Note: Each person registered has a place for messages on this site. One can send a message by going to “community”, then to the data base and then clicking on the name of the person. Or if the person has commented on the blog, one can click on his name and it will go to his messages. To check messages click on “my account” and then “messages”. Another note: Next blog on the 15th will be after the Gala/Picnic. Here’s hoping those of you who are able to go to one or both of the events will tell those of us who can’t go about them. Now to our regularly scheduled blog.
As an aspiring genius, the other day I was reading an article on what makes a genius a genius. It gave the example of physicist Richard Feynman (I had never heard of this man) who had an unimpressive IQ, but was very creative in his thinking. I was thinking, in a very creative manner, that sometimes we need to approach religion with a new way of thinking, especially with regard to our celebration of some of the most important days of the liturgical year.
Last Sunday, Father Garcia mentioned that Pentecost is the birthday of the Church. After Mom and I got home, we decided that we should celebrate the Church’s 1980th birthday. We made a chocolate cake, put a candle in it and sang Happy Birthday to Mater Ecclesia. Mom really sang out. There was a lot of symbolism in our little ceremony. The Holy Spirit descended in tongues of fire and there was our little tongue of fire on top of the candle. The Gospel reading at Mass was Christ breathing on the Apostles, giving them the Holy Spirit and the sacramental ability to forgive sins. And Mom and I had used our breath to blow out the candle — and fire certainly has a connection to sin. We didn’t have 1980 candles, but the one represented the One True Church and Her Unity. Our birthday party made Pentecost a little more vivid.
Once I read a story about a monastery electing an Epiphany Queen. The description made the event seem like the greatest in the world. Every household, it seems, should have an Epiphany king or queen or both elected each year in a similar manner. I was thinking, maybe the way a genius without a very high IQ would think, that it would be interesting to write to various religious orders to find out how particular days or seasons are celebrated and make it into a booklet that families could then use to adopt/adapt the customs for their own homes. Does this seem like something people would be interested in? Is there already a book of this sort?
We have Trinity Sunday and Corpus Christi and the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart immediately ahead of us. What will we do to celebrate these days? As it works out, the Gala and the Picnic are on the days following the Universal Holy Day of Corpus Christi (the Thursday after Trinity Sunday). We could see these as extensions of that celebration. Or the Picnic could be a celebration of St. Anthony of Padua’s feast. A picnic is a wonderful way for families to celebrate. Which leads me to tell you a picnic story.
Uncle Ray and Aunt Mary’s family had a great place for picnicking. It was the Old Nile Reservoir (not in Egypt) which was a dry lake bed fed by the almost always dry Bijou Creek (not in France). It was a vast area with nobody around — near Hoyt, Colorado, where my godfather was the postmaster. After a big snowstorm one freezing winter, Uncle Ray decided the family should go on a picnic. So all eight of them piled into the cab of their tractor (this is similar to putting eight people into a phone booth) and they blazed a trail through the snow to the Old Nile. Cousin Betty, who was retelling this story to me via e-mail when she was supposed to be working at her job as parish secretary, said she can’t remember anything about the picnic, only the ride crammed into the tractor cab and how cold her feet were. Our family went on a picnic with Uncle Ray’s family at the Old Nile once, of all times, on a warm summer’s day. On this picnic I learned about animal survival techniques. We surrounded a lizard, and someone was able to grab it, hold it by its tail, and then we watched it wriggle free from its tail. That was great. Then we found a mud puddle with water snakes in it. We decided to grab snakes too, but soon found out that the snakes made our hands smell terrible — 10 times worse than a skunk smell. This was not great and we left the snakes alone. We then played volleyball with a net strung between two cottonwoods. Cows had pastured there a while ago, so cousin Dan designated himself as the sanitation department. The game would periodically have to be halted so the sanitation chairman could come running with his shovel to improve the court when debris was found under leaves and such. That was a fun volleyball game.
Burke Lake Park probably is a little different than the Old Nile, but just in case, could someone bring a shovel to the Picnic?
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