 Vincent Cavanagh © 2024 Merry Christmas and a Happy Jubilee of Hope to you all for 2025!
Vincent Cavanagh 25 Dec 2024 *Orders are now Closed*
 Vincent Cavanagh © 2024 * 2025 Calendar Flip-Through GIF added — 6 December 2024.
EILEEN ROSALINE O’CONNOR was an Australian Catholic nun and co-founder with Fr Ted McGrath of the Society of Our Lady’s Nurses for the Poor – more colloquially known as the Brown Nurses or just Our Lady’s Nurses – a religious order whose mission was to give free care and nursing to the poor, especially those who had fallen through the cracks of regular systems.
Eileen could not stand or walk for much of her life due to a severe curvature of her spine from having fallen out of her perambulator (pram) at a young age. The extent of her height was 3 feet 9 inches (115 centimetres) from which was given the affectionate nickname of The Little Mother. She lived most of her life at Coogee, a suburb of Sydney, except for when God healed her enough to go to Rome to obtain approval of her fledgling religious order. Such was her determination, that the rigours of travel did not deter her. Despite being bedridden most of the time, Eileen was the hub of the order. She co-ordinated much through telephone calls. At the end of the day, she welcomed the Nurses home, and received their confidences. Having been so chronically ill herself, she knew just how much kindness and tenderness were needed in caring for the ill and the elderly, and how important it was to maintain the dignity of anyone they ministered to. She died at the age of 28 from chronic spinal tuberculosis and exhaustion. On Friday 16 August 2024, Archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher OP officially signed off on the collated Australian documentation of Eileen O’Connor’s life for the Cause of Sainthood. And on Monday 14 October 2024, Archbishop Fisher formally presented the documentation in Rome to Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints. For further information about the life and work of Eileen O’Connor and the story of the Sisters of Our Lady’s Nurse of the Poor, visit the website for the Cause of Eileen’s Canonization here. And as a clarifier, this step of the Canonization process is seeking for her to be recognized and approved by the Vatican as a Blessed; the step before being named a Saint in the Catholic Church. Vincent Cavanagh 16 October 2024 My father and I spent the day today travelling together along the recently opened City section of the Sydney Metro, stopping to look at the new-build architecture on our way out to visit the Australian Railway Historical Society’s Redfern bookshop. Just over a hundred metres from Waterloo Metro Station. In the Sydney suburb of Alexandria. Clear as mud ;p Our first stop on the new section was Victoria Cross Metro Station which, as far as I am aware, has already been shorted to “VicX” in text message form by my peers.  “Captain Kirk to the Bridge ...” Painted 20–21 August 2024
This is the handed down Description of the Virgin from that same Miracle Hunter summary: One evening, according to tradition, a lady of great beauty appeared to the refugees in the jungle, clad in white and surrounded by light, holding the infant Jesus in her arms, with two charming boys holding torches at her side. The lady walked back and forth several times in front of the Christians, her feet touching the ground. I opted to save myself some artistic headache and stress by deciding to only focus on the Virgin, child, and torch bearing youths rather than attempting to include the onlooking Christians and have even less room for the actual apparition. I think that that decision has born itself out well.
Vincent Cavanagh 22 August 2024 I will endeavour in this personal, reflective piece not to repeat things that I have already written much about before.  'Rise Up', Vincent Cavanagh © 2024 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.
Illustrated 26 July 2024  Vincent Cavanagh © 2024 It has been a long while since I lasted did a picture for myself or “published” one on this website. Hopefully this may be the end of the illustrative drought, pax. PEACE: Summer daisies, Bubbles, Snow-capped mountains, Gliding swans, and Bountiful clouds. Vincent Cavanagh 27 July 2024 Yes, I’m back and this may or may not be a newsletter under a different guise.
You can do it like I have 💀 by staring off into the sea of empty calorific YouTube video suggestions wondering what that last thought was that you didn’t want to forget. Or reading through multiple inter-referenced substack pages and church journalism and a touch too much European politics “news” – which I still don’t have my head around; and should probably be grateful for that fact. 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: The incessant distraction of interfacing with devices leaves us feeling as if our brain and our body are forever in a different place. It almost seems as if we are in a race to upload our life into the virtual universe. Our desire to capture and share the present is numbing our ability to form natural memories of the moments we want to actually treasure. By excessively documenting our lives artificially Marshall McLuhan might say we are “autoamputating” our memory. 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: Some segments of the culture might experience a carefree insouciance as they become largely forgetful of what has come before—the wisdom, knowledge, and traditions of history—and more gripped by the here-and-now stimulation of their screens. 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: I know the more palatable answer here is to speak of digital well-being and balance and how to successfully navigate the algorithm in a way that we can consume the good without the bad. But we can’t. Just like any mind-altering drug we might ingest, social media makes it so we are not in control of the experience we’ll have immediately after. And I can no longer see any potential reward in delivering our God-given brains to a [tattooed] group of tech bros in Silicon Valley.” [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.] Keepin’ Up wit’ Gen ZNow 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. Jubilee 2025For 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. Not the website, but myself. I'm currently laid low with change–of–season flu, which I've been stuck with for the better part of a week and counting. I'm hoping that it will be breaking sooner rather than latter. Vincent Cavanagh 27 May 2024 Rail journey to Thirlmere, NSW. A selection of photographs from mine and my father's journey on Transport Heritage NSW's NSW Rail Museum Express on Easter Sunday (31 March 2024) to Thirlmere and back again behind NSW AD60 Class Garratt Steam Locomotive No.6029. Enjoy!  6029 at the head of the NSW Rail Museum Express on Central Station Platform 3, awaiting the departure of the Royal Easter Show service to Flemington for connections to Sydney Olympic Park.  On our way through Picton the sounds and sight of 6029 startled the invading bat colonies that have taken up residence among the trees surrounding the Stonequarry Creek Viaduct.  "Tin Hare" Railmotor CPH 18 and NSW 42 Class 4201 sitting under the main shed at the NSW Rail Museum, Thirlmere.  Over the fence view of 6029 before our departure from the NSW Rail Museum back to Sydney.  An interior shot of the Lounge Car that my father and I travelled in for the journey to and from Thirlmere.  If you ever want to know what it's like to be inside of an agitator, ride behind a Garratt. 6029 on the return to Picton Station.  Catching the evening sun's light glinting off the domes of the Old Rite Russian Orthodox Church as we pass by heading towards nearby Lidcombe Station.  With a piercing shriek, of what may have been it's safety valve, 6029 departed Strathfield Station for Sydney Central and we likewise departed from the express to make our own way home before the evening became to late for comfort. Vincent Cavanagh 3 Apr 2024 |
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