{"id":8908,"date":"2014-02-20T15:10:14","date_gmt":"2014-02-20T20:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=8908"},"modified":"2014-02-20T15:10:14","modified_gmt":"2014-02-20T20:10:14","slug":"the-symmetries-of-small-c-catholicism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2014\/02\/the-symmetries-of-small-c-catholicism.html","title":{"rendered":"The Symmetries of Small-C Catholicism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a>
(Half of you kept staring until you yelled \u201cSet!\u201d right?)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Over the past week or so, I\u2019ve spent too much time on my phone playing Threes<\/a> (review by\u00a0Ars Technica<\/em> here<\/a>). \u00a0The game has you drag around little numbered tiles to combine ones and twos to make threes, and then threes with each other to make sixes, sixes for twelves, etc. (the biggest card I\u2019ve built, before running out of space, is 384). \u00a0 And after some time futzing around with it, I\u2019ll confess to looking up at my friends and thinking, \u201cThose two are roommates, so they\u2019re a matched pair, and I could drag them together and collapse them.\u201d<\/p>\n

I love the game in the same way I love Set<\/a>\u00a0or topology (where you get to compare shapes like a donut and a coffee cup, and rule them identical<\/a>, since if you had one made out of clay, you could deform it to become the other without tearing new holes or closing up old ones). \u00a0I like finding patterns and using it to make connections between disparate objects.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s one reason I like ritual prayer. \u00a0If you imagine me as a very long list of variable, describing everything about me \u2014 my age, where I am in time and space, etc, and I settle down to pray Morning Office<\/a>, the little variable called isPrayingLiturgyoftheHours gets set to 1. \u00a0So, no matter how many other ways I differ from any other person, if they\u2019re praying the Morning Office, too, we match on that one bit.<\/p>\n

If you go back to just the normal (x,y,z) coordinates that give our position in space, I can look along a line of everyone who shares the same x-coordinate, and they\u2019re all matched across that one dimension. \u00a0In fact, I only need two dimensions at that point to distinguish any one of them from the others, because they\u2019re all united along the x-line.<\/p>\n

This is a roundabout way of saying that today I\u2019m starting the St Louis de Montfort<\/a> prayers for consecration to Christ through Mary. \u00a0It\u2019s like a very long novena, with daily prayers for thirty three days, culminating on the Feast of the Annunciation<\/a>, which means it will also serve as a bridge from Ordinary Time into Lent for me. \u00a0I\u2019m using the app that Marc Barnes recommended<\/a> in order to look up each day\u2019s prayers.<\/p>\n

I made this decision a little on the spur of the moment, when I saw a Facebook friend mention she was doing this set of prayers, but I like that I\u2019ll be joined to people, some of whom I know, some of whom I don\u2019t, all going through this series of prayers and meditations together. \u00a0These Catholic practices are also small-c catholic \u2014 universal, and open to everyone.<\/p>\n

I like devotions to Mary for exactly this reason. \u00a0Whatever other differences there are between us, everyone has the spiritualChildofMary variable set to one. \u00a0So, no matter how distant I feel from someone, or how angry or confused I am, I can try and reach through Mary, along that connection, to feel some kind of kinship. \u00a0The way that St. Louis de Monfort\u2019s prayers are linked to the calendar means that there\u2019s one bonus homology between me and everyone else who is following this consecration. \u00a0Are any Catholic commenters interested in joining in?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the past week or so, I\u2019ve spent too much time on my phone playing Threes (review by\u00a0Ars Technica here). \u00a0The game has you drag around little numbered tiles to combine ones and twos to make threes, and then threes with each other to make sixes, sixes for twelves, etc. (the biggest card I\u2019ve built, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":8911,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-parsing-catholicism","category-spiritual-practice"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Symmetries of Small-C Catholicism<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Over the past week or so, I've spent too much time on my phone playing Threes (review by\u00a0Ars Technica here). \u00a0The game has you drag around little numbered\" \/>\n<meta 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