"Holy Diver, you've been down too long in the midnight sea..."

Just got back from the Tuesday Night "P&W". My first time going this semester, but I decided I should give it a chance this semester as well. It really is different each semester. Anyways, I was still kind of in a Force One or Two Wig-Out on the Harburg Scale, which is down from my high of 4 today and certainly down from a solid 9 yesterday, so I wasn't really feeling like going. But I decided to anyways and God surprised me. It was actually pretty darn solid worship. Not quite to the level of Man Praise (which, I realized I haven't written about yet, but it was frickadiculous) but really... /nothing/ can beat over 30 men praising together. That's why I love the Christ the King Men's Retreat in February. Maybe some of the other guys from Ann Arbor will go back with me this year...

So anyways... I guess the news is that God loves me. Um... nothing /new/ exactly, but just as earth-shattering as the first day I heard Him say it. Yeah...

"Oh what's becoming of me..."

-L

"Sitting here watching you sitting here watching me sitting here watching you..."

So, it's been a while. I'm not even going to try to sum up all of the things that have been going on. School has been fairly easy and even pretty interesting so far. This weekend has been a little tiering seeing as I have two three-page papers due at 1PM on Monday. But I already have the first one done and most of the quotations for the second one so... hopefully I can dash it off in the couple of hours I have tomorrow morning.

Last Monday, Odin led Meditation on St. Francis' Meditation on the Our Father. That was pretty profound. It was kind of one of those "God Coincidences" because I have definitely been meditating a lot on the Our Father ever since late summer. Everyone generally has a member of the Trinity that they're most comfortable relating to God as, and conversely many people have a person of the Trinity that they are less comfortable thinking of God as or praying to. My "less comfortable relating to" person is definitely the Father so I have been meditating on that a lot in an attempt to improve in that area. It has been super-fruitful so far. Maybe I'll write more about that later, maybe you can just ask me if you see me. Anyways, the main thing that has struck me over the past couple months is how Christ taught the disciples the Our Father not in response to the question "Lord, teach us a prayer" but rather "Lord, teach us how to pray". Therefore, the Our Father is not so much "a prayer" as it is a guide to the prayerful heart. It should form the background to every prayer that we say, forming our attitudes for approaching our Ever-loving Father. In keeping with my "theme" (I guess you could call it that?) of total surrender to God's will, the lines that struck me the most were, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven" and just how essential it is that those lines be behind every prayer that I say. Because, honestly, if the Lord answers that one then we're alright. No matter what.

I wrote another poem on Friday morning in adoration. I'm not sure it's anything too profound, but it's an issue that I think about every now and then. Just sort of the issue of loving things/people other than God (as much as anything that He created can be /other/ than Him). Yeah, I pretty much always end up on the side of "Well, you can't go wrong with love, so long as it's actual love!" I couldn't think of a good title for the longest time, so I just titled it after the Bible verse that inspired it. Just an FYI for those following along at home, it refers to the verses as they appear in the Douay-Rheims. I think some Bibles have it a verse off. Go here for that reference, in any case.

Ecclesiastes 5:17-19 -9/15/06

Oh Lord, I love the world around me much,

And not just simply as a type of You

Nor as a metaphor for what You do.

I love the good I see, and it as such.

Is this akin to rabbit loving hutch,

Instead of He who built the shelter there,

And do I in this love of creatures err?

Should I despise embraces for Your touch?

No, rather let the ox partake of grain

And let the laborer enjoy his wage

(Though I am so unworthy of my pay),

Nor should I from the gifts You give refrain.

I do not think that one could find a sage

Who’d say, “If you love Light then hate the day.”

I should have been asleep 30 minutes ago, but I'm just leaving to take a shower right now. Oh well... after tomorrow's over I can sleep easier.

"I'm waiting for something that is too real..."

-L

"Can we try for right now, free of doubt. If you give the chance I could try and figure out..."

So, today was a pretty big day! It was the Household Olympics! Although they are held every year, this was actually my first time participating. Freshman year, I didn't really care enough about households to go "compete" in their name. Then last year, I was working all day Saturday. So I wasn't sure if I'd like it or not.

There was a costume contest associated with the Olympics that we didn't participate in because we basically didn't have any feasible ideas. So we skipped that part. We had an awesome team though. There were probably about five brothers on it, and seven freshmen. They were all pretty-much from Thomas' smallgroup, which was awesome. They are a great group of kids, and it is really encouraging to see them take an interest in household. For the rest of the day though (well... for three hours at least) we ran around competing in various events. The highlights of the Olympics were:

-creaming the Living Stones in a tug-of-war. I mean, seriously. We had them down in two pulls.

-doing pretty awesome at the stocking-head battle. It really can't be explained any better than that, except perhaps to clarify that the stockings were actually pantyhose.

-beating the record at the egg-toss. We only beat it by one foot in the recorded match, but we hit the highest marker they had set up (four more feet out) several times while we were practicing.

-losing a fearsome tug-of-war match to Foot of the Cross. We were at a standstill for seriously, like, five minutes before some of our unshod members started slipping and we lost. But it was still awesome.

So, yeah. After the Olympics we went straight into Lord's Day and pretty much all the kids who were on our team came. Most of them, it was their second Lord's Day with us, because they went with Thomas during Orientation Week. They are a pretty solid group of guys, and I am really glad to see that they love the campus and love the idea of households. It seems like each successive year is getting more and more excited about households, though I could be wrong. It is really encouraging though. Yeah.

So there was a FOP tonight, but I didn't go. After my pretty awesome talk with Anthony Muse on the way to the coordinator's retreat (he is the FOP Music Team co-leader this year, and has pretty much the same vision for FOPs as I do. i.e., less introspective/healing oriented stuff and more focus on God and praising Him) I really do intend to go to at /least/ one FOP this semester, if not many. But tonight I was pretty tired and just wanted to sit around. So after brushing off the usual "You don't want to go to the FOP? Are you feeling alright?", I read about 5 pages of Erasmus and played a good deal of Call of Duty 2 with the fellas. All-in-all a pretty fun evening, but there is actually still more.

See, lured by the promise of "free pizza", I threw on my Hawaiian shirt and went to the "Caribbean Party" in the JCWC after the FOP. So it turned out that the pizza cost $1/slice, so I bought two anyways. The rest of the evening was spent hanging out with first Thomas, Ken and JP because I came with them, then hanging out with Claire and Tina because Tina is down here visiting for the weekend, and it had been a while since I'd talked to her, then hanging out with Liz and Phil because well... the former is always a good time, and I haven't talked to Phil in quite some time either. So all in all a very successful social evening. :)

But indeed, I am not done yet! On my way back to the dorm, I met Nate, who informed me that SOL was inducting three girls tonight. So we gathered together all our art skills/strange, sad little minds and pumped out some construction-paper signs. There were actually some pretty darn good ones in there. So yeah: Maria Bagel, Littledorf and Annagall are all in SOL now. That's kind of fun. We all went over and hung out with them after we put the signs up on the Bagel/dorf door. That was fun as well. It had been a while since I had hung out with the sisters, but they are always a bundle of fun. Christa was there (well, I mean, of course... why wouldn't she be?) and, although we never exchanged a single word the entire time, somehow it wasn't really awkward for one of the first times since last February. At least, it didn't feel awkward to me. And... I dunno. That's kind of big. It made me happy...

Anyways. God moves in really incredible ways. I went to confession to Fr. Conrad yesterday, and my spirits have been lifted ever since. God works His plan of salvation so beautifully in my life, and all that I have to do is wait for His signal to act. There are so many things that I don't know, but I find my only certainty in this: that the loving Father is watching over me.

"I'm kind of scared because I don't know how.

But I'm watching the close calls and catching my breath now."

-L

"Well you are worth more than the man I am, sad and in love..."

I wrote something tonight. I think the idea came to me yesterday. It is based off of one of Aesop's Fables, though I admit to having entirely recontextualized it. I haven't put it on the website yet, partially because Geocities is blocked by the Internet here, and partially because I am still somewhat uncertain as to whether I should put it in a relatively well-established section, or use it to start a new one altogether. But I guess that's really what the poem's about in the first place...

Anyways, a sonnet. Strange semi-Spenserian, semi-Shakespearian rhyme-scheme. The title is the ephemeral "fifteenth line" that I really wish I could have included, but alas: my desire to write sonnets precludes that desire.

"... The Answer That You Give, I Will Attend" -9/1/06

Oh tell me, Phoebus, this I have in hand

And trembling keep thus clutched unto my breast

So long without the sun and without rest

Is there a hope that it has strength to stand

Much less attempt the flight it does demand?

This bird, oh Phoebus, underneath my cloak

That flaps its wings to hear your shining name

Is its small heart too strong for me to tame?

Its quivering wings too strong to e'er be broke,

Except perhaps by any word you spoke?

This question, Phoebus, does on you depend:

Does this small life deserve to live or end?

"Marking miles of martyrs

Of better men, of better men than me

And I wanted to tell you, I just didn't know how"

-L