A round up of sorts [UPDATE]

The other day I found a Fulton Sheen app of nearly 300 of his wonderful talks on my iPhone for $12.99.  Here's a great quote from him on Christ the Eternal Priest:

When I speak of Christ as being priest and victim, I do not mean that we need to go and get hair shirts. Today we don't need hair shirts. Our neighbours are hair shirts. We live with hair shirts. We had to have hair shirts centuries ago when we were so far apart from everyone else, we had to find some penance. Today, they are immediately near."

There are quite a few hair shirts here on the internet too!

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Whale Oil has been launching attacks on Andrei and today Redbaiter, on his blog, while as with me he's gone from semi-attack to mocking interest. As we are all bloggers, I for one think it's nice that he keeps us in the forefront of his mind as he comes across various news items and ways of thinking.  This is like a collaborative thought process, even though it's still very much at the combative stage right now.  In the meantime, my heart goes out to him and his family on the imminent death of his mother from cancer.  As I have already told him on FaceBook, she is in my prayers.

UPDATE Friday 28 September, 2012: Whale Oil/Cameron Slater's mother passed away this morning.  I am so sorry for his loss.

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I got my hair cut and coloured today, and had a little time to respond to a comment on KiwiBlog's General Debate about a priest who stopped a yoga class from being taught on church grounds. As a teenager, I got into yoga in a big way, doing a daily one and a half hour routine and going vegetarian. I really wish that as a young, Catholic girl at the time, I had been told that yoga was incompatible with and even damaging to my faith, a faith that I had mostly lost by the time I left school.  Catholic priests absolutely should stop things like yoga from being taught on church property, otherwise it looks like the Church tacitly endorses it.

I started yoga in an attempt to control my anxiety, which really hit me after my best friend committed suicide when I was fourteen years old. It kind of worked, as did other physical activity.  However, I discovered in my early 20's that anxiety can be overcome by changing how you think of yourself in stressful situations. Anxiety occurs when the nervous system is stimulated because of apparent danger, therefore setting off the fight or flight system. But, if you instead tell yourself that you want to be where ever you are or want to do what ever it is you are doing, then the anxiety doesn't get triggered.  It takes quite a bit of effort at first, but eventually it becomes second nature to face doing things that you'd rather not do without fear.  Probably why I don't have too much trouble with the blogging world and all the attacks on me, I've spent years combating my own fears so worry about what other people think of my opinions doesn't really happen much.

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Recently, I came across through the wonderful New Advent site, a really interesting conversion story by a very well educated Protestant who decided he had to become Catholic because it was true.  I'm coming up to my six year anniversary of returning the Catholic Church, so his realisation that he needed to become Catholic because the Church is true, that is the Church really is who she says she is, was the reason to convert.  If you want to understand some of the intellectual arguments that Protestants can wrestle with, read the story.