Warning indulgent post as I talk about myself

This year continued to be a year of transitions for me.

I found this C.S. Lewis quote to be fairly accurate for me.

“Grief is not, as I thought, a state but a process: like a walk in a winding valley which gives you a new landscape every few miles.” (Letter to Dom Bede Griffiths, O.S.B.)

I never quite know when tinges of grief will come to me — triggers regarding specific dates and places I expected. The sporadic suddenness of grief sometimes leaves me unprepared. Mostly I live in the more abstract reality of this. Daily prayers for the repose of her soul I never forget to do. Praying the Divine Mercy chaplet for her and others is also a daily occurrence. Still, I often feel this more as a responsibility than as an active entering into the reality of the Communion of Saints. I know my limitations and am joyful that I do intellectually accept this reality and that this is an area where doubt does not intrude.

Tending to be rather bookish I can too easily stay at home and amuse myself. Trying to overwhelm loneliness, by distracting myself. I just never expected to be without my wife. I always figured I would die first. In reaction to my tendencies, I have been working on getting out of myself and not just let the world pass by.

Last year I made efforts to anchor myself within my parish. I felt like an interloper. Attending events, but not knowing anybody even casually. So this year I wanted to correct this. I had signed up for the Christ Renews His Parish Retreat mainly to get to know some people in my parish. I rather dreaded the retreat itself since I suspected phony team-building and other aspects not favorable to being an introvert.

So I was quite delighted to find that this retreat was not what I feared and it was filled with witnessing and men making an effort to draw closer to Christ and his Church. At the time I had no idea that bi-weekly meetings were part of this and I thought it was a one-time thing. I have indeed found myself looking forward to these meetings. As I have come to know better the people in my team I have come to respect them all the more. I feel grateful to be some part of their journeys.

One aspect of the meetings I struggle with is my own “know-it-all” pride and the temptation to afflict others with this. Since I have come into the Church, I have been doing so much reading regarding the faith along with consuming so much Catholic media. So I have been absorbing knowledge from others for years with limited avenues to talk about the faith. I was kind of like a pressure cooker building up with knowledge and my love of the Church. So I inflict my team members with what I have learned, but too often having something to say. To be fair to myself part of this is because I do love talking about the faith, but am also very aware of my intellectual pride. I know what gifts I do have I should use for Christ’s glory, I do not want to fool myself regarding my mixed motives. Even admitting this is a temptation to pride “Look at how he accuses himself.”

The reason this blog came about in the first place was part of that same pressure cooker build up. I just needed to express what I was learning. One thing I have been very thankful for this year is the multiple times’ people have reached out to me letting me know how my blog at some point helped them. It was quite humbling to take the Balaam’s Ass role in this. To receive a number of these unsolicited thanks during this specific year was an affirmation given to me that I was not just fumbling pridefully in the dark.

There have been other signs of God working in my life. I am a man of routines and can get very static in those daily routines. There are some various positive aspects regarding this, but it also limits some growth. Around the time of my conversion, I am especially drawn to Carmelite spirituality. So for a couple of years, I was attending meetings with a local OCDS group. Life intruded on my attending these meetings, and the group broke up after my first pastor died. When I saw in my parish bulletin notices for an OCDS group meeting there, I put it into the back of my mind to possibly attend. I finally got around to visiting and this has become an essential step for me as it has challenged me.

As a man of routine, my daily prayer walks involving the Rosary, Divine Mercy chaplet, and intercessory prayers were my God punchcard. I don’t want to diminish how this is an integral part of my prayer life, just that it can become a mere habit than developing a further friendship with God. So being back with the Carmelite group and dedicating myself to thirty minutes of contemplative prayer daily made me structure my life to make this part of my routine (without being just routine). Part of my God punchcard was making it to Eucharistic Adoration twice-a-week. I am blessed that now I can go daily. The parish I attend daily Mass on my way into work has perpetual adoration, so now I show up an hour earlier. My parish also has Eucharistic Adoration during the week for limited hours (although they are expanding hours in January), so I go there too. A dedicated Perpetual Adoration Chapel within reasonably short driving distance rounds out my opportunities. I might suck at contemplative prayer, but as Chesterton said: “That if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” Jesus is worth the effort.

This year also marked a year of attending conferences. I wrote previously about my experience going to the Chesterton Conference in Orlando and Catholic Answers Conference on Faith and Science. Greatly enjoyed both of these experiences and the people I met. I plan to attend the same conferences in 2019. The Chesterton Conference led me to seek out going to monthly Chesterton Society meetings. Unfortunately, none are local, so I end up driving to Orlando. The drive is worth it. I was impressed with the members of the Orlando group I met at the conference and have totally enjoyed the meetings. Plus how could I not love people who love Chesterton?

A final aspect of this year’s journey has been my Latin Mass experience. In early 2017, I started to attend the Latin Mass and was later asked to join the choir. This year I have gotten to know a little better those also attending. There has been an effort made to bring us together and to work together to promote the Latin Mass within the parish along with planning for the future. I do love to sing and having to learn Gregorian Chant has stretched my abilities. This forces me to practice, especially as the other members of the choir are much more talented than Ib (not false humility). Somehow I got roped into leading the Rosary in Latin before Mass. This was indeed not a plan of my introvert nature. I was super nervous the first time doing this and was worried about how others would react. I did a lot of practicing listening to the Rosary in Latin so I would not butcher it too much. Later it was requested we sing the Salve Regina at the end. Back to practicing countless times. Pretty happy though as to how others have joined in and integrated this into parish life. That it still happens when I am unable to attend.

So this has been a year of stepping out along with being asked to do things. Volunteering goes against my natural tendencies, but I am better for doing so.

Next year I am going to nail humility and perfect it.

This version of The Weekly Francis covers material released in the last week from 2 December 2018 to 20 December 2018.

The Weekly Francis is a compilation of the Holy Father’s writings, speeches, etc which I also post at Jimmy Akin’s blog.

Angelus

• 8 December 2018
• 9 December 2018

General Audiences

• 12 December 2018

Messages

• 2 December 2018 – Message of the Holy Father for the beatification of the martyrs Msgr. Pierre Claverie, O.P., bishop of Oran and 18 companions (men and women religious) in Algeria
• 8 December 2018 – 52nd World Day of Peace 2019 – Good politics is at the service of peace
• 10 December 2018 – Holy Father’s message to participants at the International Conference “Human Rights in the Contemporary World: Achievements, Omissions, Negations” [Rome, 10–11 December 2018]
• 13 December 2018 – Holy Father’s message to participants at Study Day on Water promoted by the FAO in Madrid

Speeches

• 7 December 2018 – To the Delegations who donated the Crib and the Christmas Tree in St. Peter’s Square
• 14 December 2018 – To Performers and Organizers of the Christmas Concert

Papal Tweets

• “This is the first step in order to grow on our journey of faith: listening. Before speaking, listen.” @Pontifex 14 December 2018
• “Our life spreads light when it is given in service. The secret of joy is living to serve.” @Pontifex 15 December 2018
• “Joy, prayer and gratitude are three ways that prepare us to experience Christmas in an authentic way. #Advent” @Pontifex 16 December 2018
• ““O Wisdom from the mouth of the Most High, you fill the whole world. With strength and gentleness you order all things: come to teach us the way of prudence.” #AdventAntiphons” @Pontifex 17 December 2018
• “Jesus knows well the pain of not being welcomed. May our hearts not be closed as were the houses in Bethlehem. #Internationalmigrantsday” @Pontifex 18 December 2018
• “Be like Saint Joseph: a man of dreams, not a dreamer; a man of silence, because he respects God’s plan. #SantaMarta” @Pontifex 18 December 2018
• “Advent is a time for us to prepare for the coming of Jesus, Prince of Peace. It’s a time to make peace with ourselves and our neighbours. #Advent” @Pontifex 19 December 2018
• “God enters history and does so in His original style: surprise. The God of surprises always surprises us. #SantaMarta” @Pontifex 20 December 2018

Papal Instagram

• Franciscus

This version of The Weekly Francis covers material released in the last week from 2 December 2018 to 13 December 2018.

The Weekly Francis is a compilation of the Holy Father’s writings, speeches, etc which I also post at Jimmy Akin’s blog.

Angelus

• 2 December 2018

General Audiences

• 5 December 2018

Speeches

• 13 December 2018 – To New Non-Resident Ambassadors accredited to the Holy See

Papal Tweets

• “Loving God means serving our neighbour without reserve, and trying to forgive without limits.” @Pontifex 7 December 2018
• “What is the secret of Mary’s beauty, “tota pulchra”? Not appearances, or that which passes, but a heart totally centred on God.” @Pontifex 8 December 2018
• “Advent is a time to recognize the emptiness needs to be filled in our lives, a time to smooth the rough edges of pride, and to make room for Jesus who comes. #Advent” @Pontifex 9 December 2018
• “Every human person, created in God’s image and likeness, is a value unto themselves and is subject to inalienable rights. #HumanRightsDay” @Pontifex 10 December 2018
• “Keep the faith. In this second week of Advent, we ask for the grace to prepare ourselves with faith to celebrate Christmas. #SantaMarta” @Pontifex 10 December 2018
• ““Comfort, comfort my people” (Is 40,1). How does the Lord give comfort? With tenderness. #SantaMarta” @Pontifex 11 December 2018
• “Let us beg the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, to continue accompanying and protecting the peoples of the American continent. #VirgendeGuadalupe” @Pontifex 12 December 2018
• “Even when we pray alone, we pray together with all the people of God.” @Pontifex 13 December 2018

Papal Instagram

• Franciscus

For at least twenty years I have been someone who has used various note taking tools. The primary aspect being able to have a centralized location for notes that is searchable across notes.

One of the early ones I used was called Info Angel. I really loved this piece of Windows software since it did most of what I wanted and had extensive formatting features including tables. It used an Access database so I was able to copy this file back and forth between work in home. I am surprised the page for the product is still up since it hasn’t been updated in a decade. I used this pretty much until I first bought an Apple computer in 2007.

Since then, I have used OneNote and Evernote. They are both powerful products and work across different mobile and desktop operating systems. While I used these products, I never really loved them. There were just too many annoyances where I found myself having to adapt to their system instead of more intuitively for me doing what I wanted.

Once I learned and started using Markdown, then I wanted to use it for my notes. Markdown is a plain text formatting language that makes it very easy to format text while it remains plain text. I wrote an Introduction to Markdown some years ago.

Since no major note taking app used Markdown, I rolled my own system. Basically I stored each note as a file in Dropbox and used various text editors (Sublime Text, Atom, Visual Studio Code) to perform searching across folders and files. The advantage was that the system was free and fairly powerful and worked on Windows and Mac. I could also access and edit the notes on my iPhone/iPad, but not easily.

I then started to just use Apple’s Notes. This mostly worked for me as Apple had finally made synching work correctly and that Notes itself became more powerful. If it wasn’t for the fact that I prefer using Markdown, I would have stayed with this solution.

So I have been looking for something to replace this system. A year or so ago an app called Bear Notes came out. It sounded pretty interesting since it supported Markdown. It also had a yearly subscription system for more advanced features. So I was hesitant to go this route and just stick to Apple Notes.

I finally did decide to try it out since you can download it for free and get the majority of features. Just no sync between computers and mobile devices for free.

Testing out Bear Notes I quickly found that I liked almost everything about it. Within a day I started to import my notes from my previous systems and use it full time. There are multiple reasons I love this app both aesthetically and feature-wise.

Organization

One of the important aspects of note taking is finding a note you created later on. So having some kind of organization structure along with full text search is very important. Bear Notes solves this in a very interesting way using tags. Not just a single word tagging system, but one that can be nested.

For example if there was a document I wanted to add for related Carmelite studies, I could tag it with tags and subtags:

#Catholic/Carmelite/Documents

Even more powerful is the fact that I can use multiple lines of tags so that the same note could appear in two different folder locations. You can access the note in both locations along with editing the same note in either.

#Catholic/Carmelite/Documents #Documents

These tags are just typed inline with the note and when you start typing a tag is uses suggestions to show you existing tags you have used. You can place these anywhere within the note, I just place them at the end.

Formatting

First off you don’t have to enable Markdown. If you don’t enable Markdown, you will see formatting features such as in a regular word processor.

While Bear Notes allows you to use Markdown, it is also provides features like other word processors to see your formatting. They take a hybrid approach of using Markdown tags along with a visual indication of the formatting style. Thus while you can enter links using Markdown syntax, the resulting url will be hidden.

While Bear Notes allows you to use Markdown, it is also provides features like other word processors to see your formatting. They take a hybrid approach of using Markdown tags along with a visual indication of the formatting style. Thus while you can enter links using Markdown syntax, the resulting url will be hidden.

For example. this screenshot shows a note I created to quickly navigate to other notes. I can easily edit the title of the link or edit the link itself. So the link can be a url to a website or a link to navigate to another note.

The above example shows the formatting of a note I created for studying where I both pasted in text and wrote up my own notes. I like to use headers and unordered lists to organize my notes.

Formatting options can be done either via a menu or by typing them using Markdown.

Images and Files

Images can be pasted inline into your note so that they show directly anywhere within the note. References to images and files such a PDF, audio, etc can be inserted into a document. The file is then embedded into your note and this is not a reference to an external file path. It is directly stored in the note and thus can be accessed via Bear Notes on any device you are using.

The above is an example of a PDF link. Clicking on it will show the contents of the PDF.

Theming

As you can see by my screenshot examples I like a rather dark theme, this one is called “Toothpaste”. There are multiple themes to choose from with light and dark themes. These setting can be set for each device you are using this app on. Theming is part of the app subscription.

Searching

You can choose to search you note text across every single stored notes or just within a selected tag folder. There are also search tags you can use to specify files with attachments, images, or todos.

One caveat is that while searching across notes works for both desktop and mobile versions of this app. Searching multiple occurence of a word within a single note only works on the desktop version currently. In the mobile version it will just list the notes that match the search term.

Exporting

One of the important things about note taking is being able to export your note. Bear Notes supports multiple export options including on iOS. You can export a note as txt, Markdown, PDF, HTML, RTF, DOCX, ePub, and as JPG.

You can even export all the notes within a folder using formats listed above. This works amazingly well even on iOS.

Other Features

At the top of the Sidebar under Notes there are special groups that are automatially populated with notes within a certain criteria.

• Untagged: Notes without any tags defind.
• Today: Notes created today.
• Todo: Any note that has a Todo checkmark box inserted.

There are plenty of keyboard shortcuts with many of them working both on the Mac and iOS versions.

On the iPad Pro you can use the Apple Pencil to sketch notes directly.

You can add text, images, attachments, and entire web pages from extensions or on iOS via the Share Sheet.

One nice feature is that folders created from tags can have their own icon. This is visually pleasing and is part of the overall attention-to-detail this app has.

There are multiple settings and you can modify many aspects of how the app works and how information is displayed.

Pro Features

The app subscription pricing is $15 a year. This includes changing the theme along with allowing sync across all installed versions of this app (via iCloud). If you just want to use this on one device, you do not need the pro features. Regardless there is a trial for trying these features out before paying the subscription.

I am of a mixed mind about app subscriptions. Like everybody I don’t want to add any annual fees. Still when it comes to professional apps I use everyday, I want app developers to have the money to continue to develop new features and support existing one. I had no hesitancy about an app subscription for this app.

Other Concerns

Bear Notes is restricted to the Apple Mac and iOS devices. So no support for Windows or Android. While I use Windows at work, I also have a MacBook Pro there. Ideally would like multiple OS support.

This app I assume is created by a small company, so there is concern about how long this app will be around. Still even if this app stopped being supported, the data in it can be exported out. Plus since the sync uses iCloud, data storage is not dependent on this company.

Final Thoughts

I really love this app. I use it constantly. I especially like the iOS versions of the app as I also use the iPhone and iPad versions throughout the day. This is a well thought out app and you can see the attention to detail and the access to features whether you are using it on a Mac, iPhone, or iPad. They have really looked to how best implement the layout of the app in these different use cases. Overall I am very impressed and I am hypercritical when it comes to note taking apps.

So what is missing from this app? Things that I want added?

• Table formatting: Would love to be able to insert a table and enter information into it. Later versions of Markdown allow this. I imagine this is a feature that will be added at some point. After all, Apple Notes finally added it.
• Inline searching of text within a note on iOS.
• More keyboard shortcut keys. While there are a good number of these shortcuts, I always want more.

Links

• Here is a review that was done by MacStories after the app first came out. This is an in-depth review, but there have been multiple features added in the last two years.
• YouTube review of the Mac version
• YouTube review of the iOS version

Since today is the Feast of Guadalupe the second reading in the Office of Readings in the Liturgy of the Hours has the account of the miracle by Don Antonio Valeriano from the sixteenth century.

While I already knew the details of the story, I was struck by something while reading it again. The fact that just the Castilian roses were really enough of a miracle in itself to convince the Bishop of the authenticity of Juan Diego’s contact with Our Lady. Or at least good evidence when investigating his claims. This combined with the life and humility of Juan Diego certainly provided solid evidence in this regard.

The aspect that struck me is that God went further and produced the miraculous image on Juan Diego’s tilma. I started thinking about how often God works in our lives and how the answers to our prayers can seem so astounding. Yet when we look back at this we might see that this answer to prayer was multi-level and was even more amazing in further effects. That we can be really joyful in an answer to a request and reflect later that this initial answer had secondary effects that were larger in scope in your life and for others.

That God not only will answer our prayers but in a way that is unexpected and better than our initial request. Our Lady of Gudalupe’s answer to prayer became a miracle of evangelization and devotion. No doubt we only see the surface of this effect, even if amazing in itself. Plus we can’t see the future horizon of the effect.

This also makes me realize that probably in the majority of cases we don’t see secondary effects. Whether they are answered prayers or seemingly unanswered ones. It probably won’t be until the General Judgement that we might understand this. I guess this is the iceberg of prayer and that still only seeing the surface we can be thankful for this and trusting God regarding what we are unable to see.

We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28).

Connie Rossini’s Is Centering Prayer Catholic is an excellent source to see a critique regarding Centering Prayer. What I really liked is the distinctions she makes and how she compares the various statements made by the late Fr. Thomas Keating compared to what St. Teresa of Avila wrote regarding contemplative prayer. She really is trying to be as fair as possible, and does an excellent job of explaining the problems along with also accurately explaining what authentic Catholic contemplative prayer is.

Previously I have looked into some of Fr. Thomas Keating writings and statements and found them problematic. This book does a good job of focusing on the claims of the centering prayer movement.

This book also makes good caveats. For example what people might encounter under the umbrella of centering prayer, might actually be something much closer to authentic Catholic contemplative prayer. There is a good amount of confusion regarding what exactly centering prayer is as understood by some people practicing it compared to what the centering prayer movement advocates.

She also uses the document Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of life, a Christian reflection on the “New Age”, to compare the concerns raised with the statements of the centering prayer movement. This new edition answers objections raised by Contemplative Outreach, the organization started by the founders of the centering prayer movement.