This & That

Oh what celestial event is occurring in the Ohio sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, no -- it's the sun! To what do we owe the privilege of this surprisingly strong sun coupled with fifty+ degree temps? Oh. Yeah. Likely global warming. Which means I can't *really* enjoy it, seeing how it's a bug, not a feature (that's assuming humans are contributing to it, concerning which I have no idea). But that's to indulge in the tyranny of the anecdotal; one warm temp does not global warming make. And every so often the stars align to produce freakishly positive weather under the unlikeliest of circumstances, mainly a 50 degree sunny low wind Saturday afternoon in January. As one FB'r put it, "is this Indian winter?" The biggest surprise is that it would coincide with a day off work, given the 2/7ths chance. So this is how southern Tennesseans live? Is this their "winter"? Took advantage of it by jogging a couple miles, walking a couple miles, and then sleep-reading on the back patio under that startling sun.

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There's ever the thrill of finding out what lands next on my Google Reader, and today's gem was a bit by Friar Minor about the epiphany:

"Maybe I notice this every year and for­get, or maybe I never caught it before, but it's inter­est­ing that Leo the Great, in the Office of Read­ings today, rec­om­mends for our imi­ta­tion not the magi but the star. 'The obe­di­ence of the star calls us to imi­tate its hum­ble ser­vice: to be ser­vants, as best we can, of the grace that invites all men to find Christ.'"

I rather liked that because it soothes the old ache of seeing creation as cold and impersonal, as an evolution-inspired thing. Seeing the created world as God-made lets us not have to wait for supernatural events in order to praise the Lord. The beauty of the sun and trees - those things I can actually SEE - shows me that there is something beyond me, a greatness. It's the rare time that my senses actually work for me instead of against me.

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Am re-reading "Love in the Ruins" by Walker Percy, which included this rather direct dialogue: "You know what's wrong with you? You don't love God, you love p-ssy!" Yes, pretty darn direct. The world in a nutshell: worshiping the wrong thing.

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So finished up the Judy Collins saga. She followed a Heather King arc, though without the Christianity: drank for 20 years, miserable, blackouts, depressed, found rehab, it "took" and she's been sober with respect to both drink and romance, the latter which had been a revolving bed affair. One does get a sense of just how powerful knowledge can be, since she was never told - and had no idea - that it wasn't that she drank because she was depressed, but she was depressed because she drank. After more than a decade of "therapists" who recommended free love in order to help solve the underlying issues that they said provoked her drinking, it was revolutionary to consider the reverse. Turns out some people are just of an addictive bent and thus get bent. Her life did seem to change on a dime with sobriety, beginning with her love life: she met her husband shortly thereafter and they've been together since '78.