the devil's in the details

Daily communal prayer is both a blessing and a chore. I love the Liturgy of the Hours and I'm really glad I got into it this summer before I came to school because it gave me a totally different perspective into how it is prayed. In communal prayer, when you're required to participate at risk of a triggering some kind of formation team intervention, (basically your chaplain gives you a hard time and if you keep missing he sends a nasty letter to your Bishop), it's harder to be prayerful. I'm used to going to adoration at CTK at whatever (often odd) hour I'd like and spending as much (or as little) time as I like at prayer. Community is teaching me a lot about the nature of prayer in the greater church.
The hours is the official prayer of the church, it marks the hours, the days, the years. There's something really pleasing about notching off a day, asking God for His assistance and thanking Him at the beginning and end of every day. Sr. once told me that given my personality, it would be very helpful for me to make use of schedules and plans, to have daily goals written to where I can scratch them off as I accomplish them. The hours is becoming a sort of calendar in itself; a constant reminder of the passage of time and our need to seek God at all times.
When I read Augustine's Confessions I fell in love with his constant recall to the Psalms, the overarching prayerful tone which focused the whole work upon the pursuit of God. I caught myself spouting psalms at something I saw when I was walking to class the other day and just had to smile, I love the sacramental nature of reality, how even things I scarcely understand, and honestly avoid (namely pain in general) are somehow a manifestation of God's presence. I don't mean in some sort of pantheistic, everything is God sort of way, (that makes no sense) but that in the same way a myriad of songs by a particular artist convey a myriad of nuances about them, and when you grow to recognize them you get more out of the music, one gets more out of life for listening to nuances of God's song. (honestly that's a horrible analogy and sounds very heterodoxic, but that's all I got).
St.Augustine is the one on the far right, the above is three photos of the apse in the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception which I stitched together using a neat little program. I plan on creating larger images of the Basilica and the Oratory of the Holy Cross.

I'm still on crutches, but Fr.B let use a golf cart to get across campus, a welcome gratuity as my hands are getting calloused and are constantly aching for walking on them.
Tomorrow is the re-dedication of St.Maur hall (after renovation) and Fr.R will be around for the alumni reunion:; good times expected.

The Inherent Goodness of Legs

I had surgery on my leg on Monday, the nurse was kind enough to take pictures with my camera, see the gruesome surgery photos on my flickr.

As you can see in the first frame, my leg is very much broken, although as the fibula is not a weight bearing bone, I didn't realize that until about a week after I broke it. I did however notice that my leg was sort of "sloppy" my foot didn't work correctly because all the tendons and muscles attached to it through the fibula were rather useless, oh and my foot was pretty grossly swollen.

Surgery was on Monday, I'm back in my room here till tomorrow I go back to the doctor for a checkup and a proper cast. The doctor said the surgery went well; I had a great time chatting it up with the anesthesiologist the whole time. They gave me the option to go under or have a spinal injection, and I don't like going under so they gave me the spinal. I didn't feel a thing, the whole time I could hear the doctor chatting, and hear him drilling, I was on some happy drugs and just didn't really care.

So I've been admiring my fully functional left leg for the past week, awe struck by how easily I could be permanently disabled, and how beautiful the machinery of our body is. Whenever I experience physical pain, or think of how corrupted this world and my body is, I think of the fact that Christ died that we might rise to glory with Him, and that, God willing, we'll experience Heaven in our resurrected bodies; sense experience isn't all evil, our bodies are not useless, they are not merely vessels we inhabit on our earthly voyage, they are part of our very being, essential to our salvation.

I'm told that Dr.DiStefeno is the best orthopedic surgeon around, so I'm glad he was able to patch me up. I hope to be up and around by tomorrow, (on a casted foot), and hopefully I won't fall too far behind in my classes(!).

In other news, they're having a colloquium about Blessed Columba Marmion, O.S.B., and the Archbishop of Philadelphia, his eminence, Justin Cardinal Rigali will be here to speak on his life and spirituality. I don't know if I can get out of my room (Br.E doesn't want me to leave for my own good), but if I make it out, I'll go to his talk.

Peace

of legs and seminaries

Both of mine are broken but still useful and essentially good. I broke the fibula in my right leg playing soccer... I mean, saving a woman and her child from a burning building in a harrowing rescue in which I jumped from a third story window with them in my arms (while yelling "EXTREME!" just for good measure)... not really, I was just playing soccer and went down on my ankle wrong when I got tangled up with an opponent over the ball. More thought's on legs and their essential goodness later (I go in for surgery on my leg Monday afternoon, I'll be under general anesthesia and everything so if anyone reads this before then, please send a prayer up for me).

Conception Seminary College is not perfect, in a lot of ways it's highly imperfect, but I love it here and by God, I want it to be the finest institute of formation it can be; please pray for everyone involved in it's administration and oversight.

I just found that I've been linked from Catholic Ragemonkey since June, which is quite an honor, and I just found out that one of my seminarian brothers is a parishioner of Fr.Hamilton's. (neato!)

More pictures are up at theresfire and my flickr.