Lex Anteinternet: The Annual Protestant Meatless Friday Freak Out, Inconveniently Moving Easter for Convenience, and Oliver Cromwell, fun sucker.

Lex Anteinternet: The Annual Protestant Meatless Friday Freak Out, I...: 

The Annual Protestant Meatless Friday Freak Out, Inconveniently Moving Easter for Convenience, and Oliver Cromwell, fun sucker.

I started this post right at the start of Lent and then didn't finish it, and was going to trash it, but due to a late Lent event, I'm picking it back up.

The United States and Canada are Protestant nations. They don't really notice it as a rule, and quite a few cultural Protestants like to deny it, but if you are an adherent member of an Apostolic Christian religion, or for that matter probably if you are Jewish or Muslim, you'll definitely notice it.

One of the ways that it oddly comes up is the annual "it doesn't say anywhere in the Bible that you can't eat fish on Fridays" discussion that Protestants in particular, and some very weakly evangelized lapsed Catholics, like to have.  It's ironic as some of the same people will insist that grape juice was served at The Last Supper (nope, definitely wine) or that the Bible says once you accept Jesus into your heart you can go back to sinning (nope, St. Paul in particular warns you can do that and still go to Hell).

Of course, it doesn't say that you must abstain from meat on Fridays.  It's a law of the Church, not biblically imposed. The Bible discusses fasting and gives lots of examples, and it left the office of Bishops to bind and loose.  This is a rule of the Church, which has been bound. 

It only applies to members of individual Churches.  I.e, Catholics are bound, not Lutherans, or members of make it up as you go Christian churches.  Moral laws bind everyone.  Church laws bind the members of the church.

Also, FWIW, fasting and abstention from meat go way back in Church history and used to be much stricter as a practice than it is now.  It's still much stricter in the Eastern churches.  In the East, fasting involves abstention from alcohol, eggs, dairy, fish, meat, and olive oil for the 40 days of Great Lent and Holy Week.  So the Orthodox, for example, are really down to a very bland menu at this point.

That group of people who like to claim that the Latin Rite practice was made up to support the fishing industry are really out to lunch on this one, particularly as the claim is based on a grossly misconstrued concept of what the food economy was like in the ancient world.  If you lived, for example, in a Sardinian fishing town in the Middle Ages, fish is what was for dinner every night.  The fishing industry didn't really need anyone's help to be economically viable.  And at one time the Latin Rite fast more closely resembled the Eastern one.  Claims like that are generally myths of the Reformation, created in jolly old England to justify carrying on with the Reformation when they couldn't come up with any actual good reasons to do so.

For most non-Catholics and non-Orthodox, however, this isn't in the forefront of people's minds.  Restaurants get it, as there are a lot of us, which is why fish based fare shows up this time of year darned near everywhere.  But rank and file Protestants, particularly of the Christmas/Easter variety, really don't ponder this much.  If you live in a state like Wyoming, that's really obvious, as we have very low religious observation here anyhow.  There are a lot of Catholics, but we're a minority.  Protestants who don't go to church often are no doubt the majority, followed by Protestants who go to the new "non-denominational" churches, which is to say the quasi Baptist, churches (there are no "non-denominational" churches).  They can't be expected to know Canon Law.

When you go to a function of any kind during Lent, this becomes pretty obvious.  "Here's your entrée". . will come the server, serving the beef sandwich between two slabs of beef served with beef fries.

Oh, well.

That you can't suspend this and just go to meatless on Saturday is something people don't grasp.  "You can skip it this time".  No, you can't.  Violation of the rule is a mortal sin.  That seems extreme to non-Catholics, and probably has for a long time, but by the same token we live in an era when a host of other mortal sins, the sexually and marital ones in particular, are ignored by even devout church going Protestants.  If you can convince yourself, getting married for the third or fourth time doesn't mean that you are an adulterer, you can pretty easily convince yourself that eating a hamburger on Fridays in Lent is okay this one time.  Indeed, in some odd ways, the logic isn't that much different.  They both involve appetites and excuses. 

This does make Catholics stick out, and the Orthodox even more, maybe.  In some ways, as the Catholic Church has suspended so many of these rules, the fact that there are some remaining makes Catholics stick out all the more and, in turn, the few remaining rules offend people all the more.  And that is in a way part of the point in the modern world.  It sets us apart, and it should.  Like those who appear with ashes on their forehead on Ash Wednesday, it's going to mark you.

This came to mind as when I got home last night, Long Suffering Spouse announced, "my mother proposed to have Easter Dinner this Friday. . ."

Eh?

Now, by way of an obvious point, we're clearly a "mixed" family.  My side of the family is all Catholic.  LSS's is all non-Catholic.

I don't know where the dinner suggestion stands right now, as LSS isn't saying, which means it must be in the air. She protested this as we have "town jobs" which means that a Friday gathering really isn't a viable option anyhow.  And one of the things about being married to a Catholic means is that the Catholicism will start to be picked up by the non-Catholic party, no matter what.

Beyond that, however, under the current rules for Latin Rite Catholics, (and I'm sure for Eastern Rite Christians as well) on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, the fasting rules allow Catholics to eat only one full meal and two smaller meals which, combined, would not equal a single normal meal.  We've already seen that the Eastern Rite is fasting by this point every day. Catholics may not eat meat on these two days, or on any Friday during Lent.

Now, I'm over 60 years old, which means the fasting rules no longer apply to me.  As it is, however, that's my normal daily routine anyhow.  I never eat big breakfasts or lunch.  I used to often skip both, but thanks to my thyroid medication, I'm hungrier than I used to be.  Be that as it may, I'm not comfortable with a feast on Good Friday. That's weird, from an Apostolic Christian prospective.  "This is the day our savior was murdered. . . let's just skip ahead to the day he was raised".  

You can't really do that.

Of course, in Cromwellian influenced Protestant America, you probably can.  He wouldn't, as he didn't approve of observing things anyhow, but he so messed stuff up it's never recovered in the English speaking, non-Catholic, world.  Another reason that they've had to hide his head.

Anyhow, I love my in-laws, who are great, but this is pretty much something I'm not going to be able to do.  I can't go to a big Easter dinner on Good Friday and do something like, "wow, that ham looks great. . . I'll just have the mashed potatoes. . . thanks".  The meatless rule still applies to me, and there's probably not going to be a giant cod for an "early" Easter dinner.

That would be weird.

Also weird is that on Good Friday, I have people trying to make appointments.  Most law offices are closed on Good Friday.  But most Americans work as Oliver Cromwell was a theologically deficient fun sucker and our Puritan heritage is ruining everything. Working to the grave is one thing that our Protestant founds in this country really gave to us, and it's one of the things that's really wrong with the culture.  Now, I usually do work, but I've long looked forward to most of the office being out, and only working a partial day.  And it gives me a chance to take Holy Saturday off.

I'm going to have to handle this today.  In prior years I think I would have just said yes, to somebody wanting in, or "the office is closed".  But instead I'm going to just say, the "office is closed for Good Friday".

I'll let the Puritans ponder it.

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: Collapsed

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: Collapsed: 

Blog Mirror: Collapsed

Well worth reading:

Collapsed

You can see my reply there as well, which I've set out again here:

"Last year it would have not been a problem but this year I'm not in great shape due to family issues"

Me too, except it's my own health, starting with a surgery in October 2022, and another in August. Haven't really recovered, although I should have.

Maybe you never really do.

Anyhow, was walking out of the high country at a pretty good clip as a rainstorm came rolling in. Lost my footing on a rock, fell, rolled over, and cut myself pretty bad. Just me and the dog. No cell reception, and I've given up carrying my gmrs radio as there's nobody to call if I'm hunting alone.

Rolled over, wasn't damaged and hiked out bleeding. It hasn't been a great year.

Glad you were okay.

I don't mean to be hijacking somebody else's blog, but since October 2022 I haven't been myself.  I wrote previously on my surgery followed by a second surgery.  Since the first surgery, my digestive track hasn't recovered, and it's clear that it's not going to.  I'm sick every morning.  Not some mornings, every morning, save, oddly enough, for a few days I spent at trial where I couldn't afford to be.*  Most days I'm better off not eating any breakfast anymore, as it's just going to make me sick.  I was already developing an intolerance to milk, but now it's through the roof.  I can't even eat cereal with a little milk.  The stuff I'm used to eating in the morning, which was always a pretty light meal, is a no-go completely now.

And the second surgery resulted in a medication that I'm pretty sure isn't adjusted right, right now.  Everyone has told me how thyroid medication is supposed to make you feel great and give you energy. Well, that isn't working for me.  Researching it, there are a tiny minority of people who actually never feel good following a thyroid surgery and for whom the medications don't work to address that.  Given that almost no medication ever works well for me, I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was me.  Hindsight is 20/20, but I really wish I'd foregone that surgery now and have borne the risk of cancer instead.  At age 60, and from a short-lived group, the risk probably was worth it.**

Worst of all, frankly, being sick all the time impacts your attitude in ways you can't really appreciate until it's obvious.  I've been there recently. Short-tempered and not having a good long term outlook.  At work the other day I blew up on two colleagues who have been running a really irritating religious debate for years, in the hallway, for what they conceive to be the entertainment of the unwilling listeners.  Our poor Mexican runner has to listen to this constantly, and I finally had enough and just exploded on them.  The point isn't that their juvenile behavior was okay, but that my reaction was so stout.***I shouldn't have done that, and that's just a minor example.

I usually look longingly forward to hunting season, but this year I've just not been too motivated after a certain point. Being tired has a lot to do with that.   And when you are like that, you are a pain to those around you, at least to some extent.  Some can see and appreciate that, others not so much.  It's hard to appreciate it yourself until something forces you to.  I looked forward to all summer to the season, and enjoyed deer hunting, but usually by now I've done a pile of duck hunting.  I've gone this year. . .twice. Every Saturday, the dog looks at me with confusion.  The funny thing is that all week long I still look forward to getting out, but when the weekend comes, I go down to work like old lawyers do, and when Sunday comes, well I haven't gone to Mass the night prior, so I get a late start doing whatever I'm going to do.

As noted above, not only am I tired, but I'm not in shape the way I usually am.  I've fallen so rarely out in the sticks that as a short person, I'm one of those people who were sort of goat like, climbing in terrain where hunters and fishermen wouldn't normally go and not worrying about it even though it was patently dangerous.  As a National Guardsmen, I recall once somebody remarking how me and another NCO were mysteriously able to negotiate difficult terrain at night, silently.  We were both avid hunters.  To take a fall, and a pretty bad one, on terrain that I'd been over a million times was a shock.

I was actually quite lucky at the time.  I was all alone, taking a path that I normally would not have, although as noted I've been on it many times before. There was a thunderstorm coming in.  I was carrying a loaded shotgun.  I fell, and, recalling the plf ***I learned so many years ago, rolled out of it, but not before I'd scrapped myself up pretty badly.  I wasn't sure at first if I'd broken anything.  I had my cell phone, as noted, but no reception, so I couldn't have called for help if I wanted to.  I usually carry a handheld GMRS radio, but I've quit recently as if I'm alone, who am I going to radio to?

Hors de combat, after it started to heal.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

I can recall my father getting like this when he was almost the exact same age I am now.  He died two years later.  He seemed pretty old at the time, so I wasn't hugely surprised.  I guess it's like the Hendrix song, "You may wake up in the morning, just to find that you are dead".

Of course, he was gravely ill for months prior to that.  In retrospect, however, it all started for him with a colonoscopy, the same way that this has started for me.  I recall him remarking as he was in the hospital on how all of his mother's ailments were now visiting him.  She died, if I recall correctly, at 65.

In my mind, I always imagined that at some point after I had reached retirement age, which I have not yet, I'd retire to a life of full time outdoorsman.  Not too many people do that.  There may be a reason for that. Some of us are luckier as we age than others.

Oh well, nature has a way of waking you up and reminding you that some things need to be done.  Getting sick? Quite doing what you are doing, refocus, and soldier on.  Get a grip, reform, reform, and keep on keeping on, but mindful of errors and omissions.

Footnotes

*I've long noticed for some reason a person's system will suppress symptoms of almost any illness when you absolutely have to keep on, keeping on. Usually things come back with a vengeance, or at least fatigue, when the crisis has passed.

**This is not intended to be advice for anyone else, I'd note.

***Re the argument, the entire facility had grown extremely tired of it and the shutting them up was welcomed, save by one of the arguers, who may be permanently mad at me.  Showing my presently poor mental outlook, I don't care.  I'm tired of hearing minority religions insulted when some of the employees belong to them, and I'm tired of having my own faith routinely insulted, which I've endured now for decades.  And while I'm a serious if imperfect orthodox Catholic, I'm also tired of one of these individuals, who isn't that good at arguing, turning to religious topics no matter what is being discussed, to include my assistant simply taking her shoes off in her office the other day, which would not normally lead to a Biblical discussion, but of course did.

I've also had it with somebody thinking that mocking the Spanish language is funny in front of somebody who's an immigrant.

***Parachute Landing Fall.  I learned this, oddly enough, while I was a CAP cadet.

Lex Anteinternet: Something to consider when you see a photo of that...

Lex Anteinternet: Something to consider when you see a photo of that...: 

Something to consider when you see a photo of that buff gal or guy . . .

is are they wealthy or employed in the vapid (i.e., entertainment) industry?

A photo showing a buffed RFK Jr., age 69, brings this up.  I don't know really when it was taken, but people who are logic impaired seem to think this proves his anti vaxing position.

No matter what you think of that, what this proves is that he has piles of time on his hands.

There's a massive difference from being awaked at 3:30 in the morning as United Airlines has cancelled, for the second day in a row, your spouses flight home, and this means you woke up only 30 minutes early, and you go on to get up and fix coffee knowing that everyone you meet today is going to be in a desperate crisis, and you are going to be in crisis central all day long, and then come home and hope that she made it home and isn't stranded somewhere, and to have all of this be normal, than to have all freakin' day to do nothing.

Sure, not everyone who doesn't have to deal with the world all day will look buff. Some will just self-destruct. But part of really looking good, so to speak, is having the time to do it.  And for those in the entertainment industry, well that's their job.

Yeah, a person should take care of themselves.  Many don't. Genes (as the young deaths of some celebrities even show) mean a lot.

But stress, anxiety, injuries and daily living mean a lot too.

Lex Anteinternet: Sacrifice. What's Wrong With The World

Lex Anteinternet: Sacrifice. What's Wrong With The World: 

Sacrifice. What's Wrong With The World

In the West, we just celebrated Easter.  In the East, where the Old Calendar is sometimes used, it's today.  This might mean, for the observant, that they were in Church the prior Sunday, in which case, for churches using the Catholic liturgical calendar, they heard this.

Then Judas, his betrayer, seeing that Jesus had been condemned,

deeply regretted what he had done.

He returned the thirty pieces of silver

to the chief priests and elders, saying,

"I have sinned in betraying innocent blood."

They said,

"What is that to us?

Look to it yourself."

Flinging the money into the temple,

he departed and went off and hanged himself.

We all know, of course, that Judas was Christ's betrayer.  Not too many stop to think that he was seized with remorse and hung himself.

Why was he so miserable?

Probably for the same reason that Western society, on the whole, is.

He thought of himself and chose his own inner wishes rather than being willing to sacrifice.

It's struck me recently that this is the defining quality of our age. We won't sacrifice and don't believe we should have to.  It explains a lot.

Interestingly, in a matter of synchronicity, after I started writing this I happened to listen to an episode of Catholic Stuff You Should Know on Augustine's City of God and Lewis' The Great Divorce that ties in perfectly.  It's here:

The one that explains exactly where we are.

CAN WE BUILD THE CITY OF GOD?

And I do mean exactly.

Also, a matter of synchronicity, we passed the 111th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic after I started this.  

The wealthy men on board the doomed ship, and a lot of the other men, stayed on the sinking ship so that women and children would be saved.  The men who went were largely the crew, needed to man the lifeboats as part of their tasks.  Otherwise, men didn't complain, they just stepped aside so that as few women and children as possible wouldn't die. A Catholic Priest stayed with them to prepare them for entry into the next life.  All of them were living up to a standard, but the interesting thing to note there is that it was a standard.  They were heroic, but not because they exceeded the standard, but rather because the occasion came to apply it, and they unflinchingly did.

Now we shove women into combat, something that in any prior age would be regarded as an outright societal act of cowardice and a complete failure of male virtue.

We've come a long ways, all right.  And not in a good way.

Sacrifice was almost the defining quality of any prior age, or at least those that preceded the late 1960s, and very much the defining quality of the 18th through mid 20th Centuries.  Men would die before they'd let women and children be injured, and if they didn't, they'd be branded as cowards for the rest of their lives.

Most people married, and marriage was understood to have a sacrificial element to it in numerous ways.  People didn't "write their own vows", the vows were part of the ceremony and they were, well, vows.  Promises you weren't getting out of, in other words.

Latin Rite English wedding vows still reflect this.  The entire series of events reads goes as follows.

First, the Priest asks a series of questions, to which the couple responds "I do", or words that effect:

(Name) and (name), have you come here to enter into Marriage without coercion, freely and wholeheartedly?"                   

"Are you prepared, as you follow the path of Marriage, to love and honor each other for as long as you both shall live?"                       

"Are you prepared to accept children lovingly from God and to bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?"

Only after ascent to that, the Priest reads:

Priest (or deacon): Since it is your intention to enter into the covenant of Holy Matrimony, join your right hands, and declare your consent before God and his Church.

Groom: I, (name), take you, (name), to be my wife. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.

Bride: I, (name), take you, (name), to be my husband. I promise to be faithful to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, to love you and to honor you all the days of my life.

The element of sacrifice is so strong in marriage, that in Croatia, a Catholic country, an added element is present, in which the Priest states:

You have found your cross. And it is a cross to be loved, to be carried, a cross not to be thrown away, but to be cherished.

That's really heavy.  That's not a fuzzy bunny, flowery rose, type of view of marriage at all.  You're signing up for a real burden.

But one to be cherished.

And that's the thing that the West has lost. 

We don't want to sacrifice at all.

If you look at life prior to the late 1960s, sacrifice was darned near universal.  Everyone, nearly, married and divorce was rare.  People sacrificed for their marriages.  Most married couples had children, and having children entailed sacrifice.  Reflecting the common values of the time well, the screenwriter of The Magnificent Seven summed it up in this fashion in a comparison of family men to hired gunfighters:

Village Boy 2 : We're ashamed to live here. Our fathers are cowards.

Bernardo O'Reilly : Don't you ever say that again about your fathers, because they are not cowards. You think I am brave because I carry a gun; well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility, for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground. And there's nobody says they have to do this. They do it because they love you, and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage. Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee anything will ever come of it. This is bravery. That's why I never even started anything like that... that's why I never will.

The line, "And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground." was literally true for many.  Indeed, it's been noted that up until some point after World War Two Finland, which routinely comes in as the happiest country on Earth, had a very early male death rate, simply because the men there worked hard, and basically worked themselves into the grave for their families.

People were not, of course, perfect, and therefore children naturally arrived on the scene with an unmarried origin.  Depending upon the age of the couple, that often ended up in a marriage before the child was born, adding an added element of sacrifice in which the couple sacrificed, in essence, an element of freedom or even their future for what they'd brought about. When that didn't occur, the child was more often than not given up for adoption, which involves an element of sacrifice, but because it arises in a different context, we'll not get too deeply into that.

Things tended to be focused on that fashion. There were people who didn't follow this path, but they were a minority.

This has been portrayed, since the 1970s, as some sort of horrible oppression.  But the surprising secret of it is that people seem to be hardwired for it, and when it's absent, they descend into, well, a descent.

None of which is to say that sacrifices aren't present in the modern world. They are, although by and large society tries enormously to avoid them.

It's tried the hardest in regard to the natural instincts of all kinds.  People are able to avoid nature, and so they do, least they have to sacrifice. But that's a sacrifice in and of itself, but for what?

The self, is what we were told initially.  But the self in this context turns out to be for the economy.  In a fairly straight line, we're told that you should avoid commitments to anything requiring commitment, so that you can get a good career, make lots of money, and go to Ikea.

Very fulfilling?

Ummm. . . 

No, not at all.  

In The Great Divorce, which I haven't read but which Catholic Things summarized extensively, Lewis placed a self focused Anglican Bishop in the role of the self-centered intellect.  Self Centered is the epitome of the current age.  And that self-centered role placed the figure in Hell.

We're doing a good job of that figuratively for the same reason, and literally as well.

Prior Related Threads:

What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 1. A thought on community

What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 2. Care, lack of care, and an existential lack of focus.

Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 3. Our lost connection with animals.

Lex Anteinternet: "If this is a time to rest and recover, then be su...

Lex Anteinternet: "If this is a time to rest and recover, then be su...: 

"If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt."

If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt. God made rest a part of His commands to us.  Enjoy the joy and remember that He made us human beings, not human doings. 

Fr. Joseph Krupp.

Fr. Krupp's Facebook post here was synchronicitous for me.

I didn't take much time off last year.  And my not taking "much", what I mean is that I took three days really off, just off, because I had surgery and was laying in the hospital.

That's not really good.

I'd like to claim that it was for one reason or another, but truth be known, i'ts something I imposed upon myself.  And I do this every year.

Indeed, I'm much worse about it than I used to be.

All the things you hear about not taking time off are 100% true, if not 200%.  You become less efficient, for one thing.  And if you work extra hours, sooner or later, you'll acclimate yourself to working the extra hours to the point where you need to. That's become your work life.

Christmas in my work place essentially always works the same way.  We work, normally, the day before Christmas, December 24, until noon. At noon, we dismiss the staff and all go to a collective lawyer's lunch.  That institution is, I think, a remnant of an earlier era in our society in general, when it could be expected that most professional institutions would remain a certain size and everyone who worked there would have a sort of collegiality.  It sort of recalls, in a way, the conditions described by Scrooge's original employer in A Christmas Carrol, in the shop run by Mr. Fezziwig.

This use to really prevail in firms when I was first practicing.  I recall being at lunch on December 24 at a local club restaurant in which other firms would also be there.  Everyone was doing the same thing.  I haven't seen another firm at one now, however, for years.  Maybe they just go somewhere else, but I sort of suspect that they're not doing it.

Well, good for us. It's hard not to have a certain feeling of sadness about it, however, as three of the lawyers who once were part of that are now dead.  Others have moved on long ago.  New faces have come, of course.

Anyhow, that institution sort of ties up the afternoon of December 24, but it's an afternoon off.   If you are a Catholic with a family, it's always been a bit tight, as we normally go to Mass on Christmas Eve and then gather after that. Christmas is obviously a day off, as is Boxing Day, December 26, although most Americans don't refer to Boxing Day by that name.

This year Christmas came on a Sunday, which was nice as it made December 23 the day of the lunch and effectively an extra day off.  We took, of course, Boxing Day off.

Sometime in there, I began to wonder why I hadn't taken the whole week off.  With just three days off, beyond Sundays, and having worked most of the 52 Saturdays of the year, I should have.  I had the things done, pretty much, that I needed to get done.

What was I thinking?

If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt. God made rest a part of His commands to us.  Enjoy the joy and remember that He made us human beings, not human doings. 

Well, I'm actually at the point, in spite of myself, that I'm so acclimated to going to the work that I feel guilty if I take time off.  And frankly, the Internet hasn't helped much.  On the afternoon of the 23d, I received a text message asking me if I was working that afternoon.  I wasn't, and they were gracious about it, but this is how things tend to be. It's hard to actually escape the office.

On Boxing Day I went goose and duck hunting.  Conditiond were great.

I should have had my limit of geese and ducks, but I shot like crap.  It'll be part of an upcoming post, maybe, but my hunting season has been messed up due to surgery.

I was going to go with my son, but events conspired against it, so it was just me and the dog.  

Earlier this year, my wife had us buy a bigger smoker. We had not had one until fairly recently, when we won one at a Duck's Unlimited banquet.  That one is a little traveling one, sort of a tailgating smoker, and can work from a car's battery system.  You can plug it in, and we've enjoyed it, but due to its size, we decided to get a bigger one and did.  It's been great.

This was my first occasion actually using it, something necessitated by the fact that our oven is more or less out due to some sort of weird oven thing that happened to it which will not get addressed until sometime this week.  Besides, I'd been wanting to try smoked waterfowl.

It turned out great.  I should have taken a picture of the finished bird, but I didn't.  Maybe one of the top two roasted geese I've ever had.

Anyhow, I should have taken this whole week off, but didn't.  I may take some time later this week, however.  

It's been a really long year.

The Discontement Double Header

Lex Anteinternet: Every once and awhile. . .: 

And then. . . there's this: Life Stinks. Merry Christmas! | Catholic Culture

This is an interseting article really worth reading:

Life Stinks. Merry Christmas! | Catholic Culture

Note, this isn't going to go the way you probably think.  Consider these these opening paragraphs:

Merry Christmas to you and your families! It is a glorious and beautiful feast—with the tenderness and simplicity of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—attracting us to worship the newborn King. Come, let us adore Him. On Christmas, we remember the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity—the Word made Flesh, Jesus—entering the world. He came on a mission to save us from our sins and open the doors to heaven.

But let’s face it. Most of us don’t think that’s enough.

Some of you might remember a hilarious movie from the 1970s. A cranky old guy on TV, fed up with the world, complains that the life situation is “bad, really bad” and he wasn’t “going to take it anymore!” So he calls on everyone to go to their windows and scream, “I’m mad as [Hades], and I’m not going to take it anymore!” For the uninitiated, the name of the movie was Network.

A lot of us feel the same way today. We’re tired of the lies and baloney. Honestly, many of us are tired of life. Oh, for the good old days: The days of the Cold War, the Tet Offensive, the Sands of Iwo Jima, Flanders Field, or Pickett’s Charge. Would that I had been born into, say, an Old South plantation with an easy life. No, wait, as long as I wasn’t one of the field slaves and never exposed to cholera, polio, or sepsis. What was dental care like in the 19th Century? Didn’t George Washington have wooden false teeth?

And it goes on from there.

Every once and awhile. . .

Every once in a while what you're doing, how you are going about doing it, how you have done it, and what that means can hit you like a ton of bricks.

You've known it all along, most likely.

Down in the parking lot where I park every day, there used to be a car with a sticker that said this on it:

We all do things we say we never would

Soccer Mom

Quite true.

I suppose that's similar, in a way, the more grim

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation

Henry David Thoreau

Or not.

And then there's the observation by the observant:

Fr. Joseph Krupp

@Joeinblack

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Dec 27

#talkedtotheboss He said there is no place where we can stop & think “I’m good where I am.” We are called to a state of blessed discontentment; where we recognize the blessings of where we are while striving to know more & love more. Never stop growing.… https://instagr.am/p/CX_Ha-bLcZ8/

That, we might note, is called Blessed Discontentment, or Holy Discernment.

I frankly think there's a lot to that.  I feel that from time to time, maybe frankly most of the time.  But in my selfish way I'm not really grateful for it.

I'd like to feel contentment, quite frankly, but the origin of my present discontent isn't, I think, of the blessed variety so much as it is of the "Yeoman, you're an idiot", variety.

Added to that, I think, is the affliction of Generation Jones, that being that we're pretty risk-adverse.  Or maybe we're like my father's generation, the Silent Generation, in that we feel we have to make huge sacrifice as by and large, we're not going to take the brass ring anyway, and better hang on to what we got. 

I dunno. . . 

Maybe it's my father's life being disrupted by the early death of his father, and then mine being disrupted by the early death of mine, preceded by the extreme illness of my mother for many years prior to his death.

Still, there's something to it.  The art of compromise for a greater purpose over pursuit of dollars, which is the only American alternative, has merites to it.  Entire cultures, in fact, once prized that, over what we do, that being apparently only money.

None of which is much salve for the first thing noted here.

Or for the fact that time runs out.  Americans like to believe "your never too old", but you can be.

For example, the maximum age to go to work for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is 37 years old.  Not that old.  Does that makes sense?  I don't know, but it's likely based on young people being in better physical shape than old ones, and the need for a person to be able to retire from Federal service by age 60.

The current maximum age to join the U.S. Army is 35 years old. And that's for active duty or any of its reserve components. For awhile it was up around 40, but they've apparently dropped it back down.  That age is 28 for the Marine Corps. . . 28.  It's 39 for the Navy and Air Force (38 for Air Force reservists), so they'll take "older" enlistees.  It'a a bottoms out at 27 for the Coast Guard, which will take reservists up to 38.

You get the point, however.  If you are sitting in your cubicle in Boston watching the Coast Guard cutters go out, and you are thinking, "you know, my job at Amalgamated Amalgamated sucks, I think I'll join the Coast Guard!", and you are 30, you aren't.

The Canadian military, I'd note, is the real outlier, FWIW.  A national "never too old" policy, and something to do with how Canadian old age pensions work, caused the Canadian government to up their maximum enlistment age, or commission age, to 57 years old.

Truly. This is what their recruitment page states (I just looked it up for this super interesting thread):

To join as a Non-Commissioned Member (NCM)  Non-Commissioned Members are skilled personnel who provide operational and support services in the CAF. Non-Commissioned Members start out as recruits and are trained to do specific jobs.	To join as an Officer  Officers in the CAF hold positions of authority and respect. They are responsible for the safety, well-being and morale of a group of soldiers, sailors, air men or air women. Analyzing, planning, making decisions and providing advice are a few aspects of an Officer’s role.
You are between 16 and 57 years old. If you are under 18 years old, you will need permission from your parent or guardian.	You are between 16 and 57 years old. If you are under 18 years old, you will need permission from your parent or guardian.
You are a Canadian citizen.	You are a Canadian citizen.
You have completed Grade 10 or Secondary IV (Quebec).	You have completed Grade 10 or Secondary IV (Quebec).
	You have, or are working towards, a Bachelor's Degree. If you do not meet this requirement, you may be eligible for one of our Paid Education programs.

I meet all the criteria save for one.  I'm 58.

Not that I was going to call the recruiting department, I wan't, but if I were, the answer I'd get is "go away, you geezer, eh?"

Makes sense, really. Who wants to serve under a 58 year old lieutenant who's a veteran of the US reserves system.  "Why back in the day. . . "

Indeed, as the long-suffering readers of this blog know, all two or three of you, we've been doing day by day playbacks from the early 40s recently here, and had been doing the same for the late 10s and early 20s.  This relates to the ostensible purpose of this blog.  A person had to serve in the Frontier Army for 40 years in order to draw a pension, which very few enlistment men did, but which also explains why promotions were glacially slow in the Regular Army.  Around 1900, however, the system was changed to allow early retirement after 30 years of service, with 75% of the benefit drawn, reduced to 60s% in 1924.  That system also evolved in that time period such that, at first, if you had 40 years in the service you were put in the "retired list", absent some unusual exception.  As a practical matter, that meant most servicemen left by age 60, if they were career men.  In the early 20th Century, however, that was changed so that at age 64 you had to go.

This system was changed again just prior to World War Two as Gen. George Marshall wanted to clear out as many old soldiers as he could before the U.S. entered a new mechanized war.  Tired of older ossified officers like Chief of Cavalry John Knowles Herr, he managed to bring in a 20 year early retirement system, again scaled so that those retiring didn't receive a full pension, and the mandatory retirement age dropped to 60.  He then simply sidetracked most of the senior commanders in their 50s.  Herr, I'd note, retired in 1945 at age 56, his career wrecked by his refusal to ever acknowledge that the age of the horse was over.

That system is the one the military still has, and most law enforcement agencies have it as well.  Given the physical and mental toll that being a policemen seems to have on people, that makes sense.  At least by my observation, after twenty years, most are ready to retire. 

Not all, however, as the Wyoming Game & Fish Department used to require its wardens to retire at age 60, but some jerk occupying that position sued them and won, so now you don't have to retire.  I'm 58, and I thought about becoming a Game Warden when I was young.  If I could retire at 60 years old, I'd do it.  

Or so I claim.

A similiar age restriction, I'd note, exists to become a Catholic Deacon.  It varies by diocese, but at some point people age out.  So, roughly, if you've been hearing a call to be a Deacon for your whole life and decide to act on it by, let's say, age 60, or in some areas, age 50, you are too late.

Being privately employed, and employed in a field where seemingly nobody ever retires, its actually difficult to imagine how retirement comes about.  It's even more difficult for those around you to imagine it.  Having said that, I could imagine my father retiring and urged him to do so.  He was a professional also, but not a lawyer.  He died at age 62, having never retired.

That's a bit haunting frankly.  He never retired, but he was awfully tired.  I receive occasional thanks for things he did even now, some 30 years or so after his death, which I appreciate but which also shows me how much he was identified by what he did.  By his late 50s it was clear to me, as he was frank about it, that he'd had enough and he wanted to retire.  I kept urging him to do it, but I was in university and he probably worried about the expense.  I told him not to, that I'd be fine.  I'd been in the National Guard as an undergrad, and I was willing to go back in as a law student.  Indeed, I'd gotten out of the Guard as I'd believed the fable that law school is hard (any idiot can graduate from law school, truly), and didn't think I'd have time to be a Guardsmen.  It turned out that I would have, and by my last two years I was well aware of that.

Well, he didn't retire.  He was holding out for 63.  He didn't make it.  What hopes and goals were lost in that?  I know a few which were irretrievably lost. . . or maybe not.

In some odd ways, perhaps because of my age, I tend to feel worse about people who experience that late career death than I do those who die in their 40s, oddly enough.  Dying at that age is a disaster, most particularly for those around those who depart, but dying just before retirement age seems to have cheated somebody out of something they were working for.

On being cheated, I'll also note the postponed dream or goal.

My mother had a friend who was a banker.  I didn't know him well, but my mother, who had no real interest in agriculture at all, always referred to him as a "rancher".  He wasn't.  He was a banker.

Now, there's nothing wrong with being a banker.  But his story was that he'd grown up on a farm or ranch as a young man, and then worked his entire career as a banker.  He'd never lost the interest in agriculture and it was pretty clear that's what he really wanted to be.  Around retirement age, but prior to his retiring, he bought a small acreage.  I'd not regard it as a farm, but it was in a farming belt, and he put up hay there.

Or, rather, he tried to.  By that time, in his late 60s, after a lifetime of indoor work, he couldn't hack it physically.  And his wife of many years, additionally, was in extremely poor physical health and had a serious allergy problem. 

He ended up selling.  

He's now passed away, but I wonder how a person reacts to that?  You live for years hoping for one thing and then the toll of years won't let you do it.  Is your conclusion that you should have done it in the first place?

Some people, I'd note, keep on keeping on as others require them to.  I knew a physician at one time who worked right up until his death.  I don't know how old he was at that time, but he was at least in his 60s.  He was old enough to retire, and his not retiring was a topic of conversation.  It turned out that he didn't, as he supported a large number of extended relatives with his income.  He wanted to, but he his loyalty to his extended family kept him at his office.

Admirable?  In some sense, to be sure.

And tragic also.

Which I guess takes us back to the first item here.  Surely, occupying a worthwhile career that you have sought to enter and do, isn't a tragedy, even though staying too long may be.  But what about working for years with a lingering "lost vocation" in the background? Surely, that is tragic.  The American belief that "I'll be able to do that some day" is a crock, and realistically, people who live in that world should realize that age, health, economics and circumstances are in fact more likely than not to terminate some of those dreams. Some others not.  A guy who dreamed of being a cowboy, for example, can, if he has the talent and skills, write about that.  Some hobbies that are close to vocations, such as hunting and fishing, can usually be carried on well into advance years.

But we don't get any time back at all.  Time can't be banked.  Money acquired in hopes of a dream retirement can just as easily be lost to the worker by death.

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

Ah well! for us all some sweet hope lies
Deeply buried from human eyes:

And, in the hereafter, angles may
Roll the stone from its grave away.