{"id":568,"date":"2008-04-18T13:06:44","date_gmt":"2008-04-18T13:06:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/04\/friday-fried-brain.html"},"modified":"2008-04-18T13:06:44","modified_gmt":"2008-04-18T13:06:44","slug":"friday-fried-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/04\/friday-fried-brain.html","title":{"rendered":"Friday = “Fried Brain”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I”m about Poped out, and we’ve still got three days to go.
\nWhat I’m going to do in this post is pull out some statements from the past few talks, sections that really, as they say “spoke to me.”\u00a0 I think it will help me organize my thoughts for the Times <\/em>gig (and I have a new one up. Nothing big, but something.)<\/a>, because there’s just so much I want to say…but as I said, my brain is sizzling.
\n(MIchael’s out of town, in Florida. Which doesn’t irritate me as much as it usually does since it’s in the 70’s today here. Anyway, he called and said, “How are you?” I said, triumphantly, “I survived!” “What?” “The Earthquake!) <\/em>
\n(This wasn’t my first earthquake…and, I know, at such a distance from the epicenter, I don’t even have the right to say it was “my” earthquake at all. In the fall of 1973 an earthquake hit east Tennessee<\/a>\u00a0and I vividly remember that one.)
\nOh, wait, before I do that, a little coverage of the coverage<\/a>, thanks to a reader. God bless Ann Rogers, whom I can usually find no fault with in reporting, but this one misses the point just a little – part of it’s the headline, for which reporters have no responsibility, but still…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
\nEr…when?<\/p>\n

In a speech that delved into difficult issues from abortion to immigration and sexual abuse, Pope Benedict XVI charged U.S. bishops to do a better job of making sure that Masses are vibrant invitations to follow Jesus Christ — or risk losing their church by attrition.
\n“Do people today find it difficult to encounter God in our churches? Has our preaching lost its salt? Might it be that many people have forgotten, or never really learned, how to pray in and with the church?” he asked 350 assembled bishops in response to a pre-selected question about a decline in Mass attendance.
\n“I think we are speaking about people who have fallen by the wayside without consciously having rejected their faith in Christ, but, for whatever reason, have not drawn life from the liturgy, the sacraments, preaching.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s really so fascinating, because it points to the vast – vast\u00a0 – <\/em>chasm between what the Pope is talking about – and hey, it’s not just the Pope – when Catholic tradition means when “drawing life” from the liturgy is the topic, and the meaning in our culture.<\/p>\n

How do we draw life from the liturgy? Through the Presence of Jesus Christ, our participation in the Sacrifice – the more we are aware from that the more we participate <\/em>– which means, in this sense, the more we internally join ourselves to the action – that is how we draw life.<\/p>\n

Not <\/em>how much our emotions are excited or how lively things are.\u00a0 In fact, the traditional Catholic sensibility minimizes emotiveness in liturgy because, of course, the emotions are not trustworthy.<\/p>\n

But what it all comes down to are externals v. internals. The world sees a call to drawing life from the liturgy and thinks that means “lively,” while what the Pope means is an orientation and openness to, well, Life.<\/p>\n

More later on different topics. Got to go strip some wallpaper border.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I”m about Poped out, and we’ve still got three days to go. What I’m going to do in this post is pull out some statements from the past few talks, sections that really, as they say “spoke to me.”\u00a0 I think it will help me organize my thoughts for the Times gig (and I have…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nFriday = "Fried Brain" - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/04\/friday-fried-brain.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Friday = "Fried Brain" - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I”m about Poped out, and we’ve still got three days to go. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}