Three posts in ONE day!

Well here are the pictures from Mexico. Okay, so they aren't scenic and they show none of the region we were in, but I always get comments that I never take pictures of people. Well here we are, people, pictures and well be happy, there are NONE of me! I had the camera!
This is my Father and Sue in Ensenada walking the streets looking like tourist with lots of cash to be taken from their pockets. I looked, I didn't see any cash...damn!



Here are Cathy, Sue and my Father on the balcony in front of the condo.



Try and be nice. Try and take pictures of people instead of flowers and what kind of cooperation do I get? No respect I tell you! NONE!



I wonder what they were looking at? I guess I could call them all smart asses, or am I the butt of the joke? OK, I'll stop!!!!!!

Spring 2007

Let's hear it for Costco! They came through and the pics were ready Today by 4PM! SO, on with the flowers from this year's early spring in the Seybolds' Gardens.
This is the bleeding heart plant. It is potted and has returned every year now for four years. It really took off in its new location in the flower bed this year, and is very visible from the patio dining area.



The peach tree was in bloom, now there are small peaches forming. This tree was grown from a pit by my father and made two moves to two houses in 4 years. It took up residence here 4 years ago and has produced fruit every year since being planted. This is the tree that produces my peaches for canning, you know the "booze" flavoured peaches!


I was just amazed at the detail of this picture. This is a detail shot from the above photograph.

The people you find on the internet!

So, my father was here last week and was saying that no one had a picture of the ships he was on while serving in the US Navy. I drug him to my library and introduced him to GOOGLE. Sure enough the ships came up, as I typed in the names. As we looked at the pages, I noticed that there were pictures that members of the crew had posted. Sure enough, after about 15 minutes of looking at unknown sailors we found two of my father from his time on the USS Surfbird. I downloaded them and then burnt them to disc for him to take home. It is amazing what you can find on the internet if you look long and diligently enough. So, to let all of you see, this is my father when he was younger than I am now. Typing that made me feel old! My father is the sailor on the far right in each of the below two pictures.




I have no idea of who the others were/are, and neither did my father. I only hope that their families will find the pictures and enjoy them as much as my dad and the rest of us have!

I am still waiting on Costco for the vacation pictures. And this summer will see me in Italy again, so more pictures from Bella Roma and other locales as soon as I return!

Spring Vacation 2007

A week of vacation. Somehow that never quite turns out to be a week of rest. I find that to be an elusive venture any longer. I enjoy the rituals of vacations, from either the driving, the packing, the tourist thing of walking and buying as well as the stints of boredom from not being close to that what makes me comfortable.

I find that the older I become (isn’t that a silly phrase, as if I could become younger) I really relax when I can stay home and have time to wander about the web reading divergent texts and ideas. I like the mental stimulation that it causes and the ideas that it forces me to think or to rethink my previous concepts.

Books have become a major vacation staple. I remember when I was in my early 20’s that I would take a week at Soda Springs in the OSJ Cabin. I would drag up my stereo system (Thank God for iPods, boom boxes and CDs today) as well as a set of vinyl records. I would set up the system in the front room, open the cabin up, put on the obligatory gym shorts and lay about on the porch and sun myself while reading books for a week. To this day when I hear Al Stewart’s Time Passages, I associate it with The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I was a lazy record changer, and the album (remember I am talking vinyl here) would play over and over as I read through the 3 volumes of the Gulag. Usually during that week, friends would stop by and we would talk about things, have dinner and the drink a bit too much as college students tend to do, and we solved all life’s problems. Then I grew up.

I still bring books on vacation. I finished two that I had started earlier this year. One, The President, The Pope and The Prime Minister, Three Who Changed the World by John O’Sullivan, was very interesting. It discussed the role of Ronald Reagan, John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher in the end of the Cold War and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. A very one sided view of the Reagan Administration, as well as the Thatcher period. His approach to John Paul is even handed. Overall a very good read, but that may be that I agree with his premiss that the three above mentioned are the pushers and shakers that helped the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and with out their strong and steady wills, with lesser people in command, never would it have happened. Over all I would rate this one well up on a list of easy reads too. Not complicated and broken down so as to easily be interrupted and still pick it up and carry on as if no time has passed.

The second book, Christianity and the Transformation of the book, Origen, Eusibius and the Library of Caesarea by Anthony Grafton & Megan Williams, was amazing. The skills that these two authors, Origen and Eusebius, in the way they wrote and critically studied early Christian writings as well as pagan and late antiquity writings is amazing. In fact the very format of the book, as we know it today, is a direct descendant of these two men. I remember Fr. Gus talking about how St. Jerome had in his hands a copy of a book with the Hebrew, Greek books of the Bible. I now know what he had was the Hexapla.

The Hexapla was a book “written” by Origin that had a Greek equivalent for every Hebrew word. It contained not just the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, but two other Hebrew versions of the Old testament as well. What makes this such an amazing thing is that they were laid out in columns on a page so you could read across from the Hebrew word to the Greek equivalent to the text of each of the versions side by side. Where they differed in content Origin made diacritical marks and noted the difference for the reader. The reason for the quotation marks about written is that Origin’s hand may not have written the book, as copyist or scribes would have and he really isn’t writing a book as much as laying it out to be seen and read. He did write comments, and critical comments of origins of words and how they were used, but he is really not “writing” a book as much as presenting a book.

This last book was a good read and I have been trying to finish it while still reading on the ideas of Predestination and Free Will. It was a nice break to have some light reading to relax. I have one more I wanted to get done before Tuesday and my return to work, but that will have to wait until summer. Looks like I am back to the scholastic study of Predestination again and the lighter books will be put off for a few more weeks.

I had hoped to have pictures from vacation to post today, but Costco (at least the one I went to) was having difficulties with its processing machines and may not have my hour developed film ready until Tuesday! Oh well, I am sure we can all wait for that.

Brother Vincent F. Paletta, O.S.J.

Brother Vince Paletta was buried today. He was a wonder filled man. When the world would get dark when I was in College, he could shine a light on the darkness and make it go away. He was a happy man, yet he had a most unhappy life. He suffered from many pains in life, both physical and emotional. He was a devoted son, who loved and cared for his mother until her death. He suffered effects from a car crash he had been in from the late 50’s. He developed a liquid brain tumor that went undiagnosed for many years until it solidified. During the time while the tumor was undetected, he suffer extreme headaches and lost peripheral vision. He would have outburts that scared many, and an anger that would rage. Many thought he was going insane. When the tumor was at last found and removed, he suffered still from extreme headaches on occasions and his vision never returned to normal. Yet in all the time I knew Vince, he never complained about his ailments. He would laugh and say he had the vision of a hawk! (To which I would reply a dead hawk.) He laughed at his disabilities and learned to live with them.

Vince would go for a walk everyday down the hill at Mt. St. Joseph, a walk that lasted for 45 minutes to an hour. Everyday upon his return he would talk about all he saw, he did and what the dog did when he was walking. The walk seemed like a journey to a foreign country, when in actuality it was Vince being Vince. He enjoyed the simple pleasures of life. He would watch which flowers were blooming, which branch of a tree was falling, what tree the dog “watered” claiming at the end of a bad drought that all the trees on the Mount were “saved by the Zookalator watering each one”. (The Zookalator was a mutt named Joey who followed Vince everywhere.)

Vince named all of us with nicknames. One of us was Corazon, because he was hispanic and all hispanic songs have the word corazon in them. I was called Heinrich because of my always reading about the NAZIs and World War II. There was Chuck, stick, ganzo,Stevaroo and Chester. He found one unique aspect of us all and would give us names that we used to call each other by. It was an honor to be “named” by Vince. You had arrived and been called once he had a name for you.

As I said in the beginning, Vince was buried today. His body was ravaged by age and cancer and was laid to rest. I looked at him lying in his casket with his eyes closed and giggled. When we would walk in and find Vince sleeping in his chair in his “office” he would declare loudly that he was wide awake, he was “looking for holes in his eyelids!”. I smiled as I walked away from his grave today and wondered to myself, what nickname he is giving to God today?

A new toy

I have often heard the expression that men are just boys with newer bigger and more expensive toys. I guess that is true in my case. I just got a new scanner that will allow me to take my old slides from my previous trips to Europe and digitize them for computer viewing. I will also be able to burn them onto a CD and use them in my classroom. You would not believe how difficult it is to find a slide projector! In fact digital projectors cost less than slide projectors ever did cost! You can get a digital projector for about 150 USD and slid projectors of a good quality always started at about 250+ USD!

SO........ To share some of the slides I have converted. These pictures are from the Vatican Museum. The angles are an old fresco from a church that was destroyed. They saved the fragments that you see. Some seem distorted, but you must remember that they are on a curved surface, as they were on the inside of a dome. They are among my favorite frescos I have ever seen!

Fat Tuesday/Skinny Wednesday

This is something that I feel needs to be explained. Every year when the Lenten Season comes upon the Christian World, they jump into this frenzy of giving things up, not eating meat and especially it seems, sweets and candies go out the door until the Easter Bunny loads them up with chocolate bunnies and strange eggs. I guess it means something but lets look at it from the way it was originally intended.

The idea of fasting and abstinence (two different events by the way, fasting being eating only one meal and a snack for the other two, and abstinence which is the not eating of a particular food such as the meat of warm blooded animals on Fridays of Lent) has as it basis the idea that you would take the cash saved from eating less (fasting) or from eating less expensive foods (like red meats) and give that cash to the poor. In the middle ages and even into the late 1700's early 1800's beef was a rarity and an expensive meal. Fish on the other hand was cheap and easy to come by in most places, as major cities and towns were located on rivers. This served two purposes, one being water to drink, the other being fish to eat. It was also an economic advantage for moving goods from one place to another. But I digress, the main reason for not eating meat was to save the money, and then give that to the poor.

The idea that God likes it when we suffer, or that self imposed pain is a good thing that God encourages is not a Christian idea. To develop a strong self discipline is good in general, but it is not a road to salvation. The old idea that if something is good it must be sinful is outrightly wrong. That was the heresy of Jansenism, in Jansenist thought, human beings were born sinful, and without divine help a human being could never become good. Jansenism was officially outlawed by the Catholic Church in 1712. Yet many of the ideas of the Jasenists carry over in the overt ideas of fasting for the sake of the poor. That is a silly idea if you just think about it for a minute. “I fast to experience the suffering of the poor therefore the poor are better for my gift of suffering and becoming like them for that time. I have a better understanding of their pain and suffering.” No, you do better by fasting and giving the money you saved to a food bank to help relieve the suffering of the poor.

God does not relish the idea of his people in pain. God does not want everyone to be poor and hungry. God desires that we all be well fed, and happy. If we have more than someone else is not a sin, it is using our talents as given to us by God. Do we have a responsibility with extra goods and material things we have, yes we do. We need to share, we need to give to those who are less fortunate than us in talents and gifts. That is where fasting and abstinence come into play.

You see, it is far better to fast and abstain from bad habits than from food. We have focused on food, yet what God wants is for a people who are loving and caring. When I worked in Catholic Schools, I used to encourage my students NOT to give up candy, but to choose an aspect of their life where they were failing or felt they needed improvement. It could be being mean to a sibling or not being respectful. It could be in an area of their life that wanted to improve such as manners or courtesy. Every day during the 40 days of Lent, they were to address that issue and try either to change that behavior, if it was a bad behavior or make it a part of their life, if it were a good behavior. That is what God wants from us, not people who moan about what they cannot eat or have given up, but people who are trying to become better people.

Fasting is a nice idea, becoming better people is a better idea.

Questions

I am still reading Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica. I have encountered a question and I am in the midst of researching for an answer. It seems I am not alone in my quandary of what did Thomas mean when he says that all is "predestined" in the plan of Divine Providence. I have sought out "professional" help on this. I turned to one of the better scholastic teachers I had in my college years and asked him for help. I was relieved to find out that it is a question that is still in open debate and was given the name of a book (Predestination by Reginald Garrigou-lagrange) to find and to read. Lucky me, I have trouble pronouncing the man's last name yet alone taking this on as a light reading assignment! Needless to say a fool and his money (or his credit card) are soon parted. I found the book online at www.Powells.com . They specialize in hard to find books. They had it and for a MERE $22.50 I get a paperback edition of this tome to read.

The question I have is difficult to phrase, so let me try:

I recently read in the Summa the section on Fate and Divine Providence. In this section Thomas says that there is Fate, but that Fate is equal to Divine Providence. He mentions that the word Fate (L. fatum) is derived from the latin word fari which means to foretell. He then refers to Augustine and Bothius who revile at the use of the word Fate as it is used by infidels (pagans) and may be misunderstood by the christian. Then he goes on to say that the christian should understand that Fate = Divine Providence, and that we should use this word in place of Fate as not to confuse the two. Thomas equates the two, Fate and preordained Divine Providence. When I read this, it sounded more like Calvinism. The concept of free will (and I understand that all out comes of free will are in the knowledge and understanding of God) does away with the concept of Fate all together.

The question is, what exactly is Thomas trying to express about Fate, and are we Fated in life or are we acting in Free Will? In Divine Providence is there the concept of Fate, thus making the use of Free Will a mute point?

So, with the information I have received that this is an idea still open to debate as to what exactly is meant by the terms Fate, Predestination, Divine Providence and Free Will, I journey forth on my trek to knowledge and understanding.

A quick sidebar here, in that Augustine understood the word Fate and Fates more in the understanding of what we would call astrology today, thus his aversion to the use of the word and how Aquinas, living almost a 1000 years later looks at the word differently. Thus I need to see how I would understand the word myself today, and try and revamp that idea as well.

Looks like I have my summer reading list all lined up!

Choose Wisely

Of all the things that Aquinas covers in his Summa, his discussion of free will and choice are to me the most interesting. The intellect is the key for most of what Aquinas dictates as the "image and likeness of God" that we has humans possess. Since we are material beings, made of matter as well as of spirit (which he focuses on as the intellect) we are the lower level beings. We apprehend ideas in our mind, we do not have the reality in our mind. We have an understanding of an object, we do not know the object in its reality. We can only know through the senses, thus our understanding and our knowledge is limited.

That alone opens a lot of doors to the idea of "freedom of choice" or of choosing right from wrong. It allows for a lot of "grey" area in moral teaching as we know each person has a different apprehension of this as they are understood in our mind. Two witnesses to the same event have different memories and truths. A person is neither focused nor in sync with another at a level that they both see the same thing and understand the same event in the same way. Take this thinking and this logic to its fullest and you have a true libertarian understanding of moral "truths". Yet, we all accept I hope, right is right and wrong is wrong. As for degree of culpability we all differ.

I look at the Muslim world and how they choose their governments, They are usually autocratic, with few governmental entities. There is no need for many of the entities, because in Islam, a lot of what governments would do, is in fact done by the local Mosques and the charities that they operate. From our advantage point in the west, we see this as religious interference in governmental affairs, they see it as normal and good. Alas, who is right or wrong is a matter of location, culture and religious belief.

But here in the United States, there is a great divide over many issues that could be simply resolved if (ah, that fine word of indecisiveness) we would just look at things differently. The idea that all countries must be a democracy as an example. Some of the greatest ideas came to us from people who lived and thrived under monarchs. Why is democracy so important. The majority can be wrong you know! We saw that in the democratic election of Adolf Hitler’s party to the Reichstag in 1932. They choose poorly. So too with the Italians and the election of the Fascist Party in with Mussolini in the 1920’s. Democracy does not always mean that just because the majority choose freely that all is well. And when you look at how choices are made in the United States today, with minority opinions and ideas, using courts to enforce their ideas onto the majority (yes, both the right and the left use the courts to this end, it depends on if you are in that minority whether you think it is a good idea to utilize the system for you minority view, be it the saving of a tree to the saving of a job) is not a true democratic ideal. Here you have a minority idea being enforced on the majority. The role of our courts have changed from interpreters of the law, to enforcers of the law.

Here is the crux of this rambling essay, freedom of choice is made with the apprehended reality we have, NOT the reality as it is. Thus, all our choices are poor choices. You see, it doesn’t matter if we live under a dictator, a monarch or in a democracy, the individual choices we make will always be flawed because we seldom look beyond our own comfort zones for information. I used Islam deliberately in this essay because just the mention of it makes people angry and they refuse to see that there are good ideals and practices in the faith of Islam. Have they read about the ideas of the faith or talked to Muslims about their faith? Just one example of not moving outside of our zone to look for more information to enhance our “apprehension of the reality” we are going to judge and act with our free will.

Knowledge is key, understanding is the lock. Together they make us better humans and better humans make better choices.

Merry Christmas!

Well, if you didn't get a Christmas Card, it is my fault as I ran out of pictures and cards! SO, for all of you who have to get your Christmas Card fix, here we go! From Cathy and myself, Merry Christmas and a Happy and WONDER-FILLED New Year!