+Of Tummies and Teaching

I’m going to have to go see my doctor.  For the last week or so I’ve been awakened in the middle of the night by severe heartburn.  I wrote it off the first couple times as a fluke and took antacids (which didn’t help much at all).  I also tried widening the gap between dinner and bedtime when I could.  (I can’t always.)  But the pattern is too consistent and too troublesome to write off any more.

The worst of it is, I can’t get BACK to sleep.  Or at least not well.  I’m starting to show the early signs of sleep deprivation, and that just can’t go on.  I don’t want to drug myself to sleep and then possibly be at the mercy of acid reflux, though.

Why do things like this happen during the busiest of weeks?  I’m up to my eyeballs – though it’ll drop off a cliff to nearly nothing by Friday.  The good news is that once this is fixed, it may fix other things too…  Early this year, I pleaded with my doctor if there was anything we could do about my chronic cough.  He said it was most likely either my asthma – or acid reflux disease.  We decided that asthma was the more likely explanation.  But now it seems we were quite probably wrong.  Perhaps I’ll finally be able to ditch the hack-hack-hack, God willing!

I’m sponsoring someone for baptism this year, a very sincere and earnest guy named Keith.    He works nights, so isn’t able to come to the regular RCIA session.  Fr. Jesse, to his credit, decided to start a morning session for him and a couple other people.  (We haven’t always done that in previous years.)  Since my schedule allows, I’ve been going with Keith to that;  I’m the only person there other  than Fr. Jesse and the people being catechized.

The first session was last week.  It was good.  This session… not as good.

It may well be simply that I’m sensitive where Fr. Jesse is concerned.  (There’s a lot of history between us, not always pleasant;  though we’ve made great strides this year in patching things up.)  So I may well be wrong.  But I sure had the impression a couple times during the session that his attempts to include me in the discussion were barbed – that when he added things like, "Isaiah knows what I’m talking about here" to a point he was making that I didn’t wholeheartedly agree with, that he was trying to get under my skin.  Since I knew I might well be wrong, I’ve kept my mouth shut.  But… sigh.

It would be unfair to paint Fr. Jesse as the sort of theological liberal who basically undermines everything the Church teaches.  Unfair, but you can see how people could get the idea.  😛  His talk today about the Creed was quite orthodox in its presentation.  But in his commentary and side-comments, he basically tried to paint anyone in the parish who cares about orthodoxy as a cold, heartless jerk.  I agree with him that it’s a grave danger to have orthodoxy without orthopraxy – to be a Pharisee.  But he seems to just brush off the cold hard fact that a great many Catholics in the pews are dangerously ignorant of their faith.

Likewise, he warned people that they’d hear about "apologetics" (said with an audible sneer).  And he made sure to warn them that it was strictly a matter of learning to parrot back canned answers to people, yet that many Catholics wanted to make it the very center of their faith – without living it.  I didn’t want to contradict him, so I just said that perhaps I was mistaken about the meaning of the word, but I’d always thought it just meant "being able to give a reason for the faith that is within us, yet with gentleness".  He assured me that if I read any books whatever on apologetics, I’d find exactly what he was talking about.  He seemed to assume I hadn’t;  all I can say is that he must be reading different books.  Or maybe the same ones, but with different lenses on.

I don’t think things will get to the point with him that they got with Sheila;  I don’t think he will ever present something so off-base and wrong that I can’t stay silent.  But it seems likely I’m going to get plenty of practice in holding my peace.  It’s probably good for me.