Book Review: Thank God Ahead Of Time July 31, 2009
Posted by philangelus in religion, writing.1 comment so far
I received “Thank God Ahead Of Time: The Life And Spirituality of Solanus Casey” (by Michael Crosby) through The Catholic Company’s book review program. Today, July 31st, is the same date Solanus Casey said his first Mass and the same date as his death, so I wanted to make sure to post the review today.
I’d never heard of Solanus Casey prior to reading a bit about him in “God’s Doorkeepers,” but he sounded so intriguing that I wanted to hear more. Solanus Casey was a priest in the Capuchin order, born in 1870 and died in 1957. He operated in New York City, Huntington, IN, and Detroit, and his chief responsibility during 60 years as a priest was to act as porter. In this capacity, he became the “face” of the order, and because of his demeanor, his patience and his kindness, shortly people began to line up to tell him anything that was troubling them, and to ask for his prayers. Before long, miraculous healings began to be reported by those who came to him for help.
Solanus Casey could read hearts, meaning he often knew exactly what to say, what to advise, what was not being said, or whether a person was holding back their true intention. Casey’s spirituality was anchored in gratitude, compassion, and love of the Eucharist.
Solanus Casey gets five stars, but the point of the review is to review the BOOK, not the man. So here goes:
The book is adapted from the research Crosby did for the Vatican when it investigated Casey for sainthood. (He’s now “venerable.”) As such, it’s thoroughly researched and footnoted, with none of the hagiographic sense of many saint-biographies. The style is balanced, almost academic but with none of the dryness. In fact, Casey’s humanity comes across foremost, along with compassion for him and those to whom he ministered. The text is very readable. Although there are hundreds of footnotes, most of them are citations and not clarifications (meaning you don’t have to keep flipping to the back of the book for the full story.)
Crosby does not hesitate to discuss some of Casey’s shortcomings, giving a well-rounded treatment to the man as a human being who lived within his culture and his time.
The best part, for me, was how Crosby chronicled some of the changes made in Casey’s spirituality over time. Too often we read about saints as if they were fully-formed by age twelve (unless they had a cataclysmic conversion experience) but Crosby notes at times that a certain trait was just in its beginning stages, or that such-and-such was the first notes of what would become one of the hallmarks of Casey’s later ministry. This documentation of his spiritual progress should be a comfort for all of us saints-in-training who know we have a long way to travel.
I highly recommend this book with five stars.
Father Jay, shattered July 30, 2009
Posted by philangelus in The Boys Upstairs, kiddos, writing.10 comments
My upcoming Christmas novella, The Boys Upstairs, will be an ebook but nevertheless have a cover. I’ve been contacted by the artist, who wanted me to do things like refine what I meant by “house.” (Because, as it turns out, I can say “house” and an artist then visualizes fifty different kinds of house without the slightest difficulty.)
While deobfuscating my non-artistic scrawl on the “cover suggestions” sheet, it occurred to me that the artist might want to illustrate one of the actual characters. Fortunately for me, Wendy had drawn one long ago, when the story was in its first incarnation.
Meet Jay, former wild youth on the rocket train to a lifetime in jail, injured during the war in Iraq, converted while in the hospital (a la St. Ignatius Loyola, whose feast day is tomorrow) and afterward ordained a priest. His injuries left him legally blind and with several physical disabilities due to nerve damage.
His brother, formerly his partner in crime and now a cop, is estranged from him. The story opens with Jay’s brother bringing three homeless kids to the rectory. For more than that, you’ll just have to wait.
Our scanner is kaput, so I photographed the drawing in the frame and emailed that to the artist. Afterward I displayed it on one of the book shelves in our library. (It should be our formal living room, but it looks like a Barnes and Noble vomited all over it, so we just say “the library.”)
The next day, while I was upstairs with the baby, Kiddo#1 came into the room and said, “I have a paper cut.” He got a band-aid and went back downstairs.
A few minutes later he returned saying, “I need another band-aid.” This time I took a look, and he’d sliced two of his finger tips. Okay, I said to myself as I patched him up, this ought to be good.
Somehow, Kiddo#1 informed me, the picture of Father Jay had toppled off the bookshelf — he had no idea how, and it certainly had nothing to do, not even a little, with their game of BalloonBall taking place in the library — and the glass had shattered. Ever the brilliant kid, Kiddo#1 stated that “Mom will be very, very imaginative in coming up with a punishment for this” and reached the only possible conclusion: he should try gluing the shattered glass back together.
His IQ is something like 350, you see, but he comes up with the same kind of Patented Brilliant Ideas as his mother.
I threw out the big pieces, vacuumed up the rest, and then surgically extracted Father Jay from what remained of the frame. How could I be angry: it was merely a case of life imitating art!
I have purchased another frame for Father Jay, and he has received an honorable discharge from the book shelf. I have not been very creative in punishing the kids. This story, however, has gone onto the internet, something Kiddo#1 will find more humiliating than the most humiliating punishment I could possibly devise.
I’m such a mean mom.
Dry humor July 29, 2009
Posted by philangelus in family, kiddos.2 comments
Just as we speak for the cat, we also speak for the baby. Pretty much if you can’t speak for yourself in this house, someone will say what you should be saying, even if you’re the car, you don’t exist, or it’s a future version of you that you haven’t become yet.
The baby dislikes having his diaper changed. Those are precious seconds he’ll never get back where he could be playing with something, dumping out the things we’ve carefully put away, or screaming at the five year old. Instead, for no reason he can discern, I put him flat on his back and change his diaper.
A while ago, we started speaking for him: I don’t know why this happens, Momma, but my diaper got wet. If you’re not a parent, just know that babies aren’t born with a sense that they’re urinating. It’s all reflexive to them, and they’re just not aware that it happens.
Later, the diaper-change-time-talking evolved into, Momma, I do not like these diapers. They keep getting wet. I need better diapers. And then one day, this:
Me, singing “If I had a million dollars.”
Kiddo#1, as the baby: “Momma, I could have a million dollars.”
Me: “What would you buy with a million dollars?”
Kiddo#1, in a squeaky voice: “I would buy a diaper that does not get wet.”
This conversation will go on for some time because diaper changes simply aren’t that exciting. Momma, if you give me a dipe that does not get wet, it will be a wonderful thing. You will never have to change me again. I could wear the same dipe all the time!
Last weekend, we went visiting, and because I love my friends and relations, I opted against dragging along a big plastic bag full of smelly wet cloth diapers. We bought our first package of disposables in…gee, since we moved…and Saturday morning, I put the baby into the first of many disposable diapers.
He did fine over the weekend (note: cheap generic diapers? Work just as well.) and then on Monday, I put him back into cloth.
Which he promptly hated. He squirmed. He complained. He cranked at me. He followed me around the house tugging at the diaper wrap and looking distressed.
After a few minutes of this, I realized: disposable diapers don’t feel wet.
They’re so absorbent that they just get fat, but they lock the moisture away from the baby. Whereas cloth, being cloth, gets wet and feels wet.
My baby had found what he’d asked for (well, what we’d said he was asking for) for months: a diaper that did not get wet.
high-distortion rock: the sensitive side July 28, 2009
Posted by philangelus in music.add a comment
My Patient Husband and I mock one another’s music. It’s like a hobby, even though many times we enjoy the same music. We’re equal-opportunity mockers: we also mock our own, and frequently mock the singers themselves.
Me: What is this song about?
Him: It’s about four minutes long.
Me: No, really, I like my music to make sense.
Him: {wisely falls silent}
Me: Well, sensible music….and Roxette.
Keep in mind, I like Daughtry and the last two albums I’ve bought have both been Daughtry. One of my favorite songs off the first album is “Over You.” It has imagery. It has Big Guitars. It has a rocking beat. It has anger. It has that anticlimactic final note like, “Yeah, whatever, I’m over you.” Awesome work, right?
Lyrics:
I’m slowly getting closure, I guess it’s really over.
I’m finally getting better.
I’m picking up the pieces, spending all of these years
Putting my heart back together.
I said to my Patient Husband, “Well, that’s what manhood is reduced to: slowly getting closure and finally getting better.”
Awed, he replied, “I don’t know if David Lee Roth even knew what closure was!”
Where’s the anger? Not that it’s bad, but when did psychoemotional fluency become a part of the larger definition of masculinity?
Now let’s take my second-least-favorite Rob Thomas/Matchbox 20 song:
I think you’re so mean. I think we should try.
I think I could need this in my life.
I think I’m just scared. I know too much
I can’t relate and that’s a problem.
I can’t relate and that’s a problem?!?
And who over the age of seven says “I think you’re so mean”?
David Lee Roth would have said, “Here’s how I relate!” and broken something over his amplifier.
Don’t get me wrong: the fact is, it’s a positive shift that American culture has become more aware of its underlying emotions, and it would be even better if we could translate that into lasting marriages and happy families.
But what we’re seeing here is actually a very different phenomenon: I think the music industry realized just how much money women were spending on harder rock music. Because in general (as the movie industry has known for two decades) women will listen to something their male partner wants to hear, but men will tend not to want to listen to music that sounds like it should be female. (Not the gender of the singers, but the target audience.)
So in order to make $ by the boatload, groups like Daughtry and Nickelback are inserting female-oriented lyrics into their male-oriented music. Thus creating road trips where I pick music I know my Patient Husband will like, and my Patient Husband picks music that he knows he likes, and there’s some crossover.
Clever, isn’t it? We both win.
It’s not the musicians who have become emotionally savvy. It’s the marketing gurus.
the wheel of cheesecake July 27, 2009
Posted by philangelus in angels, food.13 comments
Last week we talked about angels and food, how it’s something totally unnecessary to them as pure spirits, but something they recognize as not only necessary for us but also symbolic.
When my son was in the hospital a few years ago, it was a stressful time. The local hospital had decided after a consultation with their attorney that it was medically necessary to transfer Kiddo#1 to a hospital 50 miles away, so every day I was making the drive, dealing with a profoundly apathetic (not to mention incompetent) nursing staff, and doctors who only stayed fifteen seconds in the room at a time (if you could catch them at all, since they only appeared at 5AM or 1oPM.) That situation still leaves me furious years later because of how badly my son was treated.
I was at the breaking point. Kiddo#3 was five months old; Kiddo#2 was two. We were trying to keep them occupied in a small hospital room, and everything was tense.
I took the baby and went to the hospital cafeteria to pick up some coffee. On the way down, I thought to my guardian angel, “I need cheesecake.”
A thought popped into my head, and I said, “Maybe the whole cheesecake, yeah.”
A bit later, I thought, “Caramel turtle cheesecake.”
It felt as if the angel was laughing, so I added, “Chocolate cheesecake on chocolate graham cracker pie crust.”
And then something weird happened: I felt the suggestion of strawberries and cinnamon.
Now, cinnamon and strawberries don’t go together. I don’t know why — it’s like cinnamon and chocolate, both yummy separately but disgusting together.
Yet it made sense that cinnamon does well on cheesecake, and so do strawberries, and I like them both, so why not put them together and make something lovely and even more stress-relieving?
I went ahead and designed My Guardian Angel’s Wheel Of Cheesecake that he could bring to me (I knew this was fantasy, but hey, if he did it, I would not have objected. I still wouldn’t, come to think of it!) and came up with different flavors for every slice of cheesecake.
But in my heart, I kept going back to that cinnamon-strawberry cheesecake because it meant something more to me than just “Here, eat this.” It meant, “I’m worried about you,” and “I pay attention to what you like,” and even more, “I’ve never actually tasted these two things myself.”
I held onto that during the next stressful days because caught up in a system that didn’t care about my son, my family or my sanity, there was someone who cared very much about speaking to me in a language I understood.
Interwoven threads July 25, 2009
Posted by philangelus in religion, writing.add a comment
In the last week, I’ve had a bug to read some of my journals from a few years ago. Because, as Oscar Wilde says, “I need something scandalous to read.”
That or, “Diaries are personal and private and therefore suitable only for publication.” And think, Wilde wrote that a hundred years before weblogs!
Ah-heh.
My point, since I had one, is that it surprises me when I read the whole book at once to see how God wove together situations that seemed unrelated at the time in order to resolve them both.
I’ll be vague because at least one of the situations involves someone else, and I don’t think it would be right to share that person’s private details.
In one case, I had a question that had been bothering me but which wasn’t pressing. I asked my guardian angel to find out the answer, and I said, “I know you probably can’t or shouldn’t tell me. But I want to know in my heart that at least you know.” I thought I felt a reply that, really, God knew it regardless. And I said yes, but I wanted to feel the information was closer to home.
Nine days later, the journal records a rather intense and strange happening amazing enough that I went right to the computer and inflicted an account on Wendy and Ivy. 
It wasn’t until I re-read the journal this week that I realized the strange happening was actually the answer to the question. In the footsteps of Indiana Jones’ father, once I’d written it down, I didn’t have to remember it any longer.
Another journal is more impressive. There’s a series of interlocking events, seemingly unrelated, that add up to a resolution more tightly-plotted than anything I’ve ever written. Maybe God knows that as an author, I’ll appreciate it, so he shows off a little for me.
There’s a holiday event gone bad, followed by me asking a question of the other person (which the person answers in a way that hurts my feelings) followed by a lighthearted episode. That’s followed by me rephrasing the question, the person finding the rephrased question actually helps frame a larger issue in a helpful way, then some speculation, and then suddenly the stuff from the holiday-gone-bad gets resolved and the question gets answered in an improbable way.
The events in that journal are like a bunch of interweaving threads, a braid, only I wasn’t directing it and I’m fairly certain the other person didn’t want it to go in the direction it did.
Which means God had it under control the whole time because it worked out so perfectly. I couldn’t see it at all when I was in the thick of things.
Retail therapy! Laughter = the best credit July 24, 2009
Posted by philangelus in sarcasm.7 comments
Via Erica on one of my online forums:
HEMA is a Dutch department store. The first store opened on November 4, 1926, in Amsterdam. Now there are 150 stores in the Netherlands .
Take a look at HEMA’s product page. You can’t order anything and it’s in Dutch but just wait a couple of seconds and watch what happens.
If I lived there, I’d so be shopping at that store.
writing again July 23, 2009
Posted by philangelus in The Boys Upstairs, writing.3 comments
About two weeks ago, God kicked me off the forum where I spent the bulk of my internet time, and after I got done feeling tasty and stupid, I proceeded to keep living.
I have my suspicions about why leaving was the thing to do (*sigh*) and it wasn’t entirely time. One of the side-effects of going has been that I’ve paid more attention to my writing.
In the last two weeks, I’ve written and submitted two brand-new short stories, written two-thirds of another one, and re-edited two-thirds of ♥My Book♥. Also, I got back the second round of edits on The Boys Upstairs (my upcoming Christmas novella with Lilley Press) and spent a couple of days working on those. I’ve also spoken to the publisher of Seven Archangels: Annihilation to discuss publication of another book in the series, Seven Archangels: An Arrow In Flight.
In other words, I’ve returned to being a writer. Kind-of.
Then yesterday, I took my kids to the park. We returned home to bake cookies, and when I got my email, I had a message from the editors of Chicken Soup For The Soul. I’ve had a short piece accepted for “What I Learned From The Cat.”
Isn’t that awesome?
Even more, the piece revolves around what one of my cats did when Emily Rose was diagnosed with anencephaly, and how the cat then went on to “protect” my pregnancy with Kiddo#2. And I found out about it three days after Emily’s ninth birthday. How cool is that?
But wait! There’s more! (Of course there is.) I also got an email from the artist who will be designing the cover for The Boys Upstairs. At the time I signed the contract, they asked for my ideas about cover art, and after I finished saying to myself, “Dammit, Jim, I’m a writer, not an illustrator,” I had come up with a few ideas. The artist was asking me to clarify some of the details (ie, when I said “house” what kind of house did I mean?)
All of a sudden, the writing is going on again. Very strange. Very good, but strange.
Angels and food July 22, 2009
Posted by philangelus in angels, food.2 comments
We’ve talked already about how it’s silly for me to celebrate angel days with food, since angels don’t eat. Even though my children have learned to work the system.
In the Bible we see angels bringing food to people. The Eucharist is referred to as “panis angelicus,” or the Bread of Angels, even though they don’t receive it.
Humans use hunger as part of our understanding of the world. Hunger for God, hunger and thirst for holiness, hunger for prayer. We use the word “hunger” to imply a lack we urgently want to fill. In “Seven Archangels: Annihilation,” Mary is the only human being in the story, and she shows her love to the angels specifically by cooking. It’s a uniquely human way of showing care. In “Seven Archangels: An Arrow In Flight,” which is under discussion right now, Gabriel watches a family cooking and suddenly internalizes the difference between “eating” and a community eating together.
My dream of Gabriel started in a restaurant. I’ve dreamed about my own guardian, and in some of those dreams, he’s given me food. I think to them it means, “I will nurture you.”
I came across this in a journal from a couple of years ago:
Food must be amusing to angels. It’s functional — to sustain life — and yet we make it symbolic (of togetherness) and use it to say we love one another, and to seal covenants, and finally Jesus comes to us as food. And they don’t need it at all.
Love Finds You In…uh, where? July 21, 2009
Posted by philangelus in sarcasm, writing.12 comments
I came across submission guidelines for the Summerside Press series “Love Finds You” and I think we here at 7A4K1F should consider submitting.
The guidelines, in part, read thus:
In the fall of 2008, Summerside Press™ launched the Love Finds You™ fiction series, which features inspirational romance novels set in actual cities and towns across the United States. [...] Additionally, each story in the series should make a clear connection to the name of the town in which it is set. For example, a story titled Love Finds You in Revenge, Ohio might feature revenge as a central theme.
So, let’s get started! I’ll send them a query letter for a truly moving love story. I could set it in…oh, let’s see…it should be someplace evocative…
I know! We’ll set in Flushing.
Dear Ms. Meisel:
Latrina Seward, a home-owner in Flushing, NY, finds herself pursued by John, a plumber. She’s just dumped her boyfriend (a real snake) after years of being #2 in his affections. He frequently told her to pipe down, and that “on a scale of one to ten, you’re an eight.”
On New Year’s Eve, John helps Latrina handle a plumbing disaster and then stays to watch a bowl game. Latrina resists John’s charms, not wanting anything she considers a ball and chain in her life. Unflappable, he lets his charm overflow into her heart, but she doesn’t think this augurs well.
Over time, Latrina becomes privy to the details of John’s past, and they fall in love. By the light of a quarter moon, John and Latrina decide to take the plunge and get married.
I have enclosed three sample chapters, which I’m sure will make you immediately think of Flushing.
I also have a romance between an accountant and a collections agent, set in Billings, Montana.
Sincerely,
Jane
