Another Star Trek thing :)

I've been very disappointed in SNL for the past like...oh 10 years...but this was pretty classic. I am in love with Leonard Nimoy.

New Star Trek- no spoilers

I truly enjoyed the movie...of course there were things that were over the top and cheezy...but isn;t he entire premise the same?!

I think it did its job, because I came away wanting to see it again...and also wanting to watch Star Trek II and III and old episodeso f the original series adn the next generation.

It has made tons of money and will make more...which means...more sequels...prequels etc...its left open for that in an interesting way...

I liked it more than I thought I would



Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

I have no idea what to do with my Mondays....and I like that fact

Thankfully, the Religious Education year has come to an end. Since September I have worked until 8 pm on Monday evenings. We have back to back sessions, K-5 and 6-8. We sing, we learn the week's patron saint, we have great volunteers. I teach a lot of pre-teens about the meaning of respect (for teachers, for the church, for their peers) which they apparently have never heard of before. We have 3 rules: respect, equality and investment...foreign concepts these days, you would think we are speaking in ancient Greek...

But, its all over until next September and tonight is my first free Monday in 9 months and I'm not sure what to do...do I go home? the laundromat? the bank? I made an appointment to get my haircut tomorrow, something I have not done in over a year. I was going to go to the DMV as my license expires next Monday, but they are closed.

I feel strangely free, and its a little exhilarating. It's not completely over yet, We still have two more first communion masses next weekend and the Steubenville East Summer Retreat to organize.

Susan says to me today, "Want to make the First Communion certificates tonight?" good idea, to get ahead of ourselves a bit at a time we are used to working already. And now this plan has turned into watching Twilight on the big movie screen with the awesome speakers in the Visitation Hall with some friends while we have dinner and work on the certificates...I can't think of a much better Monday, except maybe not working at all and going to see Star Trek, but I can do that later in the week.

And it will get my mind off the fact that I am unable to watch the Met games when in CT...

The Mets have won seven straight games and are in first place, not getting comfy but it sure feels good to be a Met fan...

And it sure feels good, to be winding down for the summer here at church :)

And I went for a hike this morning and did some sketching and took some pictures.

'Chatfeild Hollow' is this gorgeous state park nearby with awesome trails and rivers and boulders.

Relaxation is my favorite.

here are some shots from Chatfeild today:

Christian Rock and Band Practice

I feel so excited today and I'm not really completely sure why. I think part of it is that I'm happy to be seeing my family tomorrow and we're all going to Citi Field tomorrow! And another part is that I feel finally like I'm definitely out of the little funk I've been in for the past few months...must be springtime :)

I started listening to really uplifting Christian music and realized that now that I'm alone leading the Life Teen Band, I have a lot of responsibilities, but also a lot of creative freedom of what songs to have the band play during the liturgy.
Often when there were other adults in the band, they wouldn't be able to come to practices. I would teach the teens these songs and we would play them on Thursday but on Sunday we would have the same rotation of 7-8 songs that the rest of the band knew by heart and had been playing for the last 9 years. not there was anything wrong with that, but part of the point of having contemporary music at a liturgy geared towards teens, is keeping it current. Not many teens enjoy Christian 'rock' (and I use the term loosely) to begin with, so playing Christian rock from 1999...not a good place to be creatively.

I've been to busy with confirmation and first communion and being sick that I have just been keeping afloat with the status quo with the music since I took over completely three months ago. But, tonight at practice I'm excited to teach the kids songs I learned at the Music conference in Arizona last year. They are a year old, but on the top 100, and brand new to us...and bonus...I can actually play them :)!!!

Now I know Christian Rock isn't for a lot of people and I know that musically it is not anything outrageously original or special or even requiring much talent...most of the lyrics are taken from the bible not written by these artists...

But what you need to know about this type of music is that is comes from a place in which the people who are writing it know that semi talented music ministers all over the world will need to be able to do decent covers to lead worship. Christian Rock to me is really 'worship' music, but then you get into a gray area where its like 'gospel' or 'worship' or 'mainstream' and each person categorizes those differently. Yes, there will be many cheezy guitar solos and synthesizers, and over 50 million G-C-D-EM chord progressions, but when you go to a conference and you see 3500 teens singing along and its not about drugs or sex...

Well, in my opinion, there is something to be said for that in today's society.

So, my weakness is Christian Rock, not all of it, definitely not all of it. But, I DO definitely have my favorite songs that reveal a none to great musical talent, which I feel if I look to a value in it deeper than 'the music'...look to its benefits for my ministry and my ability to play it with my band at my church and for the thousands of other music ministers out there doing the same thing. IT is then that I see a value in it.

And also there is a different between Christian Rock that is appropriate for liturgies or leading worship and the kind that actual Christian Rock bands like Relient K, Thousand Foot Crutch, Five Iron Frenzy, Jars of Clay, POD, Switchfoot, or Third Day perform. Many of these Christian Rock bands have had much mainstream and commercial success. This is a whole other arena than what I am talking about for my little band or other churches, at least Catholic ones. You will never hear "Meant to Live" or "Flood" during a mass, but they were on TRL on MTV for like 10 weeks...I kind of stop listening to a Christian band when they get too popular because they usually are not really Christian based in their lyrics anymore and have 'sold out' to an extent and I find its not longer worth listening to the "bad music just for the lyrics" Which I find ironic and funny because with most music genres its the other way around.

So my mp3 player has a mixture of music I like for the hard core classic rock that it is...and the guilty pleasure music that I listen to for the value of the message of faith it gives me. But truth be told, you definitely have to be in the mood for it. Ha ha ha...

Here are a few of the songs that I'll be playing/teaching my band tonight..give it try :)

I like this one during Easter Season....



This is one of my favorite "Happy Jesus Easter Songs" it ALWAYS cheers me up. I first heard it at the seminary in Denver in '03, its little older but new to CT... some of the lyrics make me laugh out loud...how do you feel a 'God Song' rising up in you? I have no idea...






This third one- I personally would not classify as 'rock' at all... its more of a Jesus ballad :) but when its done right, the build up is epic. I remember hearing 'Orphans of God' Played at mass by this amazing band in Arizona and it literally gave me chills...I had never heard it before and I just listened and I was so touched by it. I had just returned from Peru and missed the children from the orphanage so much so it was very powerful to hear this song at that moment.

St. Therese

As predicted, today my spirits are back to their chipper selves!

I'm very excited today because this afternoon I will spend the rest of my day working in the parish Library. And when I finish my work, I plan to have dinner there with a friend and read :)I'm thinking something by Fr. Benedict Groeschel or St. Therese the Little Flower. I was reading one of his commentaries on her yesterday...I only read about three pages because I was feeling so sick, but those pages really painted a picture of faith that I have been experiencing for the last seven or eight years, and if I'm honest with myself, really my entire life. So, I want to explore that more. The theme is spiritual darkness or dryness/feeling the absence of God's presence. I had always known that Mother Theresa experienced this and also St. John of the Cross explains it in detail in "Dark Night of the Soul". But I never knew that the Little Flower experienced this also, I knew she suffered great physical pain with her tuberculosis, but I always pictured her as having been constantly comforted spiritually by God. I was wrong. In her journal she writes the following:

"I wish I could put down what I feel about it, but unfortunately that isn't possible; to appreciate the darkness of this tunnel, you have to have been through it. Perhaps, though, I might try to explain it by comparison. You must imagine that I have been born into a country entirely overspread with a thick mist; I have never seen nature in her smiling mood, all bathed and transfigured in the sunlight. But I've heard of these wonderful experiences, ever since I was a child; and I know that the country in which I live is not my native country; that lies elsewhere, and it must always be the centre of my longings. Mightn't that, you suggest, be simply a fable, invented by some dweller in the mist? Oh no, the fact is certain; the king of that sunlit country has come and lived in the darkness, lived there for thirty-three years.

Poor darkness, that could not recognize him for what he was, the King of Light! But here I am, Lord, one of your own children, to whom your divine light has made itself known.

Dear Mother, I seem to be writing just anyhow; here is my fairy-story about the country of darkness turning all of a sudden into a kind of prayer. I can't imagine how it can interest you, trying to master ideas so badly expressed and so confused as mine. But after all Mother, I am not writing for the sake of literary effect, I'm simply writing under obedience, and even if you find it tedious, you will at least realize that I've done my best. So I will make bold to take up my parable where I left off. What I was saying was that the sure prospect of escaping from this dark world of exile had been granted me from childhood upwards; and it wasn't simply that I accepted it on the authority of people who knew more of the matter than I did - I felt, in the very depths of my heart, aspirations which could only be satisfied by a world more beautiful than this. just as Christopher Columbus divined, by instinct, the existence of the New World which nobody hitherto dreamt of, so i had this feeling that a better country was to be, one day, my abiding home. And now, all of a sudden, the mists around me have become denser than ever; they sink deep into my soul and wrap around it so that I can't recover the dear image of my native country anymore - everything has disappeared.

I get tired of the darkness all around me, and try to refresh my jaded spirits with the thoughts of that bright country where my hopes lie; and what happens? it is worse torment than ever;the darkness itself seems to borrow, from the sinners who live in it, the gift of speech. I hear its mocking accents: 'its all a dream, this talk of a heavenly country, bathed in light, scented with delicious perfumes, and of a God who made it all, who is to be your possession in eternity! you really believe, do you, that the mist which hangs about you will clear away later on? All right, all right, go on longing for death! But death will make nonsense of your hopes; it will only mean a night darker than ever, the night of mere non-existence.'...

Dear Mother, does it sound as if I were exaggerating my symptoms? Of course, to judge by the sentiments I express in all the nice little poems I've made up during the last year, you might imagine that my soul was full of consolations as it could hold; that, for me, the veil which hides the unseen scarcely existed. And all the time it isn't just a veil, it's a great wall which reaches up to the sky and blots out the stars! No, when I write poems about the happiness of heaven and the eternal possession of God, it strikes no chord of happiness in my own heart - I'm simply talking about what I'd determined to believe. Sometimes, its true, a tiny ray of light passes through the darkness, and then, just for a moment, the ordeal is over; but immediately afterwards the memory of it brings me no happiness, it seems to make the darkness thicker than ever.'- St. Therese of Lisuex

Fr. Benedict's thoughts on this excerpt of her writings:
let me draw your attention to the fact that such an experience of isolation and loneliness is only possible because St. Therese believed that God was present, and thus on rare occasions during her time of trial she experienced the Divine Presence as a 'tiny ray of light.' In a paradoxical way, it is only faith in God's presence that makes it possible to experience his absence.

My feelings- I don't suppose that what I feel is of the magnitude of this great doctor of the church, cloistered nun and saint. But I do relate to her expression of the mist of the darkness. I have had just enough of an experience of God to be determined to believe. That belief is constant, complete and unwavering. It causes me to hope and live in a way to honor my God and teach his truth. But I exist in a lonely mist that breaks though the 'tiny rays of light' that I sometimes experience through mass, precious moments with family and dear friends and sometimes, when in adoration...but not often... in those moments I can occasionally get a glimpse of heavenly happiness or 'consolations', but it is never long lasting and never complete. Afterwards I often doubt those moments because I know I'm not holy enough to experience them. I have a constant unattainable yearning in my heart that I know will only be satisfied in heaven.
St Therese's words spoke to my soul so deeply I'm excited to read more of her writing sand maybe come to some greater thoughts and feelings on this in as time goes on and I develop more of an understanding of it all.

Anyway I hope to find a good book in the library tonight and thankfully my headache is gone today.

tuesday blues

So a while ago I wrote about how great thunderstorms are.

I stand by that, what I don't like is light or medium rain. No thunder, no pounding buckets of torrential floods. It is not powerful enough to be cool, so it settles for being an annoying inconvenience. And we have it forecast for the next five days...boo.

Also, today I overslept by 20 minutes and missed morning mass, which always makes me cranky. When I can;t enter into the eternal existence of heaven through witnessing the consecration and receiving the Eucharist, the rest of the day seems very worldly and pedestrian and everything annoys me. Jeez, I don't sound very Christian writing that. What I mean to say is that attending daily mass makes me strong enough spiritually to face the day as the best version of myself. My soul is having an annoying rainy day as well due to not being at mass. Add to that a migraine and a meeting up at school on my thesis which I have no concrete topic for just mental outlines that I can't fully articulate today, and I'm kind of cranky and upset.

I know its not a big deal, I also know it will pass and I'll be my cheerful self again in no time. But today I'm frustrated and tired and also ending this blog because looking at the screen is hurting my head more and I am procrastinating on my thesis meeting which is in twenty minutes. Then I have an interview with my advisor about what courses to take next year and when, if ever, I will graduate and I just wish I could focus more or reschedule.

and the annoying drizzle persists and made my hair frizzy and my mascara run.

Wow apparently I'm just a big baby complainer today...take a pill Annie...

ha ha, I'm a dork
later gator