Party for Mr. Icon

 

Yesterday at Adoration, I was sitting in my pew and writing in my prayer journal (which is labeled "My Incoherent Ramblings") when someone sat right behind me and then knelt and leaned over me. This would have been annoying enough if the place were full, but there were plenty of other pews to choose from, and in fact plenty of room in his pew to move over and not be RIGHT BEHIND ME like some kind of horror movie villain. I was so annoyed that I left off writing about anything spiritual and just started writing about how there was this FREAK leaning right over me when there were PLENTY OF OTHER SPACES he could go to, and he must have been reading over my shoulder because then he sat back in his pew. Maybe that was petty of me, but when I mentioned it at Night Prayer, and how it was far from the first time such a thing had happened, the Dairyman's Daughter said it happens to her all the time too. Right during COVID, when they would only allow eight people in the church at a time, she signed up to go to a Mass and sat in the empty church, and then another woman came in and sat RIGHT BEHIND HER. During a pandemic!!! Rich said that never happens to him, people always sit as far away as possible from him. What's his secret? No deodorant?

Tonight after work I drove to the Middleton Sport Bowl for a party for Mr. Icon, who is only in town for a few more days before he returns to the wilds of Alaska, specifically Kodiak Island. I thought there would be a ton of people there, but it just seemed to be the regulars from the Chesterton Club, plus myself and Travalon, who joined us as soon as he got off of work. I used to go to the Chesterton Club years ago and hadn't realized they had started meeting up again, but nowadays I can't see sitting down and reading a whole book by Chesterton like back when I used to live to read. Also, people who are into Chesterton tend to be of a political persuasion that is not my own tendency. While we didn't really talk about Chesterton tonight, the conversation was extremely intellectual. I used to love that too, but now I feel like you can learn more about God from listening to the birds sing than you can from debating Aristotelian concepts of reality. Why debate reality when you can just experience it? It's like beauty in the liturgy: I used to think it was the most important thing, but over the years I have decided charity is more important, and so many people who care about proper liturgy are so uncharitable that it has turned me off to proper liturgy a bit. I still love beautiful music, but it's not the only thing or even the main thing for me anymore.

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