Someone’s small child was sans underwear during Mass this morning…only discovered right as Mass was beginning….I’m not saying who this someone was or giving the name of that small child, but just wanted to state that it happened.

Oh and the someone and his/her spouse thought it was the funniest thing ever.

“Say unceasingly this chaplet that I have taught you. Whoever will recite it will receive great Mercy at the hour of death. Priests will recommend it to sinners as their last hope of salvation. Even if there were a sinner most hardened, if he were to recite this Chaplet only once, he would receive grace from My Infinite Mercy. I desire that the  whole world know My Infinite Mercy. I desire to grant unimaginable graces to those who trust in My Mercy….” (Diary 687)

Praying this chaplet is simple, grab a rosary (don’t let not having one handy stop you, your have 10 fingers) and follow these steps:

1. Begin with the Sign of the Cross, 1 Our Father, 1 Hail Mary and The Apostles Creed.

2. Then on the Our Father Beads say the following:
Eternal Father, I offer You the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Your dearly beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world.

3. On the 10 Hail Mary Beads say the following:
For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.

(Repeat step 2 and 3 for all five decades).

4. Conclude with (three times):
Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us and on the whole world.

I had a scary moment that involved me calling 911 and having the county sheriff out to the house.

We have a land line, (I have mentioned it before) and today the phone rang after three days of being quiet. I answered it and it was a recorded message (poorly worded I might add) about credit card debt and lowering of the rates and if I am interested to press 1. With no option to remove myself from the list, I pressed 1 and this is how the conversation went:

Hunky-Dory, right? No.

The phone rang 10 minutes later and it was the same company. This time I just spoke with the person who answered when I pressed 1 and said “You just called, I asked to be removed from the list, please remove me.” and hung up.

Ten minutes later, I was changing Benedict’s diaper when the phone rang again. I answered it and it was the same recorded message. I pressed 1 without listening to the rest of it and when the person answered, I asked for a supervisor. The man at the other end told me he was a supervisor, so I asked for his supervisor. At this point he told me that there was no one above him, so I told him that I requested to be taken off the list two times in the last 20 minutes and that he was in violation of the do not call list. He told me they don’t subscribe to the list and then he said he was going to come over and choke me.

Yes, he said that.

I then went in to protective mama bear mode and said a few things along the lines of “How dare you call me and threaten me.”  I started crying a bit and the man said “Are you pouting now? Are you crying? Are you scared?” then said a few more mocking things about me being upset and crying.

At this point I ran upstairs for my cell, called 911 and was told a deputy would be sent to my house.  I was pretty upset and crying on the phone at this point. I managed to call Joshua while waiting and told him what happened. He said he would call the phone company to get the phone numbers of the last received calls.

The officer arrived pretty much said that there was not much they could do (is there ever?) and his advice to me is to just not answer the phone. Then he left.

Joshua then called and told me the phone company could not access the last calls received without the police calling it in.

I called the FTC and spoke with a very nice woman who took my information then she said that the man was most likely a scammer and that there is no way to catch him (or his “company”).

While the woman at the FTC was nice and officer was not so condescending, I am frustrated that a man called my house, threaten me with bodily harm and there is nothing I can do about it. We are still tossing around calling the FBI to see if they can help, but I am not sure if we will because we will probably get the same response.

Say a prayer for me and my shot nerves though. I realize it was probably just a loser with little to do in life and he probably lives 1000 miles away, but I am still pretty worked up over this and upset.

Betty Beguiles is hosting a Honeymooon Tale Link-Up! Check out her site for more stories.

This blog post is about our honeymoon…there will be talk of romance and intimacy, but of course, no details, (duh!). I don’t intend to scandalize with what I have written but wanted to share the story of our honeymoon.

Joshua and I were married seven years ago this month, so the memories of our honeymoon have been floating around in my mind quite a bit this past week.

We did not have a lot of money when we were married but wanted to go on a honeymoon somewhere. I tossed out Tabasco country, but Joshua shot me down saying it would be too hot. (He was right, October in the deep south is still shorts and tee-shirt weather). We ended up deciding on  a cabin up in the Arrowhead of Minnesota, outside of a town called Ely and it was a great decision.

Our reception was purposely planned on being short (only about three hours), as we did not want to be out to late and really, we were just married, we had things we wanted to do. Our original plan was to leave the reception and drive to Chicago and spend the night at a hotel there, go to the Cathedral for Mass the next morning then head up to Ely. We ended up scratching the Chicago part and spent the first night as husband and wife at our house.

This was really wonderful, actually. We arrived home from the reception, me in my dress and Joshua in his tux. Our neighbors, smiled at us and waved. Joshua attempted to carry me over the threshold, but my dress made it very cumbersome, so it wasn’t very pretty.  We then prayed a rosary together, in our wedding finery. The rest of the night was just wonderful, being married and not having to have Joshua leave and being able to fall asleep next to him seemed like heaven.

The next morning we went to early Mass (730) and planned on leaving right after to drive up to Ely.  We ended up being stopped by quite a few people after Mass to congratulate us and by Father to tell us to get our coffee table (a gift from a dear friend, Ben, who came from Ohio to MC the Mass) out of the sacristy. So with a bit of a late start and a swing by the house to drop it off, we headed up to Ely.

We stopped for lunch/dinner at a burger king (romantic I know) somewhere in central Wisconsin, got it to go and headed on our way, again. The drive seemed to take a lot longer than we had planned and we arrived at the cabin quite late, after mid-night if I recall correctly. We saw snow flakes while driving! Snow, in early October!

The next morning we woke up to a nice quarter inch dusting of snow and I had only packed sandals and tennis shoes…and since we were heading out to Mass, the sandals were the option, so there you go, sandals in snow. Since it was the Feast of St. Francis, it seemed fitting. We went to Mass then to breakfast at a small cafe in Ely, then to the grocery store to stock the cabin.

Then it happened. Joshua was starting to feel pretty yucky. We suspected food poisoning and well, with the timing, we are pretty sure it was from the BK. So, Joshua spent the rest of the day on the couch and I read.

The next day, my period started.

We attended Mass each day that week. On the day that Mass was at the mission parish close to an hour away, we planned to go hiking and had a good time in the woods, just walking around. I knew then that when we had kids, Joshua would be the one leading the pack in doing dangerous things, like oh, climbing the rocks overlooking Lake Superior.

The day we went hiking, we also ate at a little mom and pop roadside restaurant where we were the youngest people by far. That was also that day that I convinced Joshua to drive to Thunder Bay, Ontario. (When you grew up metro-Detroit and watched Channel 4 news, Chuck Gadica always told the temp in Thunder Bay, and it was always much colder there.) So off to Thunder Bay we drove. These were the carefree days, before a passport was needed to get in to Canada, just your drivers license got you over the border.  Sadly the customs agent or border patrol did not tell us about the paper mill between the border and Thunder Bay. Oh, wow, they aren’t pretty smelling things, I’ll tell you that.

Thunder Bay is, well, let’s just say, I don’t get to make spur of the moment, on the road, hey let’s look at that decisions in our family because, well Thunder Bay didn’t have much going on. I am a lover of Canada, so I enjoyed just being in Canada, but really, aside from the waterfront park, not much to do, that we knew of.

We tried canoing the next day but it was cold and I am not a very good canoe-er. Well, to be honest, that’s the story we tell, but really, I was super-duper, crampy. (sorry my one guy reader, but hey, you should know about these things too.)

When it came time to leave our little cabin in the big woods, we took a slow, meandering route home, spending the night in Medford, Wisconsin, my Grandpa Kress’ home town. We also stopped in Ladysmith and Gilman, WI, where my mom was born and where my grandparents were married, respectively. While in Medford, we went to visit some family at the Catholic Cemetery. We then stalked the old family homestead, then headed down to Stetsonville, WI where my grandpa’s brother, Monsignor Alphonse Kress was buried.

Our way home included a trip up to Door County (which really, probably cemented the “I don’t get to make spur of the moment, on the road, hey let’s look at that decisions in our family”, because it wasn’t nearly as cool as I thought it would be.

That evening we had dinner with our friend, the now Father David Schalk, but then just Dave, at Grandma V’s in Libertyville, Illinois and he took us on a small tour of Mundelien Seminary.

So that was our honeymoon. Simple, wonderful, grace-filled with a bit of trial.

Cam over at A Woman’s Place is hosting a custom rosary giveaway. Check out her blog and enter to win!

Below is the Homily from Fr. Basil Nixen’s First Mass, given by Fr. Cassian Folsom, OSB.

Tears, The wood of the Cross, the Word & The Eucharist

Author

Fr. Cassian Folsom, O.S.B.

Liturgical Date

EF: Dominica XV post Pentecosten

Readings

Gal 5:25-26; 6:1-10 & Lc 7:11-16

In Today’s parable of the dead man in Nain—which seems like a coincidence, but is actually Divine Providence— the Word of God is addressed directly to the newly-ordained priest, Fr. Basil.  (I would also like to take this opportunity to welcome the parents, relatives, and friends of Fr. Basil who have come from far and wide to be with him this weekend.)

 

1. The funeral procession, sad and painful, presents first of all, the figure of the widowed mother who is crying.  The Lord Jesus, moved by her tears, performs the miracle.  We see here the tears of the Church for the spiritual death of her sons.  “The wages of sin is death,” says St. Paul (Rom 6:23) and the Church groans and cries with her lost children, who due to sin are dead, and are taken to the tomb.  Therefore, these tears represent the intercession of the Church for sinners.

 

1. The widowed mother’s son lay in the coffin and “had the hope of rising,” says St. Ambrose, “because it was transported on wood.  The wood of the coffin, after Jesus touched it, began to be beneficial for life, so that one had the proof that salvation had to be restored to the people through the wood of the cross” (Exp. Ev. Sec. Lucam V, 90: vol. 1, p.429).  The wood of the coffin is a symbol of the cross.

 

1. Then, the four men, the bearers of the coffin, stopped to hear the Word of God.  The Gospel says: “Jesus came and touched the coffin, and the bearers stood still” (Lk 7:14).  Then, Jesus said, he pronounced the Word: “Young man, I say to you, arise!” (Lk 7:14).  Therefore, at the Word of God corpses rise.  See how powerful the Word of God is!

 

1. The Gospel says, “The dead man sat up, and began to speak. And he gave him to his mother” (Lk 7:15).  What does it mean, “he gave him to his mother” if not that the Lord restored him to full communion with the Church, a communion which was broken by sin and death.  This communion has its highest expression in the Eucharist, the sacrament of charity and unity.

 

If the parable in itself has this profound meaning, what does this communicate to us about the role of the priest in the Church?  Precisely because in the sacraments, the priest acts in persona Christi, he has the task of raising the dead and restoring them to their mother, the Church.  He does it through the tears, the wood of the Cross, the Word, and the act of giving the risen sinner back to his mother.

 

1. First of all, the priest must weep for the spiritual death of the children of the Church.  He must shed tears, understand them, and feel compunction for sinners, for the lost sheep, for the poor people who in the moral life don’t know how to distinguish the right hand from the left.  Many people are spiritually diseased, or worse, die because of these diseases, and who takes care of it?  The priest must intercede for the sinner, with groans and tears.  Maybe the priest-monk is more sensible to these things because he has been formed in the school of compunction, by the recognition of his own vices and sins.  Thus, he understands human nature and so has compassion.

 

1. The priest knows that the spiritual deceased can be saved only through the wood of the coffin, or in other words, through the cross.  There is no other way.  The suffering, the pain, and all the difficulties of life are for us an instrument of salvation and allow us to participate in the cross of Christ.  The priest must preach Christ crucified—but before preaching it, he must experience being crucified with Christ in his own flesh (cf. Gal 2:20), in order to be able to preach with conviction.

 

1. St. Ambrose says, “The dead rise at the Word of God.”  The priest must be rooted in the Bible, shaped by the Word of God.  The monastic formation of lectio divina is a good preparation for the priestly task of preaching.  Then, the preaching cannot remain on the surface of things, it cannot be the word of the priest, but must be a word of salvation which comes from God.  In this way, those spiritually sick, or rather, those spiritually dead, will rise when they hear the voice of the Lord saying: “Young man, I say to you, arise!”

 

1. In the same way in which the Lord gave the risen young man to his mother, the priest must give the reconciled sinner to the bosom of the Church.  Through the sacrament of penance, the priest serves as an ambassador of reconciliation, and restores the penitent to the Church.  Reconciliation in this case means re-establishing full communion with God and with others, and as we know, the Eucharist is this communion par excellence.  The role of the priest is not only to consecrate the Eucharist, but to restore penitents to this great sacrament.  In the liturgical assembly, they can experience the freedom of being children of God, they can adore the Lord.  In fact, this act of adoration is the highest expression of its very actualization, the recovery of its very own identity.

 

Conclusion:  the dead man of Nain, who rose for a period of time, had to die again, and in this lies the great different between Christ’s resurrection and the resuscitation of the son of the widowed mother.  The resurrection of Christ is a definitive victory over death—Christ does not die again—and the priest must be a herald of this resurrection, the true gospel and the foundation of our hope.

May Fr. Basil become a priest resplendent of the highest quality, having at his disposition these many tools:  tears, the wood of the Cross, the Word, and the Eucharist.

Aside from being the most handsome, wonderful, caring and helpful husband in the world, he is a great web-designer! He designed me a new theme for this here blog. I love it! What do you think!?

At our new house, we have a land line. We haven’t had a land line in years and do not really see the point of one as both of us have our cellphones. We do have to have one here because the only internet available here is DSL. So, we have the landline and a phone hooked up to it. We don’t use it and I don’t honestly know the number. Joshua may as he says it would be nice to be able to get a hold of me in the event that my cell dies (or is on vibrate in another part of the house). It is also nice to have the safety net for calling 911 if we need to. Oh and I signed up for the do not call list as soon as we were issued a number.

So my problem? The people who had the phone number before us, the X family doesn’t seem to like to pay their bills. We get calls all the time from collection agencies, dish network, hospitals and various other creditors asking for members of the X family.  When I get a live person, I tell them that this is no longer the number for the X family and to please quit calling. Those people have and it is nice, however, we get a lot of recorded calls with the request to return call to a certain number and ask for a person.

Folks, I don’t know about you, but I sure as heck do not have time to return those phone calls.

So what do I do? No, really, what do I do? I cannot get these people to quit calling. Even if I feel like I have made a dent in the calls, another collection agency pops up. Part of me thinks these people are still giving out our number as their number because the calls just won’t stop.

Any suggestions?