The Other Fr Steven Beatty Project

Do you live under the tyranny of the Episodes? No? You're welcome. When I was five I had a spaceship. I flew it to stars still undetected by any telescope. I battled enemies who threatened all we hold dear, vanquishing them just in time for supper, my parents and sister blissfully unaware of how much danger they’d all been in. Such an important mission required a great deal of stealth and so, to protect it from detection, my spaceship was perfectly disguised as a cardboard refrigerator box. Here’s the thing: at the time, I really wouldn’t have been enjoying myself more if it had been real. I really mean it - a boy with a real spaceship fighting a real extraterrestrial menace would not have had more fun than I did.

There's a certain shock involved in realizing that Satan has taken the words right out of our mouths. These three temptations, these traps he lays before the Messiah - they are not chosen carelessly. He is laying before Jesus our charges, not asking Him to stop being God, but rather demanding that He be the kind of god we want. All the anger and frustration men and women have ever directed at God, all the disappointment and accusation, it’s all summed up in the three temptations laid before Jesus in the desert.

Patrick McManus, who used to write a great back page for Outdoor Life Magazine, once described how fishermen have a language that is all their own, a sort of code. On a pleasant early morning on the water, a fisherman may turn to his buddy and say "well, it sure is peaceful." This is code. It means "we aren't catching any fish."After a few minutes his buddy might reply "you know, I enjoy just being out here." That means, "We aren't catching any fish." Now later on maybe they do catch a fish, and he says: "my, that's a nice looking fish right there." That means, "we caught a small fish." C.O.U.S.'s? I don't believe they exist. The fishing hole near home used to be a clay pit for the Kaolin Pottery. It only covers a few acres, but the old-timers swear that the Kaolin pit is over a hundred feet deep. Way down at the bottom, they say the machinery is still there, like ghostly steel leviathans in the

I’ve been on a Shakespeare kick lately. It happens. All these centuries later, there’s just more of humanity and the human experience to be found in those plays than anywhere else I know. It’s one of those things where every one is my favorite. As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet , Henry V , they’re all my favorite.  Except for Romeo and Juliet.