On Sunday (7 June 2026), I experienced my first ever AFL game with a group of friends at the SCG (Sydney Cricket Ground). Not that I really understood any of it, to be honest. But I will say that seeing it in real life is far superior to watching it all flattened out on a giant flatscreen TV.

As for the match itself, well, that was hardly the (ahem) introduction I was expecting. St Kilda trouncing Sydney Swans in the first quarter and it then taking the Swans the whole of the match up until the very end of the last quarter to finally get out in front on the leaderboard. Calling it tense would be an understatement. Not that I had any “skin” in the game, mind you. I have never followed any team or sporting code in my life, and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon.
​
Also, the ferocious passion of multiple stands full of grieved Swans supporters making known their disagreement with referee decisions over player actions is not something I would ever want to be one the receiving end of.
​

And then on Wednesday (10 June 2026), I got up at 4:00 AM to catch the train to Newcastle to photograph the sunrise around both the foreshore of the Hunter River and Nobbys Beach with my old DSLR.
​
I’m amazed that I actually did it. The kernel of the idea for doing it got stuck in my head sometime last year and I would have preferred to have done it earlier in 2026 when we were still in the summer months here down under, but that was a stretch too far for me in that prior moment for varying reasons.

The main reason I had for taking my DSLR—apart from better dynamic range than a smartphone—was an intention to give it a ‘one last hurrah’ before parting ways with it. Something that I am still no closer to doing after taking it out with me on Wednesday, which my shooting wrist was haranguing me over continuously the following day with accompanying pains and twinges. Most of my focus that day ended up being funnelled into making most of the morning’s golden hour light and pushing myself to try and beat a bulk carrier on its way out to sea before it reached Nobbys Head, which of course I did not accomplish. I am not Superman. Nor was I set up for jogging and, believe me, those bulk carriers can move!

I think I haven’t exerted myself so much since WYD Lisbon, and after what I put myself through on Wednesday I could not in good conscience kid myself into thinking I could do a World Youth Day again. My spring doesn’t spring back like it did 3 years ago and I don’t think it likely that I’d have anyone with me to call me out pull me back from the brink of burning out.

WYD is a youngster’s game and I’m not that young anymore.

Or should that be: foolish anymore?

 
Vincent Cavanagh
14 June 2026

First-quarter Blog Digest for 2026. What’s been happening.
 
Website-wise, there are now ‘next-post, last-post’ buttons at the bottom of each World Youth Day Lisbon blog post for ease of navigation through that series. It just took a lot of time, repetition, and wrangling with the Weebly website editor to get it done. Hooray!

Art-wise, I did have a day spent doodling out ideas for Bishop Stumbers cartoons, which was a positive. Most of them were about what said bishop might get involved in on a WYD pilgrimage. We shall see if some of them might get developed beyond their initial ballpoint drafts.
   Rattling about my brain at the moment is a possibility of re-drawing the CavanaghArt bird logos to better reflect my current style of art. The original set of birdies are well and truly about a decade old at this point, in 2026, and I’m certainly not the same artist I was back then. Whether anything actually happens on this idea, or it just keep rattling around my head, is another matter.

​Also, after the suggestion of a friend, I have been down the rabbit hole of investigating what it would take to self-produce stickers from my art and my conclusion was that, for me, it would be far more effort than it was worth. The shear amount of equipment, testing of cutting depths, sticker paper stocks, lamination, and software quirks is, to my mind, on a par with near-professional, home coffee-brewing: metric scales, correct dosage of coffee beans, the right grind size, purified water, puck preparation, flow rate, etcetera. I already have enough furores of my own with trying to convince the home printer to print on the paper-card stock I want it to. The last thing I want is to increase the number of machines throwing hissy fits in my face because it’s the wrong phase of the moon when I’m at my wits end racing to print something off for a special occasion the following morning.
   I’m not ruling out that stickers might happen, just that doing-it-myself is not for me.
 
On the personal front, after 2025, I’m still recovering from burnout. Though it’s not helpful when one continues to get sucked into the temporal blackholes of YouTube (the “new” smoking​), be overwhelmed by dehumanising discourse around ‘Artificially Intelligent’ generation of images online, and catching oneself interrogating any creative idea for art that pops up with whether, or not, it passes cost-benefit analysis. Talk about being brain-rinsed into mechanistic thinking, oi vey!
   It’s all indicative of the fact that there’s been a distinct lack of humour in my life of late. All fret and no play makes for a crabby, frustrated artist. The sensible thing would be to just say, “stuff the lot of it (AI generation) and do it (Art) anyway!” without expectation for it to — ahem — “perform well.”

   ​Thankfully, there have been some diversions in the form of meeting up with WYD friends at a Lunar New Year’s celebration, birthday party invites, wandering around the odd bookshop or two, colouring projects for others, and the odd heritage train ride here and there. A main issue for me is a lack of motivation and sufficient reason for me to overcome lethargy and get outside, physically and mentally.

I know that one should “never say never”, but with where I’m at right now I don’t see myself going to Korea in 2027 for World Youth Day Seoul.
   Don’t get me wrong, I do have strong emotions towards the next WYD, and more so the friendships born of the last one, but that doesn’t out-weigh knowing first-hand what the shear toll a WYD pilgrimage can be on a person and how much it truly demands of them. Which isn’t anything I’m willing to put myself through again—especially if it’s not what God intends me to do.
   At the end of the day, it’s all in His hands, not mine. 

8 Jan 2026 – Year in Review: 2025.

18 Feb 2026 – First new bit of art that I have made in a long while.

27 Feb 2026 – Back to Loftus for the annual Tramway Festival.

3 Mar 2026 – Finally posting about the farewell V Set trip to Kiama last year.

​On a more positive note, I’ll leave you readers with this Part 2 video by Daniel Folta detailing his process of depicting the Nativity in oil paint. For myself, it is a calm and meditative experience watch him bring his painting to life.

​Until next quarter, a holy Triduum and a Happy Easter to you all!

​
Vincent Cavanagh
3 April 2026

​Vincent Cavanagh
23 July 2023, 7:30 AM Padua–Venice time | 3:30 PM Sydney time.

   ​In this painting she is seated with her lap open to all who are finding life difficult and seek her intercession. With one hand she is holding aloft a golden Monstrance containing the Eucharistic presence of Christ, representing when she held aloft the same Eucharistic presence when various marauding armies came to lay siege to Assisi during the 13th Century and from which shone so bright a light of heaven from the Monstrance that those same armies fled, leaving the city and convent of the Poor Clares safe from harm and destruction.

   In recent times there have been social media testimonies of women being visited by St Clare when in deep difficulty, and saying, ‘here are my soft hands, here is my soft lap’. These graces have resulted in significant conversions.


Vincent Cavanagh
3 July 2025

​Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual shine upon him. May he rest in peace.

Well, given that my 12 Months Later review of my social media exodus was read as more of a 2023 Review (which it was, to be fair) I might as well do another re-view for 2024 😅

2024 was kicked off by going out with some fellow World Youth Day pilgrims to the Westpac OpenAir Cinema on the Fleet Steps overlooking Farm Cove and the rest of Sydney Harbour. The film we’d arranged to see was One Life (2023), a biographical film about humanitarian Nicholas Winton and more broadly about the Kindertransport of Jewish children from German-occupied Czechoslovakia to Britain at the beginning of World War II. This is hardly a film for the faint of heart and as if to accentuate this point we sat, in provided ponchos, for about the last two-thirds of the film under wave after wave of rain pouring over Sydney Harbour.

Watching a film outdoors on Sydney Harbour in rolling rain running off my poncho-covered head is an experience I won’t soon forget.

 
Speaking of World Youth Day Lisbon, much of 2024 was spent finishing off a 12-month voucher for photo printing by having a selection of my photos from 2023 physically printed and then arranged by me in a photo album.
To mark the 1-year anniversary of the WYD Pilgrimage in July, I organized two get-together lunches for the Over 18s Pilgrim (Italy and Portugal) cohort which many appreciated.
​
I cannot comment about my fellow pilgrims’ experiences. But for me, a year-and-a-half on from Lisbon I’m only just coming to grips with, and processing through, what we all went through over those 22 hectic days of pilgrimage across Mediterranean Europe. But I can say that, for having done it once, I at least have more of an idea of what to expect a second time around and how to manage things and myself better than I did the first time, please God.

​In comparison to 2023: 2024 was an exponential increase of train trips, train festivals and rail heritage excursions with my father. Our travels took us north to the Hunter Region around Newcastle and as far south as Goulburn and the Southern Highlands. Indeed, there were many long days with very-early morning starts. But we enjoyed ourselves nonetheless, yet we were very tired by the end of those same days.

​
September saw me travelling by airplane up to Brisbane for the IGNITE Conference 2024 organized by Emmanuel Community and its Ignite Youth ministry team.
This was the real curveball of 2024 and it was my first ever experience of IGNITE.

​All the talks by various speakers that I went to were good and informative on different parts of the Catholic faith life. A special stand out was the Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge’s talk on Encountering the Scriptures where he discussed how the bible “goes to the heart of hopelessness to find a hope that cannot be destroyed.”
He truly enkindled in his audience a greater appreciation of “the black fire on white fire” as the Rabbis describe the Holy Scriptures.

The rallies at IGNITE were experiences. There was much good in them, but by the end of the three-and-a-bit days I was ready to run back to my bunk-hole at home and not have another thousand decibels going right through my body.
​
After attending IGNITE and commuting across Brisbane each morning and evening, it has confirmed to me that what’s needed is smaller and quieter events where good conversation can take place. There’s a place for the big events, as long as they are not the only option available.

​On a less frazzled note, that same month I also started shooting 35mm film with a re-loadable plastic point-and-shoot camera. It has been a nice change of pace from taking photos with my smartphone.

 
I don’t really know or have even an idea of what 2025 will bring, apart for the Jubilee Year of Hope that has just begun. Dear God, may this new year see an outpouring of Your love and of experiences of hopes and dreams fulfilled.
 
​
Let’s see if there’ll be a 2025 Review, eh?

 
Vincent Cavanagh
3 Jan 2025

I will endeavour in this personal, reflective piece not to repeat things that I have already written much about before.

​LISBON World Youth Day Week started on a Tuesday, 1 August 2023, which makes keeping track of events personally in one’s mind rather difficult. Later on, at times one could be forgiven for the honest mistake of losing, or even gaining, a day on your internal calendar.
   Opening the Week was the get-together, catch-up and sing-song of the Australia Gathering: an event more geared towards schoolies and schoolies-at-heart than for those seeking quiet, whilst I utterly failed to not be sunburnt a second time on pilgrimage. (Venice being the first.)
​   The whole week, and events, and talks, of World Youth Day (WYD) is a marathon and not a sprint; and I was burning more energy and mental capacity than I was recovering in what little moments of quiet recharging there were to begin with.
   WYD is not what one would call ‘introvert-friendly’ by any personal measure. Nor is it amenable to diabetics or children of diabetic parents—especially when there is no clear idea of when the day’s Mass was to actually start for a person to be able to figure out whether they were inside or outside of the one-hour fast before Mass and be able to act accordingly.
   Personally, it is very hard—almost impossible—to keep up with others when you are emotionally and physically exhausted before mid-day and your strongest, inmost desire is to just go somewhere far away from the thronging crowds and just huddle down in peace, quiet, and shade to recover.
   Missing breakfast on the second day because of such exhaustions the previous day is also not a recipe for congenial interactions with others, peer-to-peer or otherwise. Mea culpa.

​ALSO, it is suffocating to one’s already stressed psyche when self-autonomy is curtailed (e.g. “You can not under any circumstances go to events or places by yourself.”) when all you want to do is go straight back to the hotel and get out of the heat because you are already overloaded but your group has decided to look inside churches on the way, instead.
   Please be under no illusion, I do appreciate the need to keep people together for everyone’s personal safety and security (and insurance protocols…). But surely there must some better way to balance keeping track of everyone and an individual’s internal idea of safety being to get out of the crowds and temperatures that they are struggling amongst?
   Communication to normal (i.e., non-group leading) pilgrims was, at times, let down by conflicting or insufficient streams of information about what the day’s schedules were or what was, or was not, permitted by the Pilgrim Leadership, which left those pilgrims who do not always live their lives by the seat of their pants (far from it) at a disadvantage as to knowing what they needed to plan or prepare for ahead of time.
   Conscientious planners and World Youth Days do not mix well.

THE good of WYD Week was indoors and away from the hot sun on the Friday, Day 4, for the third Catechesis session with the Bishop of Dallas, Texas, Edward ‘Ed’ Burns speaking on the topic of Mercy, God’s loving mercy.
   From my experience of living this WYD, this was the mountain top—the church where this session was held is literally built on a hill—before going through Calvary, which for me was the whole weekend of the WYD Vigil.

STAKING out plots of turf in the Iberian sun at the WYD Vigil site for the rest of the Diocesan pilgrims with the Advance Team, was an opportunity offered to me. I accepted it, glad to have not placed myself in a position where I would’ve been far more likely to have blown my top at someone due to the overarching heat of the day, namely the long Pilgrim Walk from Lisbon centre to the Vigil site on the banks of the Tejo (Tagus) River.
   Prior to Pope Francis arriving and the Vigil starting, there were all sorts of talks, testimonies and musical interludes. The one that stuck in my craw most was everyone being asked questions by representatives of an International Youth body that was the ‘fruit of’ the 2018 Youth Synod, questions that were specifically prompting ‘Yes’ answers from listeners in a call and response method, without really giving anyone time to reflect upon the questions and give real, honest answers. Rigged “questionnaires” that have only one option are not honest nor something one should expect to see in the Catholic Church let alone WYD.
   Being hemmed in and surrounded, virtually on all sides, by all the other pilgrims around me at the Vigil site and the near constant music—which I wished to God would have stopped—gave me sensory overload which put my body into adrenaline-fueled survival-mode for the rest of the weekend. I only really started calming down internally when we were in Fátima on our post-WYD ‘retreat’. As it was, taking photographs was the only thing that I had any control over and so used that as a way of distracting myself from the discomforts that I had chosen (many months ago) to be in that night.
   Pope Francis’ motorcade entered the Vigil site at around 8:30 pm. Once on the Vigil stage the Pope listened to two testimonies: one from a local Portuguese priest and the other from a young woman from northern Mozambique who had survived an attack by Islamist insurgents on her village. (In all honesty I had forgotten that either of these testimonies had happened and only really recalled them when I was looking up online reports about the Vigil to jog my memory for this piece.)
   What little I do remember of Francis’ Vigil Address to the youth was the on-the-fly translation by the volunteer English interpreter over our group’s portable radio/speaker:

‘Joy is Missionary’
‘…become roots of Joy’
‘You don’t find joy closed up in a library’
‘…we have to find a key for it.’ — ‘Have you gotten tired? …when you feel like a wet sponge…?’ which got a round of laughs from the Pope’s imitation of a lethargic, wet sponge.
‘…when you see a friend fallen down, pick them up. Powerfully pick them up!’
​‘…the only time we look down on someone is when we are helping them up again!’​
​

​AFTER the Address there was a drone light show displaying the 2023 WYD Theme “Rise Up” in multiple languages before we went into Adoration of Our Blessed Lord in the Eucharist.
   The assembled symphony and choir were a true highlight, giving it their all. Then came the blessed (in both ways) silence in the moment of pause during Adoration where one could’ve heard a pin drop echo throughout the whole Vigil site, across the river beside us, and beyond.
   The only upset to all of this was kneeling down on the aggregate that the site was built atop. What amount of grass that had been put down had been all but burnt by the Iberian sun over the course of the WYD Week leaving only the odd tuft of hardy grass root and a plethora of bits of rock ranging from golf ball to house brick-size. After all of the miles it had been flown and transported across Italy, the sleeping bag I had bought specifically for the Vigil ended up being used as little more than padding for both my knees and posterior. (As I write this, it still remains unopened from the day it was bought at the camping warehouse.)
   Following Pope Francis’ farewell to the crowd there was post-Adoration music from about 10:30 pm led by one Padre (Father) Duarte Rosado and his guitar. The music finished at 11:43 pm at which time we were then audibly water-boarded until 1:06 am(!) by an ecological propaganda film flying under the guise of Laudato Si’. Because it was in English there was no escape for any of us English-speakers who are already quite sick to death of this sort of emotional blackmailing that we have already experienced ad nauseam back home in our respective countries.
   I didn’t need more kindling for my already overworked emotional barometer. I wanted—wished for silence, for the blazing glare of a thousand suns of the Vigil site floodlights to be switched off (keeping only the necessary ones over the main thoroughfares between sectors turned on), for all of the music to stop, for sleep—to not be alone in a sea of people, even amongst those that I had walked through Italy with. It’s alienating to be stuck sitting on a still rolled-up sleeping bag inside of an almost 2-foot-square patch of ground surround by an array of bodies all packed in like a human game of Tetris, all of them appearing to be sleeping despite the adverse conditions.
   I tried sleeping, but I couldn’t. The mid-night air was so cold that it numbed me to my very bones. Admittedly it was nowhere near as freezing as I remember it having been in Randwick for Sydney WYD 2008—nothing compares to how cold a night that was.
   So I ended up walking back and forth from the sector our Diocese had been placed in (A5) to the banks of plywood toilet cubicles two sectors over for what felt like a dozen round trips throughout the rest of the night, in-between tip-toeing through sleeping pilgrims to get to the water station to refill my water bottle and trying not to turn into a human icicle whilst sitting huddled down on the ground.
   During the course of that night a veteran pilgrim gave me an un-used space blanket of theirs to keep warm under and we later ended up doing Night Prayer and reading the approaching morning’s Gospel Readings for the Mass whilst walking between our sector and the toilets.

   Pope Francis arrived soon after 8 am, greeting the crowds of pilgrims from the open-top Mercedes G-class Popemobile (no, I am not a petrol-head, I just like being thorough) before being whisked behind the stage to prepare for the World Youth Day Mass on the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord Jesus. I did have to force myself through a barricade of WYD volunteers to get back into our sector from visiting the toilets the last time before Mass after the Portuguese police had told the organisers to lockdown the site for the Pope’s arrival. I was not alone in wanting to get out of the pathway and back into the sector. One of those organizational hiccups, I guess.
   What I mainly remember of the Mass is standing around in the rocky earth under the mid-morning to mid-day sun. If it hadn’t been for the heat and the previous night I might have laughed at the end of the Mass with how almost comical it was with the litany of “after-Mass announcements”, ranging from thank-yous to invitations to the 2025 Year of Jubilee in Rome and then—finally—what everyone (who wasn’t curial clergy) was waiting to hear: the announcement and reveal of Seoul as being the next host of WYD in 2027.
   And then came the cauldron of making and surviving our way in small, separate Diocesan pilgrim groups through the absolute crush of people to get out of the WYD Vigil site and head back to our hotel in Lisbon.
   Amongst the small group of pilgrims I was with, it was a non-stop trek through the local streets and boulevards to the (ahem) nearby Oriente Station and then forcing ourselves through the police-controlled scrum of people trying to get into the station itself to return to their own accommodations as well. I think that there was definitely a Grace of God upon us as we walked through those streets to the station without stopping but just continuing on and on, pushing away any form of exhaustion as we made towards our stated goal.

   Alighting from the Lisbon Metro we arrived at Marquês de Pombal Square—where we had gathered before to welcome Pope Francis to Lisbon and participated in the Stations of the Cross—and finally got both a foot and a seat inside the air-conditioned McDonald’s, where we had lunch and cooled down on soft-serve ice creams. What had once been a buzzing throng of international pilgrims outside was now a virtual ghost-town save for the workers continuing to take down the scaffolding for the Welcome Stage and all of the sightscreens dotted in and around Eduardo VII Park.
   Gathering ourselves, we made the short walk back to our hotel and to the awaiting welcoming committee of the Diocese before I took the elevator up to my room and crashed out cold on the bed—doing the one thing I later found out a person who has stayed up all night should never do—and then scrambling to catch-up with where all the other pilgrims from the Diocese were having dinner. As nice as it may be, never—and I mean NEVER—leave your phone on silent (or off) when people are trying to contact you with their plans, especially if they involve food.

​AND after all that happened in Lisbon—and maybe in spite of it—I still find that I want to go through it all over again.
I must be mad.
   Of course, I think we (pilgrims) might already be mad for doing it in the first place, but my main motivation for embarking on such a crazed endeavour as to do it all again would be to prove that I could do it. Do it right the second time. Knowing (at least roughly) what I would be facing rather than having everything coming at me like a boxer’s fist in an arena with all of the lights turned off. To prove that I could do it without all of the angst and baggage (both metaphorical and physical) that I took with me to Lisbon. That I wouldn’t be going in blind, as the saying goes, the second time around.

   You may well call foul and decry that as selfishness, for whatever part of it is selfishness, but I have had the same experience of not wanting to let a “bad” experience get the better of me when I had walked the Jerusalem Bay Trail from Cowan to Brooklyn (Hawkesbury River) the first time. I walked it a second time with another group (who knew what they were doing and where they were going) and I got through it with far fewer trials and tribulations than I had the first time around.
   I want to prove—if only to myself—that I can have a “good” WYD experience and not be left with thoughts such as “yes, I did it, but if I’d done this or that instead”, as I have been when going over my memories of Lisbon.

​THIS whole WYD journey started with me reading a notice in a parish bulletin about a parish group’s start of their own preparations, separate from the Diocese, to go on pilgrimage to Lisbon and hearing the words “Life changing” in a small voice.
   (Also, I’d had more than a fair share of accumulated pestering from well-meaning parishioners for the 12 years or so prior to Lisbon.)
   There was certainly a lot of stretching and pulling with WYD Lisbon and it has certainly changed the direction of my life in different ways, but I still feel no closer to a clearer answer as to whether it was “life changing” or not. It’s always clearer to see changes from someone else’s perspective than your own, eh?
   To paraphrase and expand upon what that veteran pilgrim told me on that Vigil night: you never come to World Youth Day for the actual day, that’s never the draw, you come to World Youth Day for the God-experiences, whether they be small and quiet or loud and unmistakable like a blowhorn. You don’t necessarily come for the destination, but you do come for the relationship with Him.

Pax,
Vincent Cavanagh
16 August 2024
​
[edited for clarity and to add missing words - 16 September 2024]
[added more photographs plus minor formatting changes - 4 April 2026]

Yes, I’m back and this may or may not be a newsletter under a different guise.​

Or not-quite-compulsively checking either the weather application or if there are any updates on Facebook Messenger to previous text messages (or trying to reverse engineer which comment someone liked due to the latest update, grrr!)

Speaking of substack pages, one that I’ve been gravitating back to of late—and isn’t as overly swimming in bar graphs or generally depressing as others—is the School of the Unconformed by Ruth Gaskovski. For about the past year(?) or so she has been doing shared essays with her husband Peco that they cross-post between each other’s substack page (Peco’s is Pilgrims in the Machine).

The general theme of their essays is regaining man’s [1] humanity from both the jaws and bowels of the inhuman Machine world we now find ourselves living in.

Of which this quote by Ruth from their recent article, ‘Building People with Three-Dimensional Memory’, is an example:

​And Peco continues in his section of the piece by exemplifying how technology is artificially engendering the tell-tale symptoms of Alzheimer’s into all of us glued to our digital devices:

I would highly encourage anyone else interested to read the whole article here. As well as Ruth’s interview with Erin Loechner (don’t worry, I’d never heard of her either), ‘Turning the Algorithm Upside Down: The Opt-Out Family’, where Erin answers Ruth’s daughter’s question of whether there even is a “healthy” way to be on social media:

[Note: At the time of writing, this post by the Gaskovski’s was open to non-subscribers (June 2024), future readers of this blog post may find these articles behind Subscription/Pay Walls. Their substack posts tend to be open for a few months before going behind the Subscription Wall, depending on whether an article is important enough that it remain open for the greatest number of people to read and gain use from it.]

​Now on to lighter fare. Amongst my varying sojourns through internet-life I have compiled a list of all the various different Internet Grammar and Acronyms that I’ve come across over the past month or so:

LLAP
‘Live Long and Prosper’ 🖖

rekt
Internet form of ‘Wrecked’.

🗿 Moai (Easter Island Head) emoji.
Used to communicate a deadpan or shocked/embarrassed-into-speechlessness expression.
Or alternatively—if in Japan—used to arrange meeting up with people at the Moyai statue near Shibuya Station in Tokyo.

IYKYK
‘If You Know, You Know’

Vietnamese “teencodes”:
Hixx or Hixxxxx – written version of 😢 (crying face emoji).
Huhu – written version of 😭 (loudly crying face – or as I know it, ‘waterfall tears’).

TIL
‘Today I Learned.’

ily / ILY
‘I Love You.’
Not to be confused with illy, the Italian Espresso company.

bby / BBY
Internet alternative form of ‘Baby’. (ex. ‘Woohoo BBY!’)
More often used when using ‘baby’ as a term of endearment.

RTFM
‘Read The … Manual!’
Often used within the Linux user community forums.

For those of us not on TikTok (or whichever platform it was announced on), the Reverend Samuel French (@frsamfrench) will be leading a pilgrimage in the footsteps of St Paul through Greece and Turkey with Harvest Journeys exclusively for Young Adults aged 18 to 35 for the Holy Year of Jubilee in 2025: ‘Pilgrims of Hope’.

More information about the pilgrimage can be found here.

AS I WROTE at the beginning of this blog, this post may effectively be a newsletter in all but name. Yes, there are already plenty of other blog posts on this website that have been tagged with “newsletter”, but I specifically chose to name this RANDOM Things #001 because I’d prefer to make a clean break of the prior hodgepodge of blog posts and because the perfectionist in me wouldn’t let up unless I went through and counted every-single-blog-post with either tag or semblance of “newsletter” both on this website and its predecessor. Which is not an option that I look upon with any enthusiasm, hence why RANDOM Things #001.

I do—and I ask that you reading this likewise—not expect this to in any way be a regular or (dear God save me) quarterly affair. It is my estimation that RANDOM Things be more of an ‘every now and then’ or just ‘I haven’t painted anything, but here’s what’s been kicking around in my head recently’ type of blog post.

So until the next one of these not-newsletters eventuates; Peace and Happy Feast of St Peter and St Paul.


Vincent Cavanagh
29 June 2024

Footnotes
[1] As in the genus man (mankind) of which both men and woman, male and female, make up the whole category (ex., “earth men” and “Men of Earth”) – for the peculiarly post-Age of Aquarius pedants out there.

This whole hectic schedule of events was due to a conflicting parish event after the youth night and the lateness of the St Joseph’s Day Eve party at Joseph House being on at a prohibitively late time for me to attend.

In the end the picture was printed (Thank God!) and present to the housemates, and it should now be hanging somewhere inside Joseph House.


Vincent Cavanagh
​19 Mar 2024

Now, as for an update on my previous update about working on writing down my experiences of WYD Lisbon, that’s no longer moving forward. I’m not joking when I write that it was a commandment from on high. And given how much I was reliving certain emotions to an unhealthy amount, I’m more than alright with just letting it drop and focusing on what God actually wants me to be focused on instead. 

Ask God before you leap into things whether you should be leaping into them at all.

​

P.S. Also, the writing was the reason that I only had a single day left to paint Joseph and Jesus. (Face palm) Oi vey!

*midst | as in: ‘in the midst of him’; not a synonym for ‘middle’​.

19 Mar 2024
For any update about the writing, you'll find it at the bottom of the next blog post.