Advice to Students (And All of Us)

I came across the following post giving advice to Catholic students about to leave for University from Paulinus at +In Hoc Signo Vinces+

He had found it in the Catholic Soldier's Prayerbook (1942) - I found it very moving, but I don't think it needs to be restricted to students and soldiers... I think all of us would do well to keep it in mind. Temptation is not a sin, but in the modern rush to prevent people from getting over-scrupulous, the duty to avoid occasions of sin (where we know we will be tempted) is no longer preached about as often as it should be...

...that's as "theological" as I get, being a laywoman who knows her place! So I guess that's a challenge to all you priests out there to get into the pulpit with some hard-hitting sermons ("homilies" sounds so wishy-washy!!)

"Remember that no amount of prayers will keep you from sin unless you do your part and keep out of temptation. St Paul warns us that Faith without good works is dead. He also tells us that provided temptation is not of our making God will surely give us the grace to master it. Don’t weaken yourself by thinking that you are certain to fall. That is fifth column work against yourself. On the other hand don’t presume; don’t put yourself in danger. He that loveth the danger shall surely perish in the danger."

And a line which hit home hard:

"At heart Pontius Pilate was not a bad man."

BTW, before anyone gets all upset about the idea of a woman knowing her place, there are one or two great women saints of the Church who knew their place too... St Teresa of Avila and St Catherine of Sienna spring immediately to mind (and they were not to be messed with!) I'm no saint, but I like their attitude ! So, Fr Tim, Fr Nicholas, Fr John and Fr Stephanos - consider yourselves "tagged"... I shall look forward to reading the sermons once they've been blogged!

New Disorder Diagnosed

Curt Jester has highlighted a real breakthrough in medical science. Apparently there is a disorder, hitherto undiagnosed, which is similar to colour-blindness and which impairs a person's ability to see rubrics in the Roman Missal, and thus affecting their ability to "say the black, do the red."

Luckily, help is at hand. Click HERE for details of treatment programmes being introduced at a centre near you.

Unfortunately, it would appear that the condition is irreversible in Liturgists. Psychological investigation reveals that,

"For some reason all liturgist given an ink blot test saw liturgical dancers in every pattern. They also had the tendency to move about the furniture in the psychologist's office for no discernable reason."

Variation on a Blonde Joke

I used to send these things out by email (if they made me laugh) but a friend pointed out that really, if I thought they were funny enough, I should put them on the blog and see who bothered to read them rather than adding to voluminous quantities of junk mail... especially since many of them seem to have the "send this to five people and see what happens, you'll have a nice surprise please don't break the chain" line added - which only gets up my nose, and I often delete those ones straight off...

I heard this one as a blonde joke, but was told it shortly after in another version, and it sounded even better, so here goes...

A well-dressed man drives up to a field, gets out and walks over to speak to the farmer. "Excuse me," he said, "but if I can tell you the size of your farm, the type of crops you have in the top field and their productivity, can I have one of your sheep?"

The farmer agrees, so the man continues: "Well, your farm is 150 hectares, the top field contains winter wheat and you're currently at a yield of 75%."

The farmer reluctantly concedes that the information is correct, and invites him to help himself to a sheep. The man picks one up, and starts to walk off.

The farmer stops him, and suggests another wager. "I bet you're one of those hot-shot consultants," he says. "Why yes," replies the man, "But how did you know?"

"Well," replies the farmer, "You turn up uninvited, demand payment for giving me information which I already know, and you don't know the first thing about the subject you're spouting on about...."

"...so can I now please have my sheepdog back!"

Blogging Blues

I was obviously getting too confident, and so it was time for another spanner in the works. I had switched to Beta Blogger, and tried to update my template. Oh dear... big mistake. For some reason the oh-so-easy-to-manage-and rearrange layouts wouldn't allow themselves to be managed and rearranged. I couldn't click and drag and kept getting weird and indecipherable error messages whenever I tried to edit anything...

...even more worryingly, the page elements on the layout then appeared to disappear when I tried to edit them...

...luckily I decided to have a look at the html code (even though this is probably more inaccessible to me than Ancient Greek - or modern Greek for that matter!) and, after I recovered from the first message (ie. html editing is not available, yet) I spotted a button which seemed to promise to revert to the old layout. Phew.

...mind you, I'm such an erratic blogger that most of you probably didn't even notice...