Chateau Lloyd

Storms swept through my state last week and my leafy college town took heavy damage from straight-line winds.  Several houses in my neighborhood had trees blown on top of them.  Chateau Lloyd was unscathed, but did lose power for about 20 hours.

The whole experience, from wailing sirens in the middle of a storm-tossed night to the eerie silence after it passed, free of any electric buzz, made a profound impression on my grandchildren, who were staying with us.

When the sun rose, I want to start our venerable generator but the fuel line had dried out and cracked (it uses propane) and so after fruitlessly calling about replacement parts, I went out to buy a new one.

By noon the replacement was up and running, and I breathed a sigh of relief that the foods in our refrigerator and freezer would survive.  After those appliances ran for while, we contemplated shifting the power elsewhere, since my generator is not a "whole house" variety.

The upshot of this time was a discussion about prioritizing power use, and how to best expend our limited fuel supply.  Should the outage last, we would turn the generator off overnight, knowing that the rejuvenated appliances would easily sustain and 8-hour pause.

We had been through this before, in the great ice storm of 2013, but of course winter is different than summer.  In winter, the fear is cold, not heat spoiling food.  The furnace was the primary focal point.

In both cases, though, we were forced to live with new constraints.  Power now had to be distributed via extension cord, and budgeted against the generator's capacity.

It is all too easy to take the flip of a switch for granted, and assume that our machine-dominated life is both normal and natural.  In the scope of human history, it is neither.

When the power came back - ahead of schedule - I led the family in a prayer and they embraced it with joy.  Certainly it was a welcome reminder to me to walk through life with much more gratitude for the little things.

The Episcopal church in the US never ceases to amuse.  In January, a parish priest decided to deny Communion to his congregation because he considered society to be too racist.

Now comes the news that the bishop in charge of refugee resettlement has decided it would be better to shut the whole thing down than fund the resettlement of a few dozen white South Africans.  They have a history, you see, and one the Episcopalians feel disqualifies them from aid.

Theologically speaking, this is not a recent development.  Particularly during the age of the slave trade, there was a Christian heresy that argued that black Africans carried the "mark of Cain" and were therefore accursed, fully deserving enslavement.  The Mormon Church adopted this concept and stuck with it until the 1970s, when a "new revelation" declared it to be void.

The concept is fully in alignment with predestination, and if people think the Problem of Evil is a tough nut to crack, the notion that a loving and merciful God has consigned most of humanity to hell without any possibility of escape is insurmountable.

It is one think to argue that evil exists because of free will and the constant tendency of humans to rebel against God.  Simply asserting that God is good in spite of the obvious injustice of damning people regardless of their actions is a much tougher argument to make, and in fact, I utterly reject it.

But it is of a pace with the complete collapse of the Church of England, which has been without an Archbishop of Canterbury since early January.  A vacancy that long in the Catholic Church would be a crisis and a scandal, and that it gets so little coverage proves just how irrelevant the Anglican Communion has become.

We're almost halfway through May, and it's unclear which yards are participating in No Mow May and which are simply victims of a vigorous spring and/or overdue mower maintenance.

Until yesterday, I was in the latter category.  The battery on our venerable riding mower had been getting weak, and a charged it for several days, but it failed to start.  Further efforts with a battery charger failed, and in despair I jumped it with my car, which worked.

I have this problem with not realizing how old batteries are, and as a result run them to the point where they need constant recharging and/or boosting.  I did this with my car and now I'm doing it with the mower.

There are a few No Mow May signs up, but previous participants have dropped out.  My neighbors have a toddler now, and the prospect of the little squirt emerging from the grass covered in bug bites has convinced them that virtue signaling has its limits.

And the rapid onset of spring, with balmy temperatures and plentiful rain has caused a surge of growth, and if the mower is still being serviced, things can get awkward.

For a brief moment, my wife even seemed sympathetic to the cause of the pollinators, but then the first yellow jacket showed up and required immediate elimination.  Similar disregard for pollination potential occurred when a wasp was discovered in the Great Room.

I'm guessing next weekend will see the garden go in, and then the first pesticide application will be uncorked.

Summer is just around the corner.

It was interesting to see the reaction to Pope Leo XIV's election yesterday.  It was something of a masterclass of distortion, click-bait and ill-informed pronouncements.  I figured it best to wait a day and let the chaff be separated from the wheat so that I could form an informed opinion.

Not that it matters, but I think he will do well.  Despite constant spamming and distortion, he is not a rabid progressive but a thoughtful Catholic steeped in the Augustinian tradition.  This sets him very much apart from his predecessor, who disdained tradition and rejoiced in chaos.

Leo has thus far been his polar opposite, using traditional vestments and even conducting his first Mass in Latin (albeit using the Novus Ordo) format.

It's been interesting seeing people who initially panicked over his selection come around to realize that he's quite orthodox and always has been.  Of course, there is now a permanent group of Catholic media whose only source off income is convincing its audience that the pope is a communist.

If nothing else, his elevation has helped to conclusively demonstrate which conservative Catholics are serious and which are just their for the hot takes and clickbait.

And for what comes next, I remain resigned to God's will and filled with hope that better days are at hand.

For Catholic media, the imminent conclave is a combination of the Super Bowl and an old-school political nominating convention.  Everyone has a favorite team, preferred outcomes and wants to find some way to keep score.

I'm going to turn this over the Holy Spirit because that's who ultimately gets to call the shots.  A lot of the coverage seems to be talking for the sake of talking.

That said, I do hope that we get a pope who will calm things down, lift the restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass and perhaps heal the ancient schisms with Copts and Orthodox.

Is that too much to ask?

I first encountered David Horowitz through his "Heterodoxy" newspaper, which was distributed around campus in the 1990s.  It was a breath of fresh air, and part of the intellectual current that pushed me into a more independent - and often conservative - point of view.

I've always been something of a reactionary, and while I entered college as a Democrat, by the time I graduated, I was deeply dissatisfied with the party, which was already abandoning its principles to political expediency.

I next encountered Horowitz's work online, and regular read him for many years, but it was not until comparatively recently that I purchased Radical Son, his autobiography first published in 1998.  Horowitz was a classic "red diaper" baby, raised from birth by his Jewish Communist parents to carry out the long-awaited revolution.

In a sense, it's a secular conversion story, but what sets it apart is the penetrating analysis of the mentality behind the politics of the New Left.  Marxism is a rival religion, not an economic or political program, which is why people who believe in it have a quasi-religious zeal.  Horowitz laid out very clearly that the reason why so many American Jews "lived like Episcopalians but voted like Puerto Ricans" was because the synagogue had been replaced by the Party committee room.

This is still true today.

Many people of his generation followed the same path, and American popular culture reflected this drift through TV shows like Family Ties, where a hippy couple end up with apolitical or even conservative children, all the while living the middle class lifestyle they once condemned.

Having found his new faith, he carried it forward with zeal, and it is interesting to note what while many 80s conservatives turned against Trump, he instead embraced him.

Horowitz was a minor influence on my intellectual development, but an important one.  The seeds planted by reading his paper in the dorm cafeteria took deep roots and have remained with me ever since.  May he rest in peace.

Old trade paperbacks are more than a good value; they're often a time capsule.  Yes, there's the text of the book, but the blurbs, the quotes from reviewers and even the advertisements in the back that really set it in a specific time and place.

I bought A Burnt-Out Case simply because I wanted to read more of Graham Greene.  I knew nothing about the book, but the pull-quote featured on the cover assured me that it was his best work.

Well, I've only read three of his books and, I think it's in third place.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy it.  It's quite the page-turner and if I had been able to read it on a reliable basis, I would absolutely have gotten more out of it.  When you're reading a novel, taking days off at a time really disrupt the flow.

The plot is interesting if a bit contrived:  a famous Catholic architect grows tired of the world and seeks seclusion and meaning at a leper hospital in the Congo.  The title is derived from the name the doctors give to lepers who have lost all their fingers and toes and have become disease-free.  Such a person is a "burnt-out case," and it soon clear that the main character (known only as "Querry") is spiritually the same.

It is full of vivid description and Green's affectionate satire of Catholic clergy.  It starts slow, and picked up speed as it moves towards yet another unpredictable ending.  I appreciate Greene for that.  His endings are surprising, but never contrived.  They could have been "just so," but are not.  I'm looking forward to reading more of his work.

The news this morning that Pope Francis passed away seemed oddly fitting given all that has been going on.  I imagine that he held on for one more Paschal Feast and, with the task accomplished, shrugged off the mortal coil.

He brought enthusiasm and chaos to the Catholic Church, and it seemed inevitable that a quieter, more consistent candidate will be chosen to succeed him.

For all the problems he caused, the Church is growing, vocations are up, and there is a real possibility that the schisms between Rome, the Copts and the Easter Orthodox may well be resolved.  Certainly, I think there is more sympathy for a less authoritarian papacy, and some sort of stricture may well be enough to resolve long-standing disputes.

Papal politics are famously opaque, but one gets a sense that Francis' turbulent tenure has been exhausting.  Even his liberal allies in the College of Cardinals have to be breathing a sigh of relief that there will be no more off-hand statements that require a careful walk back.

And that's really all the Church needs at this point.  

At several points this week, I intended to write something, but events invariably called me away from the keyboard.

I didn't resist because real life should take priority.  Each day I've gone to bed relatively early and immediately fallen into restful, healing slumber.

This Easter will be one of my busiest in years, and there remains much to be done today.  Indeed, the operational tempo around here is probably not going to  ease until June, but it is all positive, productive work.

In the wider world, the usual anti-Catholic antics took place, but they seem to be either ineffective or counterproductive.  The report that 40% of young adults in England go to Catholic Mass each week sent shock waves through the religious community.  By contrast, only 20% attend Anglican services.  While England is something of a basket case at the moment, its future within the Church seems bright.  I can't help think that the nonsensical attempt to ban silent prayer has people wondering what it is like.

I must be powerful stuff if you're willing to lock up old ladies over it.

France is having another banner year of adult conversions, and the final number seems close to 18,000, which is yet another increase over the previous year.  This trend has been going on for a while, and while 18,000 in a nation of millions seems paltry, it is happening year after year.  Indeed, much of Europe seems to be seeing similar trends.

The great exception, of course, is Germany, where the numbers of Lutheran and Catholic alike are crashing down.  The actions of the Catholic leadership can only be explained as either insane or demonic.  It is insane because all of the "reforms" they are pushing have already been tried by state Protestant churches for decades without any positive effect.  Indeed, the one comfort Catholics might derive is that they will soon outnumber the Lutherans because the rate of loss among Protestants is higher.

The other predictable result will be schism and excommunication, which is why I say it is demonic.  They know that Rome is not going to bend the knee on questions of core doctrine like sexual morality and the ordination of women.  

In a sense, this challenge has been coming for a long time, and presumably the liberal Catholics who dominate the upper ranks of the German Church see this is their last opportunity to ram through their long-desired 'reforms.'

Another miracle was announced this week at Lourdes, bringing the grant total to 72.  It should be noted that this list is far from comprehensive - these are only the most well-documented and completely inexplicable healings.  There are plenty more where people found healing, but it was within the tiniest margin of probability.  

Finally, archeologists working beneath the Holy Sepulchre have found evidence that there was once a garden on the site, closely following the Gospel  of John.  It is interesting that scientists constantly denigrate the Catholic Church, yet it tirelessly subjects its beliefs to scientific validation.  

Over the past few months, I've noticed the appearance of a strange new creature: the Calvinist Catholic.

These seems like an oxymoron, but as with so many things, contradiction can often coexist in the disturbed mind.

Catholic Calvinists are people who have bought fully into the idea that the Utterly Depraved are incapable of doing good.  One can never judge them by the fruits of their action, but only by their perceived motivations.

The Case Zero for this is of course Donald Trump.  Objectively speaking, Trump has been the most pro-life president of my lifetime.  Not only did his appointments overturn Roe v. Wade, but his subsequent actions (including recent executive orders), have further hammered abortion providers, forcing Planned Parenthood to close numerous clinics.

Yet when presented with these facts, one gets a remarkable set of excuses, such as Trump was motivated by DEI to hit Planned Parenthood, and the pro-life aspect was unintentional.  Similarly, his economic and governmental reforms are always characterized as chaotic and random even when it is clear that they are moving an a long-planned progression.

Maybe this is vanity.  Maybe the Catholics in question have much knowledge of theology and little of economics or politics.

It is tempting to write this off as the all-too-familiar Trump Derangement Syndrome, but these people are otherwise sensible and important voices in the Church.  It is illogical to expect them to change their opinion of Trump personally, nor should anyone ask that they do so.  He is a polarizing figure.

But when we move into the realm of policy, such distinctions assume a secondary character.  This is especially true when there is no moderate alternative.  The opposition has wedded itself to abortion without any limits at all, and their other policies are equally morally abhorrent.

When Trump is wrong, Catholics should speak out, but their criticisms will be much more effective when coming from voices that were hitherto friendly and supportive.  Simply carping at him non-stop, qualifying any praise while indulging in personal attacks are unwise and counterproductive.  It is also not particularly Christian.