Why, Lord?

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Yesterday, the good Lord gave us a lovely day in these parts. Quiet, late-summer sunrise. A perfect day for a drive… maybe up I-81 through the beautiful “Valley of Virginia…”

Punctuate all this loveliness with killing three people, including yourself, and gravely injuring another? We could ask and ask and ask, and we won’t understand why someone would do that. I wish he hadn’t.

On a lazy summer afternoon at Bridgewater Plaza, you can watch the parents buying bags of popcorn to feed the schools of carp that congregate by one of the piers. Then their children stick their fingers into the fishes’ toothless gullets. They scream and laugh. It’s the kind of hillbilly fun that people in Franklin County, Virginia, really love.

Why let it all be disturbed with the report of bullets at sunrise, Lord? The last thing any of us ever wanted–that our home would become international news like this. Why do You allow this?

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Shortly before she died, St. Monica said to her son Augustine, “Remember me at the altar of God.”

The best thing to do today: pray for the dead at Mass. The best thing to do tomorrow: same thing.

At Holy Mass, we encounter the Power Whose hands hold the living and the dead. When we pray with love, that He would help them–the dead and the living; when we pray at the altar that He would help them, He will.

At Holy Mass today, St. Paul tells us: “Stand firm in the Lord.” Because we stand firm, we can ask Why? He will unfold an answer, we trust Him enough to believe that. We ask because we believe He will answer.

Christ crucified is going through all this, right here with us, on these lovely late-summer Virginia days full of grief.

New Assignment

Rev. Nick Mammi

Rev. Matt Kiehl

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…as ’twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole (Hamlet I.ii)

Thus do we priests greet a change of pastoral assignment.

On August 1, soon-to-be-Father Nick Mammi will become the pastor of the Rocky Mount and Martinsville, Virginia. A great blessing for the people.

Maybe a co-incidence that my tenure ends just as David Letterman’s does. “The four-year parochial nightmare for St. Francis of Assisi and St. Joseph is now over.”

…I will become the pastor of St. Andrew parish in Roanoke. Also Administrator of St. Gerard parish.

Bishop has assigned me an excellent curate, soon-to-be Father Matt Kiehl. Father will assume the role of chaplain at Roanoke Catholic School.

…Can’t believe I have to leave my beloved home of Franklin/Henry County. Can’t wait to serve God in Roanoke…

May God be praised and blessed and adored for His goodness!
And may He console us sorrowful ones.

Church of St. Andrew, Roanoke, Va.

St. Gerard, Roanoke

Serene Mountaintop Point-of-View

Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. (Luke 10:41)

Anybody ever hiked up to the top of a mountain? Mill Mountain? McAfee Knob? Sharp Top? Dragon’s Tooth? Mount Rogers? Pike’s Peak? Mount Everest?

From the top of a mountain, everything down here looks small. Up on McAfee Knob, you can see down to here, where we are.* You can see the Wells Fargo Tower, and it looks like a little Lego. You can see planes taking off from the airport, and they look like model airplanes.

Now: Who lived His life–from beginning to end–Who lived His life with the point-of-view of God?

He walked the earth, stood very close to us, as one of us human beings, but He saw everything just as God sees everything?

And, because He could see everything, as if from a mountaintop, He had perfect peace. He could see how everything fits together. He knew exactly what He needed to do, and He did it. Everthing else, He entrusted to His heavenly Father.

Who am I talking about?

He said to Martha: ‘Calm yourself, my child. Don’t fuss. Mary has chosen the better part. She has focused her gaze on Me. Her eyes are fixed on the one thing necessary, on the answer, on the key that unlocks the great mystery of life. Rest your soul in Me, and you will know what to do. And you will have the strength to do it.’

Anybody ever heard of the Serenity Prayer? What does ‘serenity’ mean? Right: interior peace, calm under pressure. The prayer says, ‘Lord, give me the courage to change the things I can for the better, the serenity to accept what I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.’

There is one man Who can actually teach us to live this prayer out every day. And He will give us the graces to fulfill it. The King of true serenity, the man with God’s point-of-view: Jesus Christ.

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* Roanoke Catholic School!

Tigers at Verizon Center; Say No to Frank Gehry

…The Georgetown Hoyas’ overtime win over the Memphis Tigers on December 14, 2008, stands as one of the most gratifying experiences of my little life.

Yesterday’s game had different “trajectories.” Three years ago, the Hoyas upset a team that had been in the Final Four the preceding spring. Yesterday, the Hoyas stepped onto the court as 4-point favorites, having beat the Tigers once already this season.

But, dear reader, it was a sweet 11-point win nonetheless!

…Click HERE for yet another example of the emperors with no clothes running the contemporary architecture business.

We southwest Virginians have our piece to say about the proposed Dwight Eisenhower Memorial, as designed by Frank Gehry. Gehry’s protege Randall Stout designed the crashed metal eagle whose carcass litters downtown Roanoke.

Should the pleasant L’Enfant-plan park formed by the intersection of Independence and Maryland Avenues, Southwest, Washington, be boxed in by 80-foot pylons and stainless-steel curtains, as Gehry’s design proposes? Should puppies be jailed in wire-mesh cages for life?

Should the exploits of the great general and two-term president be “feminized,” as Kennicott suggests Gehry’s design succeeds in doing? Should we have a “masculinized” Jackie O. Memorial?

How about a good old, fashioned statue of Ike, and call it a day?

Southwest Washington lost most of its charm two generations ago. But that’s no excuse for turning it into a showplace for architectural preposterousness.

Toughest Dip in the Drink

How did I make out in my Lazarus-Saturday swim up Mill Mountain and around Ro’noke? I did okay.

Generally, I oppose full-immersion baptisms. But when the good Lord does it to you over the course of a 13-mile run, I’m into it.

The Blue Ridge Marathon provides the BEST runner experience. What do they hand you at the finish line for a replenisher? Yes. —>

Once I dry off, I will tally the donations and let you know how much we raised for ProLife Across America.

..Now, bring on April and May Madness!

Wagon Train

(Click here to go to the full 3,752 × 2,380 pixels map.)

Not to be indelicate, but the air today was balmy enough for tromping through places where frog couples are busy making more little frogs.

I found myself skirting the Pigg River and made a captivating discovery.

The Iroquois made a warpath here in their endless seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century battles with the Catawba. In 1744, at the Treaty of Lancaster, Pa., the Iroquois ceded the use of their Great Warrior Path to the white man.

Countless Scotch-Irish and Germans, having made landfall in the New World at Philadelphia, travelled to homesteads in “the backcountry”—Virginny, the Carolinas, and Georgia—along this path.

The 1751 map of the “Carolina Road” (above) fascinates me for a number of reasons.

1. The wagon road that passed along the Pigg River, down the hill from my rectory, also passed through Lancaster, Pa.–my dear mom’s hometown, 350 miles away.

2. The road passed into the piedmont at Big Lick, later to be known as Roanoke, through the pass formed by the Staunton River, also called the Roanoke River.

3. Heading upriver from Jamestown, the river named for King James forks near the land of Thomas Jefferson. The larger fork, which drains acreage from the westernmost reaches of the eastern seaboard, used to be called the Fluvanna, for Queen Anne. (These days, the whole thing is called the James.)

4. The town of Upper Marlboro in Prince George’s County, Md., where I lived three very happy years, appears on the map. But the city of Washington does not. (Washington did not, as yet, exist.)

5. Fry and Jefferson made an exquisite map. It depicts all the rights-of-way in use at the time with enough precision to aid in making practical travel decisions. I especially love the way they depicted the mountain ridges–no pretense of topographical accuracy but thoroughly helpful in travel planning.

One more fascinating geographic fact:

As everyone knows, the capital city of our nation is divided into four quadrants. And everyone knows that the U.S. Capitol serves as the axis-forming point. From the Capitol, the Mall divides northwest Washington from southwest Washington, North Capitol Street divides northwest from northeast, and East Capitol and South Capitol Streets likewise divide the quadrants.

Roanoke, Va., also has four quadrants. In Roanoke, the axis is formed by Jefferson Street, and the old Norfolk and Western railroad bed!

(If you hate geography geeks, you are visiting the wrong website.)

Publications

Some reputable scientists, even today, are not wholly satisfied with the notion that the song of birds is strictly and solely a territorial claim…It could be that a bird sings: I am sparrow, sparrow, sparrow, as Gerard Manley Hopkins suggests: “myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came.”

…Today I watched and heard a wren, a sparrow, and the mockingbird singing. My brain started to trill why why why, what is the meaning meaning meaning? …Surely they don’t even know why they sing. No; we have been as usual askng the wrong question.

It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird is singing. If the mockingbird were chirping to give us the long-sought formulae for a unified field theory, the point would be only slightly less irrelevant. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful? …If the lyric is simply “mine mine mine,” then why the extravagance of the score?

–Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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Your unworthy servant feebly seeks vanaprastha in a moutain wood. I miss you, and I am grateful for your prayers for me.

…An old friend has written a short story and a novella.

The author has no means of publishing these pieces himself, so I publish them here.

“President Wilson and the Other Dead People I Talked To” (no longer available–author’s request)

“West-East Highway”

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Who fails to drink little or much from the golden chalice of the Babylonian woman of the Apocalypse? (Revelation 17:4) …She reaches out to all states, even to the supreme and illustrious state of the sanctuary and divine priesthood, by setting her abominable cup in the holy place… She hardly leaves a man who has not drunk a small or large quantity of wine from her chalice, which is vain joy in natural beauty.

–St. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book III, chap. 22

Good Old War “That’s Some Dream”