Some Notes

Question of the day:

Somehow our ESPN got switched to Spanish. Should we call the cable company to fix it? …Or should we just save time and learn Spanish?

…I must say “Downton Abbey” offered the viewer a rare pleasure when Phoebe Nicholls appeared in the Christmas special as the Marchioness of Flintshire. She has aged very gracefully since portraying young Cordelia in Brideshead Revisited in the 80’s and Elizabeth Elliot in Persuasion in the 90’s.

However: I do think this Christmas special ran roughshod over peoples’ nerves. Ending the season with arbitrary death? I cry foul. Especially since last years’ special inspired so many consoling reflections on God’s grace.

…The most important thing we need to discuss, though, is of course the Georgetown Hoyas.

Beating Cincinnati on Friday night meant the end of a two-year Bearcats curse. The sky is now the limit. A truly epic Big-East regular-season finale lies before us.

First, we must beat DePaul. Then…the ‘cuse. Two games against the Orange in two weeks.

What? Yes.

Will we lose them both? Probably. Could we win them both? Is the Pope Catholic? (at least until February 28th at 8:00 pm Rome time?)

Of course, smack dab in the middle of all this super-high-level intensity: a Saturday-night contest (March 2nd) against the venerable, the respectable, the eye-of-the-tiger-flashing Rutgers Scarlet Knights. (Just because they are called the Scarlet Knights does not mean they are not tough.)

And who, pray tell, will be present at the sure-to-be-mega-epic Saturday-night Verizon-Center contest? A game that could set the stage for a Hoyas Big-East championship and Final-Four run?

Yes! That’s right! The parish cluster of Frank’n’Hank Counties, Virginny, represented by a busload of young people and their unworthy pastor! Bring on the noise, peeps. We are stepping into some serious Big-East-basketball drama.

Acceptable 2010 starts with St. Luke

The Hoyas tore up the hapless Rutgers Scarlet Knights this afternoon.

The most interesting part of the game was a Subway radio commercial. The delirious announcer promises a hot pastrami sandwich, “We will follow you blindly, like nearsighted bison on a flavor stampede.”

Here is a homily for tomorrow’s Holy Mass:

Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning and ministers of the word have handed them down to us, I too have decided, after investigating everything accurately anew, to write it down in an orderly sequence for you. (Luke 1:1-3)

In the synagogue in Nazareth, the Lord Jesus said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has sent me to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”

Our kind and loving Creator is giving us this year of 2010. He has given us almost a month of it already. What are we going to do with this precious gift?

We are not little amoebas floating in the waters of time. We are not bystanders of 2010, watching it flow by, as it becomes the kind of year that is not acceptable to God, with nothing for us to do about it. No. We can take a firm grip on A.D. 2010 and turn it into something beautiful and good.

Now, let me tell you the first thing we are going to do to make this year acceptable. This year we are going to read the Holy Gospel according to St. Luke.

Georgetown Hoyas Will Win Tonight

I do not possess skills like those displayed here. Nor do I really have any skills of prognostication. I really have no idea what I am talking about most of the time.

Nonetheless, Preacher is GUARANTEEING you that the Georgetown Hoyas will win their game tonight.

They will DEFINITELY win. The losing streak is OVER.