Sacred Mathematics

As I was receiving last Sunday, the thought popped into my mind, "How can the Infinite fit into the infinitesimal?"

And it was followed by: "It just did."

Great video from Michael Voris

I just saw a video posted up by the Facebook group "Traditional/Conservative Catholics" and commented to its main contributor as follows.

I noticed the emphasis Michael Voris gave in that excellent video to the point that the Mass is not about us, or the priest; it's about Jesus Christ, Who is the real celebrant, and in Whose place the priest acts. In the Ukrainian Byzantine liturgy (from St. John Chrysostom) there is the following prayer by the priest of which this is a short excerpt:

"Bending my neck, I approach and I petition You: turn not Your face from me nor reject me from among Your children, but allow these gifts to be offered to You by me, Your sinful and unworthy servant. For it is You Who offer and You Who are offered; it is You Who receive and You Who are given, O Christ our God, and we give glory to You, together with Your eternal Father and Your most holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now and for ever and ever. Amen."

I might add that Ukrainian preserves the formal / intimate usage in pronouns and verbs, and that in all the liturgy, God the Father, Son, and Spirit are addressed as intimates. Which Latin used to do. The fault, of course, is with the English language for having lost the distinction.

Best wishes to you, and keep the commentaries coming!

Understanding the Revised Mass Texts

I found this book at a religious book store last week. It's very good. I bought one for myself, and one for a dear friend who is a convert from Judaism, so did not get the benefit of hearing Mass in Latin, as I did when I was in grade school (graduated 1958) and high school (graduated 1962). I recommend it to everyone.

Holy Saturday - the "In-between" Day

Today is one of the two days of the year when there is no Mass. Yesterday's service (which was called the Mass of the Pre-Sanctified when I was a kid) wasn't really a Mass - it was a prayer service with Holy Communion. There is no Mass today until the Easter Vigil Mass at night. According to an authoritative source I read, I think Father Zuhlsdorf's site "What Does The Prayer Really Say," the Easter Vigil Mass must take place during darkness, to symbolize the darkness without Christ. The new fire, the blessing of water, remind us that Christ is the Light of the World, and, as He said, He makes all things new.

There are very good reasons the Church uses material things to symbolize spiritual realities. One is that we humans are both material and spiritual beings. What happens to the body affects the soul and vice versa. I know that when I'm tired and draggy, or spiritually downcast, I go to Mass or Adoration anyway, say my morning and night prayers anyway; "Bring the body and the mind will follow." I'm blessed to be as old as I am and have sixty years of habit behind me; that helps (even though in habit there's a danger of doing things without paying attention).

Another reason is that Jesus is both human and divine. Another is that He took bread, blessed and broke it, and said "This is my body," likewise the wine. This is one instance where we Catholics (and Eastern Orthodox) take Scripture more literally than our Protestant brothers and sisters.

Anyway . . . .

Here are some odd facts that you probably never needed to know, but I'm foisting them on you anyway just for the fun of it because I don't feel like doing anything today.

An acre-foot of water (that is, one acre in extent and a foot deep) weighs 2722500 pounds.

The triple point of water means the circumstances under which water can exist as vapor, liquid, and solid at the same time, such as mist over a partly icy lake.
This is 0.01 degree Celsius.

Homoskedasticity and heteroskedasticity have nothing to do with sex.

20-pound paper is called that because of the weight of one ream (500 sheets) of the "parent stock," in this case 17" x 22"; thus one ream of ordinary typing or copy paper weighs five pounds.

The Gregorian calendar in common use is five years off.

The solar day is longer than the sidereal day.

The 45th parallel of north latitude runs through north Minneapolis, between West Broadway and 21st Avenue North.

Happy Easter!