This Common Buckeye on the tarmac driveway next to the tomatoes calls to mind Tomato Buckeye Rot. The similarity of the markings is striking.
Imagine that your visual defense against predators is to look like a rotten tomato.
If you’re all nerdy about chemistry amidst a symbiotic ecosystem, the Common Buckeye in its various morphologies opens up a universe of bio-manipulation and applications (see Genesis 1:28). Nature is not ever what we think; there is always so very much more.
Creation speaks of God the Creator. In such times as this (see Romans chapter 1, beginning to end, no, really, go read chapter 1 of Romans now!) it is good to notice the beauty of God’s Creation and be pointed to God, thanking God, praising God.
Meanwhile, at the same time, this grasshopper was on the floor of the open carport. I mean, those eyes…
Anyway, over at Wikipedia we read about what fallen human nature has to be busy about, even with grasshoppers:
- “In February 2020, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis announced they had engineered “cyborg grasshoppers” capable of accurately detecting explosives. In the project, funded by the US Office of Naval Research, researchers fitted grasshoppers with lightweight sensor backpacks that recorded and transmitted the electrical activity of their antennal lobes to a computer. According to the researchers, the grasshoppers were able to detect the location of the highest concentration of explosives. The researchers also tested the effect of combining sensorial information from several grasshoppers on detection accuracy. The neural activity from seven grasshoppers yielded an average detection accuracy rate of 80%, whereas a single grasshopper yielded a 60% rate.”
So, probably you don’t need to have a helicopter drop a thousand detection-grasshoppers onto this kid. You already know there’s something suspicious when he’s dressed for the arctic in a cover-the-bombs-parka when it’s a hot day. By the way, this 14 year old was successfully stripped of his bombs.
Anyway, this kind of research will surely save lives. Who would’ve thought? Grasshoppers!
There’s always more to learn. Fascinating. Thanks be to God. Love of God makes the thanksgiving exhilerating.
I call to mind the double anamnesis speech of Cardinal Ratzinger to the USCCB in Dallas, TX, in 1991. This is one his most important contributions, right up there with Ad tuendam fidem and then, as Benedict XVI, Summorum Pontificum.
Too bad the bishops didn’t understand a word of what he said, which means that they were already more involved in the second half of chapter one of Romans than the first half of that first chapter. And so we have what we have today.
Basically, you can’t have a remembrance of the pristineness of the Garden of Eden without first of all having a remembrance brought to one’s own living testimony (anamnesis, from which we have the word martyr) of the Last Supper united with Calvary, we being united in solidarity with the wounds of Jesus.
This is essential reading for today: https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/conscience-and-truth-2468
It’s good to be solidly grounded in the joy of learning ever so much more about our relationship with our good God in these times of the denial of natural law, divine law, in these times of the denial of Jesus.
You know you’re getting somewhere when the Holy Ghost has you say, “Abba! Father!” through, with and in Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, looking forward to the new Eden, the new paradise, the new “garden” of the new heavens and the new earth in heaven.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a wretched sinner who crucified you, and please have mercy on the whole world. You founded your mercy on your justice. Thank you.
Oh. And imagine being hidden with Christ in God, your camouflage being the carrying about the death of Christ within us, you know, as the Master, so the disciple. I think of Saint Paul:
- “From henceforth let no man be troublesome to me; for I bear the marks of the Lord Jesus in my body” (Galatians 6:17).
- “But Father George! Father George! You don’t understand! Being close to Jesus in this world isn’t to be hidden at all. You stand out as the exception, not with the majority, what Karine Jean-Pierre says makes you an extremist!”
Yes, well. This is how it works: the closer you are to Jesus the more the world doesn’t understand your identity in Jesus, who said that the world will hate us as much as it hates Him. Who we truly are is invisible to the world just as the identity of Jesus as the Son of the Living God was not recognized by the world. Proportional to our ‘in your face’ proclamation, the more hidden with Christ in God we are.
ARISE! LET US BE GOING! 
“But who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from my unknown faults.”
Otherwise, one risks going to Hell with a clear conscience.
I am grateful for the inclusion of Conscience and Truth – I am not finished with it, but I had to make this quick note before it escaped me.
Thanks be to God for your humble efforts, Father.
” A man of conscience, is one who never acquires tolerance, well- being, success, public standing, and approval on the part of prevailing opinion, at the expense of truth. ”
Ain’t that the truth.
So much good stuff in Ratzinger’s speech.
“The possibility for, and right to “mission” rest on this anamnesis of the creator which is identical to the ground of our existence.”
To me, this speaks to Covenant and Mission. The Lord makes a covenant (constantly renewing it in the Mass?) and then gives us a mission (Ite, missa est), having already prepared our hearts by writing his (at conception?) law into them.
Am I babbling, Father? After all, these are thoughts off of the top of my head – I don’t mind, at all, being a fool for the Lord. So let me get that out if the way so you can charitably correct me.
I really like that, Ite, Missa est. Love one another AS I have loved you.
‘My own I is the site of the profoundest surpassing of self and contact with Him from whom I came and toward Whom I am going.”
Somewhere in there, is the free will that the Lord gave us, and the only “thing” we truly own, by which we make that journey in freely responding to the Lord’s invitation.
Saying yes in This grace
Precisely – the answer matters.
“The true nature of the Petrine office has become so incomprehensible in the modern age no doubt because we only think of authority in terms which do not allow for bridges between subject and object.”
GASP! If I don’t know what he means, am I guilty? I’m going to need an explanation of this sentence.
Jesus orders with aid of grace, His friendship. The Pope commands, all things being equal, appealing to conscience, but always in view of Christ Jesus.
Thank you, Father.
“It has maieutic function, imposes nothing foreign, but brings to fruition what is proper to anamnesis, namely its interior openness to the truth.”
I will digress to note that proponents of liberalism often abuse the maieutic method , imposing foreign objects by misstating their opponents position, in bad faith – these liberals think themselves great. -meh-
Well, at least Ratzinger has explained to me the nature of the offense committed.
At the time, Marxist catechists were imposing through questions, which was called “values clarification”.
“Only when we know and experience this from within, will we be free to hear the message of conscience with joy and without fear.
”
What a wonderful way to end this speech. This is how I feel once my GA has dragged me into line for Confession. I am working on making it easier on my GA.
“Clear thou me from my unknown faults.”
If you want to see the butterfly, don’t squash the catapillar.
oh Father…so much…
Ratzinger’s talk on Conscience and Truth is rather long and somewhat dense in spots, although brilliant. Timely, as more issues re: authority and obedience are coming to the fore in the Church. To put it bluntly, bishops and cardinals are collectively making some very wrong decisions that are adversely affecting millions of souls. So….terrorists, and that should not be.
Every time I review this talk I discover new points, and the conclusion is always exhilarating (a little like Buckeyes and grasshopper eyes).
Something that helps me is a 3-part podcaZt series Father Z did back in 2012. Father Z explains some of the terms used. He also speaks with good expression which helps me get a better sense of the text, more than just reading it to myself.
However, Father Byers’ synopsis in simple words is extraordinary, and not at all dumbed down!
( Not sure this will work?)
https://wdtprs.com/2012/06/podcazt-130-ratzinger-on-conscience-and-truth-part-1/
https://wdtprs.com/2012/06/podcazt-131-ratzinger-on-conscience-and-truth-part-2/
https://wdtprs.com/2012/06/podcazt-132-ratzinger-on-conscience-and-truth-part-3/
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger: “The true sense of this teaching authority of the Pope consists in his being the advocate of the Christian memory. The Pope does not impose from without. Rather, he elucidates the Christian memory and defends it.” (Quote from “Conscience and Truth” at link Father gave above.)
Pope Benedict XVI lived these words, Pope Francis does not and therein lies an important truth.
Some labelled Benedict XVI a coward for “resigning” – that he fled in fear of the “wolves”; in other words, that he took the easy way out. I cannot see that. He well knew what conscience is and is not, and would not mistake an easy way out that betrayed Our Lord as good. It therefore seems to me that whatever it was that he did (resign, not resign, step aside, …?) he did for the right reasons.
Does it not make more sense that Pope Benedict’s “resignation” (or whatever it was) was not the act of an hitherto good Pope fleeing God’s will but rather that Pope acting in accord with God’s will? Might it not be that this (our temporary loss of a good Pope) is the way “God’s anger is being revealed from heaven; his anger against the impiety and wrong-doing of the men whose wrong-doing denies his truth its full scope”? (Romans 1:18)
Others have said that Pope Francis is the Pope mankind deserves because of our unfaithfulness. That sounds right. No doubt the 2nd half of Romans is describing the times when written but so too does it describe our times which is surely the worst manifestation of such to date (e.g. promiscuity and contraception, abortion and same sex-marriage, all backed by worldly power: big pharma and other big money elites, academia, government, media and even by a disturbing number of Church prelates).
I thank God for Cardinal Ratzinger-Pope Benedict XVI for doing his best to make clear:
“All power that the papacy has is power of conscience. It is service to the double memory upon which the faith is based and which again and again must be purified, expanded and defended against the destruction of memory which is threatened by a subjectivity forgetful of its own foundation as well as by the pressures of social and cultural conformity.”