A miscellany for the Octave of Pentecost
“The Coming of the Holy Spirit,” an altarpiece at St Mary’s Church, Krakow, Poland. It goes with the sermon.
If my records are correct—and I’m pretty good about that sort of thing—I had preached only twice on Pentecost, and I wasn’t happy with either of those sermons. It was for the first of them that I initially articulated that cardinal rule of Anglo-Catholic preaching, “If you can’t make it good, make it Marian.” This time I was hoping to make it both good and Marian (and good-and-Marian, if that makes sense). It may have been a bit too much for the 8:00 (honestly, I’m a bit too much for the 8:00), but I think it worked at the 10:15.
Pentecost is always the day of our parish picnic (held in the parish hall: Pentecost can be quite miserably hot outside in St Petersburg). I enjoyed lunch-the-event—lots of good conversation—but wasn’t really able to enjoy lunch-the-meal because I had to wait out each ridiculously small bite as it hung out in my esophagus for a while at the point of the stricture before eventually dropping through. This would have been more discouraging than it was if I hadn’t been scheduled for a dilation the next day.
Pre-op baking
Accordingly, I went home and baked snickerdoodles for the nurses and doctors. The cookies were very well-received, as always, and my forty-second esophagogastroduodenoscopy with dilation was uneventful. (They make my doctor write out the whole long word on the consent form every time, so I just typed it out in full in solidarity.) I went home with a dilator for self-dilation; I had hoped that I had seen the last of those, but better to do upkeep at home than to end up needing medical dilation in another two months. If you’re at all curious, you can see what one looks like in this video, though mine is blue rather than green.
Please note that I don’t particularly recommend that you click on that link.
The aftermath was a bit tougher than usual. There’s always a sore throat and my esophagus is inflamed, but this time I also had serious chills for a few hours, and body aches that lasted a couple of days. My Tuesday morning personal training session was tougher than usual for that reason; I felt like I had still not quite shaken off the anesthesia. Yesterday (Wednesday) I felt more like myself, and by the end of the day I was even eating fairly normally: dinner was grilled pork chops with fig compote, farro, and arugula with balsamic vinaigrette, and I did fine. This morning, knowing that we would be going hard on legs, I put on my special Angelic Encouragement Shirt:
I took this three months ago at the gym. I think I may be microscopically buffer now. I’m definitely in better focus. Also, if someone can tell me how to control image size so that I’m not ginormous, I’d be grateful. I think we’d all be grateful.
It was an excellent workout, and I hope to be gratifyingly sore tomorrow.
What I should be doing right now instead of blogging is working on the book chapter that I was quite sure wasn’t due until December 1 but, as I learned from a “gentle reminder” email yesterday, is actually due a week from Saturday. In my beautifully systematic work plan to get me through the end of the calendar year I had mistaken the deadline for the final, polished, post-editorial-comments version for the initial see-what-you-think-about-this version. Thank goodness I have an RA starting work for me on Monday. With his help I can get the thing done in a month or so.
But the whole mini-debacle got me thinking about my goals for the rest of the year, both professional and otherwise. Here they are:
Write and submit “Work, contemplation, and sloth in medieval Christian thought” for the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Work (that’s the late paper)
Write and present “Augustine on the Saving Work of Christ” as the Costan Lecture in Early Christianity at Georgetown
Finish and submit John Duns Scotus: Ethics in Transition (or whatever I’m going to call it)
Finish and submit the prospectus for a replacement for Fr Wolter’s Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings
Have the whole of Bach’s E-major French Suite up to a reasonable performance standard
Get weight to 12 stone while maintaining my current body composition (that means gaining 7-8 pounds of muscle in seven months: doable if I’m really careful about diet and consistent in working out on my own in addition to training twice a week)
Get properly plugged in to the ministry of Word and Sacrament in DC
I could add an 8th—see Augustine’s Confessions: A Critical Guide through the press—but that ball is in Cambridge’s court and has been for nearly five months now. Come on, people!