The CatholiCity Message
Volume XIV, Number 7 – September 2, 2010
Dear CatholiCity Citizen,
There was an atypically negative reaction from a sizable minority of our readers to an item in our previous message regarding female fashion (along with positive feedback). We are truly grateful to those of you who took the time to send in criticisms--they help us more than you can possibly know. There is no doubt that your author failed as a writer because a good number of you clearly mistook his tone or meaning on an issue that is very personal, and for his part in failing to communicate and edify effectively, he sincerely apologizes. If your feelings were hurt, please, find it in your heart to forgive.
TEDDY AND THE ANGEL
When your author was a teenager, he found himself alone in his parents' home one summer evening, asleep. He had two collies, Teddy and Tiger, who stayed outside in a huge backyard behind chain-link fencing. We fondly called Teddy and Tiger, brothers, the Odd Couple. Teddy was clean, trim, wickedly smart, aloof, and almost cat-like quick in his ability to hunt birds and squirrels. Tiger was gregarious, big and thick, always messy and muddy, a little bit dumb, and too lumbering to catch Teddy, much less a bird. They fought sometimes, as brothers do, but mostly got along quite well. Teddy spent his days, like a lion on a throne, resting atop a gigantic rock, which Tiger could barely scale without getting vertigo.
Escaping the high fence was an obsession for both dogs. First Teddy learned to open the gate with his snout. Tiger was just smart enough to copy Teddy. So we put a lock on the gate. So Teddy took to digging hidden "tunnels" beneath the fence in the wooded area of the lot, and Tiger followed him to freedom. If the setting were today, and if we had set up security cameras and computerized monitoring, Teddy surely would have figured out how to hack into the system to disable it.
I could write an entire book about their Great Escapes, including the time Tiger swam across a five-mile bay to the mainland from our New Jersey shore house on Long Beach Island. The family that found him reported alarmingly that he was sick. I rushed to retrieve him, and my heart skipped a beat when I saw Tiger lying on the ground in their yard, not moving, as the children petted and consoled him. Tiger heard my voice and jumped right up, having feigned his malady to bask in their affection. One morning I found Tiger waiting for me outside our back door with a dead cat in his mouth, beaming with pride over the first and only prey he had ever managed to catch. Upon examining the poor cat, I discovered it had tire-tread indentations across its body. It had been run over in the street and Tiger was trying to pass it off as his success. Bemused, yet moved, I praised him mightily, allowing him his counterfeit moment of triumph. "Good boy! Attaboy!" Biggest smile I ever saw on a dog, if dogs could smile. One time Teddy escaped and made it all the way to Freehold, New Jersey (Bruce Springsteen's hometown), hours away by car, and we got to him the day the dog pound was scheduled to put him to sleep.
As the oldest son in a family with nine girls, I loved Teddy and Tiger as only a little boy can love his dog. In their later years, for several months Teddy began escaping regularly despite our extensive counter-measures, and we could not figure out how he was doing so. Eventually, a neighbor spotted him literally climbing--not jumping--the high fence using all four limbs, like a human commando, when the coast was clear. The feat was a truly bizarre thing to see, like a suspension of both the laws of physics and animal anatomy. It was simply not possible, yet Teddy had trained himself to defy the universe itself. There is no doubt a video would be a YouTube mega-sensation nowadays, although it would falsely appear to be CGI, not real.
Sadly, we had to put Teddy on a chain attached to their enormous two-bedroom doghouse--a chain just long enough to allow him to reach the nearest fence to jump up for a pat on the head--the dog equivalent to solitary confinement. A couple of years went by, and I found myself alone on that moonless summer night (the rest of the family was down the shore for Easter vacation, and I had stayed home to play in a baseball game). Teddy and Tiger were senior citizens by now. I woke from a sound sleep in the middle of the night, and felt compelled to cross the house to look out the back window from the second floor. Pitch dark, I could see and hear nothing. I turned and began to walk back to my room, but a powerful force compelled me to turn around and go all the way downstairs and walk outside. It was still too dark to see anything. I felt ridiculous in my underwear. I walked across the driveway to the fence, and in the darkness Teddy slowly came into focus an arms length in front of me. Teddy had defied his arthritis to climb the fence, despite the chain, and was hanging by his neck, choking, unable to make a sound. Tiger was asleep in the doghouse. I yanked Teddy up, seconds before death, then carried him into the house, where he recovered slowly but completely.
On that night, I knew more than I know any other reality that the force that had woken me and made me go outside to save my dog's life was my guardian angel. And I have relied on my angel ever since.
The following morning, I made a point of letting both dogs roam free, all over the neighborhood, and we spent the whole day together, as I had done on so many lonely days as a little boy. For the first time ever, inspired, I broke out my father's Kodak Carousel slide-projector, and inserted a special set of slides he had put together, and watched photo after photo of them and me growing up. For a long time before my ride showed up to take me down the shore, I laid on the carpet in the front foyer next to both of them, petting them, as we listening to music. The following day, Easter Morning, a neighbor called. Teddy had been found dead, hanging by his chain over the fence.
His final Great Escape.
I walked to the beach gazed out at the ocean on an overcast day. My dad came out and asked if I was okay, and I told him I was. I did not cry then, even though tears flow as I type this now, three decades later. I was oddly serene, happy even, because God--and my angel--had given us all an extra day together to say good-bye.
A few days later, I returned to our home up north, and spent a lot of time consoling Tiger, dried mud on his mane, who was distraught and confused. He jumped up on me and kept manically galloping around the yard, trying to run down the scent of the brother he could never catch--until the next morning, when he laid himself down for the last time, escaping the fence of this world, peacefully.
GORGEOUS "SHROUD OF TURIN" LAPEL PINS, WHILE THEY LAST
Finally, we still have a handful of beautiful, custom-made "Shroud of Turin" lapel pins left if you want to make a donation to support our work. It would make a great gift for your kids' new teacher (or for your wife or husband, for all of our home schooling readers). Take a look-see here:
http://www.catholicity.com/support/donation.html
CATHOLIC QUOTATIONS
"Self-will should be so completely poured out of the vessel of the soul into the ocean of the will of God that whatever God may will, that at once the soul should will; and that whatever God may allow, that the soul at once willingly embrace, whether it may be in itself sweet or bitter."
Louis de Blois
"The frontiers between sense and spirit are the devil's hunting ground."
Coventry Patmore
"If a soul lives long enough on the plane of sensuality or of ambition, she finds that Christ is worth less than nothing there."
Robert Hugh Benson
"Perhaps the only sound criticism is self-criticism."
G.K. Chesterton
"About sex especially men are born unbalanced. We might almost say men are born mad. They scarcely reach sanity till they reach sanctity."
G.K. Chesterton
"One thing only in the whole world is more absurd than the convention of the fig leaf, and that is the pretence that sex is not uniquely significant."
Eric Gill
"Now, though the era of persecution is gone, yet our peace has its martyrdom, because though we bend not the neck to the sword, yet with a spiritual weapon we slay fleshly desires in our hearts."
Pope Saint Gregory I
"No amount of pious training or pious culture will protect the faithful, or preserve them from the contamination of the age, if they are left inferior to non-Catholics in secular learning and intellectual development. The faithful must be guarded and protected by being trained and disciplined to grapple with the errors and false systems of the age."
Orestes Brownson
"Every education teaches a philosophy, if not by dogma then by suggestion, by implication, by atmosphere. Every part of that education has a connection with every other part. If it does not combine to convey some general view of life, it is not education at all."
G.K. Chesterton
REPENTENCE PRAYER
Let us join together, tens of thousands of us together, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, in repentance:
"Dear Father in Heaven, For all the times we have harmed another person's reputation by word or deed, forgive us. For all the times we have mischaracterized those with whom we disagree by using ad hominem attacks and name-calling, forgive us. O Father, help us to remember, in the world or in cyberspace, that charity and probity is what distinguishes us as your sons and daughters, and to always to hold ourselves to the highest standards. Let us never forget that words may as well be knives, and that the spiritual bleeding of another person's heart can be more painful and lasting than a wound to the flesh. Help us to forgive those who have harmed us with words. You, Father, have never harmed us so. Instead, you gave us the Word, your son, Jesus, whom we love and of whom we declare again and again and again: We love you, Jesus! We love you, Jesus! We love you, Jesus! With Our Lady, Saint Joseph, Saint Escriva, and Saint Anthony, we pray, Amen."
Thanks for being a part of our work. CatholiCity Citizens are the best! Don't forget to stock up on our free CDs and novels using the links below. We remain, ever with Our Lady,
Your Friends at CatholiCity
