Jan 22 William Paterson d. 1592 with reflections on Fulton Sheen's Character Building sermon

Thom and Jack
Good morning, I love you

Saturday, 1211, 0534. Yesterday I found the ‘perfect’ gifts for my faith formation class. But there were only five nutcrackers in the box and I need eight gifts. Oh well, even the perfect is not perfect enough.

Tom Clancy has another book out – it’s big enough to be a boat anchor. The first hundred pages have my attention. See how a ‘good thing’ can be a temptation? I probably should have finished off my work for yesterday on yesterday. Instead , I had a long lunch at the Macaroni Grill with Tom Clancy.

I did get some writing done, though. It’s not my best. It may not be informative. But every day there’s more. That’s something.

Rumbling around in my head, louder and louder as Sunday approaches, is my lesson plan for my faith formation class. The lesson in the syllabus only tangentially fits the lesson of the day: Gaudate Sunday. Rejoice! We’re half way through Advent, Rejoice the Lord is near. These children won’t know what an entrance antiphon is. And Latin? Puleese! But the rose candle must be explained. The stuff of advent. The advent wreath. The advent candles. The advent calendar. And to keep us focused, the Crèche. …

The parish apparently does not have a step ladder. How’s a lady reach the top shelves in the supply rooms? Anyway, I spent ten bucks to get a plastic two step so the students can reach the candles to light them. Another contribution to the parish. Which will mean more to the life of our parish. The effect of the students’ processing and lighting this week’s advent candle or the two-step?

Fulton Sheen on character. I revisited Life is Worth Living. An original 1953 edition. The book shows the wear and tear of 57 years of being around for us. I’ve been around 61 years for you. Yes, the years before 1987 were for you, too. As the boy is father to the man, the son is father to the children. I can vividly picture the good bishop in the frame of our black and white tv. He was in our living room, a bishop, talking directly (only?) to us. It’s a privilege to have a priest in the house. Imagine how it felt for me to have the bishop be our guest.

Character building by Bishop Sheen. The practice of character training is more complicated than the theory. (Read the first two paragraphs of this chapter and you’ll see the dichotomy of your parents.) The character we create – note, we create, not born with, character is built, not a genetic component. The character we create depends on whether we give primacy to the soul or the body.

It is easy to let the body dominate. Just let go. Just do it. It is very hard to have the heart, mind, soul, ideals dominate. But it’s the crucial choice in deciding who we are, what we’ll do. How do we harness our body, the sensate? How do we discipline the lower, yes l o w e r, appetites. Take a few minutes with Paul’s letters and get a fill of the mind body dichotomy.

There is operating in nature a law of degeneration. And our body is in nature. Is it our aspiration to be degenerates? Do we want to be pulled down to what is the worst in us, in nature? We do not become better by being left alone. By letting things be – all due respect to John Lennon. I remember where I was when I heard Howard Cosell tell us that John Lennon was shot. 1980, a Monday night. With remembrances of 1968. 1963. Remembering where I was, how I found out that my brother died; my mother; my Uncle Mike; Aunt Monica. So we reflect on 30 years after John Lennon was shot. We remember every year the loss – because of all the gains from them – of the people in our lives who have died on our watch.

Muscles if not exercised atrophy. Amen to that! And the pain creeps in and worsens. No pain no gain is an axiom to commit to or else you wind up with no gain and constant pain.

“If we allow our minds to become fallow and do not pour truth in it by study, not only does ignorance possess it [like weeds take over a fallow garden], but we actually reach a point where we can enjoy nothing but picture magazines and cheap novels.” (so I balance Tom Clancy with Fulton Sheen?)

“The capacity for thought and for discerning truth from error is then surrendered and lost.”

“Nature penalizes the slothful. [you remember sloth, don’t you? Not a critter but a deadly sin.] Organisms that fail to develop themselves deteriorate and become degraded forms of life.”

Chew on that one for a while! And it is true for our entire existence. I am living proof of the good and the ugly of the possibilities of develop or don’t. A contrast for consistency of good would be my brother and father – so far as the physical goes and, I humbly assume, the spiritual.

“Life is a temporary suspension of destructive powers.”

One reason, I suppose, that Jesus kept reminding us to be prepared. The thief is always lurking in the night. The Evil One never rests. He tempts us with the good. He persists like the Chinese water torture. Be not like the frog contentedly in the pot as the water gradually boils around you.

“We can lose our souls [you remember soul, don’t you? Not the music, your essence.] not only by doing evil, but also by neglecting the good.”

It’s Advent. Get off your butt and do some good. I saw my first Salvation Army kettle and bell ringer yesterday. It’s a iron clad rule, thou shalt not pass a Salvation Army kettle without putting money into it. Plus, it’s important for thanking the bell ringer for being there for us.

The tension between need and satisfaction. What are you doing to control your reactions to this ever present tension? Those efforts are called discipline.

“People who are always wanting their own will are unhappy. The self-centered are self-disrupted. The man who is self-seeking winds up hating himself.”

“The self one has to live with can be one’s own greatest punishment. To be left forever with that self which we hate is hell. He who starts only loving self, ends up by hating himself.”

Taking Bishop Sheen one sound bite at a time is about all we can chew on. Chew slowly. Don’t choke on it. Take your time. Mull it over. Pray with him. He’s at his blackboard in the sky. Ask him to help you wrestle with the implications for you.

The law of self perfection. “This involves a certain amount of self restraint, effort, and discipline to bring the body captive to the mind.”

“If there were any nonsense in the world, it is the notion that repression is always wrong. It assumes that nothing should ever be repressed. This is to forget that if you repress evil, good comes up; if you repress good, evil comes up…. The problem is not whether there will be repression or not; it is rather what will be repressed - goodness or evil.”

“If the evil is not eradicated at once, there is both a lingering pain and a diminishing pleasure. Total abstinence is a biological phenomenon as well as a moral recommendation.” Do no evil. If your hand is an occasion for falling, cut it off!

“As the eye should not look at everything – e.g., a too bright light – so neither should the brain look at everything. Though reading is good, one will not put garbage inside the brain. When the wrong kind of ideas get into the mind, they seep down into the unconscious and, later on, come out as evil acts.”

“No character ever develops without a certain amount of punishment and resistance and mortification to that which is evil.”

“Limiting the good which we enjoy is actually a form of concentration; it is very much like paying more attention to the rose than to the thorn.”

“It is necessary [Necessary] every now and then to impose hard things upon ourselves lest we develop faults in a given avocation.”

Bishop Sheen advises: stand while teaching; do not use notes. Stand to communicate with passion not passivity. “Truth should always be communicated to students with a certain fire and enthusiasm; but if one is on fire, he cannot sit.”

Motives for self-discipline. [you’re adults now; well, at the end of adolescence. It is time for SELF discipline. As a professor told us during our first graduate school class, ‘you don’t know enough yet to ask questions. I’ll tell you when you may ask questions. First, learn something.’ So too it is with children. Initially and continually it is the parents’ responsibility to teach and impose discipline so that you may learn what it is. It is our job to plant the seeds and nurture them, plucking the weeds when concupiscence sprouts them, so that you start with an informed conscience and an inherent understanding of discipline. You grew up with a lot of weeds allowed to take root. But now, it’s up to you to discipline yourself. Bishop Sheen offers a few reasons why discipline, your pursuit of perfection, is both necessary and good.]

The reason is love.

“In order to give carnality free reign, the aspirations of the spirit must be have to be suffocated.”

“In order to satisfy the desire of the personality for union with Perfect Life and Truth and Love, which is God, instincts and passions which rebel against these ideals must be disciplined and mortified.”

“The best reason for doing it is to reproduce within ourselves the Divine Image and Likeness.”

The motivation is Love.

“Love is not only an affirmation, it is also a negation.”

“A man who loves a woman and asks for her hand in marriage by that very acts negates every other woman.”

“A man who affirms the love of God negates the love of evil.”

“Those who wish to develop a character of soul … The motto of their lives is ‘all things that are pleasing to Him, that I do.’”

“The reason noble characters refuse to sin is not because they are afraid of hell or punishment; they negate evil because they would not hurt the one they love.” [I suggest to you that if you do not have this relationship with the All Loving God, you’ll never get there in a human relationship.]



January 22

William Paterson d. 1592

The litany of English martyrs also gives us pretty much the same bioblurbs. Hundreds of them. Over and over. But consider that. For hundreds of years of tyrannical massacre of our priests and repression of our faith and church, the Catholics of England persisted. Boys who saw priests hung, drawn, and quartered went into exile, became ordained, then returned to serve while risking each day, literally, life and limb. So we should take the brief moment it takes to refresh ourselves in the blood of the brief bioblurb of each English martyr. No matter what we see around us, in our face, that represses our faith and disdains our Church, we must draw on the courage of these martyrs to do ourselves what it necessary to be better Catholics.

[I copied the name as Patenson. But I think that’s a typo in the original.]

William Paterson was born at Durham. Next time you think Duke, think William Paterson.

William Paterson left his homeland and studied at Reims. He was ordained in 1587.

1588 William Paterson returned home to serve his family, friends, countrymen; to promote the Catholic cause in the dangerous atmosphere of Elizabethan England. Sure good queen bess did plenty of good for England – and laid the foundation for much of the good that fled there to settle America. And there was Shakespeare, too. But, do not ever forget what she promulgated against Catholics and our faith and our church. Do not forget so that you can see it happening in your own life. So that while it’s happening in your life, you can resist and overcome the Elizabethans in your life.

1591 William Paterson was tried and condemned for being a priest. Let’s guess that he was 23 when he was ordained. Look in the mirror. Imagine yourselves leaving home to become what God called you to be. Then having the courage – the Holy Spirit – to return to your Elizabethan homeland to witness to what is right and good and the One True Church. No doubt such faith will be tried by everyone around you. Your faith, our faith, The faith, will be condemned out of hand. You risk ostracization. But not quite the fate of William Paterson; which may be an easier fate to face?

During imprisonment, William Paterson converted six other prisoners to the Catholic faith. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, you are Catholics. How you live your life not only matters to you but may be the crucial experience for an other’s opportunity to see the Truth and the Way. You too will convert people to your cause just by your presence and your persistence in your modus vivandi. Let your life be an example like William Paterson’s.

William Paterson was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. William Paterson gave life and limb for our faith, to witness to those who scorned him. [imagine the daily scene at Tyburn. The priests kept coming. They professed their loyalty to the Crown. The witnessed their faith and loyalty to God and Church.]

William Paterson was beatified in 1929 along with the many other English martyrs.

I’m off to 0800 at OLG.
Ora pro nobis.
Te amo.
Dad
[0714]
2317 words in 100 minutes.