We have one Saint and one Servant of God to honor today. We honor Saint John of the Cross, Priest and Doctor (died 1591). Born as Juan de Yepes Alvarez in poverty in 1542 at Fontiveros, Spain, he cared for the poor in the hospital in Medina del Campo, Spain, and became a Carmelite lay brother in 1563 at age 21, though he lived more strictly than the Rule required. He studied at Salamanca, Spain, and was ordained as a Carmelite priest in 1567 at age 25. He then considered joining the much more strict Carthusians, but was persuaded by Saint Teresa of Avila to begin the Discalced or barefoot reform within the Carmelite Order and took the name John of the Cross. He became master of novices, and the spiritual director and confessor at Saint Teresa’s convent. His reforms did not set well with some of his brothers, and he was ordered to return to Medina del Campo. He refused, and was imprisoned at Toledo, Spain, writing much of his great work The Spiritual Canticle while in prison, and escaping after nine months. He also authored the poem Dark Night of the Soul, the commentary on Dark Night of the Soul, and the mystical work Ascent of Mount Carmel. He became Vicar-general of Andalusia, Spain, and his reforms revitalized the Carmelite Order. A great contemplative and spiritual writer, he was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius XI in 1926, and is the Patron Saint of mystics and poets. We also honor Servant of God Catherine Doherty (died 1985). Born as Ekaterina Fyodorovna Kolyschkine in 1896 in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, her parents belonged to the minor nobility and were devout members of the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1912, aged 15, she made what turned out to be a disastrous marriage with her first cousin, Boris de Hueck (died 1947). At the outbreak of World War I, Catherine de Hueck became a Red Cross nurse at the front, experiencing the horrors of battle firsthand. On her return to St. Petersburg, she and her husband barely escaped the turmoil of the Russian Revolution with their lives, nearly starving to death as refugees in Finland. Together they made their way to England, where Catherine was received into communion with the Roman Catholic Church on November 27, 1919, becoming a Russian Greek-Catholic. Immigrating to Canada with her husband, she gave birth to their only child in Toronto in 1921. Soon she and her husband became more and more painfully estranged from one another as he pursued extramarital affairs. To make ends meet, she took various jobs and eventually became a lecturer, travelling a circuit that took her across North America. Prosperous now, but deeply dissatisfied with a life of material comfort, her marriage in ruins, she began to feel the promptings of a deeper call through a passage that leaped to her eyes every time she opened the Bible. Consulting with various priests and the bishop of the diocese, she began her lay apostolate among the poor in Toronto in the early 1930s, calling it Friendship House. Because her interracial approach was so different from what was being done at the time, she encountered much persecution and resistance, and Friendship House was forced to close in 1936. She then went to Europe and spent a year investigating Catholic Action. On her return, she was given the chance to revive Friendship House in New York City among the poor in Harlem. In time, more than a dozen Friendship Houses would be founded in North America. In 1943, having received an annulment of her first marriage (as she had married her cousin, which is forbidden in the Church), she married Eddie Doherty, one of America’s foremost reporters, who had fallen in love with her while writing a story about her apostolate. Serious disagreements arose between the staff of Friendship House and its foundress, particularly surrounding her marriage. When these could not be resolved, the couple moved to Combermere, Ontario, on May 17, 1947, naming their new rural apostolate Madonna House. This was to be the seedbed of an apostolate that, by the year 2000, numbered more than 200 staff workers and over 125 associate priests, deacons, and bishops, with 22 missionary field-houses throughout the world. Doherty is perhaps best known for having introduced the concept of poustinia to Roman Catholicism through her best-selling book, Poustinia, first published in 1975. A poustinia is a small, sparsely furnished cabin or room where one goes to pray and fast alone in the presence of God for 24 hours. Her cause for canonization was opened in 2000; if you know of any miracles that can be attributed to her intercession, please contact the Vatican. Today is also the birthday of Richard’s cousin Devonne, and of his niece Laurie, daughter of his sister Bonnie in Texas (1966).
First up, on Monday night our LSU Men’s Basketball team was upset by Coastal Carolina, losing their game by the score of 69 to 78; our Tigers are now 6 and 3 for the season (and unranked).
We woke up an hour early today; and I had a Facebook message from my friend Jean in California with her new address. We got out and got to the casino an hour early, and were the #1 and #2 dealers on the A side of the Early Out list. Before we clocked in, my doppelgänger, the dealer who shares my first and last name, gave us a Christmas gift of homemade pumpkin bread. Richard and I worked one hour (both of us on blackjack tables) before we got out at 4:00 am; we do not have to be back at the casino until 3:00 am on Christmas Eve. The convenience store that sells the crawfish pies was not open yet when we went by, so we went on home; we arrived home at 5:00 am, and I went straight back to bed.
When I woke up (again) at 11:00 am, I had a voice mail from the bridal shop letting me know that my shoes had come in. Richard went to Wal-Mart to get supplies and most of the stuff that Liz Ellen requested for us to have on hand, and picked up my shoes, while I ate my lunch salad and read the papers (I finally got around to reading our local paper’s Sunday edition, which arrived yesterday). Richard then headed to Lafayette to pick up his tuxedo & shoes for the wedding (and satsumas for Liz Ellen), while I occupied myself with the cleaning of my vanity area, the organization of the stuff in the bedroom, and stuff on the computer. Liz Ellen called me about 2:00 pm; she was in Athens, Alabama, and was planning on spending the night in Tuscaloosa.
At about 2:30 pm, after an ominous series of alerts advising me that my virus program had picked up on and eliminated several threats, I got a message on the computer that some sectors had been corrupted and that the computer needed to reboot itself; once it did so, I was faced with the Black Screen of Death, with nothing but a cursor blinking up in the left-hand corner. I called Richard to apprise him of the situation, then read the January 2011 issue of Consumer Reports magazine, which had an ominous story about glass baking dishes; apparently they are making the dishes from a different formulation of glass, and since about 2009 there have been cases of glass baking dishes exploding in the oven and on the countertop. (Yikes.) Richard arrived home about 3:15 pm, and took our computer’s hard drive off to our local computer store so that they can exorcise the demons within it fix it for us. While he was gone, I got a phone call from my massage therapist asking if she could change the appointment that Liz Ellen and I have with her to 7:00 am and 8:00 am on Thursday morning. I told her that would be fine. (While Liz Ellen is an early riser, it may be a bit more difficult for me to get out of bed that early.)
Richard got back from the computer place at 3:45 pm, and I spent the next several hours cleaning and messing around on Michelle’s computer, and did a couple of Advance Daily Update Drafts. After Jeopardy! we had dinner (chili) and lit the Advent Candles. And I am now producing today’s Daily Update on Michelle’s computer (which we appear to have inherited, now that she has moved to her boyfriend’s apartment in Baton Rouge), and once I am done I will take a well-deserved hot bath. I will note that the LSU Women’s Basketball game with Texas Southern has started, and that I will give the score of the game in tomorrow’s Daily Update.
Tomorrow Liz Ellen is due to arrive around about lunchtime; and aside from doing my laundry and getting my Powerball and Louisiana Lotto tickets, I anticipate that most of my day will be spent in doing stuff with her.
Our Parting Quote tonight comes to us from Rodney Whitaker, American film scholar and writer. Born in 1931 in Granville, New York, he became enthralled with stories as a boy. His family struggled with poverty, and he lived for several years in Albany, New York. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Washington. While there he wrote and directed his three-act play Eve of the Bursting (1959). Whitaker went on to earn a doctorate in communications and film at Northwestern University. He taught at Dana College in Blair, Nebraska, where he was chairman of the communications division, and served in the US Navy during the Korean War. Later he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for study in England. In 1970 he wrote a nonfiction work, The Language of Film. While chairman of the Department of Radio, TV and Film at the University of Texas, Austin, his wife suggested the pen name of Trevanian for his fiction based on her appreciation of English historian G.M. Trevelyan. His first novel, published at the age of forty, was The Eiger Sanction (1972), an intelligent, gritty and thrilling spy spoof that became a worldwide best seller. Saddened that some critics did not ‘get’ the spoof, Whitaker followed it with an even more intense spoof, The Loo Sanction (1973), which depicted an ingenious art theft (which was reportedly copied by thieves in Turin).In 1975 The Eiger Sanction was adapted as a movie directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. Trevanian requested (and received) a screenwriting credit as Rod Whitaker. The balance of the script was written by Warren Murphy, the mystery writer perhaps best known for co-writing the Destroyer series of men’s action novels. In 1976 came The Main, a roman policier set in a poor neighborhood of Montreal with Claude LaPointe, a police lieutenant in his mid-50s whose wife had died young, as the lead character. Next came Shibumi in 1979, Trevanian’s meta-spy novel, which received the most critical acclaim. Whitaker kept his true identity unknown for years. He refused to grant interviews or contribute to the publicity efforts of his publishers. His first known interview was granted to Carol Lawson of The New York Times for a June 10, 1979 article coinciding with the release of Shibumi. It was rumored that Trevanian was Robert Ludlum writing under a pen name. In 1983 Trevanian published The Summer of Katya, a psychological horror novel. The widely diverse books solidified the myth that “Trevanian” was a collective pen name for a group of writers working together. Under the name Nicolas Seare, Trevanian also published 1339 or So: Being an Apology for a Pedlar (1975), a witty medieval tale of love and courage; and Rude Tales and Glorious (1983), a bawdy re-telling of Arthurian tales. After a 15-year absence from domestic publishing, in 1998 Trevanian reappeared as the author of a Western novel called Incident at Twenty-Mile, and a collection of short stories titled Hot Night in the City (2000). The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (2005) depicted the coming-of-age story of Jean-Luc LaPointe, a boy surviving with his mother and sister in the slums of Albany, New York in the years preceding and during World War II. Although the book was published as fiction, commentators described it as autobiographical. In November 2005 it was selected as one of eleven Editors’ Choice books by the Historical Novel Society (died 2005): “Irony is Fate’s most common figure of speech.”
From The Recamier 