April 2009 Archives
In the Act of Contrition prayer, Catholics profess their sorrow for their failings and promise to avoid the "near occasions of sin". Of course it seems like that promise is always a little harder to practice than to preach.
Enter: Kansas State University. The K-State geography department has plotted a national map of the seven deadly sins showing what parts of the lower 48 encounter the highest rates of each type of sin. http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/mar/26/one-nation-seven-sins/.
However cliche, the American South is speckled with high rates of gluttony, Las Vegas has a lot of greed and most of the sunny Southwest enjoys their siestas in sloth. It is unsurprising that K-State's Riley County is remarkably humble-- there's not much of which to be proud in Manhattan Kansas.
The data was scientifically collected and plotted, but K-State's geographers themselves admit that the task was a silly exercise.
(img Neatorama)
In the list of the 10 commandments, the first one seems like a total no-brainer. I am the Lord, thy God. Thou shall not have other gods before Me. Check and double check, right? It's not like there's too many people sacraficing oxen to the Egyptian god Ra, right? Right.
Of course, there are other things that people can worship like a god even if they don't actually worship that other thing consciously. The classic example is people who place attaining money higher than any other pursuit. I've always felt smug about this suggestion that other people chase dollars more than salvation-- and my relative poverty helped back up my smugness. Yessir. Smug all the way to work on Sundays instead of Holy Mass. When I worked in the restaurant business, I often ended up with a Sunday shift-- and I usually didn't use the late-starting days of the hospitality industry to go to Mass early.
Don't get me wrong. Some people have to work on Sundays. Is that a violation of the commandment to keep holy the Lord's day? I confess that I don't know and don't want to get into that now. Hey, I usually have to do a little shopping on Sundays or go out to eat on Sundays. Am I complicit in the sin of people who staff the stores or restaurants? Again, I don't know. But I do know that it points me in a direction that, until a few months ago, I'd never considered.
I am a slave to time.
Really, a total slave to time. To scheduling. To getting busy doing stuff-- any kind of stuff-- from work stuff to leisure stuff to family stuff to house chores stuff. All of it. I put it in a schedule and have a hard time deviating from that schedule. Oh, God is in the schedule too. He's right there on Sunday before lawn mowing or burger grilling, right after newspaper reading and dog playing. He's even got His own category in my Microsoft Outlook calendar.
But sometimes I find myself scrambling to fit Him in. Even Holy Mass on Sunday often gets to be some kind of a calculus project in finding a suitable time and location to worship Him-- and get in all the other stuff done on His day! But it's not just Sunday, it's every day. From the moment I wake up in the mornings until the day crashes into night-- it's always a race against the clock.
Oh, how many times have I wished for a 28 hour day! Wouldn't that change the world? Imagine the possibilities! I promise, Lord, that I won't waste it on watching Cash Cab or eating snickerdoodles. I'll use it for good and Holy purposes like washing the car or cleaning the bathroom. Honest, I will!
How pathetic.
I do not own my day. The hours and minutes own me. Some days they feel like my false gods, to which I submit with every reminder of my Blackberry.
I am the Lord, thy God. Thou shall not have other gods before Me.
Yes, Lord. You've made a good point. I need to turn over more of my day to You and spend less time chasing my most precious commodity: time. We are all given the same set of 24 hours every day.
Every day is His creation. I don't want to squander His blessings by fiddling away the hours on the couch while Seinfeld re-runs peel away the day. But neither to I want to dishonor His creation by letting it enslave me and push me around.
Tempus fugit, time flies. Isn't man to have dominion over the things of the air? *sigh* So it is.
I need to give up some of the binds of time. Right. I'll schedule that for sometime next week.
Father Mitchel Zimmerman is the vocations director for the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas and one of the finer priests in this part of the country.
In his Easter Vigil sermon, Fr. Zimmerman commented on an interesting characteristic of living a Christian life in the 21st Century: it's countercultural. There was a time where it was rebellious to leave your religion-- it was edgy and earned you come cultural cache points to be liberated from the chains of organized religion. Today, the opposite seems to be true: the rebels have become the mainstream and only the truly countercultural people are the ones that still give pride of place to Faith in their lives.
To join the Church today, or to renew our baptismal promises, is actually to go against the tide. There is no doubt about that. Even as Christians are still the majority, and some 2/3 of Americans will attend a Church service today to celebrate the Resurrection, professing faith in the Resurrection of Jesus is not the latest craze like Hannah Montana. It is not like becoming a fan of chocolate chip cookies on facebook, which I did last week. No, it is more fashionable today to lose religion, not to find it.Go read the whole thing! http://frmitchel.blogspot.com/2009/04/easter-vigil-homily-2009.html
The text is not very long, but is one of the best reflections on living a life in Faith that I've read in a very long time.
Luke 24: 1-6:
And on the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came to the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled back from the sepulchre. And going in, they found not the body of the Lord Jesus. And it came to pass, as they were astonished in their mind at this, behold, two men stood by them, in shining apparel. And as they were afraid, and bowed down their countenance towards the ground, they said unto them: Why seek you the living with the dead?
He is not here, but is risen!
Have a blessed Easter.
Gentle reader, we're almost there. How are your lenten resolutions going? I'm doing okay at mine. I still have to take care of some almsgiving and I missed my extra-hour with the Lord last week. I'll do better this week. I promise. But the 
