Sunday Funday IV

Today is the Swift Super Bowl. As much as I detest all the coverage and celebrity worship, I just can’t bring myself to pull for the 49ers. Part of me wanted to root for the meteor (SMOD!) but someone is gonna have to win, and I’d rather it be Andy Reid’s team.

I am enjoying the fact that Ash Wednesday falls on the feast of St. Valentine. I joked with my students they should get their ashes in the shape of a heart – as a reminder that Jesus will always love them, even if no one else does.

This past week was a super busy one for me – there was a class retreat, and there were three nights of basketball games (both guys and girls). I stayed for them all because I am the “voice” of many athletic events through the year and I often emcee many non-athletic events as well.

I brought my daughter to school with me on Friday, and it was an enlightening experience for how much more she has to grow up – as she is a 6th grader and the difference between her and even the freshmen was very stark. Thankfully, there is time between now and the 9th grade!

Lent begins this week, and this is a time I believe that we shouldn’t be giving things up, but rather adding things that we wouldn’t normally do. If you don’t pray as much as you should, try adding 10 minutes a day of prayer or reflection. Reading from Scripture can be helpful. Do more acts of service and charity to benefit others without any expectation of payback. Jesus said “love one another as I have loved you”, which implies being willing to die unto yourselves, even if not in a literally physical way. Lent is a great time to reflect on that *command* – and it is more than merely not eating meat on Fridays.

Have a great week. If you are a practitioner, enjoy Mardi Gras/Carnival/Fat Tuesday. Pancakes are my favorite, and in my former parish in College Park, the Sunday before Ash Wednesday was always a pancake feast. It’s one of the (very few) things I miss being on the Shore. Enjoy!

Sunday Funday III

This is the first Sunday without football since Labor Day Weekend. Very strange feeling not to at least passively watch RedZone, the Eagles, or even a playoff game. The SwiftBowl Super Bowl next Sunday may get a little bit of my attention, but I can’t say I’m looking all the forward to it.

Mass was a little bit intense this morning. There was a young man who was acting very shiftily in the front of the church. I noticed him before Mass began, and couldn’t decide whether he was mentally disturbed or autistic. As I was the lector, I had to keep my head while there was a lot of shuffling around. Finally, after the homily, the young man came and sat with a family and the rest of Mass carried on as it usually did. My daughter (now 11) was being super observant and freaked out for a while, but she settled down as well. All’s well that ends well, as Shakespeare said many years ago.

Speaking of Shakespeare, yesterday I watched the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, which is a modern retelling of The Taming of the Shrew (I do love the rhyming quality). It was one of my favorites as a teenager (it was released in 1999), especially since I had a major thing for Larisa Oleynik in my tween and teen years. Maybe I’ll do a proper review of it at some point, but I’m sure the Moral Guardians^TM will throw a fit, since a lot of it would be considered…”inappropriate”.

As I have written about the Liturgical Wars before, there are other weird “in-between” positions I take. My entire youth was saturated with “bad” Catholic music – written by the St. Louis Jesuits, Marty Haugen, David Haas, and so forth. I can’t stand to hear it during Mass itself, but for some reason, I will listen to it while washing dishes. I am perfectly fine with belting out “One Bread, One Body” or “Servant Song” with a sponge and Dawn in my hands, but when I am sitting in the pew, I believe there ought to be a restraining order against them in worship. Strange one, I am.

Being February now, it is a slow month, but pitchers and catchers will be reporting soon! We’ll see how the weather goes. My car still runs. For now. Another week in the books and getting ready to start.

Why I Love Teaching…

Catholic Schools Week, now mercifully over, has “Teacher Appreciation Day” to wrap it up, and in addition to the nice lunch we got yesterday, I was handed a stack of written notes from students. A couple of them were more form-style, like you’d see on a Hallmark card, but many were heartfelt.

I was touched. Especially for a subject that many kids groan about having to take. But this is why a big part of what I do in class is relationship building and life lessons. Those bonds are worth more to so many of these kids, even though most of them will not remember a good chunk of what I taught in class on any given day.

And that’s ok.

Why? Because I love my students.

Class Thoughts

This is a bit of a strange week – being Catholic Schools Week and such. As a result, I decided that I needed to get in as much as possible today. With the freshmen, it was largely combining aspects of Jesus’ identity – of Redeemer, Teacher, and Miracle-Worker, emphasizing the redemptive suffering and death he endured. I always find it an important point to make because too many people will reduce Jesus to a one-dimensional being and neglect the essence of his life – his death.

Because tomorrow is “Student Appreciation Day” – we have shorter classes, a movie, and a volleyball game (of which I am foolishly partaking). I believe class periods are roughly 20 minutes, so that’s just enough to make the point then about how the words and actions of Jesus’ ministry caused people to go wild.

As for the Juniors, taking moral and social issues – it was a review of virtue: Cardinal and Theological alike, and our first main issue of the course: human dignity. Today was discussing the meaning of “equality”, and what it doesn’t mean. Tomorrow’s short class will revolve entirely around the use of language and the clarity and obfuscation it provides when speaking of these issues. We’ll see how it goes. I have one section that is really chatty and another that never says a word. Such is the life in teaching!

Sunday Funday II

It has resumed being a normal winter here on the Shore, at least somewhat anyway. A typical day gets into the mid-upper 40’s and the overnight lows are somewhere in the low-mid 30’s. Occasionally it will dip into the 20’s and occasionally it will rise to about 52 during the day. What we had the last few days is more akin to late March/early April. And now we will suffer, as we must.

I attended the daily Mass on Friday morning since we had the fog delay, and I think that the Church ought to just do away with the Sign of Peace now, unless they are willing to go through the catechesis of its proper meaning. I highly doubt that, though. There’s not a whole lot more maddening to me during the Sign of Peace for people (old Boomers especially) to be flashing the hippie “V” peace sign. I see it at my own parish as well, and I am not sure how many other things are as antithetical to the intended spirit of the Sign of Peace than a glib flashing of the V. Try that in Europe and you may be taken outside and beaten.

It’s Catholic Schools Week. Being a veteran of Catholic schools as a student and teacher, I can say with certainty that it is much better for elementary schools than it is for high schools. When I was a kid, CSW was essentially an elementary school version of spirit week. It was fun, we got to do cool things – concerts, assemblies, Grandparents’ Day, day of no homework, and free ice cream. At the high school level, we already have spirit week in the fall before Homecoming, so CSW is more acknowledged in principle than practice. We will, though, be having a student vs. teacher volleyball game and I am playing. Because I’m a masochist, that’s why.

My car was hit by a deer on my way to school last Tuesday morning. This was about only 14 hours after I paid the big repair bill for a thermostat housing replacement. The damage is largely superficial and there is no effect on the actual ability to drive it, thankfully. It did, however, take an already ugly car and make it even uglier!

Today is a full, rich day in terms of things going on, at least passively. Mass, going to celebrate a friend’s 40th birthday, and then watching the conference championship games. I don’t particular care about the Ravens (Eagles fan, after all), but please God, I cannot survive, this country cannot survive two full weeks of Taylor Swift coverage should the Chiefs win. And if they win by some ticky-tack reason, I and many other people will assume the fix is in. And they should. Oh, and go Lions.

I hope everyone has a wonderful and restful Sunday. Happy Catholic Schools Week. In just four days it will be February, my most hated month of the school year! Stay tuned this week and find out why…

On the Incarnation

The first main lesson taught in my freshman Christology classes (I have three sections of it) concerned itself with the very nature of who Jesus is, both in his own time and in ours. We briefly touched on elements such as Redeemer, Teacher, Healer, Son, and so forth, but none of those have meaning until we get to the very crux of the Incarnation – that the Son of God came into the world in the flesh and dwelled among us.

The Nicene Creed says: “For us Men and for our salvation, he came down from heaven. And by the Holy Spirit, he was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became Man“.

One of the reasons I love the term “incarnation” is because it removes all the ambiguity about the human nature of Christ; it is such a raw term, akin to “meat” and truly emphasizes the physicality of Jesus Christ. Throughout the Gospels, there are many little subtle things that continue to remind us of that physical, tangible nature of Jesus. One could almost see them as a preemptive defense against the then-dominant Greek cultural stress on spirit and the soul to the exclusion of the body. And given the timing of its publication, the Gospel of John was a direct defense against the already present and growing Gnostic heresy that would bedevil Christianity for centuries (and still does to an extent).

We see such examples in how Jesus grew up (Luke 2), slept (Matthew 8:24), wept (John 11:35), and agonized and suffered a gruesome death (all the Passion Accounts). We can related to these things because Jesus was just like us in all ways, except our fallen nature of sinfulness.

When discussing the Incarnation, I like to give a little lesson on the word condescension, because nearly always it is used in a negative sense – think “mansplaining” or something along those lines. But when used properly and positively, it means that someone comes down to us, as one would get down on the floor with a small child to play with blocks. Christ coming into the world and taking on all of our limitations of time, space, growth, and death is the ultimate condescension. Why? Because as St. Athanasius said and wrote nearly 1700 years ago (and is said during the preparation of the altar during Mass), the Son of God lowered himself into our humanity so he could raise us up into his divinity, thus restoring us to our proper state as created prior to the Fall in the Garden of Eden.

I finished by reminding them that while the Incarnation is not, strictly speaking, necessary, for as Gabriel says to Mary at the Annunciation: “nothing is impossible for God”, it is incredibly appropriate and fitting for our salvation to be put in motion this way. Who better than the Son of God in the flesh to come give us a living and breathing example and demonstration of humility and sacrifice? Just as we learn skills and tasks through demonstration and doing, so we also learn humility and sacrifice love by witnessing and doing.

New Semester Courses

The first week of the new semester is over, but even with that, it wasn’t truly a full week. Here on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, we have these things called “fog delays”, in which school will start later due to the heavy water vapor. Granted, driving in the fog is no joke, but it’s not usually a problem by 8 in the morning. Nevertheless, yesterday’s school day was started 90 minutes later due to such a delay, and by the time I was leaving campus in the afternoon, it was 75 degrees.

On January 26th.

Anyway, the courses go like this – for the 9th graders, we are doing Christology – the study of Christ. It’s straightforward in the sense that it is a combo of talking about who Jesus is and a study of the New Testament. It’s one of my favorite topics to teach and it is something I really get into, regardless of the grade level. For the 11th grade, the course is called “Catholic Moral and Social Issues”. They took Moral and Ethical Philosophy in the first semester, and now they concern themselves with the applicability in the issues we face in life and society.

It is a little bit of a tricky course. for a few reasons. The main one is that teenagers are (largely) fickle and ignorant about the deeper issues. This isn’t necessarily a criticism of them, it’s just the way it is . There are always exceptions, and adults aren’t exactly better either. My larger point, though, is that teens will mature and more often than not will change how they view things the older they get. I certainly did.

Another element is the very counter-cultural nature of such a course. The world says one thing, and proper Christian formation says another. Separating the two is always difficult especially given the age group involved, who largely are still focused on reputation and gaining the approval of their peers. My challenge during the first couple of days was tell them to look deeper at the issues and use their God-given sense of reason to wade through it and see the nuance; emotive argumentation is not going to be permitted. Disagreement is allowed, but we are going to be rational in our disagreement.

In other words, exactly the opposite of how our social and political bodies act in the world.

The course is designed around the Ten Commandments, namely Commandments 5 (Thou shall not kill) through Commandment 8 (Thou shall not bear false witness). We will start with the latter as a stand in for human dignity and its status as the skeleton key for every other door we open. It makes sense – quite frankly, if you dehumanize someone, it becomes easy to take his property, family, and even life. Therefore, it is important to start with the dignity aspect even though it isn’t a “tangible asset”, so to speak.

We’ll see how it goes. This week is Catholic Schools’ Week, which means there will be lots of auxiliary events and a shortened amount of class time. Alas, on we move!

Hall of Famers, Among Other Things

Congratulations to Adrian Beltre, Todd Helton, and Joe Mauer as they were all elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame by the Baseball Writers Association of America. They will be inducted on July 21st. My dad, brother, and I just recorded our reaction to the Hall of Fame class on an episode of The Small Hall Baseball Podcast that will be released tomorrow. Not only did we react to the winners but also pondered what will happen to all the individuals who fell short, or fell off the ballot all together.

It was the first day of the new semester at school. I got to (re)introduce myself to a bunch of students I had previously taught over a year ago, but under much different circumstances. The last time, I was new to the school and they were the veterans; now I don’t have to worry about it all that much. There was also a new group of freshmen I now teach when I hadn’t last semester. Much to tell, and will do so tomorrow.

The Questions…The Questions…

Why do I have to take religion?

What am I ever going to use this for?

Why isn’t my grade higher? I should be doing better, because I go to church, fill function X (and so forth).

I love teaching. I love teaching theology. What I don’t love are some of the inane questions I get from students regarding my subject matter, such as the ones above. Every teacher has gotten some variation of these questions, especially along the “when am I ever going to use this” lines. It can be frustrating at times, and some of this flows from the cultural shift that has taken place surrounding education at large over the last few generations. At one point, education wasn’t for the masses, except for the basic skills (known colloquially as the “Three R’s”), but rather for those who could afford it and wanted a broader base of knowledge and worldliness. It certainly wasn’t for job training or preparation. When provided, it was usually done so under the guidance of religious people – Catholic orders of priests and nuns, divinity schools, and churches. Universities were meant to be seats of knowledge.

Over the past 125+ years, education has become the purview of the government, and that has been a mistake. Government isn’t interested in broader bases of knowledge or worldliness; in fact, it is interested in the opposite for the general population and to sort out and set aside its next generation of mandarins to carry out the Prime Directive of the Bureaucracy.

What appalling cynicism! (Yes, it’s true…read here)

At one time, the rationale could be made that the government school system (let’s call it what it is – “public school” has always been a euphemism – As if “the people” actually have a say in what goes on, get real!) was looking to “help the next generation become productive citizens,” but that has long been gone, at least in my lifetime. Now, the bureaucratic side of education merely aims to keep feeding itself and the students pay the price – they aren’t learning, whether it is considered “useful” or not by our modern standards.

So how does this tie back into the questions posed at the beginning? The questions buy into the more recent premise set within education that any kind of schooling is supposed to provide some kind of job training. If one desires to be an engineer, then sure, a theology class is going to have little to no meaning to that individual who pursues engineering. I found myself in school saying it as well – why do I have to take pre-calculus when the only math question I need to figure out in theology is “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”¹ But having been in the classroom for 20 years, I know that mentality is wrong, and it is not the fundamental premise of education – which is about the person, not the job/career he wishes to have.

My “Little Things” provides much of how I view the purpose of education, using theology to make the point. Education is about life – the vicissitudes we face in this vale of tears. Love God and love neighbor, be able to think on your feet, use your talents and abilities the best you can. Everyone has something to offer, and I believe it bears repeating that education is about broadening one’s horizons, not becoming a cog in a machine. The premise used to be the former, it has now become the latter, and we are all worse off for it. Well, most of us are, anyway. It will not change unless there is some form of Great Awakening – which I wonder if that even gets taught in government school history classes…too much religion involved. Hopefully such an awakening doesn’t happen too late. Until then, we are slowly careening toward the final stage of doom.

Or maybe that’s just my pessimism speaking.

¹ The answer is zero, since angels don’t have bodies and therefore, cannot dance. How’s THAT for pedantry?

Sunday Funday I

I used to write a list of ten things every day long before it became a standard trope among web writers and bloggers; on Sundays, I would throw out random observations from the previous week or what was going to be happening. I am going to resurrect that portion, because it’s going to be the one thing that is more stream-of-consciousness.

When I first moved to the Eastern Shore (in the Spring of 2021), I was told by many that the summer would get occasionally hot but the winters would be relatively mild to what they were when I lived in Prince George’s and Anne Arundel Counties. LIES! Some days over these past couple of winters have put that to rest. Back in December of 2022, we had a three day stretch where it never got higher than 12 degrees (Fahrenheit, because this is America, damn it!) and yesterday’s high was a balmy 23 degrees. I will say, long-term, it is to our benefit to have those consecutive days of cold, if only to avoid the hand-sized mosquitos which arrive in the summer.

A new semester begins this week, and I have some major turnover in students. I am trading away 54 sophomores, most of whom I have had non-stop since they began as freshmen in the fall of 2022, for 10 (current) freshmen, 34 juniors, and 4 seniors. The upperclassmen will be partaking in a moral and social issues course, which should be fun, and harrowing (maybe). I’m looking forward to it, since I designed the course.

I found that writing once again has come naturally, and I wonder why I ever stopped in the first place. Lots of reasons, but none of them particularly good.

Mass is at 11 AM for us. We attend a small country parish that has really nice people and for me is a time-warp to my youth growing up in College Park in terms of worship and liturgical aesthetics. Given what I have written previously, I’ll let you decide whether that is a good or bad thing…

My car…my car… It has 194,000+ miles on it, and the thermostat housing essentially blew up on me while I was on my way to school Thursday morning. It should have been done Friday afternoon, but the shop ordered the wrong part and so I have to hitch a ride to school tomorrow. Fortunately, the shop is only a couple miles from school. Believe it or not, this is the first major repair it has ever needed. My wife says it will be the first of many. I hope she’s wrong.

This afternoon, my dad, brother, and I will be guests on another podcast, released sometime this week. It will focus on our Phillies fandom, even though our show theme is Hall of Fame-centric (hence my mock ballot below). Should be interesting; I’ve never been on someone else’s pod.

Today signifies the last good full weekend of football. Divisional rounds get 2 days of 2 games each. Next weekend is conference title round, and that’s only Sunday. While I remain a football fan, the NFL is making it harder to remain, or put it another way, making it easier to pay less attention. There are always movies and tv shows to watch until it gets warm enough to do outdoor work. Enjoy the day!