We went out to dinner tonight to a real restaurant - the kind with the menu on paper not back lit up behind the counter. We had a coupon...which we forgot to use. Oh well.
Place called The Elephant Bar. Pretty big restaurant that was very busy. Food was good and not too pricey. Pam had some kind of trout dish which she said was good, and I had chicken teriyaki. A smaller portion than I expected but I was particularly hungry so on any other night it might have been fine.
Mostly, the place was LOUD. The cooks work behind a tall counter, open to the restaurant like in some Asian restaurants (they describe their menu as fusion). So the kitchen noise combined with the din of a thousand conversations, each artificially loud because of the kitchen noise and all the loud conversation. I found it almost stressful, it was so loud.
Did I mention it was loud?
We talked about going to a movie afterward. I wanted to see "Unknown," the Liam Neeson flick that came out today. Pam wanted to see "Never Say Never," the Justin Bieber movie. (NOT!) So we compromised: we came home to watch a Top Gear episode I recorded.
Hey, it saved us a good $20. And we laughed like crazy. Those guys are hilarious.
Seriously - I don't understand.
They're going to beatify Pope John Paul on May 1. Beatification (not to be confused with Beautification which involves Botox and a spray-on tan) is the step just before someone is declared a saint. Think of it as an ecclesiastical on-deck circle.
The notions of beatification and sainthood (as defined by the R.C. Church) are sufficiently wrong to keep us busy for several nights. But today's news out of the Vatican is what boggles my mind.
They're going to exhume his casket and place it on display in St. Peter's Basilica after the mass of beatification so that people can pray before it and venerate it (him). The Vatican has promised the casket will remain for as long as necessary so that everyone who wants to can pray there, and the Vatican thinks that could take days.
I don't know if it's coincidental, but in order to reach sainthood the standards require that a second miracle be attributed to him after his beatification. (The first one was a nun who reports she was cured of Parkinsons months after Pope John Paul died as a result of praying to him.) A more cynical observer could suspect that with the days-long veneration fest they're trying to increase the chances of something that could be labeled miraculous.
But I'm not cynical.
One week ago I stood before a casket holding the body of a 4-year old girl. Eloise was not there. She was, is and will be in the presence of our Savior. She is now whole, free of the limitations that defined her daily experience. For all its sweet appearance, the body in that casket was not substantively different from the casket itself. It was organic - and inanimate - material. Prayers to Eloise's body would make just as much sense as prayers to the casket itself, or the bier on which it rested.
Prayer is powerful and effective. The Bible says so. But it also says there is ONE mediator between man and God, the Man Christ Jesus. That excludes all other options, including caskets and long dead bodies.
It reminds me of Ps. 115 about idols that have eyes but do not see, mouths that do not speak and ears that do not hear, yet people pray to them as though they were living and powerful. An incredible number of Catholics - they're expecting tens of thousands of Poles alone - will pray before a casket containing a lifeless and decaying body believing at the encouragement of their church that their prayers are somehow especially effective.
Just so there's no confusion here, I don't understand people who pray to a casket But my real problem is with a church that teaches that kind of clearly unbiblical nonsense. They call themselves guides when they themselves are blind.
Sound familiar? 'cause I stole it.
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