Daily Archives: October 13, 2009

The Brown Scapular

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The Anchoress writes about the World’s Tiniest Hair Shirt, her scapular, which after hanging for years on her bedpost, now hangs about her neck as a “discipline.”  I can relate.

Wearing the cloth scapular has been an on and off battle which I believe my scapular is now winning.  From the stand point of pure convenience, I argued with Our Lady of Mt. Carmel,  that wearing the medal was better and would make this devotion easier for me to undertake.  So I wore the medal, but the cloth scapular glared at me from between socks, peeked through the clutter in my dresser drawer, or from wherever I last left it. Mary wasn’t buying my arguments. The Anchoress is right. It is a “discipline” – before it turns to love.

I finally found one I can wear with a minimum of hassle, though each morning, I still wake up with it intertwined with the chain of my Miraculous Medal. I used to grumble.  Now I just smile.  I think I owe the change in my motus primo primi (firstly first movement) to the efficacy of the scapular. It wraps me in the love of Mary and weaves the movements of her heart with mine.  Does that make any sense?

Loosing the World of Face to Face?

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How much of your world is face to face?  Twitter, Facebook,virtual networking, email; all “thin community”.  “Thick community” is eye to eye, face to face and human.

Os Guinness says that four things are important to humans: meaning, belonging, identity (Who am I?) and  purpose (What am I here for?) Reminding me of Socrates’ “The unreflected life is not worth living.” Guinness writes:

“We are, quite literally, spread thin across space and time, potentially everywhere and nowhere at once. We thus tend to have, in the words of Gilbert Meilaender, ‘not an individual identity, but fragments of experience; not the narrative of a life that is in some sense a whole, but a decentered flow of experience.’ “

As I peek in on Facebook, I leave feeling as though I don’t know anyone anymore, just shouts and waves as comments and faces rush by. (Twitter’s even worse!)  Am I alone in feeling this?

Guinness has an engaging discussion:  “Survival of the fastest: Living sanely when life is fired point blank.” on the Veritas Forum .