curé of Ars

On a rainy Monday morning in January, the second full day of my trip, I went to pick up a rental car at 9:00 a.m., hoping to drive the 25 miles or so to Ars easily in time for the 11:00 a.m. Mass.  It was not to be.  There was a pouring rain.  The car rental agency gave me directions to Route A-6 from Lyon to Ars, but the directions they gave me involved driving through a tunnel that was closed that morning.

My rental car was a stick shift.  I hadn't driven a stick shift for a year, and Lyon is hilly.  My first time up the road toward the tunnel, I was in the left lane and needed to be in the right.  So up the hill I went, figuring I may as well practice for a while before getting on the freeway anyway.  Back down the hill, second try, same mistake.  Back down the hill, third try, right lane, but the tunnel was closed.  Instead of Route A-6, I was on Route A-4, and a sign said it went to Paris.  The guy at the rental car had told me to take that road to the entrance to A-6, so I was left wondering if the tunnel is always closed and if there was another entrance to A-6 further up the road.  After driving for a while, I stopped and looked at my map, which didn't even have a road marked Route A-4.

And by then it was 11:00 a.m., so I was going to miss Mass.  Back down the hill, I went to the cathedral, where I knew I could stop and study the map for a while, and where I could find a restroom nearby.  I found another entrance to A-6 a couple of miles away and finally was on the right freeway after almost giving up and taking the car back. 

While I was lost, I finally prayed something asking the Curé d'Ars to help me find the road to Ars.  And then, frustrated and feeling hopeless, I prayed something like, "Holy St. Jean Vianney, I am a poor stupid woman who cannot find the road.  Pray for me."  The whole time, I was thinking about how slow my eyes were to see the signs, so that my reaction time was too slow to catch an unexpected turn, and how little sense I could make of the map.  Beyond all, I had rented the car that day to avoid a 7 km taxi ride from the nearest train station which, by 11:00 a.m, sounded like it would have been no inconvenience at all!  And that is despite the fact that driving in that part of France is no more difficult than driving in San Diego County, where I live.

Then I sensed a response from St. Jean Vianney, "No one finds their way here without asking for help."  And I thought it must be true, in more ways than one.  Why hadn't I prayed any sooner than that about a visit to such a holy place as Ars?  Or stopped and asked for directions again when the rental car company's directions didn't work out?

And then, as I flipped through pages of my trip notebook looking for the proper exit near Ars, I came upon an article I had copied about the Curé.  "Ars: A Meeting for the Prayer of the Humble" it was titled.  I laughed.  It had taken 3 hours of trial and error, but I thought I finally had enough humility to last me the rest of the day!

I finally arrived at the church in Ars 3-1/2 hours after I picked up the rental car.  It had taken me that long for a simple 25 mile drive! 

There is a monument to "the Meeting" in Ars, a statue that commemorates a meeting between St. Jean Vianney and a small shepherd boy when the saint was on his way to Ars for the first time to become its parish priest.  He told the boy, "You have shown me the way to Ars, I will show you the way to heaven".  So it seemed fitting that I could not find the way to Ars without praying for help.

I spent the first 45 minutes praying in the new part of the church, which is very pretty in blue, pink and yellow French colors.  Then I went through the Curé's house, looking and taking pictures.

That house must have been very cold on rainy winter days in the early 19th century.  It was cold and damp Inside even now.  I looked at the simple table, the fireplace where the cooking and heating was done, and the roof that did not instill confidence even now, after the house has had the benefit of some restoration.  It was a simple country parish's rectory, which he sometimes shared.  There was one simply furnished room where he lived part of his time there, and another simply furnished room where he died, always in real poverty.

Walking from there to the votive room, it occurred to me that this is where Jesus lived, the theme from Sunday's Gospel.  Jesus would have lived in similar humility and poverty.

Then I went to the Chapel of the Sacred Heart where the relic of St. Jean Vianney's heart is kept.  The advantage to going in winter is that there are so few people around, so real silence is possible, real solitude is possible, even in places that attract a lot of pilgrims.  This is a jubilee year, 150 years from the death of St. Jean Vianney, so it was especially unusual to find time there in solitude.

Then I bought a book and a video and looked around, and went back to the Church and sat to pray for a while in the old part of the Church (the Basilica) in a Marian chapel off to the side, thankful to be there.

Finally, as a light rain continued to fall, I found the road to the Carmel of Holy Curé d'Ars, and took a few pictures of its exterior before my phone/camera alerted that the battery was low.  The gate from the road to the chapel was open,  and the door was unlocked, so I gathered that pilgrims were welcome in the chapel, but the room was dark.  I looked at the chapel but did not turn on the lights.

The Carmel of the Holy Curé d'Ars is one of several Carmelite monasteries in France that are not affiliated with an order because they are more traditional than the orders are in France.  They are still recognized by the Church as Carmelite, and they are mentioned on the website of Carmel in France.  The nuns allowed someone to come in and videotape their way of life last year – a video that can be found on YouTube.

I walked back to my car in the rain and left, probably around 4:00 p.m., having actually accomplished everything I had wanted to do that day despite the rain, and thankful that the storm never got any worse.

The article I took with me mentioned the religious climate there, as the sanctuary of the Curé d'Ars draws priests and religious pilgrims from all over the world, like a little Rome.  Elsewhere, I have read that people do sometimes sense St. Jean Vianney's presence there.  The priest who is assigned there now has said that he has sensed the saint present with him during the Eucharist. 

I suppose that the shrine may be crowded during the warmer months of the year, especially during this jubilee year with the added attention drawn to Ars by the Year of Priests.  It was quiet the day I was there.  That is one of the reasons why I sometimes like to travel alone to places like that in winter.

Picture: St. Jean Vianney's bedroom in the curé's house in Ars.

Kitten Update

I have had so many cat and kitten posts for the past few months that I am going to take them out of the "about me" category and create a separate "cats" category for them.

I brought my 6-month old kitten home from the veterinary hospital yesterday.  The final diagnosis was some kind of viral gastroenteritis, which can be caused by any of a number of viruses.  She tested negative for everything they tested her for, including feline panleukopenia.  She had been vaccinated against the latter, but her symptoms matched it.  That is related to the parvovirus that affects some dogs, and she was tested for it two times but both times tested negative.

Since the veterinarians do not know which virus she had, they do not know whether she is still contagious.  Thus, Mitten is now quarantined in a bathroom for 7 to 10 days to protect Muffin, who is not sick.  Muffin was also vaccinated against panleukopenia, but may not have been vaccinated against whatever caused this deadly illness.  I am thankful that Mitten survived it, and I would hate to see it begin to affect Muffin too.  The veterinary bills for the one-week hospital stay exceeded $5,000.00, and Mitten is still so sick that she can just barely walk.

Blogging, other than kitten blogging, will probably continue to be light for the next week or two as I need to devote time to Muffin, who is lonely in one room, and Mitten, who is sick in another.

"Everything"

My high school Sunday School teacher sent a beautiful e-mail today as her husband has been fighting pancreatic cancer since November 2006.  Last night she came across something she had written in her Bible in August 2001.  She gave me her permission to post it here.  More than 30 years have passed since I was in their non-denominational protestant church, but it is surprising how much faith we still have in common:

Everything that comes into my life is in some way a gift.  Everything (happiness, family, joy, suffering, grief). So in every experience I must recognize that it is material for sacrifice, an offering back and up to God.  He is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Amen.”

That was true in August 2001. It was true in November 2006 when we received the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and is still true in May 2008.

The word Everything teaches us about our Lord-

Jn 3:35 The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands. — Sovereignty

Jn. 4:39 Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did.— Omniscience

Jn 14:26 … the Holy Spirit, … will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you. — Omnipresence, Omniscience

1 Cor. 10:26 The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it. — Sovereignty

I could go on and on.

John and I stand amazed as we watch everything our Heavenly Father works out in our lives, opening doors of witness in suffering and grief, yes, we grieve.  All this gives us the opportunity to offer back to God our praise and thanksgiving for His faithfulness and goodness to us.

“Always giving thanks to God the Father FOR everything.” Eph. 5:20

“Give thanks IN all circumstances [everything], for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” 1 Thess. 5:18

My New Computer (My Life This Past Week)

Updated 4-12-08:  Since I finally found a solution to my computer problems, I will post it for anyone who may have the same problem and find this by Google.  There seems to be a problem in that the Windows Media Player in Vista did not work properly in Parallels, at least as of a few weeks ago.  Also, the French Catholic TV channel KTO works best with Windows Media Player 11, which runs on Windows XP.  Windows XP needs to be the 32-bit version for a MacBook.  I decided that, for the programs I want to run through Windows, I would rather use Boot Camp and split the disc instead of using Parallels to run both Leopard and Windows at the same time.  I have to re-start to switch between them, but some programs run better.

Updated 4-28-08:  About a week ago, this computer crashed.  It was found to have had a defective logic board, which caused a complete harddrive crash.  Although I think that what was written above is still valid, I would caution that part of the problem I had was probably attributable to the defective logic board.

******

Much of my time outside of work for the past week or so has been taken up by a lovely new computer and its software.  Meanwhile, little blogging has been done or even imagined.  Perhaps tomorrow afternoon I will have an idea.  For now, I thought I would do a little post on my new laptop and one of the issues that has had my head spinning . . . perhaps I can even find a reader who can help.

The Old and New Computers: My old laptop was a white Mac iBook G4, a wonderful thing when it was new.  Its operating system, "Panther" (Mac OSX 10.3) was the latest new thing at the time, and it still had the old Mac OS 9 for some applications that were not yet available in OSX.  It served me well for about 4 years or so.  But for the last 6 months it was dying.  Some of the updates did not run well on it, and software updates may have been partly to blame.  Probably more to blame was the hardware itself.  A reliable machine, it had been dropped more than once, and in fact it once fell a good 2-1/2 feet or so, from the top of my luggage, to land on concrete hard.  I had cat hair and coffee and soup splattered on it over the few years, and I had removed the keyboard enough times that the screws no longer worked.  Unable to open it for a good cleaning inside, I suppose I watched it burn up over the last 6 months.

Seeing it malfunction more than usual in recent weeks, I first ordered a newer operating system, hoping it would be more compatible with the software updates, and then I realized I was throwing money away on that.  The laptop was not likely to last more than another 6 months or so, I thought, even with new software, and that would be money that could go toward a new laptop that would already have the newest operating system. 

So I canceled the order and bought a new Mac Book instead.  It is a beautiful black one with much more memory than the one I had before and a lot of new features.  So my time for the past week or so has been taken up with loading software on the new computer and moving things to CD-Rom's and then loading them on the new Mac Book: all of my iTunes library, address book, documents, and photos.

I was right about it being a waste of money to order a new operating system for the old iBook.  It truly died soon after the new Mac Book arrived.  Last week-end, I was having trouble even getting it to start a couple of times, and had to force it to quit too.  It ran slowly, painfully, and I was afraid at one point that I would not be able to get personal information deleted safely before the files became inaccessible by normal means.  The new computer turned out to be more necessary than I had realized, and still a joy.

The Adventure: The new Macs can run both the Mac operating system Leopard and  Microsoft Windows at the same time, without rebooting, if you also have something called Parallels Desktop.  The new laptop arrived with the Tiger operating system on it and with a disk for Leopard.  It took about 3 hours to check and download Leopard, then Parallels, and then Vista.  Then there were 15 Mac updates and about 41 Microsoft updates, and I was downloading updates for hours until 11:00 p.m.  Then I still needed to load things like Adobe Acrobat, Firefox, Flash, and a few other things like that.  I only got my new Microsoft Office for Mac and loaded that on today.

How wonderful to have a new computer!  Playing with having both the latest Mac operating system and the latest Windows operating system has been a blast.  The internet runs fine on both.  The trouble is that the two things I wanted to work on Windows still are not actually working. 

The malfunctioning remote access for my office seems to be an office-wide problem.  The remote access is not working now for the people with PC's either, so all I can do is wait until our office tech support guys figure out what is wrong with that.

The other primary use I had for Windows is not working either, and I still haven't figured that one out.

The Remaining Problem: I have not been able to access the French Catholic TV channel KTO since they switched to a new website a month or so ago.  The shows and videos that they offered on their old website ran beautifully for me on Real Player.  The new website runs on Windows Media Player, and that is no longer maintained for Macs.  I tried the Flip4Mac technology that is supposed to allow Windows Media Player features to run through Quicktime.  That worked (although not very well) until a Quicktime update left me unable to access the KTO videos at all.  KTO runs well enough on my office PC, which has Windows XP Professional, and I thought I could access KTO again with Windows on the new Mac.

I cannot.  I have worked at it for a week trying different things.  The Mac Store had another TV software working for me last night until Parallels updated its tools, and then that stopped working too.  I now have customer service requests in to both Parallels and Microsoft.  Meanwhile, I think it may even be the case that Windows Media Player 11 (which runs the KTO videos) does not work well with Windows Vista Home Premium (the Windows operating system that I bought).  So I am waiting to hear back both as to whether there is something I need to adjust and even whether I bought the correct version of Windows for what I want the computer to do.

Anyway, any help in that regard would be appreciated.

Updated March 9: Microsoft customer service uninstalled the Parallels video driver, which apparently does not support Vista, and installed the standard VGA video driver that is part of Vista.  Video now works fine if I am playing video in the Media Player, and I can access video in websites such as KTO.  However, over the web, it is constantly buffering, disconnecting, or giving me a still picture while I hear audio.  And sometimes the audio is distorted.  So . . . this is a considerable improvement, but it still is not as good as what I could get in Real Player from the old KTO website.  Something still needs to be adjusted, or I'll have to wait for something to be updated, but this is definite progress.

Back to Blogging:  While I wait for the Parallels and Microsoft tech people to get back to me, I suppose I can get back to other things in life for a while, including blogging.  That's all for tonight, but perhaps I will have thoughts about something other than computers to write about tomorrow.

Moving Day

Photo: My desk, almost clean, for a short time after the last of the papers were put into boxes except for those I was working on this morning.  My office is moving to larger space and will open in a different building tomorrow morning.  The new space is better organized, and I will have a larger office.  But I will certainly miss this view!

The Fires

A local news/talk radio station has called today's fires San Diego's "Katrina by Fire" and "our 9/11."  If you want to follow the news, here's a link to the San Diego Union-Tribune and one to its latest fire news page.   

I didn't write anything as long as I was in the clear.  In the fires we had 4 years ago, I was probably in one of the safest places in San Diego County, except that during one particular day, the air quality was so bad that it really was not breathable if I went outside.  That day, I started to drive to my office, realized it was not a good idea to try, and came home.  I had some fear of what might happen if the air quality did not clear up fairly soon, as the air outside would eventually have to come inside.  However, it cleared, and all was fine.

In this year's fires, a large part of Rancho Santa Fe was under voluntary evacuation by this morning.  By noon or so, all of it was to be evacuated, and parts of Solana Beach were evacuated, with the idea that the fire could burn all the way to the ocean.  By mid-afternoon, the voluntary evacuation was extended as far north as the southern part of Carlsbad and cities east of there (the beach area west of the freeway excluded), and an hour or so later that was extended to the northern end of Carlsbad and cities to the east.  Now, Camp Pendleton -- the northern boundary of the county -- has advised some military families to prepare for possible evacuation.  An evacuation area has been set up at the football stadium -- reminiscent of Katrina, but with no likelihood of flooding.

The evacuation, as far as I can tell, has been very orderly.  Traffic going out of the area was about 20 miles per hour most of the way, and up to the limit part of the way.  Given the location of evacuation areas from east county to the coast, and from almost to the northern boundary to near the southern boundary, that is laudable.  By population, San Diego is one of the largest cities in California.  Geographically, San Diego County is as large as a small state or small country.  While the news still says 250,000 have been evacuated, that is the same number I think I heard hours ago, and it does not appear to include the number under voluntary evacuation.  The full number of people who have left their homes is probably much higher.

So here I am, along with much of north San Diego County, at a hotel for the night.  It is unlikely that I will lose anything except the price of the hotel bill and the time lost in slow moving traffic going north.  It is actually too soon to think of it as anything like the equivalent of Katrina in the damage likely to be done.  It is not likely to really destroy the life of the city unless it becomes much, much worse than the fires that struck 4 years ago.  During my drive north, I could smell smoke, but the air was certainly breathable, and there were even people having a pleasant walk on the beach. 

Time will tell what will be lost.  This is my third forest fire experience, counting a loss in the Oakland Hills Fire in 1991 and the experience of being merely stranded indoors 4 years ago.  If I lose my home, it will be my third loss to fire.  I choose very carefully where I live now, and it is not on a wooded hillside or another area that would ordinarily be in any danger in this kind of fire.  However, the winds have blown so hard through part of today that there is always a possibility of branches blown by a dry wind landing on a roof from a fire a good distance away.  And if the fires are arson, there is always the possibility of an arsonist targeting an otherwise safe area.  I received one of the automated "reverse-911" calls saying that I was under a voluntary evacuation, so here I am, with 2 cats who are having their first extraordinary experience in the sort of nice hotel that does not ordinarily allow pets.  One is curious, and the other is hiding in the skirts of the bed.

So here we go again, although in all likelihood it is a precaution that will be over tomorrow evening or Wednesday.  I doubt that I will post anything other than a possible fire update between now and then.