Thanksgiving Dinner

I forgot to buy squash, which we usually have on Thanksgiving, so all we had for Thanksgiving dinner was roast turkey with bread stuffing, mashed potatoes, baked (microwaved) yams, gravy, cranberry sauce, home baked mince and pumpkin pies with sage cheese. The yams were there for the first time in a long time. Actually, we used to have sweet potatoes, but all I could find in the store was yams, and I think they're basically the same thing anyway. I got them because my brother likes them. I never really cared for them, but I had some nice sweet potato in a restaurant recently, so they're back on my radar screen.

Things that used to be part of the meal when we had way more than two people to eat it included, in addition to the items mentioned above, relish plate of celery and stuffed green olives, potato stuffing, scalloped oysters, creamed onions, and steamed pudding with foamy custard sauce in adult and children's versions and hard sauce.

Happy Thanksgiving

I want to wish all my American readers a very Happy Thanksgiving day. However you celebrate it, or not, I hope you can see many good things in your lives, whether they are special to you or part of being in this world. And I hope you can be grateful to Nature's God (as Jefferson put it) for giving us all the good that exists.

It's going to be a busy time for me. I've baked the pies, but tomorrow, after I get home from Mass, I've got to clean all the dirty pots and pans sitting in the kitchen make the stuffing, stuff and roast the turkey, make the cranberry sauce, boil and mash the potatoes, bake the sweet potatoes in the microwave, cook the giblets, make the gravy, and clear the dining room table of the stacks of accumulated mail. On Friday, I'll be going to a symphony concert in the afternoon, and to dinner with friends thirty miles away in the evening.

So if I'm not commenting as much as you're used to, that's the reason.

Have a great day and weekend, everybody!

Theology of the Body — 2010/11/20

"In the mystery of God's creation, sexual attraction is a call to communion. Lust is a lie. It keeps us from hearing the call to self-giving inscribed in the body itself. Men have always been attracted to the feminine form, and women to the masculine. This, in itself, is nor lust. … It is one thing for a man to be aware of the value of sexuality among the other riches of a woman. It is another to reduce all the riches of her femininity to a single value — sex.
"Lust obscures the significance of the body and the worth of the person. … Lust in the heart aims not to establish a communion of persons, but only to satisfy the sexual urges of the body.
"According to Jesus, this reduction of the person can be expressed in a single look. In the man's heart, the woman ceases to be valued as a whole person, as Eve was valued by Adam, and instead becomes an object of lust."

I think this bit clarifies things greatly, so I'd like to repeat what seem to me to be the most significant sentences. Men have always been attracted to the feminine form, and women to the masculine. This, in itself, is not lust. … Lust in the heart aims not to establish a communion of persons, but only to satisfy the sexual urges of the body.


Obviously, for us homosexuals, lust toward women isn't a big problem, but I think this is useful to think about with respect to our attractions toward men, whether we believe, as I do, that all sexual activity with the same sex is wrong, or we believe that homosexual activity is not necessarily always wrong.

Nate Levesque and Rapha — The Return of the Bloggers

Two bloggers whom I have followed have resumed after being away for a while.

Nate Levesque is in 12th grade in Torrington Connecticut. He has been trying to cope with parents who constantly belittle him. It seems to me that he has begun to achieve some success. I'd suggest going back to the beginning of the blog, last March, to get an idea of what he's had to deal with and how well he's coping. If you feel that your situation is hopeless, here is one guy's experience that shows that it gets better when you don't settle for the way it has been. He calls the blog HJK73, and he has another one called The Philosophy of Nate, in which he gives his views on new technology — recently some thoughts on Windows 7. Check them both out. He's a guy who has had a bit of a hard time. I know some people have it even worse than he did, but what I think is great is that he decided not to take it anymore. And even now I'm sure a word of encouragement would be welcome, and his story can give some hope to others.

Rapha is a 20 year old Brazilian who is studying engineering. His blog is titled Sudden Explosions. He used to post as Maskboy (not to be confused with Mirrorboy), and he told about some of his struggles as a gay man just coming to terms with his orientation. I'm looking forward to learning how he's doing now that he has started to blog again. Check him out.

Seth the Waiter et al.

On November 5, there was the first regular "social evening" at the Harvard Musical Association (meaning chamber music concert followed by a supper or refreshments), and as usual I went to the Scollay Square for dinner. Seth the Waiter was there this time and he greeted me cordially. There was also a new busboy, who was rather attractive and seemed more interested in doing his job than the one they had last winter (who looked like Dustin Pedroia, only taller).

I told Seth a bit about my trip to Germany and Ireland. He had driven a bit in New Zealand when he accompanied his sister there last winter, so he knew what it's like driving on the left. (I still have to tell you about the trip and maybe post some photos and links to other photos and videos. If I had more self-discipline and weren't such a procrastinator, maybe I'd have gotten to it by now.)

Seth asked about the book, as always. It was touching the holy, the same one I'd been reading at Petit Robert Central two weeks earlier. Seth expressed polite interest but wasn't as fascinated as the waitress there had been. He told me of a couple of books he was reading/had recently read: The Shadow of the Wind and Water for Elephants. Links are to New York Times reviews of the books. (With my recent trip to Ireland still in mind, I thought he said "Waterford Elephants." LOL He wrote the titles for me, because I knew I'd never remember them.) At some point he also made a passing mention of his girlfriend.

The busboy was reasonably attentive and smiled nicely as he removed the plates.

They used to have a hanger steak item on the menu, which got removed when they did their second round of going to less expensive items. But it was back as a special, and I had it. I think the sauce was different. This time it was a rather nondescript brown gravy, whereas previously it hadn't been thickened — more like a deglazing of the pan with red wine. Well, it was still a decent meal.

Fail?

You may have to be of a certain age to appreciate this.

Be sure to check out the comments.

Timmy

Timmy Abbros died on October 3, surrounded by the love of his parents and brothers. He had two blogs. The first was titled Timmy Waiting for God. For some incomprehensible and unstated reason, Blogger deleted it. So he started a second one called Timmy, with a url which said timmystillwaiting. If you never saw it, please check it out. He was an amazing guy. He had health problems which had him frequently spending time in hospital, but he always managed to write humorously about it. In fact, his ability to take all sorts of incidents and make really funny jokes about them was really special. He was also very kind-hearted, which shows clearly in his blog. What he never mentioned in all the time I read his blogs was the high level of physical pain in which he lived every day. We only learned of it when his older brother Lee told us, after he died. Timmy never complained to us about it.

November 3 was unavailable so I am having a Mass said for him in my parish as close to the traditional "month's mind" date as possible, November 5. It is my earnest hope and prayer that the God for whom he waited has swept him up in a loving embrace in which there is no more pain or trouble, but only unending joy. May God console his family in their grief, and may we all meet him in Heaven.

Theology of the Body — 2010/11/03

Continuing my sporadic series of excerpts from Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body in Simple Language by Sam Torode, ©Philokalia Books


"In the Wisdom literature [of the Old Testament], lust is often compared to fire. …
"… [I]tcreates an insatiable desire to satisfy the body and its senses. … In its restless pursuit of satisfaction, lust drowns out the voice of conscience and dulls sound thinking. …
"This was the image of lust familiar to Jesus and his audience. While the men described in Proverbs and Sirach have already committed adultery, Christ takes a step back. Before adultery is committed in the body, he says, it is commited in the heart, through the eyes.
"The way we look reveals what is in out hearts. As we saw in our earlier reflections, sexuality flows from the gift-giving, nuptial meaning of the body. In marriage, husband and wife are called to become one flesh, forming a selfless communion of persons. But lust looks at the body in a way that denies its nuptial and procreative (life giving) meaning.
"… How is lust a form of adultery? Both violate the true meaning of the body. Both cheapen sexuality and reduce the body to an object.
…
"Sexual desire can be a destructive force. In order for it to be the positive, creative power it was meant to be, it must be transformed by Christ."

Found It

As I just mentioned in a note at the end of my previous post, I've tracked down Adon's blog. It's called Forever Silent. Since he started this summer, he has given a frank, sometimes explicit, sometimes amusing, sometimes poignant account of his years of discovery. Or, as he puts it in the intro, "Unable to break my silence about being gay because of living in a conservative New England community as well as being an active Mormon and married, I will try to do so here." Check it out.

I've made a separate post because I'm sure many readers will not notice the note at the end of the previous post.