Friday Link Fest Because...

1. Why do I do a link up on Friday when I have my own link up on Thursdays?  

Because This Ain't the Lyceum! cracks me up with her earnest telling of what she's doing and why.

2.  I know, it's Friday but....

If you didn't make it to Catholicmom.com yesterday, here's the link to Small Success Thursday!

3.  Today, I have a piece over at Aleteia!  It's on teaching forgiveness and my own two cents.  

Here's the picture of the actual Forgiveness Jar.

4.  How's the Book coming?  Slow.   Last week I was sick, I'm trying to get back into the swing of writing, but somehow, life keeps taking up more and more time.   This week, I'm taking on Saint Teresa of Avila.   I figure, I should share some sites I've found that are gems.  This week's favorite is:

Order of the Carmelites.

What I keep understanding as I pursue this project, is I am in the kiddie pool of understanding, they swim in the ocean. 

5.  What are you reading?   I just got it, so I just started, but Elizabeth Scalia has a new book!

Thus far, I'm really enjoying it.  I hope to review it next Friday...as part of keeping my brain from spinning toward its natural state of atrophy.   

6.  What else are you doing?  In two weeks, we have a blockbuster weekend with Prom, Girls on the Run 5K and the Gaithersburg Book Festival!  The past two years, I've gone.  This year I'm helping with a booth.  I hope next year...to present!   

7.  I am a geeky woman.  I saw Captain America's Civil War.  I enjoyed all of it the same way Stephen Greydamus does, like a pizza that tasted great going down, but I probably shouldn't have eaten so willingly.  

After every movie, my husband and I do a wrap up, sort of like a post game review.   What got me was, the writers chickened out.  In the comic Civil War, the fight between Captain and Ironman has high stakes and high consequences.  If the movie had been willing to allow those sort of consequences to happen to both sides, it would have made the pain between them that much more than a mere stake out of my side, your side.  Superhero movies do have to rely on action and pop, so philosophical musings about the consequences of decisions, of releasing/holding onto power have to be done on the fly.   As Falcon says, "most fights don't involve that much talking."  However, I think the intimacy of the fight fell a little flat because there wasn't as much talking as one would want, to bring the audience into the Civil war with genuine torn loyalties.    

The poster promises something I don't feel the movie quite delivers, the pain and break isn't as decisive or hard as it should be.   It's more of a friendship sprain than a heart breaker. That being said, it was a fun popcorn date. 

Talking it over with my husband, we have allowed as young as John to go see it, but I wouldn't let anyone younger.  

See you Sunday.  Now I have to go get some writing done. :)

We Have No King But Caesar

The people have spoken and we will have as President this fall, someone who thinks Planned Parenthood does some very good things...or we will have Hillary Clinton.  
We will have someone who has no humility.
We will have someone who has no scruples about lying, about destroying others, and about lying about destroying others.
We will have someone who thinks the law is for other people.

We will have a leader who is willing to mock other people, and to tell all followers, it's okay to hate the other side.   They're legitimate to hate.  

We will have a leader who thinks because people on the other side hate, they are somehow legitimate and noble.  

We will be ruled by either a party indifferent to anything anyone says, or the other presuming about its own moral value based on comparison.   If the Houyhnhnms or the Yahoos win, humanity loses.  
America loses.

No one running for office this year who will be on the November ballot has done anything ti show they care about anything or anyone other than themselves.  

If the theme of the 2008 election was hope, the theme of 2016 is

Abandon all of that, ye who enter here.  

Not to spend too much more time gazing into the Palantir, for such way lies only despair, but my one worry and warning is based on the one thing I've seen from the fruits of both candidates about the coming election.  No matter who wins, we will have someone in the White House who above all other things, desires power.  

We Like to Think We Think

God always wants it all.

That's why the Eucharist isn't merely bread and wine, and isn't a symbol, and isn't anything less than everything.

That's why we are the bride to the bridegroom, the church to Christ.  That's why marriage is sacred and sacramental, and supposed to be a total self giving.  Because God doesn't do half measures or gestures or well meaning symbols.  God is always all in and God always wants our hearts all in.  God doesn't want us just to need Him, but to Love Him.  He doesn't want us just to tolerate our neighbors, but to love them.  God wants us always all in.

So today, I'm asking people to go all in.

I have a friend from three years of writing.  We've never met face to face, but she's helped with my writing, she's encouraged me when things got tough, and she's always been kind.  She is a veteran.  She suffers from a debilitating condition.   Tonight, baring a miracle in Ann Arbor or Oakland County, Michigan, baring someone going all in, she will be sleeping outside and she is scared.  I am scared for her.

Today, where I live, it is mucky and wet, cool and unpleasant to be outside.  I do not have to be.  However I stood outside today, forcing myself to take in the minor discomfort.

I don't know what it is like, to sleep without a roof.

I don't know what it is like, to feel unwanted on sight, to have no place where the doors are thrown open because it is you in particular.  

I don't know what it is like, to have to fear not merely the dark or the cold or the trash, or the looks of others, but also the whole community, because I cannot tell the state of anyone else around me. I do not know that level of edge, the veneer of safety and security having a place called home gives.

Some people have seen me post to my friend's Go Fund Me page, you may be tired of it, but take a moment to think how tired you would be, if there were no place you could stop and safely call it an end to the day.   No place to rest.   I don't want to imagine, except I know my friend, doesn't have to.

Consider giving.  We are so many. We have so much.  This is a little act of courage, of hope, of salt, of light, of goodness, of comfort, of warmth, of rest.

 Click here to help!

“Christians who stay still, who don't go forward, are non-Christian Christians. We don’t know exactly what they are. They are slightly ‘paganized’ Christians: who are there, who stay still and don’t go forward in their Christian lives, who don’t make the Beatitudes bloom in their lives, who don’t do Works of mercy… they are motionless. Excuse me for saying it, but they are like an (embalmed) mummy, a spiritual mummy there. There are Christians who are ‘spiritual mummies,’ motionless, there. They don’t do evil but they don’t do good things.” --Pope Francis

Here's a chance to do a good thing.
For the cynics: Will there be need tomorrow? Yes.  Will there be other needs tomorrow from other places? Yes.   However right now, you know about this need, from this person, and have the rare opportunity, to make tonight a night where she has a roof.