I was struck a few years ago by a conversation with a friend of mine, not a believer, but married to one. In answer to the question "what seems most intuitively true and certain to you?" he responded, "Evil is real." To that we say, Merry Christmas! Here's a little reflection on the prologue of John's Gospel, the Scripture reading for today's feast. THE PLAN WAS MADE FLESH Homily for Christmas Day #v4v Support using Bitcoin⚡️ on any Podcasting 2.0 app

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THE PLAN WAS MADE FLESH - Homily for Christmas Day by Father Nick Blaha Homily Cast

Delivered at Christ the King, Kansas City, KS

Media file: #christmas #incarnation #grownostr

"HOPE AND WORK - Homily for the First Sunday of Advent"

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HOPE AND WORK - Homily for the First Sunday of Advent by Father Nick Blaha Homily Cast

Delivered at Christ the King Church, Kansas City, KS

#advent #catholic #christian #grownostr

OK I need some data crunching help. Excel gurus, PRESENT ARMS Problem: calculate the future date at which smoking cigarettes daily may resume, such that the reduced life expectancy—should I continue smoking till death—is equal to or less than the life expectancy at that age. It’s easy to find the date I’m expected to die given my birth year and average life expectancy (5 November 2057). Trouble is, how can I backdate the resumption of smoking, so that my average life expectancy reduction from smoking will be less than the average years of life remaining… …or, given how pleasant it is, even EXTEND my life, according to the dictum, “if it’s good TO you, it must be good FOR you”? How do I calculate the exact date I can look forward to, assuming each cigarette diminishes life expectancy by 11 minutes on average (according to this data: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1117323/) Just looking for some light at the end of the tunnel here, folks… #plebchain #asknostr

This past Sunday, the Gospel in the Catholic lectionary was the parable of the five wise and five foolish virgins. I was struck by the whole idea of having oil for the wedding party's arrival. Was it crucial to have on hand? or was the errand to fetch more in the middle of the night a distraction? In a sense, it doesn't matter to the parable's meaning; what matters is the failure to make preparations so that no such errands trivial or otherwise, will drag us away from what's essential. At Mass last weekend, a man I'd never seen before was behaving erratically and became unresponsive, twisting and contorting himself into weird positions. I called the police after trying to find out what was going on with him, to no avail. While they too suspected drugs, the paramedics discovered very quickly that he was diabetic and had extremely low levels of blood sugar. Within a minute and a half of getting an IV drip into his arm (a mighty struggle as he was a pretty athletic guy) he was back to normal and answering questions lucidly. The sullen, trippy attitude was completely gone and I had a pleasant conversation with him while driving him home, snacking on cake from the baptism party downstairs. But during those 15 minutes of dangerously low blood sugar, some pretty raunchy stuff came out of the guy's mouth. Ridiculous stuff, and we all had a chuckle over it, but it got me thinking... were I to be in that position, what would be my uninhibited flow of speech? Would I be embrassed later to learn what I'd said? It struck me as an apt way of approaching the meaning of the "flask of oil" Christ highlights as gaining us access to the kingdom of God. The "oil" that we can't do without is the daily process of conversion and the practice of virtue aided by the grace of the Holy Spirit. Without it, we will be caught empty-handed and scrambling when the Lord is passing by. Only through that daily struggle to deepen our interior conformity to Christ will we be able to stand watch and not be left out in the cold. We won't be able to fake it or fool anyone or talk our way out of the serene judgment of the Risen One. In the light of that countenance, we will be our own most precise and comprehensive judge. What we speak in our own defense or condemnation will be the pure radiant truth. Readiness is all.

So clearly I'm missing something. #Amethyst no longer has the ability to connect to a wallet for native zaps? I had it all set up and now it's gone, and I can't find where to add it again. Very confused. #asknostr

Android 14 broke my wireless and my Amethyst, I just want to go back to when things were groovy.

#Amethyst crashing hard and fast on Android 14 update of grapheneOS @Vitor Pamplona

No smoking for one week. The patch helps. Cigarettes are sublime. As Richard Klein wrote, "Smoking belongs to that category of action that falls in between the states of activity and passivity—a somewhat embarrassed, embarrassing condition, unclean, unproductive, a mere gesture." I often quoted Matthew Schmitz as well: "If our bodies are temples, we should not fear to fill them with smoke... Still, incense is not tobacco, and I consider smoking a beautiful indulgence but an ugly habit." A weapon against time. Pleasant beyond all measure. Yet I'm no longer free, entangled in a web of smoky tendrils. The patch has the nicotine covered; the craving is something else, something psychological or spiritual, affective--of the heart, even. Blessed are the pure of heart. It was, for me, becoming an ugly habit, tethering my attention and my gratification to itself and becoming something that clouded the eye of the heart. So here I sit, slowly clearing the way for a better way. I may be permitted a little poetic musing to fill the gap. "I cannot help but think that a leaf hailed by the French as une volupte nouvelle, the only pleasure unknown in ancient courts, is a fitting symbol for the advent of our Lord. We know what the ancients did not; we taste the sweet presence for which they longed. Christ is the true volupte nouvelle. To those who know him, all other pleasures seem tired and worn." #quotestr #grownostr

Anthony Esolen at The Catholic Thing is on a roll.

The Catholic Thing

Let’s Build, But Expect No Help - The Catholic Thing

Anthony Esolen: The world is now an astonishingly bitter and lonely place. By contrast, we must be attractive in our bounty of marriages.

The Catholic Thing

We No Longer Talk about Such Things - The Catholic Thing

Anthony Esolen: We are witnessing the complete societal dismissal of any norms regarding sexual behavior between consenting adults

Grass fed Ribeyes from ALDI That's it That's the post

If I may be permitted a little patting of my own back: With the help of some great tutorials, I have as of today set up a collaborative multisig wallet for board members of a nonprofit to receive and hodl Bitcoin donated via a self-hosted @npub155m2...dcvg on @npub126nt...e9ll node. Just to be clear, I am a liberal arts major. Bitcoin is for everyone.

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Discover & share this eating chicken Animated GIF by Killswitch Engage with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create...

Ad maiorem Dei gloriam #plebchain #grownostr

Homily for today's feast of the Transfiguration is live on the podcast (Support using Bitcoin⚡️ on any Podcasting 2.0 app):

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ENTHRONED - Homily for the Feast of the Transfiguration by Father Nick Blaha Homily Cast

Extended quotation taken from True Leadership by The Habiger Institute Available from Cluny Media: https://clunymedia.com/products/true-leadership?...

#SundaySermon