1. This week was training for my new teaching job. It looks like it’ll either be an amazing experience or a catastrophic disaster. I guess we’ll find out.

2. At the very least, I won’t have to worry about what I should read for a while; it’s pretty much all read books and discuss, and I’m teaching five different classes. So, have to read everything and be ready to lead unripe human melons in discussion about it. Right now I’m working on deciding how to organize and tackle that.

3. Today’s the feast of St. John Vianney, as I only learned at Mass this afternoon (sorry St. John). The Homily told stories of how his parishioners initially hated him; they’d made up lewd songs about him, post threatening letters to his door, throw things at him in the street, and so on. But the holy cure persisted in his simple, straightforward way (he was never very well educated or intelligent) and, as we know, became famous across Europe for his preaching and spiritual direction.

This was, of course, during the days of Napoleonic France and the aftermath; the chaotic world of war and perpetual revolution. In fact, St. John was conscripted into Napoleon’s army for the Peninsula Campaign and sorta-kinda accidentally deserted (he thought he was being directed back to his regiment, was actually being directed to a town where a group of deserters were gathered and decided he was better off hiding out there than trying to explain). Which shows how much holiness can be pursued even as the world falls apart around you.

Oh, and the amount of food and sleep he took (something like a single potato for breakfast and one hour of sleep a night) wasn’t actually sufficient to keep him alive, yet he carried on that regimen for forty years of relentless labor, which is generally marked down as one of his miracles.

4. Remember too, this was the first half of the 19th century. At the same time that St. John Vianney was going about his holy work in Ars, Charles Dickens was scribbling away in England (while a young prelate named John Henry Newman was matriculating at Oxford and subsequently wrestling with his faith) and Karl Marx was dreaming dark visions. Across the Atlantic, Andrew Jackson was presiding over an expanding United States, Davy Crockett was fighting at the Alamo, and John D. Rockefeller was putting in job applications. While all those familiar, distinctly modern events were going on, St. John was curing the sick, battling the devil, and making prophecies over in rural France. God never stops signing His work with wonders.

5. I’m writing this late in the day, following another failure to avoid distractions. It always seems to me like there’s something urgent or immediate that needs doing, and that thing nags at my mind while I’m trying to work, except that I don’t quite know how to do that immediate thing and if I try to direct my attention onto it, something else of the same sort begins to tug at my attention, making it harder to focus on the original distraction.

I suspect this is a manifestation of something deeper; a more fundamental anxiety issue. It’s annoying whatever else it is.

6. From St. Francis de Sales: “We often say that we are nothing, that we are misery itself and the refuse of the world, but we would be very sorry if anyone took us at our word or told others that we are really such as we say.”

Telling it like it is.

7. And something fun to end with: