1. The weather is warming up, which means my middle schoolers were extra rowdy this week. I am increasingly convinced that children are, in truth, reptiles.

2. For recreation I started re-reading The Ball and the Cross for the first time in quite a while. Chesterton’s way with words is of the sort that is easy to imitate badly and impossible to match, meaning that many try, and the best of them are those who recognize that they have failed.

3. In the surreal first chapter, Fr. Michael tells Professor Lucifer a parable of a militant atheist who began by forbidding his wife to wear a crucifix, proceeded to vandalizing the village church, and ended by burning his own house because it was made of crossed wood, driven mad by the ubiquitous presence of the Holy Sign in the world around him.

This parable has only grown more frighteningly applicable in the intervening years. Indeed, it’s practically the story of the modern world in a single bound.

4. This past Thursday was the Major Rogation Day, when traditionally people would do penance and process about the community ask God’s blessing on the year’s crops. Accordingly, I made a visit to the Blessed Sacrament and processed about my own property (read: apartment) chanting the Litany of the Saints for a fruitful year.

There are countless such traditions and practices in the Catholic heritage. I’m of the firm opinion that we ought to be reviving them and, where necessary, adapting them to a non-agricultural or modern context. We may not have the boundaries of the parish to walk around, but what boundaries we do have we may process about while calling God’s blessings upon our work, whatever it may be.

5. It is a part of the Catholic mindset to meld the earthly and the spiritual so that, ideally, one cannot tell where one ends and the other begins; to bless water, fire, and incense, to offer seasonal prayers for proper intentions, to have specific devotions and Saints for various professions. Of late we have, unfortunately, contracted a very bad habit from our Protestant neighbors of all faiths and none of trying to keep the spiritual and the material separate in air tight compartments, for fear that the one might corrupt the other. But that ship is long sailed, as Christ has already united the Divine and the Human as inseparably as two metals forming an alloy. The more of our lives we can weave into prayer, the better.

6. Got out to see Spy x Family: Code White this week. It was about what you’d expect; as a non-serial anime film, nothing serious is going to change, but it was enjoyable as an extended episode of the anime. We got all the usual beats (Anya struggling at school and getting a chance to earn a star, Loid becoming overly-fixated on the mission, Yor worrying about her place in the family, etc.) and running gags (Anya’s bad handwriting, Yor’s weakness for alcohol, Nightfall’s school-girl crush on Loid, the pathetically flimsy Forger family cover stories, etc.), to the point where it kind of feels like they were structuring the film to fit as many in as they could. But being basically an extended episode of the series, it’s got the same charm and humor and heartwarming family love as we’d expect.

There’s an extended bout of toilet humor at one point, but otherwise the content of the film is about the same as the content of the show (which can be kinda bloody, what with Yor’s ‘real job’ and the grimly serious subject matter underlying the spy-film fun). Maybe a few more swearwords. And it’s overall a bit more intense than the series proper: Yor outright suspects Loid of having an affair rather than just doubting her own worth, Anya faces some very serious and direct menace (which she has before, but not very often), the family goes up against rogue military officer on the very of igniting war rather than individual terrorists or intelligence missions, and so on.

Overall, it’s pretty good fun, though nothing extraordinary.

7. Been clearing out old files and papers. I’ve filled three or four trash bags with shreds and even had to pause for a while because my shredder was overheated. At lot of things left over that I’ve been meaning to get rid of and now are at least clearing out before the move.