Kicking Over My Traces

This week’s Catholic Carnival is being hosted right here at Kicking Over My Traces, and I am honored and humbled.

• HMS Blog — Bearing Fruit for the Son
  A reflection on the Mass readings for Sunday 10/2, focusing on a couple of practical applications of Jesus’ words about the need to bear fruit in God’s vineyard.

  Host comments: The repeated vine/vineyard metaphor, and the undesirable fate of the unproductive vineyard, in this week’s readings are striking — especially in light of my own past failures to put God first. The times that I have shoved God aside and worked hard on my own to solve my problems have been exactly when I’ve made the biggest mess out of things. And what epic messes! The most astonishing thing though, each time I’ve messed up so breathtakingly, is that not so much that God didn’t mind my messing up — far from it — but He welcomed me back with grace and forgiveness, to try again with His help. It’s a good thing His patience is bottomless; I’d have thrown up my hands and given up on me a long time ago!

• Part-Time Pundit — Beaten but not Broken: Death with Dignity
  A reflection on the victory of the Crucifixion, that despite all humanity could pour on Jesus he was not defeated with his Death.

  Host comments: a thoughtful consideration that we should not avert our eyes from the crucifixion of Christ, skipping quickly to the triumph of Easter morning; that there was a triumph also on Good Friday that every Christian should savor and deeply appreciate.

• Bearing Blog — Tertullian vs. C. S. Lewis

  A quote from Tertullian (160-230) is compared to the theme of C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce: is it better to maintain that God might be really generous with salvation, or is it better to insist that the way is narrow?Host comments: Well, this wasn’t quite what I thought it was going to be — but that’s okay, since I’ve never read The Great Divorce and now want to. Click through to find a discussion of whether it’s game over! at death, or whether God might allow a sort-of do-over once we see how things really stand.

• Angry in the Great White North — Episcopal priests looking to State for protection from their Church
  In the tension between Church and State, Church officials (in this case, Episcopal priests) appeal to the State for legal relief from a Church that seems to have lost its way.

  Host comments: I have been irregularly following the growing schism in the Episcopal Church, with some sadness. I cannot agree with the actions of the priests, in filing a lawsuit. This sort of thing should be outside the competence of secular courts. The priests, and their congregations, should pray over the matter without concern for the physical assets (i.e., the church buildings and real estate), and follow their conscience.

• Deo Omnis Gloria — Praying for the Dead
  An explanation of how and why Catholic pray for the dead – and why it is actually supported by Scripture, rather than contradicted by it.

  Host comments: I want to expand on this post’s reasons for praying for the dead, by saying that I think that it does good for the person praying as well as the person prayed for. Mindfulness of this sort brings an orientation to the day’s activities that is otherwise absent.

• Confessions of a Hot Carmel Sundae — Holy Families
  You don’t get to heaven based on the size of your family.

  Host comments: I am right there with this contributor — except make mine a hot fudge sundae — but the “big family doesn’t make you holy” thing? Yeah, I’m square with that. Crazed, maybe; not holy! One unarguable benefit of a big family is you get introduced up close and personal to the notion that God really really really likes variety…

• A Penitent Blogger — Running from God’s Will
  A reflection on the difficulty and the need to respond faithfully to God both in our vocations and in the choices of daily life.

  Host comments: Jonah and I are birds of a feather in running from God, though my usual method is avoiding the confrontation by not being mindful through the day, not bringing a God-oriented mindset to everyday activities. To me, one of the great values of such daily hour-rooted rituals as reciting the Angelus at noon is to refresh and restore that mindfulness.

• HerbEly — The Night and I
  Herb Ely reflects on a poem his mother wrote in 1938. He senses that she had moved from a deep spiritual experience, and accepted God’s plan for her. Yet she had not forgotten. She wrote that her “soul knows well, the glory of night and the beauty of day.”

  Host comments: It is a marvelous thing, even briefly, to glimpse God’s plan for us — even if it means letting our own plans slip away. Beautiful.

• On the Other Foot — Good night, Father-Boy!
  It’s hard to imagine a kid whose diapers I’ve been changing growing up to wear an alb and a collar.

  Host comments: Amazing the things you can learn through the Catholic Carnival. Spectacles…?

• The Troglodyte — The Paradoxy of St. Benedict, University of Mary Unveils Sculpture
  Benedict’s humility as an example for our day.

  Host comments: The post gives background on a new outdoor sculpture of St. Benedict that offers a counterintuitive example to think about. I’m thinking!

• Ales Rarus — Faith => Grace => Love
  A recent revelation regarding the nature of faith: faith is an active condition (rather than a single choice), by which we receive grace. Grace is what gives us the capacity to love. Thus, to have faith is to love. This is what St. James meant when he said faith without works is dead. If we are not loving, we are not living.

  Host comments: A wonder and a marvel and a blessing from God is a sudden new understanding of a concept previously believed well-plumbed! This post, too, in its exposition of faith as a continuing and never-completed action, illuminates the importance of mindfulness as we go about our everyday life.

• Kicking Over My Traces — Mark Shea Discovers the Trinity
  A (very) short reflection, contributed by this week’s host of the Catholic Carnival, on a piece by Mark Shea at Catholic Exchange, on how the doctrine of the Trinity was worked through during the first centuries after Christ, in which I try to show the difference between inventing doctrine from whole cloth against gaining a deeper understanding through analysis of revealed truth — using a mathematical example.

  Host comments: It’s very basic math, relying on an example from high school geometry, and the idea of axioms and logical proofs. The nut of the problem is revealed truth. As Mr. Shea says in his piece, the developed doctrine has to cover all revealed truth. Leave out an awkward piece to make your theory work, and you’re walking down the wrong garden path…

What an inspiring bunch of bloggers! Thank you for allowing me to put this together, and praise be to God, who inspires such writing.

Credo ut intelligam.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 4th, 2005 at 5:58 am +0000 GMT and is filed under Catholic Carnival, Catholicism, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.