Quick Hits

On the way to work saw bumper sticker that said, I'm Proud Of My Obscurity...
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Paul Harvey reports results of a new study that shows work is therapeutic. "If it came in a bottle, everyone would take it...". Something to ponder when you're not working.
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For reasons unbeknownst to me, the topic of conversation at family gatherings is never about those "word of faith" preachers who say that if your daughter falls ill it's due to your lack of faith, or to those others who suggest you send them your mortgage money and you'll be given thrice back. Nope, it's always questions about why the Catholic Church is so mediocre and/or stubborn. Recent complaints I've heard: 1) since priests can't marry, you've earned your priest shortage. 2) Where's the fellowship? 3) Why hasn't the church encouraged Scripture reading until now? Numbers 2 & 3 seem valid enough. Sometimes I wonder why anyone would want to convert, but then I go to Mass and wonder why everyone doesn't.
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Local Baptist ministers suggests children celebrate "Reformation Day" in lieu of Halloween. It took a great wrasslin' with my will not to email: "For some of us, Reformation Day is far scarier than Halloween". Funny enough to me, but no use irritating him.

He also claims Halloween is too pagan and "can't be redeemed". But I'm not sure it can't be used a) as a reminder that we are dust and to dust we shall return. Intimations of our mortality can be awfully like a cold shower. And b) as dressing up as great historical figures like saints. And if Baptists aren't fond of saints they certainly like the Old Testament ones, like Elijah and Moses. I give and I give...

Why Death's Heads?

Prompted by this post, and by it being Halloween, and by my recent visit to Boston's old burying ground, I wondered: Why did the Puritan's depict such strange imagery on their tombstones?

    

An answer:

Why should death's heads be popular at all, and what cultural factors were responsible for their disappearance and subsequent rise of the cherub design? The most obvious answer is found in the ecclesiastical history of New England. The period of decline of death's head's coincides with the decline of orthodox Puritanism. In the late seventeenth century, Puritanism was universal in the area, and so were death's head gravestones. The early part of the eighteenth century saw the beginnings of change in orthodoxy, culminating in the great awakenings of the mid-century. In his recent, excellent book on the symbolism of New England gravestones, Graven Images, Allan Ludwig points out that the "iconophobic" Puritans found the carving of gravestones a compromise. While the use of cherubs might have verged on heresy, since they are heavenly beings whose portrayal might lead to idolatry, the use of a more mortal and neutral symbol -- a death's head -- would have served as a graphic reminder of death and resurrection.

Given the more liberal views concerning symbolism and personal involvement preached by Jonathan Edwards and others later in the eighteenth century, the idolatrous and heretical aspects of cherubs would have been more fitting to express the sentiment of the period. It is at this point that available literary controls become valuable. Each stone begins by describing the state of the deceased: "Here lies" or "Here lies buried" being typical early examples. Slowly these are replaced by "Here lies [buried] the body [corruptible, what was mortal] of." This slightly, but significantly, different statement might well reflect a more explicit tendency to stress that only a part of the deceased remains, while the soul, the incorruptible or immortal portion, has gone to its eternal reward. Cherubs reflect a stress on resurrection, while death's heads emphasize the mortality of man. The epitaphs that appear on the bottoms of many stones also add credence to this explanation of change in form over time. Early epitaphs, with death's head designs, stress either decay and life's brevity.

Links

NRO on Russell Kirk's ghost stories...

...and this book, on religious liberty, looks interesting.

How 'bout a Rebel Song for Judge Alito!



How about a little Risin' of the Moon for the coming fight? (key of C for those singin' along at home):

Ah come tell me Sean O'Farrell tell me why you hurry so
Husha buachaill hush and listen and his cheeks were all a glow
I bear orders from the President get you ready quick and soon
For the Republican senators must be together by the rising of the moon

Chorus: By the rising of the moon, by the rising of the moon
For the senators must be together by the rising of the moon

So come tell me Senator Frist where the gath'rin is to be
At the old spot by the river quite well known to you and me
One more word for signal token whistle out the marchin' tune
With your pike upon your shoulder by the rising of the moon

Chorus

Out from many a mud wall cabin eyes were watching through the night
Many a manly heart was throbbin' for the blessed warning light
Murmurs rang along the valleys to to the banshees lonely croon
And a thousand pikes were flashing by the rising of the moon!

And a nuther!

Come Out Ye Schumer Fans   -(original by Dominic Behan)

I was born on a D.C. street where the loyal drums did beat
And those loving Donkey feet they walked all over us
And every single night when me da would come home tight
He'd invite the neighbours outside with this chorus:

Come out ye Schumer fans, come out and fight me like a man
Show your wife how you won medals by your panders
Tell her how the GOP made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra

Come let us here you tell how you slandered Justice Thomas
When you borked and him you truly persecuted
Where are the snears and jeers that you loudly let us hear
When our Founding Fathers' creed was executed

CHORUS

Now the time is coming fast and I think them days are here
When each pro-choice lie they'll run out before us
And if there'll be a need then our kids will say 'Godspeed'
With a verse or two of singing this fine chorus

Indian Giver

'Fall back'
they all say
so we got an extra hour Sunday morning
but we lost it Sunday night.

--this epic poem was written after waking an hour early but then falling asleep an hour too early

Power & Vulnerability in the Mysteries of the Rosary

One could say that of the mysteries of the rosary, the Glorious obviously show God's power and the Sorrowful obviously show His willness to become vulnerable for our sake. The joyful tend toward's God's vulnerability and the Luminous are a mix: The Transfiguration and the Wedding at Cana show his power, others are less clear. The Eucharist could be said to be both, for example.

Meditations on both types of mysteries are necessary in the healthy Christian diet since we need be reminded of God's love and power. In one sense, His becoming vulnerable is the greatest display of His strength, since power unused is an attribute of God that we can least understand, let alone practice.

Remembering Woody

I'm reading a bio of former OSU coach Woody Hayes, a great coach with very human flaws. In fact, one could say that you can't have his strengths without his weaknesses, at least not without divine grace.

Woody was well-known for his "old-style, traditionalist" football which was to run the ball up the middle with the occasional off-tackle play for variety. He seemed inflexible and unable to adapt to the new; some hinted that his refusal to use the 'recent' invention of the forward pass was to his team's detriment:

"Woody was a great coach...," Zelina says. "What he lacked in imagination, he made up for with hard work."

The all-too-familiar connection between ambition and temper was also mentioned:

"...Woody was volatile, had a temper, and had a drive that never quit. 'His temper was built into his drive,' Steve said to a WBNS interviewer in the mid-eighties. 'I don't think you could separate one from the other.'"

But love covers a multitude of sins and Woody had that in spades. The care and concern he showed his players, especially concerning their education, makes him old-fashioned and ambitious in the best senses.

The Hard Case of Fairness vs. What's Possible

Once upon a time there was an evil man who took control of a country by force.

Two years after he started a war with a neighboring country. Eight years and a million casualties later, they called a truce.

Two years after that, having re-grouped and learned the lesson not to take on an equal, he picked a smaller neighbor. And it would've succeeded but for a large coalition of nations that went to war against him and pushed him back to his own country.

The victors logically assumed that the lesson he learned this time was that nuclear material was the great equalizer since you don't have a coalition of nations fighting a nuclear power. So in the conditions for ceasefire he'd be allowed to hold power if he agreed to be monitored. He broke the agreement almost immediately.

The penalty was economic sanctions, the "humane" way of avoiding war.

And a half-million children died.

And no one cared.

Until, that is, a militarily stronger nation from across the sea went to war against the tyrant to force him out.

And then the world was outraged. At the stronger nation. Primarily because it was stronger and they resented that. But the nation found itself humbled and with more than it bargained for. Reality seemed to trump fairness.

~

And now there's a much smaller, bloodless battle brewing over judges. During the '90s Republican senators accepted that elections have consequences and dutifully voted for Justice Ginsberg, their ideological opposite, when President Clinton appointed her. They assumed the same would happen for them.

And now if Bush asks for simple fairness, a Justice Ginsberg of the right, he may not get it. Moderate Republican senators might peel off and all of the Democrats may vote against him or her. And again we'll see who wins the hard case of Fairness v. Reality.

Fair Hearing?

I'm sort of hypnotized by the backlash against the backlash against Harriet Miers. Some say she deserved a hearing.

I'm certainly impressed that people think the hearings would have been meaningful. Aren't they a sort of kabuki theatre where senators ask ten minute questions (in order to demonstrate their constitutional knowledge) and where the nominee humbly and graciously kisses the hem of their garments while saying "I can't comment on that" in ten different legalese dialects?

That Miers wasn't given a chance is partially the fault of previous Supreme Court justices like Souter and Blackmum who had fine hearings but then went on to become something... else. It taught conservatives that judicial philosophy and record are crucial, a lesson that is, what, now forty years in the making? You certainly can't accuse conservatives of being fast learners. Miers, through no fault of her own, lacked a judicial record. Personally I would love to see someone on the court outside the "judicial monastery" but the Court has made itself too valuable to be gambled with.

Spam Header Poetry

it hear of inflow garden*

* - Actual, unretouched spam header, except for the asterisk.

The Introvert's Marquis de Sade Day

the sort of thing that could make even Jack Bauer cry

Well, I've just been signed up for one of those exquisitely painful corporate day-long re-programming sessions. It's a week from Thursday.

This appears to be far more structured than the old "Interaction Day" which, as the name implies, was an annual Dilbert-ish contrivance to bring us all together and practice teamwork in the non-threatening environment of a park-like setting.

The part I liked most about Interaction Day (which, by the way, succumbed to cost-cutting measures four years ago) was the softball game. I got a hold of one I did, right down the middle of the plate, and--

Where was I? Oh yeah, Interaction Day. One time there was an exercise that involved us all standing around in a very large circle. Half of us were told to squat, as if going to the bathroom I guess. And the person next to us would sit on our haunches. And this was designed to build trust somehow.

Anyway, I've been signed up for a more structured type Interaction Day this time, i.e. one with all the misery but without the consolations of softball (though there's always philosophy). And, due to the lack of Interaction Days in recent years, I've become very desensitized to them which means I find myself facing the Mother of All Interaction Days without any accompanying Interaction Day antibodies.

They sent an email asking to fill out a pre-session survey. You know you're in trouble when you're asked to fill out a pre-session survey. It means your torturers are devilishly well-prepared and that they have broken down many a stoic, cynical individual before and what makes you think you'll be different? They asked a lot of psychological questions, sort of like how Jack Bauer of the television series 24 asks CTU to get him a profile before he interrogates a "client". To give you a taste of schadenfreude, the survey begins ominously:

We have put together a number of personal gains in which people have expressed an interest. Please select the top three items you'd like to work on in the session:

Become a better team player
Get rid of the sense of panic when in multi-task mode
Get better at coaching
Learn to delegate better
Gain some insights about leadership skills
Be a better listener
Narrow the focus — create priorities
Partner with others
Find out about mentoring
Become less guarded, stoic

Yikes. Three items? You said three? I tested the website by trying to click past this. And I found their validity code was working because it gave me the message "You chose 0. Must choose 3."

I looked it over like a carnivore would the menu at a vegetarian deli. They all seemed marvelously distasteful. I kept looking for the "Get rid of the sense of panic when having to attend these sorts of sessions" without success...

On Pants

Came across an interesting blogger (via Jeff Culbreath). Ian writes,

Just as there are subjective elements to many things that have an objective basis, so to it would seem, modesty is an objective standard, with subjective elements. I say that objective standard dictates that slacks on women are a faux pas.

He gets good commenters too. "Darwin Catholic" refutes:

I think there's an important distiction to be made between an appearance which is designed to inspire lust, and one which is meant to be attractive.

Clearly, there's a point at which one is clearly going for lust, not mere aesthetic appreciation. A go-go girl is meant to inspire lust and appears crass, while the venus di milo is intended to inspire aesthetic appreciation of the female form and appears pure.

The difficulty is, some people are sufficiently twisted in their hearts that they can look at a representation of the female form and feel lust rather than admiration.

Now, I'd certainly agree that some outfits simply are designed to create lust, or are worn in such a way as to create lust. However, I certainly can't imagine that all pants are so. Some pants are attractive, some are unattractive, some are immodest.

A well fitting pair of jeans and a snug but non-skin-showing top can serve to provide a sculpted version of the female form, just as (in another sense) an 1880s hourglass ball gown provided a sculped version of the female form.

Now, I don't deny that it's a struggle at times to look on beauty with appreciation rather than covetousness, but surely that's our problem as men of God, not the problem of the beautiful woman we're looking at.

A Current Read

'Twas innocently reading Swimming with Scapulars (which is turning out to be a riveting read - the guy can flat out write) when Lickona talks of his dumfoundness when he first encountered Camus' The Plague and how it contains within it "the clearest exposition of Christianity" he'd ever encountered, despite the fact that Camus empathized with the skeptic.

Here are a couple of Amazonian links to some of the key passages of The Plague that Lickona mentioned: excerpt 1 and excerpt 2.

Brokaw on IMUS

Watching the mainstream media talk about religion is always something of a nails-on-chalkboard experience. Or perhaps a better analogy is like watching a bull in a china shop. You brace yourself for the "moment of cringe". But it is entertaining, which is why I watched Tom Brokaw plug tonight's special on evangelical Christians.

It's titled "In God they Trust" and it seems NBC has discovered megachurches for the first time. I may be biased in thinking him biased, but he seems to create an air of menace, as if it's not good so many thousands of Christians gather in one place. Obviously the only reason there is a show titled "In God We Trust" on NBC tonight is because of politics. The secular media cares about evangelicals in direct proportion to the extent they have political influence. Brokaw asks somebody at the megachurch if they want a theocracy. And they say "no" but Brokaw opines that if the Christian right gets the politicians they want into office then a theocracy won't sound so bad to them.

An interesting moment is when Brokaw says he goes to church. He says that at his church there is talk of our sinfulness and our guilt, but here, at this megachurch, there is no mention of it. And the pastor says that's right, the message here is Jesus loves you, not guilt or sin, end of story. Which is fascinating in its own right because sometimes it seems that mirrors the Christian activists on the left. This lack of emphasis on guilt or sin appears to lead to greater trust in self, which perhaps allows one to focus less on self and more on improving others, or society. Catholic activists in the '60s and '70s - the anti-Vietnam War, pro-socialism, anti-death penalty and pro-unilateral nuclear freeze folks - rejected categories of sin as mortal or venial and in fact seemed more worried about structural societal sin than personal sin at all.

They got things done, they made things happen. Good things - like greater civil rights. And bad things - like nearly destroying the liturgy (as activists within the Catholic Church almost accomplished). And now there seems a large group of Christians on the right, perhaps in response to leftist Christians of the '60s and '70s, having learned what seems to be a lesson of the '60s: the most passionate among us can have disproportionate influence. And evil thrives when good men do nothing.

Brokaw also says that most who are going to megachurches are doing so not just religious but for social reasons - they meet like-minded people, have day care centers, good coffee, etc...In a mobile society, megachurches fill a need of instant socialization.

Manishevitz!

Miers withdraws. I'm really surprised. As Rock Wren mentioned, it'll be a sore test for Bush - surely every fibre of his being is screaming to punish his base. As Drudge would say, "Developing..."

Update: NRO says no way will the president appoint someone unfavorable out of spite.

Word Among Us

...gets it right. From yesterday's meditation:

'Those whom he foreknew he also predestined.' (Romans 8:29) What does Paul mean by “predestined” here? Doesn’t salvation depend on our free will? Or does God know in advance—and even mark out in advance—which path we will choose? Worrying about this issue is kind of like being a fish in the ocean trying to calculate how high the sky is. Simply reflecting on God’s omnipotence leads us to realize that this question is not even in our neighborhood. With David, we can say, “I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me” (Psalm 131:1).

However, we can know one thing: “God desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). Without a doubt, salvation is the most important item on his agenda. It’s so important that God designed all of history around it, from the creation of the world to the death and resurrection of his Son. Imagine: He planned everything just so that we could be part of his family for all eternity!

A Rave and a Whine

On the minutiae side of things, I love that librarything.com. I'll be sad when I'm done and it won't be long now. It is addicting, and every day I add twenty or thirty volumes to the list and watch it grow and I’m excited by its possibilities, by how I can export to Excel and sort by subject and print off lists by tag and be able to check out the ones I haven’t read yet and therefore make an informed decision as to the next read instead of just "monkey see, monkey read" (although I recognize and don't want to eliminate the serendipitious element to libraries).

It's nice to have an excuse to revisit those olden books of yore, those of such pungent nostalgia that the pages weep of another age, perhaps a better age or at least a more innocent one. Rodale's book of organic gardening, "Island of the Blue Dolphins", "The Light in the Forest", memories all.

~

It’s always foolish to deny the obvious and the obvious is this: it’s dark when I come home from work. That’s just the plain fact of it. Nature has a sort of clock-like regularity to her. I just noticed. She’s pretty strict.

I’ve decided I’m going to forego the annual “I dislike winter” parade. I think it’s gotten old. I should go back in this journal and look at the last few Octobers and I believe only the dates have changed. Whole lot of whining. Yes it’s getting darker and colder and I have very little vacation time to make up for it. Whose fault is that? Why do I use up my vacation time when it is warm and sunny? Oh, yeah, because it’s warm and sunny.

Fragments of Shakespeare That Could Be Read Spiritually

It is my lady, O, it is my love!
O, that she knew she were!
She speaks yet she says nothing: what of that?
Her eye discourses; I will answer it.

If, for the purposes of this example, we assume that Christ is speaking, then He expresses his love for us while wondering how it is that we don't realize how much he loves us. He sees her at prayer without her heart involved and he thinks "what of that?" and yet answers her anyway.

'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!

If we substitute the word "sin" for "Montague" we see that a reflection of Christ hating sin but loving the sinner. His enemy and ours is sin, but we are not our sin. By saying "What's a Montague?" he recognizes sin's uselessness and unreality since only what God sanctions is in the truest sense "real". With "O, be some other name!" he urges us to be other than sinners but to be who we really are or were meant to be, i.e. Capulets, Christians, saints.

Shout Shows

You know those political talk shows where people are shouting over each other? It's all variations on a theme. It all comes down to a couple basic assumptions that are different and then you have a panoply of issues over which you'll disagree. For example, if you lack shared economic assumptions then you're going to disagree about everything derived from those principles.

And how boring is that? Two people arguing over something that is three levels removed from their basic assumption is banal beyond belief. Which is why arguments on the same side of the aisle (like the Harriet Miers nomination) are so much interesting - you begin with shared assumptions.

My take is that people have the "right to be wrong". Lord knows I've been and will continue to be. And that rightness to be wrong will naturally extend to hurting the quality of my life or others' lives, usually unwittingly (though I recognize how ludicrous it is to say that since hurting the quality of my life is as nothing compared to what that "rightness to be wrong" has done to so many unborn children's lives).

Updated...

...my mostly political blog News You Can('t) Use with how you can recognize the five stages of Bush hatred.

Interesting quotations...

...from the first few pages of The Church Confronts Modernity :

Piux X would not allow [Cardinal] Gibbons to kiss his ring, instead embracing him vigorously and kissing him on both cheeks. He later told Gibbons: "I love these Americans. They are the blooming youth of Catholicism. Convey to them how gladly I impart my apostolic blessing to their whole country."
--
Shanahan did not enter into great detail in defense of the Catholic position on grace and justification, contenting himself with the observation that God's very decision to endow man, the summit of his creation, with intellectual faculties, was a good indication that mere passivity in reaching one's salvation was unlikely to have been the divine plan.
--
[William] James spotted in this argument the unwarranted invocation of [W.C.] Clifford's own value judgments: "He who says, 'better go without belief forever than believe a lie,'" James wrote,"merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe.'"
--
What the mystics did not do, according to Father Shanahan, was to divorce faith from knowledge. "They admitted external and objective criteria by which to test the truth of their experiences," he said. "They submitted their private feelings to the judgment of the public Church. They went down into experience with conviction, not for it - the exact reverse of what they should have done to become the ancestors of the modern liberals."

'Round the World in Eighty Links

Crack Cocaine for the Bellocian: Belloc the Historian ...via Chesterton & Friends, via Bethune Catholic.
~~~

Is novelist Anne Rice reading your blog?



Students in Rome on "Vestal Morons"

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The Pope on economics

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Taleswapper writes of That Library Thang:

"We've settled, I think, on cataloging these books, but we're going to mark them with the tag quarantine to indicate that we're keeping these books to prevent them getting loose in the wild."

~~~

Hey hey -- ho, ho -- youth culture's gotta go: according to Internet Monk & Jeff C.

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Personal tics -- from The Little Professor

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Finally a bit o' metablogging. Enough of others, what about me? I like maps. And I like blogging stats despite myself. Here is a map of the last hundred hits. Of course most of the hits from foreign countries come from googlers for "sex video" so grain, salt... salt, grain (say like Letterman said "Oprah, Uma...Uma...Oprah").

Spanning the Globe

One of my favorite quotes is from the journals of Father Alexander Schmemann: "God, when creating the world, did not solve problems or pose them. He created what He would call 'very good.' God created the world, but the devil transformed the world and man and life into a 'problem.'" If we want to adore God with praise and thanksgiving we are going to have to learn to stop seeing everything as a "problem" or "interruption" and begin to be open to seeing God's goodness and interventions even in the most unlikely of places. Many of the most horrific sins ever committed by human beings happen because people see problems where they should see blessings. If we do not adore God above all, we risk doing horrible things as we serve whatever else we put in God's place.

- from Michael Dubruiel's "How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist" via Julie of "Happy Catholic"

The Mennonites’ Zwinglian heritage always bothered me, because what I know of Zwingli’s method of determining church practice was pretty weird: if it’s not mentioned in the New Testament, don’t do it. Moreover, when it comes to communion in particular, what modern arguments I’ve heard against the Real Presence either come from anti-Catholic nuttery of the Jack Chick variety, or from a modern version of the Greek attitude I described above: “spiritual” things don’t really happen in the physical world. And to be honest, I think I always hoped that the Real Presence was waiting for me after baptism. The idea that if I’m baptized in this church, a mere symbolic feast was waiting for me, I found unbearably depressing.

- Camassia

One is compelled to wonder, when navigating the aisles of the juniors' department of your friendly neighborhood local department store -- is there an urgent national fabric shortage, shielded from the eyes of the public by a vast right-wing conspiracy? And if so, what can we do to help clothe these poor American teenagers? Clearly, the predicament is a portentous one. Flaunting belly button rings and blubber alike, teen girls cavort in public wearing transparent lacy garments which, two hundred years ago, would have made Hester Prynne blush. One is tempted to mass-produce iron-on scarlet "A"'s to accompany these so-called "shirts", but it is highly doubtful whether they even boast material enough to accomodate such an accessory. Skirts, too, have become as superfluous as Queen Elizabeth II...it seems that teen girls today must either have mastered the art of never bending, stretching, kneeling, crossing their legs, or sitting, or must have an inexplicable fascination with exhibitionism.

- blogger at "Idylls of the Princess"

Suburban housewives across the country are picking up guitars and drumsticks as part of new musical movement dubbed "Mom rock." Bands such as Housewives on Prozac, Placenta in California, and Frump in Texas began rehearsing in basements and garages, thrashing out punk-style songs about breastfeeding, washing dirty clothes, and burning the dinner. "Eat Your Damn Spaghetti," "Dishwashing Blues," and "Pee Alone" are some of the tunes that have given these mom rockers recognition.

- Michael S. Rose via Dr. Phillip of "Musings of a Pertinacious Papist"

After this post on a recent hurricane of recrimination Harumphalism among Catholic bloggers, David L. Alexander himself posts a Comment concluding, "Maybe sometimes there is no middle ground." Or there is but it's between the opposing trenches.

- Terrence Berres of "The Provincial Emails", concerning the recent dust-up over Diogenes

The attitude that "I know my faith, and could never fall" seems very presumptuous. Did Tertullian not know his faith? I have seen Catholics lose their faith, because they started out to "convert" someone, or just learn from other teachers. I have also seen many more Catholics that have had their faith weakened to the point that they are Catholic in name only. Unfortunately today in our "enlightened" era, so dominated by intellectual pride, we seem to think that we can read anything and listen to anyone, and we will be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. Well my experience is that most Catholics can not. Unfortunately, this attitude is even encouraged by many Bishops and orthodox Catholics. How many times have Catholics been encouraged to read anti-Catholic literature in order to become better apologists? Yet who inquires if these people have the stability and grace not to be adversely effected by it? How many Catholics have you seen reading their Bibles and coming away with conclusions that go against the faith, because they do not approach the word of God recognizing the warnings of Peter? (2 Pet. 1:20; 3:16) The Bishops would do well to look to the wisdom of their predecessors, remembering that all men suffer the effects of original sin.

- commenter on Amy Welborn's blog

His head was slumped down, his legs akimbo, and it was this latter posture that drew one's eyes inexorably to his crotch where his fly was open and his genitals hanging out. Must have passed out before he could get the buttons refastened, or the zipper up. If he had buttons, or a zipper. "Don't look now, girls," I said, but all three had already seen where I was looking. "Oh my God," said one. And I thought: There but for the Grace of God go a lot of people I have known at one time or another, but not me. And we got in the car and went home where I cooked a big ole pancake and sausage breakfast.

- Bill of "Apologia", on seeing a street person outside church; I'm hoping the word sausage was accidental here

I’ve been pretty much addicted to St. Blog’s for more years than I care to recount. I don’t think anything I’ve read compares with that post –meaning no disregard for anyone. This just resonates! It amplifies a subject I’ve been considering lately: how it is so easy to run off the rails and substitute human causes, sometimes even well-intentioned for those of Christ – and hoping I don’t do the same. It’s because humans want to discover the truth through our own abilities. We can do that to only a small degree. Now we see dimly, as through a glass. If we act on the images we see of our own power, we can only err as we also want to see what we want to see. We don’t want to see where we’re at fault. The only area where I’d take issue at all is the statement “While the teachings of Christ are spread out throughout the different books of the New Testament, the same teachings are packed in the Psalms in a superior manner, in that it is presented, already, in the form of prayer (and made by the Holy Spirit at that.)” I’d add “and Canticles” after “Psalms”. The Magnificat has taught me more than any catechism or treatise. Still, though, I know so very little.

- Gregg the Obscure

In Psalm 129, the Pope said, the sinner recognizes God's immense mercy, as "the supplication of De Profundis, from the dark abyss of sin, reaches up to God's luminous horizon." It is God's mercy, rather than the fear of punishment, that should rouse awe in the believer, he said.

- CWNews.com, via Amy

"The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams told worshippers to compare praying to sunbathing, except that it is soaking in the light of God. Williams, the spiritual leader of the 77-million-strong worldwide Anglican Communion, said on a BBC radio programme that many people had trouble praying and thought it was a matter of "generally getting your act together".He said worshippers struggling to pray would be better off comparing praying to lying on a beach. They should stop trying too hard and just be where the light can reach them -- in this case the light of God."

- via Jeff of "Curt Jester"

The same complaint was made back in the early 20th century heydey of literary conversions: almost all the good writers were converts.  Why so?  Frank Sheed actually organized a debate between a famous convert and a cradle Catholic on the subject and to be gracious, each argued for the other group’s contributions to the faith.  Alas, it was acknowledged that the case for the converts won, hands down. There’s no absolutely reason, of course, why this should be so.  “New” Catholics aren’t any smarter or more devout or more gifted or eloquent.  But we do possess one advantage - bringing non-Catholic questions and life-experience to the Tradition just tends to make things wake up.  And we were raised to *talk* about our faith (some would say incessantly), to seek out opportunities to give witness to the world. When the evangelical imagination is presented with the fullness of the apostolic faith - watch out!

- Sherry Weddell commenting Dom's blog

I find it embarrassing to pray for something that is totally within my power to achieve. I'm not saying I don't sometimes do so, but isn't it rather embarrassing to ask for divine intervention to, say, eat less and exercise more, or to watch less TV and get more sleep, or to stop focusing so much on the negative news and start focusing on a positive life? Perhaps I shouldn't be embarrassed at such prayers. Our priest prays for the Holy Spirit to give us focus and open our hearts before Bible study, doesn't he, and that is under our control. In fact, many of the prayers of our church focus on what is, in fact, under our control. So why do I feel like a fat, untidy pigeon God is tossing up and telling to fly? Why do I "drop down and run back expecting to be fed" at God's hand when I know, full well, how to fly? And really, our priest has been telling us in homily after homily, in Bible study after Bible study, that the fear of God is lacking in our parish. Fear of God... our minds just cannot conceive that the God of Love is a being to fear...How many people are just like me, believing in, even seeking God's endless patience and totally unaware of the damage ignoring His guidance does to our bodies and souls. How many times can we fall from God's grace before damage and death finally follow.

- Rock of "Lofted Nest"

Another Reason to Love Elena

I think it's pretty cool Elena is sticking up for Tom Delay. Loyalty and giving someone the benefit of the doubt are of little value when that someone is popular and/or unimpeachable, but is rare and beautiful when given to someone unpopular and in questionable circumstances. Whatever you think of Delay, you have to appreciate Elena's moxie and be glad that she is, given her willgness to defend the unpopular, a Catlick.

Thoughts about David & Absalom

I'm reading the Old Testament at a glacial pace but my affection and appreciation for it grows. Years ago my attitude towards the OT was poor, since I considered it to be incomprehensible and outdated by the New. I also fell into the stereotype of it as consisting of the "mean God" in contrast to the "kind God" of the New.

But last night I was reading the story of David and Absalom and I couldn't believe how rich this is. There is so much there to reflect on that I felt if I didn't write it down I would forget or miss something. Primarily it is David's love for his son that is so affecting. It is, of course, an analogy of the way God loves us. We are often Absaloms. It helps answer the knotty question: How does a good God damn people to hell? In this story we see that David showered Absalom with gifts and loved him unconditionally but that Absalom was killed by his own design. He sent himself to hell as it were. David's weeping afterwards for the child who wanted to kill and overthrow him is how God views wayward souls.

The other interesting point is that there is actually a commandment (the 4th) that should have protected Absalom, had he heeded it. ("In your laws is my delight" says the psalmist, and that strikes a discordant chord to our modernist, law-hating ears. But his laws now are writ in our hearts, in our consciences, and we should try to treasure our consciences instead of finding them burdensome.) It's interesting that there is no corresponding commandment to the 4th that says, "Thou shalt honor and love your children". That is a given. A parent's love for the child is how we see God's love for us. Our pastor makes the case that our love with God is similar to the nuptial bond but sometimes I think the better analogy is parental.

The tragedy of Absalom was also a temporal punishment that David received for his adultery with Bathsheba and the killing of her husband. This would seem a argument for the existence of Purgatory, although it still has an aspect of eye-for-an-eye that is more punitive than healing and the pain of Purgatory exists for the latter, not the former. David received almost exactly what he had done to God. By having a son upon whom he lavished gifts and love and blessings and in having that son turn on him and rebel against him, it certainly echoed what the highly favored David did to his Father.

Update: Donna Marie Lewis makes an excellent point in an email:

Unlike the relationship between God and us, Absalom had a understandable gripe with his father. David was guilty of a shameful lack of action when his son Ammon raped his half-sister Tamar (Absalom's full sister). Absalom went out and killed Ammon himself, and got in trouble for it- which wouldn't have happened if David had been responsible in the first place.

Having spent many of the fondest, er, I mean worst (right honey?) years of my life as a bachelor, I feel qualified to present:

  The Bachelor's    Guide to Home Decor

The bachelor is above all a seeker of utility. No bachelor has ever heard the term "thread count" in connection with bedsheets. All he knows is that a sheet either works or doesn't work, and it works if it is long enough to be both bunched up near the neck and extend past his toes. That, my friends, is good sheet.

The next tip regards carpet selection, which necessitates some background info. Most bachelors find the demands of dog care far too demanding. If the bachelor wants to go directly from work to pub he finds he must get someone to take the dog outside to do his "bidness". So even though the dog is man's best friend, the bachelor finds himself drawn, inevitably, to the second-bests of the animal world: cats.

Cats have the nearly miraculous ability to go to the bathroom in the house on sand, also called kitty litter. This affords great flexibility in scheduling, but the cat is not without a great weakness. It pukes. For reasons unknown, they suddenly develop something called a hair ball, though this is a misnomer since they don't just bring up a ball of hair but also the gelantinous matter that not long ago was cat food.

This presents the bachelor a decorating problem. His carpets and rugs must match the hue of cat vomit. Now I'm not saying the bachelor doesn't clean up the vomit, it's just that he doesn't do it well enough on light-colored carpet.

The next decorating tip is how to draw the line between proclamation of your heterosexuality without proclaiming that you are a pervert. The young bachelor accomplishes this by a token poster of beautiful half-naked actress. Tasteful is the key here. The emphasis should be on cheek bones, not jumping her bones.

Perhaps no greater bacheloric enemy exists than dust. Dust is an amazingly regenerative force; you can wipe a surface and a month or two later it's as if you hadn't wiped it at all. The short cut to dusting furniture is to blow hard, which most bachelors are good at since they've yet to experience the awesome civilizing force of marriage. A good blast of air will make it look as though the dust has only accumulated for a week or two rather than a month or two. Alternatively, you can simply use your hand to sweep the dust off, though it will still congregate around the base of lamps and bowling trophies. Some bachelors actually remove objects before dusting tables but I've never tried that and so can't comment.

Another great enemy of the bachelor is a lack of coasters. The key is to have so many coasters lying around that anywhere you put your drink you're likely to hit a coaster. This is actually far more important than dust elimination, since dust doesn't leave permanent furnitural damage.

Modern inventions have been the bachelor's best friend. Once upon a time the rare beer that lacks a twist-off would be opened with a simple bottle opener. But now there are bottle openers that will play tunes as you do this, such as the Notre Dame fight song. There are also Homer Simpson openers with a recording of Homer saying "D'oh!" as you uncork your Heineken. Make sure your house or apartment includes a wide variety of tune-playing openers.

And lastly: large areas of hardwood floors are a safety hazard. Sock-skating and kitchen hockey have claimed many a good bachelor.

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Graphic credit goes to davezilla.com

Blog Muscle

Ham o' Bone was recently amazed, as was I, at the quickness and power of the Internet at getting a message out. He called me at noon-ish on Sunday to point out the egregious story in the Dispatch about the unlikely advocate for the poor: the church-going Catholic. (By the way, he is an evangelical. Gotta love the solidarity.)

I put it on my blog and within four or five hours it got picked up by Jeff Miller, who has a circulation of perhaps ten times my own. So it went from one person to my blog (I'm too proud to announce my lame stats) to Curt Jester, all in less than half a day!

As I told Ham, it's surprising an editor didn't catch Hallet's error. I thought that was a major advantage of newspapers over blogs - they have editors and we don't. (And, of course, they have the resources to go places and report on stories that we don't). But the more slipshod and biased newspapers become the better blogs look, if only by comparison.

Boy Versus Pole

Here's a picture of the event that inspired this poem:

Submitted Without Comment

From a front page article in today's Columbus Dispatch by Joe Hallet:

Brennan would seem an unlikely advocate for the poor. A church-going Catholic, his spacious office is a shrine to power; there are photos of him with presidents and governors, a personal blessing from the late Pope John Paul II and plaques recognizing his efforts.

Update: I emailed the author and he responded, saying that he didn't mean to infer that Catholics are not concerned about the poor and that the paragraph was clumsily worded.

The Defusing of the Nuclear Option

One of the more comical phrases in political discourse this decade was terming the ability of the Senate majority to prevent a filibuster as the "nuclear option". That's right. Preventing a majority of senators from allowing a presidential-picked nomination for judge was compared to a nuclear warhead.

That the Republicans in Congress have been so cowed as to accept that phraseology tells a lot. And I think the reason for it dates back to the late '90s when Gingrich tried to hold up Clinton's budget, triggering the famous "government shutdown". Who would get blamed? The answer, as reported by the MSM, was the conservatives.

That fight scarred and scared them. Deeply. And they've rarely been heard from since. My guess is that any sort of fight for a Scalia-like justice was doomed by the Republican experience with the gov't shutdown.

Too Much Faith?

One of the things that was a breath of fresh air about George Bush was the obvious strength of his convictions and his stubbornness. After the Clinton bending-like-a-will-in-the-breeze years, W's presidency felt almost medicinal.

I now find his strengths a bit less appealing. Surely it's mostly the case that I liked his resolve and stubbornness much more when I was in sync with his choices. But the very competency with which his campaigns were run gave one confidence. The tremendous discipline in the White House was impressive; leakers there were as rare as unopinionated bloggers. And so when the Administration felt up to the task of nation-building the original un-nation it seemed they must know something we don't.

Now, as in the case of John Bolton, the President wants to fight for Miers. George Will reported today that even if she offered her resignation he wouldn't accept it. It seems personal now. (Which begs the question: What else was personal?) Plus the president still believes he'll sign a Social Security reform bill. Lots of faith, he.

In 2000 and in 2004 we faced the choice of either a spineless political creature who worships the god of all consolation (i.e. the polls) or the rare spine-full political creature who looks to a power beyond himself but...but is awfully sure of himself.

Fr. Paul

When I hear the name of St. Paul I think of preacher, writer, apostle and martyr. I forget sometimes that he was a priest too. Witness the Eucharist acts in Acts 27:35:

Until the day began to dawn, Paul kept urging all to take some food. He said, "Today is the fourteenth day that you have been waiting, going hungry and eating nothing.

I urge you, therefore, to take some food; it will help you survive. Not a hair of the head of anyone of you will be lost."

When he said this, he took bread, gave thanks to God in front of them all, broke it, and began to eat.

They were all encouraged, and took some food themselves.

In Praise of Technology & Large Families

Found a photo album behind a bookcase yesterday and inside were three tiny photographs of my grandfather's family taken in the '40s.

The photos were small enough that you couldn't much make out the faces. The clothes, more than anything, stood out.

But thanks to modern technology in the form of a $60 scanner and picture software for enlargement purposes, you can make old photos come to life and bring the individuals back from obscurity.




And look at this joyous picture of my grandfather's family! Looks almost Kennedy-esque but for the lack of males doesn't it? It's funny how you just move up a generation or two and the families seem foreign, in the sense of not knowing who they are or what their familial "esprit de corps" was like or what their interests and traditions were.



On the way to the opera? No, the zoo if you can believe it



a close-up


Old photos remind me of the brevity of life, which is a positive thing to remember I suppose. Now I'll have to see if my mother can help me identify more of these folks.

Bearable & Unbearable Doctrine

John 16:12 is a curious verse:

"I have yet many things to say unto you, buy you cannot bear them now."

Aren't you curious what it is that they couldn't bear, and whether there are things we can't bear now? It seemed that there were other things Jesus told them that they were unable to bear, such as his body being true food (John 6), or that he would suffer and be crucified and not be the Messiah they expected.

St. Augustine writes of this passage:

But what are these things which they could not bear? I cannot mention them for this very reason; for who of us dare call himself able to receive what they could not? Some one will say indeed that many, now that the Holy Ghost has been sent, can do what Peter could not then, as earn the crown of martyrdom.

But do we therefore know what those things were, which He was unwilling to communicate? For it seems most absurd to suppose that the disciples where not able to bear the great doctrines, that we find in the Apostolic Epistles, which were written afterwards, which our Lord is not said to have spoken to them. For why could they not bear then what every one now reads and bears in their writings, even though he may not understand? Men of perverse sects indeed cannot bear what is found in Holy Scripture concerning the Catholic faith, as we cannot bear their sacrilegious vanities; for not to bear means not to acquiesce in. But what believer or even catechumen before he has been baptized and received the Holy Ghost, does not acquiesce in and listen to, even if he does not understand, all that was written after our Lord's ascension?

But some one will say, 'Do spiritual men never hold doctrines which they do not communicate to carnal men, but do to spiritual?' There is no necessity why any doctrines should be kept secret from babes, and revealed to grown up believers (for the same preaching will be received by each according to their capacity, so that no difference need be made in the preaching)....

So then we are not to understand these words of our Lord to refer to certain secret doctrines, which if the teacher revealed, the disciple would not be able to bear, but to those very things in religious doctrine which are within the comprehension of all of us. If Christ chose to communicate these to us, in the same way in which He does to the Angels, what men, yea what spiritual men...could bear them?... Our Lord's promise, 'But when He the Spirit of truth shall come, He shall teach you all the truth, or shall lead you into all truth', does not refer to this life only, but to the life to come, for which this complete fulness is reserved.

He Could Flat-out Paint

Went to the Renoir's Women exhibition and it was as good as advertised. At the gift shop afterwards there was a book with a line that particularly struck me. It said the pleasure of art has been reduced to a merely intellectual - modern artists have eschewed enjoyment on any other level. I mean we're talking art here. Fortunately, Renoir was an exception.

I try to go to the Columbus art museum once a year, and I gamely look at the paintings attempting to see. And I always feel a bit sheepish that the quality of my seeing tends to be…mediocre. But after the Renoir exhibit I’m more inclined to think that it was more the case of the other paintings sucking. And here I thought only good paintings were in art museums. (Of course it could be that Renoir's works are more 'accessible'.)

Part of it is the pure pleasure of color, echos of crayola pleasures of yore. The purples and blues burst from the canvas like fireworks. And I love the three-dimensionality, the physicality of these paintings, the diamond encrustations that glitter above the swirls and highlights.

Renoir was more religious than most artists of his time. He tried to hold back the tide of modernism and its curiously pleasure-averse sensibility. I’m hypnotized by his ability to depict the innocence of children in one work and the innocence of the nude in the next. Most of us are too prudish, or actually the opposite, to imagine being able to paint a naked female without lust. And yet his nudes have that sort of Bouguereau-ian innocence. In fact, Renoir was like Bouguereau in finding his inspiration in both the innocence of children and the nude female body. There is a Catholicity in that, in being integrated enough to appreciate both without depravity.

  

Feelin's

One conundrum in the spiritual life is the role of feelings. On the one hand you can't look at God as the Great Pez dispenser of Peace, Love and Joy, as if we are somehow entitled and grow angry when they are withheld. But on the other hand we can't devalue them simply because our faith can't depend on them. It's a difficult line to walk sometimes, in neither growing discouraged by a lack of feeling nor growing dependent when they are prevalent.

I was trying to look for a pattern with Jesus in the gospels. Early in his ministry, at his Baptism, he received immediate comfort and assurance. This simple act of obedience by being baptized by his lesser was immediately coupled with his Father's message that he was beloved. In the middle of his ministry he received comfort after testing, such as when the angels came after Satan's temptations. But by the end of his ministry, in the Crucifixion, he asks God why he has abandoned him, and the comfort and assurance - the Resurrection - would not come for three days. The amount of time between the good done and the reward given is less important than the trend, which is this: expect comfort and assurance to occur at less frequent intervals over time, thus building faith and perserverance and discouraging immediate gratification.

We see this also in the progression between the Testaments. In the Old, reward and consolation would come in this life, in the form of wealth and old age. In the New, the reward and consolation need be deferred to the next, again de-emphasizing immediate gratification and exercising the faith muscle.

Newmanology

One of the benefits of cataloging your books is you find ones you forgot you had.

So it was nice to find The White Stone: The Spiritual Theology of John Henry Newman by Vincent Blehl, which "challenges the views of some scholars that John Henry Newman has no specific spirituality by presenting for the first time a comprehensive synthesis of his unique spiritual theology". And as Eric and others have mentioned, Cardinal Newman is a figure of increasing interest, given the recent news.

It seems the saints, in being contra-symbols of this world, end up having to take whatever spiritual sicknesses they see around them and imbibing them in order to reverse them. Our time is probably characterized by one of doubt and atheism and of a spiraling decline in regard for the value of the human person. Thus a saint like Mother Teresa showed us the value of the human person, by ministering individually and personally to the poorest of the poor, and showed us, by going through her own grave doubts and darkness, faith in an age of faithlessness.

So the problems of the world become the problems of the saints in a most personal way. If the world is hedonistic the saints will, by their contrarian example, become ascetics. If the world is Albigensian ascetic, the saints will become as "hedonists". So be careful which age you're born in (rimshot).

An exerpt from Blehl's book concerns both Newman's "contra" aspect and his prophetic foreshadowing of the Second Vatican Council:

Newman placed special emphasis on obedience, self-denial, and detachment from worldly comfort to redress the imbalance of the Evangelicals who preached the necessity of faith to the neglect of the importance of good works. He was also reacting against the 'religion of the day' which, concentrating on the brighter aspects of religion, forgot its darker side.

(...)

It is commonly admitted that before the Second Vatican Council Easter and the resurrection had lost their central place in Western Christian consciousness. Moreover, theologians treated grace mainly as a quality of the soul, forgetting or undervaluing the doctrine of the indwelling of Christ's Spirit, the Holy Spirit who is the sanctifying agent of the soul. Under the influence of the Eastern Fathers of the Church Newman restored this doctrine to its central place in Christian revelation and Christian spirituality...With the entrance of the Holy Spirit into the individual soul in baptism, the latter is placed in ontic union both with Christ and with the entire mystical body including the saints in heaven. This ontological basis of spirituality and growth in holiness has been reiterated in the Second Vatican Council.

'Who else is sezzing it?'

Excellence in anything is a rare enough thing. My particular bit of excellence appears to be recognizing it in others, which isn't especially marketable or particular praiseworthy but there you go. And today I recognized it in blog commenting. There ought to be an award.

A couple metaphors leap to mind while reading the thread connected to Tom Kreitzberg's quixotic post.

Remember how Rambo, strapped to the gills with seemingly superfluous ammunition, would kill an entire army by himself? That's sort of the feel of Tom answering critics of his encyclical Summa Contra Diogenites, which many are now weighing and interpreting in order to discern the level of authority and degree of adherence. Tom answers with dastardly insouciance; never has so much witty repartee been displayed since Thomas Jefferson blogged alone.

The exchanges also have that Question-Time-at-the-British-House-of-Commons feel, only without the prefacing "Would the Honorable Gentleman..." (which is typically followed by something like "admit that he is a frequent practitioner of buggery?")

Here are a couple examples:

Q: Tom, if you had to do it over, would you have phrased your original post in the same way, or would you have looked to provide case in point rebuttals which would have saved you time in the long run and most likely avoided much discord?

A: Oh, who knows? I'm not a very quick learner, and I'm less interested in devising an extended argument to prove what I consider obvious than in stating the obvious in terms blunt enough to be heard, even in the overheated sea of St. Blog's.

Like cursing, it's something that can't be done very often without losing its effectiveness (of being heard, I mean; it isn't meant to be, and it isn't, effective at changing minds). As it is, a lot of people still seem to think that Cardinal McCarrick figures prominently in it all.

~~

Q: Is the author of this blog merely a hypocrite?

A: That's entirely possible.

In fact, it's far more probable that what I do here is wrong than that what Diogenes does there is right.

~~

Q: With all due respect: Sez you.

A: Well, of course sez me. Who else is sezzing it? I invoked no other authority, meaning I invoked only my own.

Anyone who accepts everything I say on faith is a fathead and should send me all their disposable income.

As for the point in communicating it, each reader has to decide for himself what if any value he ascribes to my statement.

Negativity Fails   -or let me rephrase that: 'positivity succeeds'

Part of the reason Sen. Kerry lost in '04 was because he became a "nabob of negativity". All he did was attack.

And negativity is obviously not confined to presidential candidates. The egregious publication NOR is exhibit "A". Crisis is sliding. (Fortunately Touchstone is a breath of fresh air).

I recall a recent Crisis issue in which the editor - the editor - referred to the liberal Fr. McBrien as "cadaverous". So unnecessary. I don't like Fr. McBrien. I think he's one of the most dangerous and destructive forces within Catholicism. But there's no sense in personally attacking his looks or age.

Was this post too negative?

Poem Fragment and Bookish Aromas

Delicious stillness! Unthought of thought.
If you thought of it you hadn't ought to.

- excerpt of Richard Eberhardt poem

This has been on my list so long I may as well just order it and bow to the inevitable. Meanwhile, on Barnes & Noble the Compendium to the Catechism shows a pub date of 10/28 while amazon.com appears to have them already available. I'm hoping there'll be a Companion to the Compendium to the Catechism soon. (rimshot!)

Finally, Peggy Noonan has a book out on JPII next month. Also, (insert some sort of seque here) Ham o' Bone has posted a characteristically imaginative response to a meme.

Great Post...

...here titled "reverse triumphalism".

HT Julie.

Funny Line About the British

Link (via Amy):

Although a dossier on Cardinal Newman’s beatification was first opened in 1958, no miracles had, until now, been attributed to his intercession. “I had to tell John Paul that the English are not very good at miracles,” Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor said. “It’s not that we are not pious, but the English tend to think of God as a gentleman who should not be bullied.”

The Dispute

Regarding Disputations' disputation, I think I've read Diogenes twice, so I don't know him from Adam, but hinting that Cdl McC was involved in some sort of quid-pro-quo is following filmmaker/liar Michael Moore's evil playbook.

The predictable circular firing squad has ensued. Carrie on Dom's blog says:

One thing blogging has taught me. If you want to be a Roman Catholic blogger, put on a very thick skin, because half of Roman Catholicism at the very least is going to disagree with you and may do so in a most disagreeable manner. The process of growing that skin goes like this:

Step 1: Suffering shock and awe that a fellow Catholic blogger would make a mean-spirited personal attack rather than discussing the subject at hand.

Step 2: Oh, look who has been reading my blog again! I see he hasn’t changed his mind about me.

Step 3: Hey! The hit counter went up! This generates interest in what I have to say!

Step 4: How can I get ______ to come in here and make an acrimonious attack? Now if you’re really good (or lucky) you can actually generate one of these little firestorms and increase readership. So far I confess to still being a student of the technique, but there are some past masters in St. Blogs.

The most hilarious stuff was someone dogging Mark Shea for holding the bishops' miter. Zippy commented hilariously: "Yeah. Because, you know, that whole Catholic Apologist Racket is such a moneymaker." You really can't make this stuff up.

Personality Test

Draw a Pig!

Woodrow Wayne Hayes

Been time-traveling lately and doing it the easy way: been watching the Woody Hayes Show, as broadcast originally in the 1970s. The past is a different country and it becomes obvious how much is stripped when we read only transcripts or biographies. It makes me long to have heard Cardinal Newman speak, for how much richer is the visual experience and how much richer to hear Newman than Woody. No wonder the Old Testament words became the visual Word, Jesus.

Hayes died before I became a Buckeye fan and so his legend was mostly a disembodied spirit which clung over Columbus like Thurber's. Seeing these old shows bring his ghost to life. My brother-in-law has a shrine, and only the votive candles are missing. But what is interesting is all the little intangibles that have changed, the pace of speech, the mannerisms and gestures, the clothes and the words.

Link:

More painful than Vlisides's clothes was his one-on-one chat with the coach. In an act of comical cruelty, Channel 10 plopped the aging Hayes down in a mod, low-slung chair they must have borrowed from a campus apartment.

At one point, Woody launched into a rambling preseason monologue that was trademark Hayes:

"We'll run the ball a lot and pass a little. We don't like to pass too much because it softens you up, and we don't like that kind of football."

We couldn't help thinking, This guy does a great Woody Hayes imitation.

RCIAin' It

Went to an RCIA class in order to listen to hear our learned pastor speaketh. (This one is at St. Maggie's - I find myself belonging to both an Byzantine Catholic & a Roman Catholic parish. And I often go to Mass at our Dominican downtown parish. So there's three parishes I speak of, with all sorts of priests and pastors floating around.)

The talk concerned human sexuality and the book of Genesis and how the latter informs the former. And this pastor is so fascinating because he seems to be a traditionalist with progressive tendencies, or is that a progressive with traditionalist tendencies? It's always rare to find someone so outside the boundaries, but there are a lot of them (witness John Paul II). He seems devout, devoted to Eucharistic Adoration, exceptionally learned (teaches at the seminary and will give a talk at the Coming Home Network conference next month), dislikes the lack of reverence in the new Mass but dislikes the Jesuitical strain of the '50s church.

What interests me though is sometimes I wonder if he is less interested in whether a particular doctrine is intrinsically true or not true but what effect that doctrine has on people. A bit utilitarian? In other words, he seems not to emphasize the truth of the church ban on artificial contraception on its own merits, while being utterly convinced of its truth in waging the war against the forces of eugenics, Planned Parenthood, etc., who espouse a demonic dehumanizing re-shaping of society. (As he said, "why don't we become robots and be done with it?".) He talked about the perfidious Margaret Sanger and how the pill was first tested in Puerto Rico and the cynicism implicit in that action. At that time New York City was being "overpopulated" with Puerto Ricans and the elites were less than subtle in wanting less of "their kind". Ironically it worked exactly the opposite: the Pill thinned out WASPS, which is why many today are frantic to introduce birth control to third world countries and which is why the Catholic Church must oppose it with every fibre of her being.

So one could say that he was trying to sell the ban as a way of seeing the overarching vision of the Church and to attract potential converts who might stumble over church doctrines such as that one. Perhaps he could be said to be similar to the gospel writer who tailors the message to the audience. He says that one has to remember the Church has a billion Catholics and is waging an epic fight. This pastor seems most convinced by Pope Paul VI's famous encyclical for its correctness in terms of what negative effects on society the pill would have, rather than to the individual (to the extent one can divide the two). It seems like there's a tension for the church in promulgating a truth for it's own sake versus a truth in reaction to a demonic foe.

Let the Little Children Come

One benefit of blogging for me has been to see intelligence as worthless as a three dollar bill when it comes to God. He shows no favoritism. When I see the comments of a sharp guy like Rob here it makes me cringe.

Intelligence is an advantage and blessing in almost every earthly situation imaginable. Even in something as physical as sports it is an advantage. But in the spiritual realm it is worthless. No wonder Jesus was glad that the Father hid from the worldly wise what only the simple knew.

Meme of Sevens

So I was reading Sancta Sanctis and she listed the seven people she admires (St. Paul, St. Athanasius, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Dominic de Guzman, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Francis de Xavier, St. Therese of the Child Jesus - an admirable list) and I thought I'd tweak it a bit and list the seven people I've been recently most taken with. And then I saw that she tagged me, so there's even more reason. Besides, to paraphrase Paul McCartney:

You’d think that people would have had enough of silly memes.
But I look around me and I see it isn’t so.
Some people wanna fill the world with silly memes.
And what’s wrong with that?
I’d like to know, ’cause here I go again!

I hereby tag Ham o' Bone and Roz and anyone else who wants to play.

7 People I Admire (in no particular order):

1. Pope John Paul the Great
2. Blessed Mary Teresa de Soubiran
3. St. Anthony Claret
4. my grandmother
5. St. Pope Pius X
6. Mother Angelica
7. my wife

(Mary and St. Joseph are not on the list only because they are such obvious choices.) Most of the other seven lists are either in my blogger profile or have been meme'd before.

Spanning the Globe

Mass intentions for extremely dead people?

- title of a Therese of "Exultet" post that asks how long Masses ought be said for the repose of the souls of people who have died

As our priest said to us the other day, "This is the first age I have ever read of where we think that life is supposed to be nice and happy instead of hard with some gifts of joy to lift us on the way."

- Julie of Happy Catholic

Lust devours reality, because it's all about "me."

- Bill of Apologia

Radically and courageously following Christ is not important to Church bureaucrats. If it were, they wouldn't be Church bureaucrats, after all. What has been important is maintaining image: maintaining the institution's image, as well as the image of individual priests. Not only maintaining the image of those priests, but keeping their egos intact and, dare we say, keeping them quiet. We can only hope that the price paid now has been high enough that this is changing. Judging from the continued obfuscations and self-justifying cries emanating from both coasts, it doesn't seem as if the lesson has been learned quite yet.

- Amy Welborn

Ya know, there's nothing better than a waltz by Strauss; the solemn childlike joyfulness is just what I need.

-Bill of Summa Minutiae

It's hard for us to think that that unmade bed, or that messy car, might be a visible sign of a not so nice invisible reality, isn't it? But I know that in my case it is certainly and completely true. When I allow all the little things in my life to get out of control, it is only a sign that the interior of my life is out of control as well. I don't know if it is the chicken or the egg. But when I make the effort to do the small things that keep our family life on track--timely washed clothes (not washed in panic or to order), decent meals (not just something grabbed at random), a picked up and organized house (not one that you have to hunt through the piles to find the play tickets) it seems like the whole of our lives, including our spiritual lives, run better. So whether the spiritual malaise comes first, leading to the messy house, or the messy house comes first, leading to the spiritual messiness, it really doesn't matter. Getting the environment in order puts the rest in order. I know it's possible to have a vibrant spiritual life in the midst of chaos. But I wonder. Is it possible to have a vibrant spiritual life in the midst of self-created clutter?

- MamaT of "Summa Mamas"

A slice of cheesecake, under normal circumstances: c. 600 calories.

A slice of cheesecake, when handed to you (unsolicited) by your department chair: 0 calories.

Amazing how this works.

(Remember that, by virtue of its location, any food left in the department office automatically drops to zero calories. Context is everything.)

- Miriam of "The Little Professor"

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, "Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that," or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

-C.S. Lewis (via Mark Shea by way of Disputations)

The White House apparently thinks so little of its base that it believes breathlessly assuring James Dobson that [Miers is] an evangelical is a sound tactic.

- Amy Welborn

In a post below one of the readers commented and asked how much of our time should be spent focused on the things we need to do to clear the way for God.The answer is almost none at all. The miracle of divine union is accomplished by God alone. There is very little we can do to aid its progress. There is remarkably little we can do to achieve detachment. There is very little we can do to deepen prayer. But our little is the widow's mite. We offer it out of our poverty. And it is the greatest treasure God can have from us. As a father, one of the most precious things my son can give me is something, however naively done that has taken him some time. He has produced reams of art the paper the wall of my cubicle and each piece is precious because each piece represents a time when he was thinking about his daddy. So it is with our Father in Heaven. No matter how poorly done, our little widow's mite is infinitely precious to Him. Praise God there are no cubicles in heaven, but if there were, they would be peppered with these little offerings, the signs of our attention to our Heavenly Father.

- Steven of "Flos Carmeli"

None Too Subtle

A nearly century-old United Methodist church put up a gigantic banner in a gay-friendly neighborhood in downtown Columbus that says, "ALL are welcome here!" And then below it, "Inclusiveness as God intended it". Literally the "ALL" is almost a full story high.

I don't get it. Isn't this the message of every Christian church? God hates sin but loves the sinner, so I guess it's only when we faultily equate ourselves with our sin that we assume that God hates the sinner or lacks inclusivity. Inclusivity and the Catholic Church are synonymous, literally, since "catholic" means universal. It's likely the sign-maker means by inclusivity "our God makes no moral judgments" which is certainly not what God intended.

Beer o'er Wine!

HT to Julie

The Bush Judges

  

What we thought we'd get:

What we got:

A Chipperin' * We'll Go!



A chipperin' we'll go we said
when casting off the shore
of the fat ol' city sewer line
that leads to lands of lore.

We'd take that humble tunnel
to a muddy, skinny creek
where it flowed again to the river christen'd
"Little Miami" meek.

From there we'd sail to where it went
the river "Great Miami"
and take it thirty miles south
to the Ohio in Cincinnati.

Westward ho! We wouldn't rest
in this our native state
but find our raft a-buoy'd again
to the Mississippi's gate.

And down the Mississippi past
city, town and lick,
until we reached the Gulf at last
and then the broad Atlantic.

* - written for my brother, chipperin' is what he and I called rafting back in our youth.

Ouch

I missed the greatest game of the century?

Now That's Super-Sizing

Restaurant serves 9-pound burger, which no one's ever finished. Hungry? Ingredients here.

Snippets from ye olde National Review

From Ramesh Ponnuru:

Milton Friedman has analyzed federal spending as an equation: Take available revenues, add the maximum politically allowable deficit, and that’s how much spending there will be. So conservatives have tried to reduce the available revenues in the hopes of reducing the spending. This is the “starve the beast” theory of tax cutting. There is probably something to it, in general, but it hasn’t worked recently. It may be that the passage of tax cuts made deficit spending more acceptable. Friedman’s variables turn out not to be independent from each other.
_

If one wanted to try to keep government spending from growing from one year to the next, one might very well have favored John Kerry last year on the theory that congressional Republicans would be tougher on his budgets than on Bush’s. Someone trying to follow the long-run strategy to cut government — such as Norquist — would, on the other hand, have favored Bush in order to have a chance at Social Security reform and the like. The ambitious strategy, in other words, may lead to higher spending in the short run; but the long run may never come.

During Sunday's Sermon...

...the pastor at the Byzantine Catholic church admitted he didn't know what faith is, asking "if you know of a definition of faith, I'd love to hear it." Honest guy.

Update: Had a couple inquiries as to context. All I can say is that I'd wish he'd "said more words". I assume what he meant is that faith is a mystery and it's not something we can simply equate with intellectual belief. It's also a mystery in that it's both a theological (and thus infused) virtue, as well as a virtue we can exercise and build.

Causes of Civil War & Confederate Flag

Dispatch reviews a new book that asks a perennial question:

Cheers to any historian hip enough to borrow a scene from The Simpsons, as Edward Ayers does in the collection of essays, What Caused the Civil War?

Ayers cites an episode in which the immigrant store owner, Apu, is taking an oral quiz en route to earning American citizenship.

The final question is "What was the cause of the Civil War?"

Apu launches into a long, complex answer about abolition, economics and international politics, until the frustrated official interrupts: "Just say slavery."

Ayers sides with Apu. He rails against those who come up with easy answers to his central question.

While, of course, he is right — no human event as cataclysmic as the Civil War can be reduced to a one-word answer — Ayers’ aversion to making any real conclusions renders his What Caused the Civil War? frustrating.

(snip)

[Ayers] is at his best when analyzing the mind-set of his native South, such as this explanation of why the controversial Confederate battle flag is still displayed so prominently:

It stands, he writes, "for resistance — resistance to bosses, Southern yuppies, the North, blacks, liberals and political correctness. In their eyes, it stands for the same thing they imagine it stood for in 1861: ‘Leave Me the Hell Alone.’ "

That attitude might be as good an answer as any to what caused the war. Too bad Ayers only offers more questions.

On Miers

It's interesting how most on the right are on the same page - i.e. the disappointment page - with respect to the Miers pick. That helps gives lie to critics who say Limbaugh and others on the right are mere party hacks.

The Scientist

Had a "debate" with a fellow parishioner whom I had just met after Mass at coffee and donuts.

He is a retired professor of biochemistry and when he identified himself as a scientist he wasn't just making small talk. It seems he considered this component of his identity to be his entire identity.

It started out innocuously enough. He described himself as politically moderate, which I've learned to take as extremely liberal. (The word 'liberal' has fallen into disfavor after all.) And I was not wrong, as he thought of the Jesuit order as "conservative" and the Dominicans as heretic-burners. He was "personally opposed" to Roe v. Wade but considered it not his business to export his view of morality. And he had no quarrel with euthanasia, having seen a friend die from Lou Gehrig's disease.

He was hungry to argue over Galileo and Copernicus and how the church history is abysmal. And all that's within the pale. But then he went a step further that revealed much: he was not a Christian who was a liberal, but a liberal without faith. He argued against the bible, saying that the earliest writings were fifty years after Christ's death and we know we can't trust anything written that long after an event. I found myself in an argument I couldn't win, for you can't argue someone into faith.

He admitted losing his (which begs the question of why he was at Mass; a mutual friend assumed it's for his wife's sake). He blames it on a pastor previous who was "rigid and dictatorial". He said that religion has done more harm than good in the world and that we should all live by science, his pure unspotted bride. If humans wearing clerical clothes have ever treated science roughly, well, then and he was going to hold a grudge. Sometimes I think it is harder for a scientist to believe than to pass a camel through the eye of a needle.

Matthew the Wonder Boy

the tumbling rumbling hay wagon stopped
when a tassle-haired boy of seven got off
and before his parents descended the cart
he claimed two pumpkins and held them aloft

and afterwards he squired his sister around
to a contest for teens, or older, it seemed
a long greasy pole if he climbed he would reach
a prize of twenty dollars and smiles that beamed.

he waited his turn, calm as a lark
as scores of visitors tried to unlock
the secret of climbing that frustrating pole
but his confidence held, the little boy jock.

but the task wasn't easy it soon became clear
there was an effort to climb he'd not seen before
his face wet with sheen he wouldn't give up
and for that alone the crowd did adore.

The Dialogue

I sweat
He whispers
I speak of fairness
He answers of Matt 20:1-16.
I laugh:
"Be thou always so unfair!"
I say 'I am weak'
He says Paul boasted of as much.
I ache for the water of human knowledge
He aches to give more.

Fictional Monday

John Flanagan was not a sinner in any exceptional way. He was a Christian, a Christian who would never reject Christ because that would be irrational and he considered himself above all a rational man who looked at the world with an eye wrily arched at the foilbles around him.

He had a thrist for control but never saw that as a contradiction to faith. He beheld the Giver and had great self-confidence that he would not reject Him or his Gift.

But the world worked on him like water slowly changing the contours of a stone and eventually he gave in, by degrees, until he realized he had rejected the Giver and his Gift. But after the peace of conversion and repentance an odd and paralyzing fear began to gnaw, a fear he'd never experienced before: if it happened once, why couldn't it happen again?

Fall on the Rise



Went on a nice ride down the bike path yesterday; the weather feels so wistful I think of John Denver songs I didn’t know I knew. It's near unbearable to see the quaint houses in the dying light, to ride down a new road still made of dirt, to inhale the scent of the timber as the new houses go up. The fall plays the chords of memory like Horowitz. The tomatoes in the garden still hang on the vine, blood-red; I refuse to take the vines down until after the first frost. Did take down the patio umbrella down, which seems concession enough.

Self-Indulgent Seniors   -and one who's not

 It is disappointing to see my former "heroes", to use the term very loosely, Garrison Keillor and Harold Bloom, grow increasingly batty and self-indulgent as they age. It's like watching Willie Mays in '73 or John Denver in '82, though more damaging. 

Keillor's books have slipped greatly; his Love Me is nothing more than a blog disguised as a book-length narrative. It's disjointed and decadent and has nothing of the old Keillor warm-heartedness or innocent, country humor. And Harold Bloom has a new book, which apparently (I haven't read it) is a slapdash-hash of "arguments", backed up with whimsy, designed to provoke a reaction like blogs do. Bloom has Christ escaping crucifixion and traveling to India and thinks the gospel of St. Thomas is the most credible of the gospels, presumably because it's not canonical.

These two, a humorist with a measure of self-restraint and a scholar with a measure of carefulness, have fallen prey to the bloggadocia culture of lazily letting it all hang out. It's like they've ached for standards to ebb and now are going like gangbusters. And I could add to the list respected journalists like Walter "Conspiracy Theorist" Conkrite and Bill "Left Wing" Moyers. It's disturbing to see our elders aging so ungracefully. Certainly a cautionary tale for us all.

It’s sobering how un-adult the elite have become: the authors, journalists, judges, politicians and scholars. It’s like when you’re on a sports team and you see the leading scorers having bad games. You feel a sense of doom and try, usually impotently, to assume greater responsibility.

When I was a child I recall asking my mother why it seemed that every generation got less holy. Of course there was the haze of nostalgia associated with this because grandparents always appear like saints to children compared to parents, having nothing but sweetness to offer the three times they see them a month. But my mom didn’t disagree. She said it did seem like every generation was losing ground.

I began reading the newspapers during the Nixon administration and though Nixon was caught in lies and a cover-up, he seemed to have a greater gravitas and seriousness, as did the journalists of that period. Or is it merely that adults always look impressive to children? I don’t know.

Part of it seems just a simple measure of how much you've suffered. It's too mechanistic to simply say your holiness = the amount you've suffered, but my grandmother puts up with stuff better than myself or my mother. And that suffering, in the Depression and the war years and in having six children, seems to have helped give her a greater capacity to suffer in her old age. She lives in a nursing home, never watches television and is always praying Mary's beads. And she always has a smile despite (normally) not having what anyone would consider "health". They say if you've got your health you've got everything, but she doesn't...

Richard Eberhart

I didn't realize that the poet Richard Eberhart died this year. He was 101. Which in poet years is 182.

Here's an excerpt from the prose poem Vignettes recalling his experiences with famous poets:

Auden, with books sprawled on the floor, was writing poems
Often, it was the time of "Voltaire at Ferney" and "Housman,"
In slippers, and drinking tea with endless talk.
If I suggested an emendation he would enter it
In the freedom of an intensely free mind, and
Then put on Berlioz and turn it up grandly loud.
Once, at Sunday breakfast, he put a pill before my place,
Said, "Take this." I refused. Benzedrine. Such innocent days.

From "The Long Reach: New & Uncollected Poems 1948-1984"

War with the Islamists

I was leafing through this book and the author refutes the notion held in some quarters that the Crusades accomplished little. He said they bought time and kept the Muslims occupied and thus away from Europe. He quotes the historian Edward Gibbon who said that if not for the Crusades in southern France they'd be studying the Koran today.

And then I caught about two minutes of something on EWTN, something about a place in the Middle East that was Christian until the Muslims conquered and Christianity dried up there for lo these many centuries. How sad is that?

There's something disturbing about war for Christianity. I can understand war for the self-protection, or that of a nation; I can understand that in the same way I can understand having to kill a burglar in order to defend my family. But war for the protection of Christianity seems different, since God will take care of the continuation of Christianity. Obviously He might use human instruments. But shouldn't the persecution or killing of Christians be the seedbed for a rebirth of Christian culture in a given country since love conquers death? And yet...Islam has seemingly lasted a "long" time given the way it was spread. I realize notions of "time" are not applicable to God, who is beyond it. And that this is the City of Man, not God.

It's Up

The full story about the heroic mother with cancer is now online. I had posted about it originally here.

from Zondervon Press!  

       The Biblioholic's
       Bible
      
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You've seen the bible for teens, the bible for car mechanics, the bible for pre-menopausal women. And now at last... the bible for compulsive book buyers!

Excerpts:

"And if you lost a book - would you not leave the 99 in search of the lost one?"

"What does it profit a man to gain the entire Library of Congress but lose his immortal soul?"

And then Simon Peter began to read to the soldier from the latest Dan Brown novel. But Jesus said, "Those who live by the mediocre novel, shall die by the mediocre novel." And so Peter put the book down and Jesus healed the soldier, removing the abomination from his memory

....and he spent all his inheritance on cheap magazines and dissolute books. One day, while reading an Andrew Greeley novel, he thought to himself: "Even the servants of my father's house enjoy better reading material. I will go back and ask his forgiveness."

And before he was home his father walked to him, hugged him, and gave him a Faulkner first edition. His brother became jealous. "You've never given me a Faulkner first edition!" And his father said, "You are always with me, and all my books are yours."

It happened that there was a great book festival in Cana. But soon all the good books were sold. Mary said to Jesus, "They've no more books!" and Jesus said, "What concern is that of mine? My hour has not come." But his mother said to the festival organizer, "do whatever he tells you." And Jesus had them bring reams of blank paper. When the organizer looked, the paper was beautifully bound into books of surpassing quality. One man exclaimed, "Usually this late in festivals only the overstocks are left, but you have saved the best for last."

Jonah spent three days in the belly of a whale, and it was so dark he couldn't even read.

(image via "Bookstore Junkies")

Panting over Pants

It's always good to hear an argument you've never heard before, especially one supported by hard data. I could do some opining on this, but it would quickly devolve into TMI. So send a SASE. I will say that Mrs. Clinton wears pants a lot and I don't ever recall looking there.

Update: Received this email:

Guess I better finish my "Lord of the Pants" version of the Shaker
Song. So far the chorus is done.

"So keep it in your pants
whoever she may be,
for I am the Lord
of all pants" said He.

When Liam and I fell in love, I saw his strengths with perfect clarity. I knew him - what God had created him to be, all of the good, all of his beauty - as perfectly as I have ever known anybody. Over time, I added a knowledge of his faults and flaws to that. I know though that his shortcomings are not who he is, because sin can have no substance. Rather, those shortcomings are the gaps in who he is becoming, and it is my great privelige to be part of that journey. Knowing his flaws and sins has not in the least detracted from that first glorious vision.

- commenter Kate on "Exultet"

How can the mode of Eucharistic Adoration in the young be explained? Because these generations cannot live without images. In looking at the Host, certainly, we do not see Christ, in his Divinity nor in his humanity but we fix our eyes on the most direct sign of his real presence.

- a French bishop quoted by Amy Welborn

The profound meanings of the Faith are ideally passed on by more than just words. Sacred Tradition is more than just literary tradition. Only extreme literary geeks read the complete writings of the saints, collect quotes from popes, and generally POD out on G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, Evelyn Waugh, and other illustrious Catholic writers. How sola scriptura of us. The vast majority gravitate to patron saints, icons, vestments, relics, incense, habits, and other POD-itties pleasing to the senses. They understand where the real profundities are....How much have we lost by this over-emphasis? It is something to ponder that St. Thomas Aquinas, who left us with the massive Summa Theologica, said that he learned more from a crucifix than from books.

- Sancta Sanctis

Teresa [of Avila] is arguably more advanced than John [of the Cross] in the level of prayer in her writings. The Carmelite Joseph of Jesus Mary and Benedictine Dom John Chapman both considered everything in Teresa's contemplative prayer to be after the Night of the Senses in John's writings. They considered John to be writing more of ordinary prayer, while Teresa wrote of higher ways.

- commenter on Steven's "Flos Carmeli". Lord help me if St. John wrote of "ordinary" prayer (Update: clarification)

Andrew Greeley writes a column excoriating the media for their Sullivanesque hysteria over a document that nobody has seen. He tells them to take deep cleansing breaths, and then calls for people to, like, give Benedict a break and see what he will, in fact, do. It's a strange day when Greeley is the voice of reason in the Church...And strangest of all, I agree with him.

- Mark Shea via the Curt Jester

At about the time I visited this [charismatic] parish, I had been in a long time of praying "Come, Holy Spirit, but make it a glancing blow. I'm afraid of what You'll want me to do!"...The first time I attended, last year, I was so surprised by the combination of the ancient reverence I exult in and the open demonstration of how people really felt about their Lord and Savior, I cried through the whole thing. After Mass, as I was being introduced to friends in the vestibule, people noted my red eyes and nose (when WILL I learn to cry pretty?) but my friends said simply "Oh, it's the Spirit" and that was that. These people expect to see tears and emotion. I was undone by the mixture of holy boldness and aching care to keep to universal worship, to join our Mass with the Mass being celebrated at all times at all places in the world.

- Therese of Exultet

G.K. Chesterton recognized that the psychiatrist’s couch was often a mere substitute for the confessional. Maybe these bleeding bloggers send a message to those of us who mindlessly stumble through the group confession at the beginning of church: perhaps there’s an existential need to confess or acknowledge one’s shortfallings in front of others. And when that need isn’t channeled properly, you get things like bleeding bloggers.

- Eric of "The Daily Eudemon" on a WAPO story concerning confessional bloggers

If we are faltering, if we are becoming no different than the pagans and near-pagans...we need to cling more closely to Christ in the Eucharist, to seek to understand what His presence there means, to be more prepared spiritually to receive Him and to let the fruits of that presence grow in our personal lives as well as in our life as His Body, the Church. To that end, catechesis, proper celebration of the sacrament, catechesis, popular devotion, and even more catechesis - as well as simple access to the Bread of Life - are all issues of import. If you read the interventions, you read the words of men who are taking the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist very, very seriously, not as a beautiful sign of Catholic identity or the truth of the Catholic faith, but as what He promised: The Bread of Life.

- Amy Welborn

When St. Therese was fourteen and desperate to enter Carmel, she went on a pilgrimage to Rome, in the hope that Pope Leo XIII would help her overcome all who were opposing her entry. There is something symbolic (and beautifully ironic) in journeying to distant lands in order to prove oneself worthy to live in a tiny cloister for the rest of one's days.

- Sancta Sanctis

The structure and the responses are universal now, too: just as it was with the Old Mass before Vatican II, the New Mass has the property that if I walk into almost any Catholic parish around the world, I may not know the language but I'll know what is being said and done at each instant. It's a gift I ought not take for granted. Most importantly, the Novus Ordo is home for me. I like to see the house cleaned up a bit (e.g. when the parish follows the rubrics), I even like to see the real wood floors even when linoleum is more popular (e.g. I enjoy the beauty of Latin in the Mass), but when it comes down to it, it's my home, and it's been very good to me...Spiritual pride is something I already have too much of.

- Patrick of "Orthonormal Basis"

[John Roberts] is a George Bush "trust me" candidate, and I do not trust George Bush's judgement on these matters. The fact that Alberto Gonzales was floated first and rejected by social conservatives is proof positive that GWB cannot be trusted. GWB appoints people he thinks are "good people" in some fuzzy sense, without regard for their substantive positions and legal philosophy.

- Zippy Catholic

If being an originalist were made a crime would there be enough evidence to convict Harriet Miers of being one?

- Patrick of Extreme Catholic

Make 'er a Glancin' Blow!

Nice post from Therese Z of Exultet on her latest experience of a Charismatic Mass, complete with hilarious asides like "when WILL I learn to cry pretty?". Speaking of blubber, this one got me, and got me good.

The Power of TV

We all mention the "power of the blog" but look at the power of the glass teat! One mention on the television show LOST and some obscure book that sells 15,000 a year sells 8,000 in two days.

Faith in Action

Elena and Alicia and the Summas and all the strong pro-life mothers in St. Blogland will especially appreciate this inspiring local story:

By Laura Troiano, The Catholic Times

For 18 months, it had gone undetected. It metastasized to the lungs.

Peggy Peppercorn, wife, mother of four and parishioner at Columbus Holy Family Church, had now become a cancer patient.

She was immediately hospitalized. A port was placed in her chest for chemotherapy treatments. She was given a 40 percent chance of survival.

Peppercorn battled the disease for several years.

She then met with Dr. John Soper, world-renowned cancer specialist at Duke University, who told her that she needed to have part of her lung removed, and that chemotherapy would be required before and after the surgery.

“ He also told me that I may never be free of this cancer,” said Peppercorn.

She had the lung surgery in the winter of 2002. The cancer was removed. She continued with chemotherapy and regularly had blood work done. In October of 2002, Peppercorn had a check up with her oncologist.

“ At my appointment, he informed me my numbers were raising, which indicated the cancer was active again. He scheduled me for a CT scan, and I knew the procedures would start all over again,” said Peppercorn.

Another blood test was taken. And, although the results revealed that Peppercorn’s numbers had more than doubled, the cancer had not returned. Instead, Peppercorn was pregnant.

The doctors insisted she have an abortion because they would not be able to monitor her cancer for the duration of the pregnancy. But she obstinantly refused. Her cancer doctors waited at her scheduled Caesarian, in order to immediately test her. And she is free of cancer! Mother and baby are doing fine.

Sippin' Poems

...are here, where:

"This Site Is Best Viewed Through
The Bottom Of A Glass Of Amber Liquid."

Tuesdays With Belloc

"I have confessed for myself [it is a purely personal confession] that I am more in sympathy with the skeptic than with any of the enemies opposed to that which is the sole solution of our riddles and therefore the salvation of mankind: the only House. It is my fault, perhaps; and certainly my misfortune. The skeptic thinks more than he feels, and there I am with him-----or rather, I take thinking to come before feeling: wherein I have a quarrel with the Seraphim. But no matter.

Among all those outside the famous boat of the Fisherman you are most in sympathy with us.

The skeptic does not sympathize with us at all. We sympathize with him-----which is a poor substitute. We say to ourselves: 'At least this man uses his reason, on such postulates as are common to the human race.' This moves our hearts towards him, especially in such a time as ours when men have ceased to reason. But he does not correspondingly say that we reason. As a rule he knows nothing about us, and too often he is, in these days of mechanics, deplorably uncultured."

- Hilaire Belloc

My Calling: Play Calling?



Football-savy Ham o' Bone was bested by yours truly in QB1, a game at Damon's Restaurant in which you attempt to predict the next Monday Night Football play (run, pass, deep, short, left, right). But he bested me in the poetry competition beforehand, in which his poem received thunderous applause. (Of course, it's just an exhibition, not a competition, so please no wagering.)

One thing I like about the campus poetry bar is the atmosphere of politeness and solidarity despite tremendous differences in poetic ability. The best poets show absolutely no emotion while the worst read, and there's something inspiring in their poker faces. I fear I've a ways to go still, despite having nothing to crow about my own self.

The featured poet, Neil Carpathios, was pretty decent and read a poem contra-Buddhism; He said he dislikes that religion for its philosophy of detachment because he is very attached to physical things. (A question: why are Buddha's so fat if they're so devoted to aesticism?)

~

The bar is a fertile crescent for leftish conspiracy theorists, which is why a "Speak Freely While You Still Can" T-shirt elicited only a yawn. The rhetoric is so heated nowadays that losing the right of free speech feels like stale leftovers. Surely we can lose more than that!? So when she got up to read she faced the daunting task of taking Bush to task in a way greater than he'd been taken before. What could she say? I think they limit presidents to two terms because within eight years you reach the limit of language. Then it's Munch's scream time.

She recited a remarkably long poem which held Bush responsible for Katrina, for the dead bodies who "slapped at the rudder" of his ship of state. And I wondered what she read to get here from there, or who hurt her? Perhaps it is merely the joy in bonding over an object of mutual hatred and Bush is a handy enough target. Bone had a really fine poem in the hopper and he delivered it with power and fortitude and I can say without bias that it was the audience's favorite. He looked the part too with the small glasses that are in vogue and the patchy four-day beard. He was the poetic equivalent to being tan, rested and ready.

Unfortunately there was a limit of only two poems per customer, something we didn't know, so I was sore-disappointed that he didn't get a chance to read my Marian poem. In hindsight it was probably for the best since my motives weren't that pure. There was too much of wanting to read it for shock value, the shock of a traditionally pious poem read in a venue where that has never happened. Country legend Loretta Lynn says you either have to be "first, best or different" but that's been the sad story of modern art: being different for different's sake.

~

As penance for negative thoughts concerning leftists, I read Garrison Keillor's "Homegrown Democrat" and quickly sobered up. ("He hates me, he really hates me!") As penances go (for conservatives anyway), his book ranks above hair shirts and just below flagellation. (Yes, yes, how would I know.) He is tremendously condescending and awe-inspiringly unfair, characteristics which, of course, he would likewise attribute to me.

Translations

I shouldn't be surprised at variations in bible translations but it's still interesting how the word choices resonate so differently. The Muslims have found a way around variations, by basically rejecting translations of the Koran from Arabic. English translations are not taken seriously.

Take Psalm 73 for example, verses 4-5 & 8, speaking of the wicked:

King James Verse 4-5:

"For there are no bands in their death:
but their strength is firm.
They are not in trouble as other men;
neither are they plagued like other men."

Douay-Rheims verse 4-5:

"For there is no regard to their death, nor is there strength in their stripes. They are not in the labour of men: neither shall they be scourged like other men."

NRSV verse 4-5:

"For they have no pain;
their bodies are sound and sleek.
They are not in trouble as others are;
they are not plagued like other people."

Jerusalem version, verse 4-5:

"For them, no such thing as pain,
their bodies are healthy and strong,
they do not suffer as other men do,
no human afflictions for them!"

New Jerusalem verse 4-5:

"For them no such thing as pain,
untroubled, their comfortable portliness;
exempt from the cares which are the human lot,
they have no part in Adam's afflictions."

The last version speaks far more forcefully and bracingly to me, in this age of "comfort uber alles", than the first version.
___

Douay-Rheims verse 8:

"They have thought and spoken wickedness: they have spoken iniquity on high."

New Jerusalem verse 8:

"Cynically they advocate evil, loftily they advocate force."

NRSV verse 8:

"They scoff and speak with malice, loftily they threaten oppression."

Bill Luse...

...has an excellent post linking pornography and efficiency.

I wrote a poem years ago about how the look on the cowboys' faces at the nudie bar is one of *wonder* and asked how to make that look happen in church instead of at the strip joint. So the Esolen quote well captures the issue of raising the flesh to idol status rather than one of reduction to object status.

A priest at a Dominican parish downtown recently said that the god of Americans is comfort. Comfort food, discomfort outside our routine, etc...and he mentioned how orgasms are a part of that, they make you comfortable afterwards. So it's hardly surprising that this society has a particular problem with sex and raises it to idol status.

Politics

The Harriet Miers debate is sort of fascinating, what with all the currents and cross-currents it exposes within the Republican party. George Will argues that a principle of conservatism is that it be principled - i.e. not simply results-oriented not matter the means we get there. So, if Miers has promised that her vote be pro-life then there's something self-defeating and mean (in the sense of impoverishing) in that. But, of course, if she didn't promise her vote, that's bad because then she might be another David Souter. Which we rightly have zero tolerance for. As they, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Either way, Bush should pull her nomination and call it a mulligan.
_

An irresistable force meeting an immovable object is spending meeting taxation. Which will give? Both seem to be the "third rail" of American politics - some think you can't cut spending or raise taxes without becoming politically DOA. But I don't think that's true. You can survive raising taxes but you can't survive cutting domestic spending, although I don't know if the latter has ever really been tried. In '93 Clinton survived raising taxes, but not even Reagan dared seriously cut spending. So, what do you do when you can't cut spending or raise taxes? You run a deficit. And when the deficit becomes large enough it inhibits spending by giving politicians a "more serious" reason not to spend. At least until the deficit shrinks.
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In Ohio as well as nationally, the Republican Party has "struggled" governing-wise, to put it mildly. And one wonders why the supposedly more responsible, disciplined party has lost its grasp on those attributes. One wonders as well why some of the Democratic party has lost its sanity. As usual, I have a theory on both. And of course these are very broad generalizations.

The Democrats are the party of government, and thus of power. When not in power, they begin to lose the will to live and this results in a form of insanity best represented by Howard Dean, Michael Moore, et al. Sen. Chuck Schumer was honest when he said the reason he left the House of Representatives for the Senate was because he couldn't exercise enough power there. Without power, Democrats tend to lose some of their probity and self-restraint and this has pushed the party to the left which results in their offering us a lousy candidate like John Kerry.

Republicans are supposedly the party of freedom and limited gov't, but when they get a taste of government, like teetotalers who have never had a drink, they go overboard and put on lampshades. Pork-barrel spending and saving the world for democracy intoxicate them and they forget their reason for existence, which, as Bob Novak says, is to cut taxes, and to stop the Democrats from saving the world for democracy.

So are the Republicans better as a minority party since then they can soberly restrain the Democrats? And are Democrats better as a majority party, so they have an incentive for positive action and self-restraint? Perhaps so.

More Canada Pictures  (click for enlargement)


Niagra Falls. The mist from the falls obscures part of our view - 'we look thru the glass darkly'  



Pieta outside St. Paul's church.  Another view.



Lake Ontario, before she lakes you! 

Feelings...

Tom o' Disputations dislikes contradiction and irrationality. He certainly is living in the wrong age isn't he? I'm becoming a bit more sanguine to the human condition as I read Mark Brumley's excellent How Not To Share Your Faith.

I thought the book would be mostly bromides and exhortations, but I bought it because it wasn't too expensive and I figured "Lord knows I need bromides and exhortations". For one thing, I needed to be reminded not to take an overly rationalistic view of faith. But the book is much more. It's rich and deep and I'm learning a lot.

What follows are non-representative excerpts, in the sense that they are known, but necessary reminders:

Feelings often color our thinking and choosing so that an otherwise rational person, disposed to choose the good, cannot see in a particular instance what truly is good. In this way, feelings can inhibit our minds and restrict our freedom to choose and act.

Brumley gives a hypothetical. What if a Holocaust survivor whose family was betrayed by Christian neighbors?

Is it really surprising that such a man would have difficulty analyzing arguments for or against Christianity or Catholicism with rational detachment?

He also mentions Christopher Derrick's persuasive thesis that C.S. Lewis, influenced by his Ulster Protestant upbringing, never became Catholic for that reason. And if Lewis had difficulties, how much more would the ordinary mind?

Thus we should not minimize the effects of feelings and experiences on our power to perceive and accept the truth. Sometimes apologists argue away, as if those with whom they argue will always respond like Star Trek's Mr. Spock, with unemotional, rational objectivity. But, like it or not, feelings matter.

St. Thomas More's "Dialogue on Comfort"

Recently learned of St. Thomas More's last book, written in a Socratic style while he was awaiting execution in the Tower. Here is a snippet of a commentary:

Anthony then replies to the first and third of the previously raised objections, that to pray for perpetual health is childish, and that it is equivalent to praying that one never experiences any temptations or trials in this life; and, that Solomon, Job, and Abraham all experienced tribulations of one kind or another, and therefore did not experience continual prosperity. Vincent insists, however, that the second objection still stands. Anthony replies that the same God who teaches us that tribulation is profitable also teaches us to pray for relief, and that God even sometimes sends tribulation to make us pray to him for help.

32. Vincent accepts Anthony's arguments, but returns to the fourth previously raised objection, and reformulates it: that if both tribulation and prosperity are neither good nor {238} bad in themselves why put a greater value on tribulation than on prosperity? He points out that:

a welthy man well at ease, may pray to god quietly & meryly with alacrite & grete quietnes of mynd / where as he that lieth gronyng in his grefe, can not endure to pray nor thynk almost vppon nothyng but vppon his payne. (CW 12, 65/3--6)

Anthony replies to Vincent's objections by insisting that the two forms of prayer do not have equal merit:

For in tribulacion which commeth you wot well in many sondry kyndes / any man that is not a dull best or a desperat wretch, callith vppon god, not houerly [lightly] but right hartely, & settith his hart hole vppon his request / so sore he longeth for ease & helpe of his hevynes. (CW 12, 65/17--21)

He gives the example of the martyrs who made no long prayers aloud: "but one ynch of such a prayour so prayd in that payne, was worth an hole ell & more evyn of their own prayours prayd at some other tyme" (66/6--8). The greatest of Christ's own prayers were those he made "in his grete agony & payne of his bitter passion" (67/2--3).

kitty TV

two cats
leap towards the window,
i look to see--
a tree-climbing squirrel!
whoda thunk it?

Better Living thru Poetry

Looking forward to Monday, which is when Cal and Ham of Bone and I will make our annual appearance at a leftist college bar on campus. Monday's are the amateur poetry night, and our long-standing tradition is that Bone reads some of my ultra-conservative poetry in a New England accent. He plans on letting himself go for the next few days in order to get a scruffy look for maximum effect.

A couple years ago he read something in praise of Alan Keyes and surprisingly we had someone come up afterwards and say he was an Alan Keyes fan too. So you never know.

“Prego” is an Italian word that wears a veil of secrecy. Italians say it all the time, but no one knows what the heck it means. Americans have heard it from the Pasta Sauce. According to our textbook, it means “to pray” or “to beg” or “you’re welcome,” but that’s mere tomfoolery. It doesn’t mean anything, and it also means everything, or something in between those two...I, however, may have found its English clone a few days ago, and I believe it’s “Dude.” The word “Dude” is surely the most versatile word in the English language. “Dude” can be shaped into various masterpieces of expression by the mere inflection of one’s voice. One can adopt it for interjectional shock: “Dude!”; or while nodding unconsciously to another’s incoherence, “Dude”; or for a strange interrogative, “Dude?” Or for manifesting a content, relaxing sigh, “Duuude.”... At breakfast, this word came in handy... “Prego!” I said to the [milk] spillage, pointing to it condemningly, as I looked to the nun for her professorial approval. She shook her head despairingly and said that even with the forgiving, ecumenical use of that word, somehow I still had managed to use it badly. She recommended, “Ecco”...Nonetheless, I acted rightly. To cloak one’s stupidity, one must publicize it. It is counter-intuitive and deceptive. The best way to hide something is to make it obvious.

- Remus of "Vestal Morons"

Don't dance with headphones (attached to the computer) on. Headphones are a subtle eugenics program for people like me.

- Diedre of "Give Tongue"

Given the contempt unleashed even against men who describe themselves, not as "gay" but as being same-sex attracted, but still committed to a chaste live through Christ...I can understand the reticence. The insistence of reducing human beings to their temptations when it comes to this issue is disheartening...What does it mean to be "saved" anyway, except that a Christian is no longer defined that way, but is, instead, defined as a new creature in Christ? That, I think, is a good way of thinking about what Paul says in Romans 6: "For sin is not to have any power over you, since you are not under the law but under grace." I actually remember the exact moment I understood that passage. I was teaching a baptismal preparation class, and going over that chapter. I stood there, silent for a moment, looking quite strange to the young parents in the room, I'm sure. But they would have been silent, too, if they'd seen what was happening: chains fallling to the ground.

- Amy Welborn

Being a Catholic and averse to Scripture I never read the book of Job until some time in the last two years. But I will always remember the feeling that washed over me when I read that profound and unexpected and impassioned cry of faith, such that tears sprung to my eyes. This cry that erupted from the depths of Job’s soul, that flies in the face of all of the logic of the world, was, I knew, exactly the sort of childish faith that Christ talked about in the Gospels, when he encouraged men to be like little children. This truth touches something so fundamental in the soul that it cannot possibly be described, only experienced. It is interesting then, that, just as Christ entered the world as a lesson in and as a fulfillment of these words of Job, naked in the manger, and exited it in the same way, naked on the cross, so too did St. Francis enter and leave this world, free from attachment to all things but the Creator of all things.

- Romulus of "Vestal Morons"

Predestination, for the saints of Christendom, was God's concern and not theirs. The business of the saints was satisfying their all-consuming thirst for union with God and the removal of ALL barriers to that union.

- Jeff of "Hallowed Ground"

Even if Miers turns out to be the second coming of Scalia, which I doubt very much, the reasons and the process by which she was chosen will still have a negative impact on the legal side of the conservative movement. From here on out, judicial conservatives and academics will always be mindful that participation in the Federalist Society or the expression of strong opinions may very well be an automatic disqualifier for the federal bench. Better to keep quiet and avoid associating with those who have made their feelings known if you hope to go very far. Such a development is not only bad for the conservative movement but for the health of the Republic as well... if the only people nominated to the highest court in the land are those who throughout their careers have successfully managed to hide their true beliefs and avoid associating with those who don’t then we will end up with a court of cowards and opportunists.

- blogger at "Southern Appeal" via JCurley of "Bethune Catholic"

IT'S A MIRACLE! Your Pastoral Coach was listed as THE #1 religious blog in the world!!! [via "Truth Laid Bear"]... How did I go from last to first in one weekend?...(The truth is, I work in IT, so I had a suspicion that there was a coding glitch somewhere..., but it was fun to fantasize...) Now, this list in TLB has been working well for quite some time. It didn't move my blog from 4,000 to 3,000, but to #1, making it VERY visible. This didn't happen when I was talking about organic coffee or the last Notre Dame game. It happened when I was talking about how St. Therese so lovingly interceded for my father, and how God was so lovingly moved to miraculously heal him. Could it be that she wanted many people to see this?

- Hector of "Pastoral Coach", on a TLB coding glitch

There is a story about St. F[rancis] de S[ales] that he was counselling a particularly nuts-making woman. She would go on and on and on, and the good Saint is said to have worn deep finger-shaped grooves under his desk, gripping the table in his effort to keep from responding in impatience to her. There's no end to that story that I know; we don't know if she became a saint, but at the least my money is on him overcoming his frustration, to glorify the Lord.

- Therese Z of "Exultet"

The [Jehovah Witness at the door] started out with the Natural Disasters In The News Gambit: wildfires in Oregon, hurricanes of course. Things go wrong in the world; do you think they'll ever be better? I suppose a question designed to get the listener involved, but...I saw his disasters and raised him a Resurrection. I didn't yet know they were JWs, but with TRACTS and leather-bound stuff, I figured it was a religious call. "Yep, things *will* get better - at the end of time after the Resurrection, there'll be a "new heavens and a new earth"... That was a major deviation from the script and seemed to put me in the apologetics driver's seat (yes, it's a cornucopia of metaphors today!).

- Bill of Summa Minutiae, on a visit from the JWs

All this opulence in the heart of a Christian country like ours kinda reminds me of C.S. Lewis’ observation about how much a Christian should give to charity. He didn’t use a percentage formula, opting instead to say that, if a person’s giving didn’t cause him at least a small degree of discomfort or want, then it probably isn’t enough.

- Eric of "Daily Eudemon"

You'd be surprised how ingenious male dogs, and female dogs in heat, can be when it comes to sex. I've read of a mating which took place through a chain-link fence ! Female dogs happily scrunch, and male dogs happily climb, to reduce the impact of a size discrepancy. Witness the Great Dane breeder I read of, who caught her neighbor's Miniature Daschund trying his luck with her in-season females ! (She caught him before they had worked out the logistics..but they were trying !)

- Donna Lewis on Bill Luse's blog

As to the mating game, we're getting to the point where I'm in possession of more information than I really need.

- Bill, reacting to Donna's comment

Provocative...

...post from Jeff Culbreath on Thomas Jackson the Good.

I like how Jeff goes where others fear to tread. Part of my fascination is due to fascination with Stonewall. One of the best biographies I ever read was James Robertson's "Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend".

As for the differences between Catholic and Protestant saints, I haven't read enough (e.g. nearly zero) Protestant hagiographies in order to perceive differences, but I did find this from Fischer's "Albion's Seed", concerning the Puritans:

The Puritans of Massachusetts shared [a] feeling of insecurity in an exaggerated degree because of their theology. Their Calvinist faith was one of the most harsh and painful creeds that believing Christians have ever inflicted upon themselves. One New Englander described this dark philosophy as a “bitter pill in a chestnut burr.” The fabled “Five Points” of New England’s Calvinist orthodoxy insisted that the natural condition of humanity was total depravity, that salvation was beyond mortal striving, that grace was predestined only for a few, that most mortals were condemned to suffer eternal damnation…The people of Massachusetts were trained by their ministers never to be entirely confident of their salvation. From childhood, they were taught to believe that a sense of certainty about salvation was one of the surest signs that one was not saved.

What An Accurate Quiz!

Which Blogger Are You?

You scored as T.S. O'Rama. You blog at http://poncer.blogspot.com.

There are two quiz questions:

1) What is your name?
2) What is your URL?

This has got to be the most accurate quiz of all time! It actually returned my own name and URL! (I provided the photo.) Techology is amazing.

The Saint at the First Vatican Council

Years ago I read a book on the papacy written from a progressive point of view; the author obviously disliked the doctrine of papal infallibility as promulgated during that Council. What the author didn't mention in his history was that a saint was present and urged his fellow prelates to adopt the doctrine. His name? St. Anthony Claret. His feast day is coming up on Oct. 24.

I searched for more. What did he say to his fellow prelates?:

The truth of papal infallibility would be clear to all men if Scripture were understood. And why is it not? For three reasons. The first, as Jesus told Saint Teresa, is that men do not really love God. The second, that they lack humility. It is written: 'I confess Thee Father Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hidden these truths from the wise and those prudent according to the world, and revealed them to the humble.' Third and finally, there are some who do not wish to understand Scripture—simply because they do not wish the good.

He also seemed a man ahead of his time with respect to catechisis:

That the whole prospect of the forthcoming Council filled the saint's mind with excitement is no surprise. For all his humility and simplicity, Monsignor Claret was a brilliant theologian. He was greatly concerned with, and had written a book about, preserving the splendors of the Church. Moreover, he had worked on many catechisms and written several himself. It was his burning hope that the Council would take up the matter of approving a catechism for the universal Church, and, in fact, he had one of his own to propose for that purpose. So the holy man busied himself in the months before the Council with preparatory study and research.

Six thousand bits of language fell
like hubcaps on the floor
clink-clanking in their earnestness
ding-danking voices sore.

And parrying they wondered thus and
wandered to and fro,
while silently he held his wick
his candle all aglow.

The saint amid prognosticators
and when he rose to speak
he blazed like old Elijah did
and strengthened all the weak.

Despite Our Differences...

...we have so much in common. And so here's my inspirational post of the day:

I'm in the line at the cafeteria and there's a young black woman serving up the spaghetti. She is attractive and has large eyes, even Egyptian-ish, and though I don't see how that's relevant to this post I thought I'd proffer it anyway, so's you can get a visual. She asks if I want a side order and I say yes, I'll have the succotash. "Sufferin' succotash" that is. And she breaks out in a large grin and says that she remembers that cartoon too! And I say that I didn't think she was old enough to have seen that cartoon (I'm such a charmer, ain't I?). And she beams and tells me she's 24 tomorrow, (as if she's much older than I think) and I think, "sister, that is young". At least to a 42-year old. But what's cool is that you'd think a middle-aged white guy and a young black woman would have little in common, at least as far as experiences, religion, politics, etc.. But we do, thanks to the miracle of cartoons. And so, now back to my regularly scheduled blog...

A Last Douthat Excerpt

Before I forget, I wanted to post the ending of Ross Douthat's book "Privilege":

Ours is the privilege that comes with belonging to an upper class grown large enough to fancy itself diverse; fluid and competitive enough to believe itself meritocratic; smart enough for intellectual snobbery but not for intellectual curiosity.

Such privilege is wonderfully self-sustaining. It brings just enough wealth and success and education to keep us floating safely above the "simple" idealisms of family, faith, and flag, yet not so much that we are tempted into the extremes of the older upper classes, with their taste for flagrant decadence or philosophic austerity. Not for us the zealous piety of the medievals, the enlightenment enthusiasms of the eighteenth century, or the imperialist adventures of the Victorians - and not for us the blowback that such enthusiasms risked, the religious wars and revolutions, the strife of decolonization. Our politics are moderate, our religious zeal nonexistent, our sex lives promiscuous but always safe...

I have never braved danger, never feared for my life; the wars of my country are fought by other men. My Catholic faith is real, but so is my worldliness; I seek the approval of men far more than the favor of God. I chose journalism, with its traces of romance, over business, but I had no aptitude for the later anyway, and my thirst for wealth and achievement is as great as any of my classmates.

Special Bush Nominee Plain Brown Wrapper


~ Kids, hide your pro-life vice with this! Only .99, while supplies last! ~

Known pro-lifers need not apply for SCOTUS: Like 40-ouncers in the alley, you can have 'em but just don't be too obvious about it.

UPDATE: Well, There Is One Litmus Test...

Concerning potential Supreme Court nominees, the President has said that there is no litmus test regarding how they view of abortion. Which is true, but there is a defacto litmus test: the nominee can never have publically opposed Roe v. Wade.

Okay, the Non-Fictional Toronto Trip Log

Anecdotes & Observations

Hit a used bookstore. Pleasant chat with the owners; they recommend a nearby Greek restaurant and as I walk out I ask, "not too expensive right? Just moderate?" and she smiles and says, "oh you Americans have plenty of money!". "So they say" I say.

*

Mass today. Homilist quite good, quotes the poet Auden. Talks about how we usually think of love between a man and woman as having an infatuation phase and a "realistic" phase, the former seeing too much in a person. But Auden argued that the infatuation stage was more accurate, more realistic, because we are seeing with the eye of God, Reality Himself. When we see what they are capable of becoming - little less than angels - we then realize that thinking too well of people is more accurate in the long run than thinking less of them.

*

I have the spa (what they call a hottub) to myself and it's medicinal for my sore, sore legs. Walked all o'er the city, saw wonderous cathedrals, visited an old housing district ("the only street in Toronto that shows how working class neighborhoods might've looked a century or more ago"). Pictures say more than words sometimes and the art in these Cathedrals held a radiance and inspiration. Seeing St. Thomas in the pantheon around Christ's mosaic sacred heart, it melted my heart, it made me realize anew that these apostles, though heroes, were ordinary Joe's - that was the point! They were nobodies till Somebody loved them. And the readings at Mass today were powerful. We were meant to be good because it reflects on our Maker and God is a maker of quality; his Word will not come back empty. We are his wine, his vintage, just as He is our Wine.

*

At the Cathedrals I visited there were many adorers who were Phillipinian women. Their piety is obviously exceptional, may their tribe increase. I don't want to look at the state of the Faith in the Philipines for fear of discouragement. As we see the European nations fall in faith in their post-war affluence, it's hard not to assume the Philipines are next.

*

Torontoans are nothing if not patient. No wonder they're content to wait six months for an MRI. I sit in traffic on a Sunday for 45 minutes to go 3 miles. The worst part was not knowing if the 45 minutes would be 2 hours. But I consoled myself with two thoughts: if there's a better route, the natives would know it and there's got to be some natives in this large group. Second, if they can wait, so can I. And truth be told the wait was wonderful. There were multiple classical music stations playing wonderful music and the AM dial was chockful of interesting programs. I listened to Camile Paglia on poetry and might've paid for the privilege.

*

I like the idea of being more profligate with this gift of time - part of me wants to sit all day outside the hottub, in the still warm sun, where a bevy of books and comfortable patio furniture await. And yes a beer or two. The patio seems to be mostly deserted. People are probably going to Toronto, like I did today. I like the idea of unaccounted time until, that is, I'm faced with it, and then I'm restless and
think: I may never be here again and what self-respecting traveler passes up a day in Toronto? I feel ashamed for heading back to the hotel at the tender hour of 3pm. And oh was it nice to sleep or lie in bed from 10 (early due to last eve's Oktoberfest) to a leisurely 8:30am, not bothering to shave or shower.

*

Days off with plenty of time makes me feel sort of Bill White-ish, with an urge for a smoke and to catalog something: my books or CDs, or maybe it's just a longing for order, like his clean, well-lit blog and Liturgy of the Hours steadiness. My affection for the city grows in part due to three factors: 1) beer 2) I'm on vacation 3) beer. I'm even tempted to buy a Toronto t-shirt, the sort of identification with this cold-climated British city that this hot-blooded Irishman couldn't have imagined. Okay, so I'm easy.

*

One false note: One of the grandest Toronto churches, St. Paul's, proudly displays a Catholic diocesan paper filled with anti-Bush propaganda, which, I suppose, was amusing if only for its lack of subtly. The front cover shows the White House deluged with water with the headline "An Incompetent President is Humbled". The ol' schadenfreude meter went off bigtime. And inside there is a long article - get this -by Michael Moore. Yep, that Michael Moore.

*

Caught a 30 minute panel discussion titled "Uncle Sam vs. US" in which two journalists and the Canadian ambassador to the US discuss the state of US/Canada relations.

I was surprised by the level of honesty and humility displayed: they pointed out that there are many Canadians - including themselves - who have a psychological need to tear the U.S. down in order to feel better about themselves. The idea being to raise the status of themselves by lowering the status of a "higher", although that's pretty debatable. They admitted that they were insensitive in the wake of 9/11, not having a memorial service until a week later, a beat in front of Germany (said with the inflection that Canada should be a far greater friend than Germany). They also agreed that the government had sixteen positions on Iraq and that's not helpful in an ally. They said they should've just said they can't be with the U.S. in the very beginning.

Of course we are not without sin. They were passionate and outraged concerning their timber industry, saying that we are trying to "bust NAFTA". If we are reneging on our word, our Nafta agreement, than that seems perhaps a worse sin than theirs. One of the journalists said of Canadians, "if you think you're morally superior you're not morally superior."

*

The parable of the Good Samaritan can be interpreted in several ways, one more Pelegian, one more Quietist, and one in the middle. The tendency is to think of it merely as a lesson Jesus teaches: that we should be a good neighbor and be good Samaritans. Another way to view it is that Jesus is the Good Samaritan, binding our wounds, saving us when we were near death at the side of the road, paying for our injuries and leading us to the hospital, the Church. This can induce a Quietist rendering, as if we are just to relax and be merely receivers. But in the parable Christ instructs: "go and do likewise". And that means that we are to be both givers and takers, receivers and givers.

*

The word "Niagra" has pleasant associations of youth: namely Niagra Spray Starch, which my mom used to use. I was walking by the Falls and a bus titled "Le Quebec" rolls up and out pops a group of six or seven fit, well-dressed men in their early to late 70s. They're giddy to see the falls, two of them run towards the lookout, camcorders in hand, hungry for that first look.

*

Saw a couple of Hasidic Jews in the lobby. It's nice to know they're not going to blow anybody up or fly planes into buildings. They were holding High Holy Day services in a conference room just beside the elevator. I heard the wailing of some sort of trumpet and peak in. About two dozen were chanting prayers, reading from their Hebrew books.

A Confused Yankee in Queen Elizabeth's Court

  or "A Dumb Guy Does Canada"

  or "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Our Neighbor to the North"

[Note: The following is fictional. Any similarity to events living or dead is purely coincidental.]

I will try to faithfully record my experiences of Canada, sent here on a business trip. I will try to accurately render her life, her customs, and her Canadianness.

I prepared for the trip by reading copious travel guides and learned that Canada is a large land mass in North America which exports Molson and Moosehead beers.

At the time of the American Revolution, many Tories, also known as Loyalists, came here, which is why to this day Canadians are more loyal than Americans. The cause of the Revolution was pithily stated as "no taxation without representation" despite tax rates well below ten percent. It's not widely known, but Patrick Henry's famous line "Give me liberty or give me death" was originally "Give me liberty to tax myself to death!". Subsequent generations have made his dream come true.

A Traveler's Account of a Day in The Great White North

11:35 am: The customs agent is chatty, asking me where I'm from and how long I'll be staying. I ask where she's from out of politeness though honestly I'm not that interested. I tell her how much I love the Canadian national anthem, how it brings tears to my eyes even though I'm not even Canadian. I began to sing it but she says I should move along since there are other visitors behind me. How like Canadians! Always thinking of others even when they miss out.

12:15pm: I pick up the rental car and I'm going down interstate 427 and suddenly slam on the brakes -- I was going pert near 100mph! I thought: "man, can this car move." Later I found out that they measure miles in kilometers up here and so that pretty much explained why I had tailgaters and honkers the whole time.

12:37pm: Per the directions to the hotel, I'm to take "Queen Elizabeth Way" to "Winston Churchill Blvd". Funny, I didn't know they were Canadians! I learn so
much from travel.

1:32pm: I stop at Wendy's. Everyone looks so darn American here, and they speak it too, but then you give them real money and they give you funny money in change! The people here are friendly here even though I look like a Bush voter. I try to make them feel at ease by saying "Bush is Satan" at frequent intervals. They smile and bond with me and tell me that it's so refreshing to hear an American say so instead of just the Your-a-Peein's.

1:42pm: The weather up here is warm! Not even snow flurries. The weatherman says the high would be 20 today but he's obviously mistaken. It feels more like 70. He's not the only dim bulb in town. I was at the rental car joint and the guy asks me if I'll be staying in Ontario during my stay. Like, duh, I'll be staying in Toronto! You can't make it up folks.

2:14pm: Lake Ontario looks a lot like Lake Michigan which looks a lot like Lake Erie.

2:18pm: Panicky thought: I hope they have real bacon here and not that Canadian bacon shit.

2:20pm-8pm: Slept.

8:12pm: Went to Greek restaurant next door. The appetizer was grapes with grape leaves. They tasted HORRIBLE! I told the waiter: "I must've gotten some bad grapes!" He replied, "Sir, those are olives!". Needless to say, any place that thinks the leaves are the edible part of the grape plant won't get my business.

9:50pm: I stop at a couple gas stations to pick up some beer and they have none. I tease the cashier: "what the hells a fella gotta do to get beer in this country?" and he looked offended, like I'd hurt his national pride or somethin' but I don't see why. I didn't think I was doing nothin' but pointing out the obvious - that beer distribution ain't what Canada's good at. They got lots of other things to be proud of, like John Candy and their national anthem. But noooo, he cops a 'tude and tells me that Canada only sells beer at something called "The Beer Store". When I finally find one, turns out it's not even a drive-thru. Can you beat that with a stick?

Venting

Okay, so the thing that bothers me is the double standard.

There's one standard for conservatives, a different one for liberals.

Liberals don't have to appoint "stealth" candidates - they can hire a Justice Ginsberg who has a plain record of unabashed liberality.

And by affirming Affirmative Action, liberals don't have to necessarily practice it, while conservatives must practice it even though they don't affirm it. It's an odd world. One could wish for a little more truth in advertising on the conservative's side. I'm as perplexed as anyone on how to allow freedom while punishing prejudice but what rankles is the hypocrisy of pretending to be against quotas while having quotas. Is she the best potential Supreme Court nominee or is she simply the best combination of "female" and "stealth"? What do you think?

It's probably disloyal and/or unfair to say, but the gift of the Bush presidency has had a surreal aspect of looking through a lot of manure hoping a horse will turn up. He's better than the alternative would've been, but he's also never met a pork-lined spending bill he didn't like and he's proposed no marketplace solutions to the problem of health care. The war in Iraq, which, although we can't know how history would've played out had Saddam been in charge, hasn't gone well. And finally, in the words of one of the NRO'ers, his presidency was "all about judges, stupid" and so far it's...well...I don't hear any whinneyin'.

The best way to spin it for him is that his presidency became centered on the war on terror and that that sucked all the available oxygen out of the air for other fights. He therefore raised the white flag on judges, spending, health care, social security, etc. And if demographics continue and voting patterns don't change, this might be the last, missed chance for a conservative presidency for quite awhile. Perhaps his plan is to run up the deficits on discretionary spending so the Democrats can't spend it on permanent entitlements. And on judges? Well, maybe he knows more than we do. Time will tell.