Interview with the only Republican rep. to vote for the Nov. 7 health care reform bill

Former Jesuit, Congressman Cao Discusses Using Ignatian Discernment to Reach Health Care Vote Decision

I found this interview quite enlightening. Whatever one thinks of the health reform bill itself, Cao's discernment process on it was more thorough than my own. Had mine been more thorough, would I have arrived at a different opinion?

Two opposing forces have marked my interior life recently: 1) a simultaneous disgust with and compulsion to imbibe the polarizing punditry of the various political voices on the Net, and 2) a drying up of my prayer life, a laziness extending to pretty much anything except intercessory prayer for those who ask.

I wonder if the two might be related rather than in opposition? Possibly the indulgence in snarky punditry leads to both a desensitization of my conscience and will to carry out my civic duty, and a spiritual acedia.

If this is the illness, what is the remedy? I probably know it but don't want to swallow the medicine.

Tip of the hat to Sherry Weddell for the Cao interview, found at Intentional Disciples: Discerning the Good in Congress

Why the Fools are selling their shares in Starbucks (SBUX)

I started investing in the stock market this summer. So far, it's a fascinating adventure. In the past, the market bored me but I am willing to admit now that it was not so much boredom as prejudice and spiritual snobbery. I viewed it as "unworthy" a subject for study, for an aspiring saint.

That all changed when I took a Called and Gifted workshop this summer in Chicago, from the Catherine of Siena Institute. There I learned to get off my high horse and disabuse myself of the idea that money itself is the root of all evil. NO, NO, NO - it's the LOVE OF MONEY that is the root of all evil, or so the saying goes. I don't even know where the saying comes from.

Just goes to show that you CAN teach an old dog new tricks.

It turns out that I score very high in the charism of Giving, one of whose manifestations is the ability to create wealth in order to give it generously where it is needed. I've always enjoyed being generous, and I've always enjoyed hustling for money, but I never put the two together before that workshop as two sides of the same charismatic coin.

So I'm having a blast in the market.

Here is a nice analysis from the Motley Fool folks on why they are selling their Starbucks shares and advising others to do the same.

I never bought Starbucks, but I AM trying to learn how to really analyze companies and determine valuations, so I can pick stocks on my own and not other people's advice. So this is for me to print off and read, when I have time to look at Starbucks' financials. Motley Fool was bullish on Starbucks for a long time. They say that knowing when to sell is even more important than when to buy. Hence -- this is for my education!

Motley Fool Million Dollar Portfolio

Patience - under construction...

I am giving my blog a face-lift, mainly so I can take advantage of some of the newer blogger features. Now if I can just figure out how to blend my old template into my new one, so I can show all my blog roll.

Another Sunday, a little Augustine

Michael Pacher
(b. ca. 1435, Bruneck, d. 1498, Salzburg)
Augustinus und der Teufel ("Saint Augustine and the Devil") panel of Pacher's Kirchenväteraltar ("Fathers of the Church" altarpiece, c. 1483),
Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
Tip of the hat to Idle Speculations for the image

I totally forgot my last entry-- Bored Now -- until I logged in this morning to write a new one. What a revelation to me! How thoroughly it captured my recent spate of existential angst. Last evening I confessed all to my husband - the ennui that had me in its grip. We went out to eat at Applebys - not that we had ever eaten there before, but for some inexplicable reason our insurance company gave us a gift card to Applebys when we revised our coverage a month ago or so.

Applebys was crowded; we decided what we really wanted was subs from Capriotti's. Got to Capriotti's at 8:00 pm, just as the guy was locking the door! He shrugged through the glass door, and pointed where the hours were posted. A sub shop closing at 8pm on a Saturday night in a college town. The recession is real!

So we went across the parking lot to the Vietnamese restaurant that is among our favorites. It turned out that this is where we'd really wanted to be. I tried a new dish - a cold chicken salad with cabbage and teeny tiny carrot slivers. Sounds yucky, which is why I'd never tried it before, but it was exactly what my stomach wanted! The chicken was incredibly tender. The seasoning was vinegary with a hot hot relish on the side.

Went home and watched the previous evening's episode of Monk. Fell asleep watching the new V. Had vivid dreams of literature -- a billboard size title page from some unknown Emily Bronte work in front of me, then me taking pen to paper to start writing my own short story, explaining to a dream friend how the imagination will not be denied, and literature has power to effect the saddest and most tiny shriveled closed up heart.

Woke up wonderfully refreshed!

Took up the cool book I am reading intermittently: What God Knows: Time and the Question of Divine Knowledge. Love the inquiry into time. This, from a chapter on Augustine and time:

... Augustine is ever concerned with matters of the heart. About those whose affections are set on things passing away, he says, "Their heart flutters about between the changes of past and future found in created things, and an empty heart it remains." Or again, "Who shall take hold of the human heart, to make it stand still, and see how eternity ... ordains future and past times?" (Confessions 11.11.13). Always it is the heart that matters. Whatever Augustine has to teach us about the mystery of time and eternity, it is for the purpose of pilgrimage. This is one of his great words: peregrinatio (pilgrimage). Pilgrimage is not the restless wandering of Odysseus, but a different kind of odyssey -- a journey with a telos -- with a goal toward that City with Foundations whose builder and maker is God. As St. Anselm would put it so famously, all of our thinking about God, about time and eternity, is a form of "faith seeking understanding" (fides quaerens intellectum), leading towards vision, the beatific vision St. Paul described as an intimate and perpetual knowing and seeing "face to face". (1 Corinthians 13:12).

Bored Now

Not really as bored now as evil Willow gets, but it's been a while since I have written. The Internet is so vast, and I've been spending oodles of time working on the Pious Ladies Bookmobile, hanging out in Facebook, trying to figure out what the Twitter deal is, satisfying my television goof tooth with Television Without Pity, trying to win Swagbucks, yada yada yada ...

Okay, I'm being called off to Mass. Got a date with the Master! How Willow-ish is that? Don't know why I've got Willow on the mind, but I do. She's just about my favorite character from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe. Early Willow is SO COOL. Later Willow is awful, but she flows so reasonably from early Willow. That's the scary part. Maybe that's why I like her. I was a nerdy nerd too, and I could've easily grown into Evil Rae. Sort of did, but then got turned.

PARODY: Obama Trick-or-Treat Spoof • Shanklin

Happy Halloween!

Tip o' the old hat to Kathleen King.

Peggy Noonan - "We're Governed by Callous Children"

I don't want to jump on the Obama snark wagon because I think that yes, it is historic to have a black president and yes, Obama snark can all too easily fuel the racial hatred that everyone of good sense knows still seethes underneath the surface of the country. I don't wish to see it ignite. I don't want to be party to its eruption. I was happy that Obama was elected because I was tired of all the Bush hatred, but Bush hatred never alarmed me, it only severely irritated me.

But.

I very much like a recent article by Peggy Noonan. I AM alarmed by the seeming embrace of government control, regulation, and redistribution of wealth from this Administration. Noonan writes of a couple of thoughtful talks she has had with business folks. She writes about how there is a general disheartening from the business sector that bodes very poorly for the economic health of the nation. She argues that this recession, by the numbers, is not as bad as the recession of the 80's, but that what is bad is that there is a growing feeling of helplessness that nobody has a plan, nobody knows what to do to make it all right again, and government is sending out messages of optimism that are falling on deaf ears.

At the end of the article, Noonan writes:

We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists—they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don't mind it when people become disheartened. They don't even notice.

Read the article and judge for yourself.

40 Days for Life - a culturally diverse, all-ages grassroots activity to end the civil injustice of abortion

I am rather a one-note tune these days. But as I follow 40 Days for Life day to day, I am continually impressed and made hopeful by the folks who are willing to come out and do public witness to the great civil rights issue of our times -- abortion of the unborn.

Dante Shepherd is a funny guy! - he's just surviving the world and all...

Tip of the hat to Paul Smith Jr!

No child left behind -40 Days for Life, Day 28

Meet Isaiah.

Isaiah was born this past Thursday in Riverside, California.

Karen in Riverside reported a baby saved within the first couple of hours on the first day of last spring’s 40 Days for Life campaign. That baby, of course, was Isaiah. The Riverside team found assistance for his mom through her pregnancy and recently held a baby shower for her.

THAT is the spirit of genuine, compassionate service that goes back generations and MUST remain alive. THAT is the story that must be told!

Pope Benedict XVI: Promoting Right to Life Requires Fighting World Hunger

Seamless garment, baby, seamless garment... Small is still beautiful. Where can I find me a decent global distributist economic theory and attempt?

Tip of the hat to Easter Al., twittering @EasterA

Hope is always in season

Surfing around, found this quote that I liked:

Hope is a state of mind... not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation... An orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart, it transcends the world immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. ...Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
- Vaclav Havel, former President of Czechoslovakia

Hat tip to Treasure lies where your heart belongs

Abortion -This is a Suction Abortion

Today, on Day 26 of this fall's 40 Days for Life campaign of prayer and fasting to end abortion, a video from Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life. It's not gory, just clinical. I've read Fr. Pavone's articles for years but never heard him speak. I quite like it-- and when he takes off his collar at the end, I got this little frisson of a jump into alternative realities. In this Year of the Priest, it's good to reflect on the meaning of the priesthood. What difference does it make?

I started this 40 days campaign determined to pray, fast, and read each day's report and spiritual reading. I've had my usual problems fasting. Fasting makes me cranky and sometimes crazy. And yeah, sometimes I see the daily email in my INBOX and cringe because I'm looking for something more Rae-centric, like news that I sold some more books or notice of a sale at Coldwater Creek.

But mostly I am faithful. It's like the 40 days of Lent. A cross between a root canal and a spiritual goosing.

Bishop Michael Saltarelli, requiescat in pace

From the Diocese of Wilmington's website:

Bishop Saltarelli has passed away. With sadness, the Diocese of Wilmington announces the passing into Eternal Life of the Most Rev. Michael A. Saltarelli, Bishop Emeritus of the diocese. Bishop Saltarelli shepherded the Catholic community of Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore as the Eighth Bishop of Wilmington from November 1995 until his retirement in July 2008. Click here for more information.

Funeral arrangements have been announced. Click here.

He was a great bishop, a great priest, and a wonderful man.

40 Days for Life: Day 17

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DAY 17 INTENTION
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May all understand more deeply that the pro-life
message is rooted in the two basic truths of life:

There is a God;
He isn't me.

I love today's intention for 40 Days for Life. It kinds of rules out pro-life atheists and agnostics, of whom there are many. So I don't agree with it 100% because I think a pro-life public policy is possible, even given our pluralistic and religiously diverse society.

But I like this message anyway. It's very 12 Steps-ish.

Before the silver cord is loosed, or the golden bowl is broken. 40 Days for Life - Day 6

I was caught by today's scripture passage, from Ecclesiastes. Then went on to Rev. Stallworth's commentary on it, very lucid.

When I was in 8th grade, I did my final English project on death. I remember typing out Tennyson's poem, Crossing of the Bar, and pasting a picture of a sunset to illustrate it. The old fashioned cut and paste. And I was way too young to appreciate the poem. But I liked it.

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DAY 6 INTENTION
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That knowing the shortness of life, all may value it
more deeply.

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SCRIPTURE
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Remember your Creator before the silver cord is
loosed, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher
shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the
well. Then the dust will return to the earth as it
was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.

-- Ecclesiastes 12:6-7

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REFLECTION by Rev. Paul Stallsworth, Lifewatch
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God is giver of all life. Short lived or long lived,
human lives are lived out in this world. The
metaphors for death are many. But their meaning is
clear and singular: all will die. Even so, death is
not the absolute end. It is not the end of the story.
For as certainly as God gave life, at death the life
or spirit that God gave returns to God.

By God, we are created. For God, we live our given
days. To God, we return at the end of our earthly
days. And with God, we live through eternity.
Clearly, all along the way, this gracious, loving God
is with us. No human life is random or alone. No
human life was created without purpose. Not one human
life is without destiny.

All human lives, acknowledged or not, are related to
God -- from beginning, to end, throughout eternity.
Therefore, in this world, all human lives are to be
respected and protected, for their lives are signs of
God's sovereignty.