Trick as a Treat!

Trick is the nickname* I have for a good friend I made junior year of college at KKG Leadership Academy. We were both chosen to represent our respective chapters and both put into the orange group. At the time, she was dating one of my Hillsdale classmates, so I kept looking at her like a familiar face. We soon found the connection and, more importantly, formed one of our own. She lives on the West Coast and has a kind and generous heart. 

The exciting part is that we will have time together this week! She got a job with Kappa as a Leadership Consultant and, since HQ and I are in the same city, Trick is flying here today for the week for work! Ahh! We've already been texting, which prompts this quick post. Perfect timing too, because I'll be in Washington, D.C. the entire following week for work.

This is the sign on the fence we scaled to hang out by the pool and talk on our last night of L.A. Notice "Use Poo At [Own] Risk"-- there's more than a copy-editing problem here!

A great read: "The saint's 'wise heart' rejects dependence on transient things, Pope teaches" (from CNS).

A few lovely quotes from Flannery O'Connor's essay "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South" from 'Mystery and Manners':

"To be great storytellers, we need something to measure ourselves against, and this is what we conspicuously lack in this age. Men judge themselves now by what they find themselves doing. The Catholic has the natural law and the teachings of the Church to guide him, but for the writing of fiction, something more is necessary."

"Nothing will insure the future of Catholic fiction so much as the biblical revival that we see signs of now in Catholic life. The Bible is held sacred in the Church, we hear it read at Mass, bits and pieces of it are exposed to us in the liturgy, but because we are not totally dependent on it, it has not penetrated very far into our consciousness not conditioned our reactions to experience. Unfortunately, where you find Catholics reading the Bible, you find that it is usually a pursuit of the educated, but in the South the Bible is known by the ignorant as well, and it is always that mythos which the poor held in common that is most valuable to the fiction writer. When the poor hold sacred history in common, they have ties to the universal and the holy, which allows the meaning of their action to be heightened and seen under the aspect of eternity."

"It is what writer, character, and reader share that makes it possible to write fiction at all."

"I think that Catholic novelists in the future will be able to reinforce the vital strength of Southern literature, for they will know that what has given the South her identity are those beliefs and qualities which she has absorbed from the Scriptures and from her own history of defeat and violation: a distrust of the abstract, a sense of human dependence on the grace of God, and a knowledge that evil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured."

"Certainly in a secular world, he is in a particular position to appreciate and cherish the Protestant South, to remind us of what we have and what we must keep."

Today is a sunny Sunday-- I love it! I hope y'all have a blessed Sunday, on this the feast of St. Alphonsus Marie Liguori! Happy August!

*I just realized I might have post something eventually about nicknames because I give a fair amount of them out to people, but I also get them in return. Fun fact: one of my nicknames is Kevin. Anyone want to guess why?