Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

Kindle Lines

2012-01-24T13:39:00.005-05:00

I occasionally check the amazon.com reviews of the Kindle. Sometimes cryptic, sometimes near erotic in terms of intensity. Here is a sampling of actual reviews in the past day or two:

I like it for the english titles.
Unfortunately there are no mobi books in greek.

The screen really has ink inside. E-INK!!
Couldn't believe it. It's true technology.

This thing weighs weighs less than anything bound,
short of a passport,
and even that would be probably be a close call.

I just hope I'm not misspeaking on the matter.

The Kindle was a present from my 97 year old mother.

It holds approximately 14,000 books
which is a good amount for me.

Oh blessed Kindle, how long I have waited for you!

I asked for this for Xmas since I'm an advent reader;
never without at least two books in my purse.

A Moving Post...

2012-01-24T10:54:00.007-05:00

... found here. If nothing else, I've learned from the blogosphere how difficult it is to be a mother and homemaker.

Like a psalm it moves from lament to hope:

There really is no "nature" [here] to speak of that doesn't try to kill you and there are very few cultural events. Socializing requires driving all over to individual homes, which can be great but can also get old fast when many of the people you socialize with have lots of children too and you spend the majority of the time waiting on them and/or shielding your kids from learning stuff you don't like and/or talking about kids. (!)

And though this part of the South has it's own charms and benefits, I don't think a day goes by that I don't wistfully yearn for a bit of my past life.... at least.... for a bit of the ""world is your oyster" feeling I used to enjoy and take for granted. There is no glamour in poverty, there is no glamour in the ordinary cities of the south, there is no glamour in motherhood. It's a different kind of place.

*

He told me:

Proverbs 23:18 -- There is surely a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off.

But how?? I asked. And when?? What do I need to to find it again?

Colossians 1:5 -- the faith and love that spring from the hope that is stored up for you in heaven and that you have already heard about in the word of truth, the gospel.

...

Proverbs 24:14-- Know also that wisdom is sweet to your soul; if you find it, there is a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off.

Life and a Mystic

2012-01-23T12:52:00.009-05:00

"Let no one despise your youth." - 1 Tim 4:12

From here:

In sad commemoration of the 1973 Supreme Court decision that paved the way for legalized abortion, the church in the United States has designated today as a day of penance and prayer...It’s interesting to note that the church is calling all of us to repent, not just those who have been directly involved in abortions. It’s a call for all of us to examine our consciences to see how we have contributed to a culture that does not value the dignity of every human person.

* *
The Anchoress below reports on a new Bottum amazon.com single on Tim Tebow. Tebow's "drunkenness on charity" reminds me of Heather King's recent piece on how the rules are not the point of it all. From the Anchoress:

Joseph Bottum, who made a big hit with his Christmas-themed Amazon Single (a short ebook) Dakota Christmas, has published another one, this time on Tebow: The Gospel According to Tim:
Believe in him, I mean: believe that he’s for real. The young man is drunk on charity, in the same way he’s drunk on the endorphins that race through his body during his strenuous daily workouts. In the same way he’s drunk on the excitement of winning and losing football games before roaring crowds. In the same way he’s drunk on what the medieval mystics used to call “the gift of tears,” weeping easily and often. In the same way he’s drunk on his constant conversation with the Lord, referring all his victories and all his losses up to heaven.

Tim Tebow isn’t a Christian theologian. He’s a Christian mystic–intoxicated, as all mystics are, with God. He’s King David, dancing in the joy of his youth before the Ark of the Covenant. There is a theology, certainly, implicit in the prayers Tebow says, the hymns he sings, and the witnessing he performs. But whether he’s able to make it explicit or not, he rarely does. He expects, instead, his sheer fervorous presence and ecstatic deeds–the drunken joy he takes in it all–to do the work for him. He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Is Risk Aversion a Sign of Decline?

2012-01-23T09:02:00.002-05:00

...because we aren't risk averse when it comes to other things like, say, buying balloon mortgages without a downpayment. Anyway, an interesting jotting from the latest National Review:

Our defensiveness, our eagerness to protect the firms and the jobs we have now, is an inevitable reflection of our relative stability and affluence. Societies that believe that their best days are behind them are naturally risk-averse. This dread of change, most vividly illustrated in the fear and loathing of private equity, is the disease of stable societies barreling towards decline. But if America is going to have a bright economic future, we must fight against complacency and nostalgia, and eagerly embrace job destruction as job creation’s necessary twin.

The Subjectivity of Objectivity

2012-01-23T08:49:00.007-05:00

Three perhaps tangentially related items. One is this, found in an article about Dan Quayle In National Review:

Yet [Quayle] can still make news, as he did on December 6, when he endorsed Mitt Romney for president. “He’s a solid conservative, and he’s our best chance to beat President Obama,” says Quayle...it had been in the works for even longer, with Romney phoning Quayle on a regular basis to talk politics. None of the other candidates had even bothered to contact the former veep. “Romney was the only one to ask for my support,” says Quayle.

So one is left to wonder: is the ego-stroking of Quayle the real cause of the endorsement? How many political endorsements are frauds in that either a) the endorser wants something (like a cabinet position) or b) simply like being pitched? (Of course, Quayle's endorsement may be an honest reflection of what he thinks.)

And second, absurdly trivial, note this blurred image taken from a basketball game:

See those circled in red: the player in red is talking to the player in white. The player in red has the ball but is moving his pivot foot without dribbling. This is ostensibly a traveling violation. There are 4 seconds left in the game. The ref is making a motion but I don't know what it means. There was no call, and time was left to expire. The rules are made in service of the game, not the game in service of the rules.

Thirdly, I look almost longingly at the new roll-top desk and it's rich compartmentalization, it's promise of hidey-hole secrets, like faux walls that conceal ornate libraries. I look at it and it's pleasantly symmetrical dimensions, it's early 1900s post-office desk feel, it's sturdy, comforting presence. But it's just a thing, an object, and has no real mass. It's seeming hardness is merely floating molecules.

Kindle DX Review

2012-01-20T17:01:00.000-05:00

Got a kick out of this line:

"Plenty of 60+ readers out there who want the technology, but in a full easy to read adult size, not fiddly, diddly, tiny wee, have-book-must-travel micro-tech!"

That last clause has a lot of syllables.

Seven Long Takes hosted by Reversion Diary

2012-01-20T16:55:00.004-05:00

So the holidays are over and it's back to the daily dull of work, or to put it more positively, a place where we get to find God in the small things of life - the place He loves to hide in plain sight.

I officially subscribe to Heather King's vision of an ecstatic, erotic Christianity while at the same time finding myself often in tune with Tom More, the bad Catholic in "Love in the Ruins" for whom the rules are burdensome, not opportunities to "explode within" as Heather wrote. (I like how Ellyn of "Oblique House" responded to Heather's post: "I'll have what she's having.") King, like Blessed John Paul II, has that spiritual vision that sees things and both have a hopefulness that some would call naive but sometimes impractical is the only practical way to go.

*

Am pleasantly pleased I was able to find not one but THREE very promising novels. Ended up going with "A Sense of the End" by Julian Barnes, but also have another one on deck that makes for compelling & lyrical reading.

*

A chilly, gloomy day. The roads are rain-slicked/ice-slicked, the temperature right around freezing. The highs in Fort Meyers, Florida for this week look like a broken record: 81, 81, 81, 81... Nice temps if you can get 'em.

Haven't done much hiking lately - I'm becoming too detached from the natural world and hope to make up for that this weekend. Not much to look at, given the leafless trees and barren ground, but it's still outside, it still carries with it exercise and charisms of its own.

So the sky is pewter but that's okay. There will be the exhilaration of Florida next Thursday and this is fine farrow ground that the Painter paints in order to provide contrast. Though I don't particularly like the cool air coming off the window and blowing lightly on my neck.

*

I read more of Amy Welborn's frank memoir "Wish You Were Here". Her husband Michael often preached the necessity of being happy regardless of circumstance, of relying on God alone. "Am I making you happy?" Amy would sometimes ask anxiously, and he said that he would be happy even if the unthinkable occurred - her death. "God alone," was his mantra, and one that he preached to her often as if in preparation for the awful event of her widowhood. I felt a bit guilty, seeing how I so often see happiness as utterly dependent on circumstance. But while there's breath there's hope, and so I will not be discouraged. I refuse the 'broad and easy road" of discouragement!

Ran 2.5 miles yesterday + 1/2 lift and it about kilt me. Running always makes the drink go fonder, and so I relished the double helix of IPA bottles last night. 'Twas fiercely hard to resist a third, but temperance is good.

*

Volunteered for snow removal Sunday at St. J's. Hoped that no snow would come when I signed up - it's a luck of a draw type thing - but it looks like we're getting snow both today and Saturday. So earlier to church on Sunday.

Liberals & Conservatives Agreeing

2012-01-18T16:03:00.004-05:00

Like cats and dogs living together!

(I'm speaking of the right and left agreeing on the demerits of SOPA.) More via Roz.

Must be serious 'cuz Wikipedia took itself down. To tune of American Pie (the song, not the movie):

I met a girl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news
But she just smiled and turned away
I went and surfed to a wiki page
Where I’d read some good stuff days before
But the man there said the 'net wouldn’t play
And in the streets the children screamed
The lovers cried and the poets dreamed
But every link was broken...

James Wolcott's Lucking Out

2012-01-17T14:02:00.005-05:00

Spent much of Monday afternoon curled up with a good Kindle. Doesn't have the same ring, 'eh? I was reading James Wolcott's memoir of Pauline Kael and life in '70s New York. His prose is electric and often poetic. It's pretty amazing he can write like that for such a sustained burst. There's certainly a reason he makes a living doing it. Funny thing is I'd never head of him before; I simply thought that I'd like to learn more about what it was like living in Manhattan during the '70s.

Some excerpts:

The dance critic Deborah Jowitt had the fine-boned fortitude of a frontier settler with eyes forever fixed on future horizons;
__

The classical music critic Leighton Kerner, with his stooped posture and ever-present briefcase, resembled a sad pachyderm covering Willy Loman’s old rounds.
__

Office renovation removed private sanctuaries for a more open cubicle layout that allowed greater visibility for frank exchanges of differing opinions that could be overheard the length of the floor, depending on wind conditions.
__

A lesson it would take me a while to learn was that nothing makes writers happy for very long, there are always ravens pecking on the roof.
__

I don’t regret my days in gladiator school. Having your ego slapped around a bit helped the blood circulate and would prove a superb conditioning program for a future sub-career in blogging, where a tough hide would come in handy every time the Hellmouth opened. Every time I’m abused online with a battery of scurrilous remarks of a personal nature, I’m able to let them bounce off like rubber erasers, having been called an asshole by professionals, experts in the field.
__

I was too untutored in the art of deference, oblivious to the danger signs, and lackadaisical in the time-honored mime of looking busy when there was a significant lull in the action.
__

Pauline agreed with Nabokov’s contention that sentimentality and brutality were the flip sides of a subservient mind.
__

De Niro’s entrance into the Little Italy bar to the sound of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” one of the great character intros in movie history, the rest living up to its kinetic promise, a film in which Catholic guilt earned its own dressing room.
__

In the Blue Bar there were no table bells to ring, leaving you sitting stranded, making little hand wriggles to attract the attention of waiters who struck neoclassical poses at the bar like chipped pieces of statuary, to borrow an image from the novelist Anthony Powell.
__

Her sexual forthrightness was the flip side of the pickup-artist swagger Pauline found so amusing, and here she was, seated on the edge of Pauline’s bed in the Royalton, looking up at me with licky eyes, as if I were that night’s barbecue special, or was that my tropical imagination?
__

In her review of West Side Story, she talked about the unendurable vexation of dating someone whose movie tastes you didn’t share. “Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider,” she wrote.

A Diary By Any Other Name....

2012-01-17T08:47:00.006-05:00

Reading a bit of "Sex and the Soul", an expose of the sordid state of the college hookup culture and how spirituality and religion fit in (or don't, as the case may be). The thing that comes out loud and clear is that evangelicals take religion & spirituality seriously while those at Catholic colleges don't. But I came across a line in Marcus Grodi's "Journeys Home" about how a convert slowly became convinced that God's not as limited as we think He is by individual and institutional weakness. But not sure "Sex and the Soul" is particularly helpful in improving my sense of hopefulness!

*
Work came briefly to a halt while I awaited an answer from someone in another area. So I listened to a payday Friday company radio show. It's interactive; you can instant message responses and naturally I always try to be clever enough to get a mention on air. They were talking technology but got off on a tangent about this ugly (in my view) Russian hat one of the speakers was wearing. They asked the listeners if anyone knew what type it was, and I said, "a chastity enforcing hat". No comment from the hosts on that, naturally. My other response was about Bob, a guest who was late to the gate and was scheduled to speak about new technology finds at a trade show in Vegas. I said he was, "broke and hungover". Not especially funny but I figure you throw enough out there something will schtick. No mention on that one either.

*
So the bitter season of cold arrives. On the bright side - literally - it's noticeably brighter outside. We've had a fine run of mild weather, and I'm mildly pleased that there wasn't more snow today (we got merely a dusting). We've certainly had the easiest winter - so far! - I can recall more or less ever. But the temp has dropped like Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon: down to 17 from a relatively balmly 42.

The barren trees wave in the wind while I listen to appropriate music: "Hildegard of Bingen" by "O Ecclesia". Very Middle Ages-ish. Early music is bereft of extraneous instrumentation much like the scene outside is bereft of leaf or ornamentation.

*

Odd website of "anarchist, feminist Christian" who seems obsessed with boobs. I assume it's a variant of that feminist obsession with vaginas, as prompted by the play "The Vagina Monologues". She's interesting though; is studying theology which makes her intrinsically interesting. Not a Scott Hahn fan but is reasonable enough not to want to come off as snobby, just saying he doesn't seem to have scholarly credentials.

*
Spent a couple hours and finished "Open City". I'm getting better at reading novels, a dubious skill at best. I've reverted back to the days of the late '80s and early '90s when I fairly regularly consumed them: Dickens, Updike, Laurie Colwin etc... Now I'm reading them at a much more rapacious rate, at least by my standards.

"Open City" is a post-modern novel, a stream of consciousness, and therefore plotless. Which doesn't bother me much - plot is bonus. I read not for characterization but for the poetry of the thing. And this had much poetry as many reviewers point out. But it also had a real tinge of sadness throughout which some reviewers also mentioned. A mixed bag: a lot of beauty but too many downbeat notes. Cole wrote so movingly of going to a concert of Mahler's Ninth Symphony that it gave me a real hunger to experience a classical music concert again. It's been so long! Arguably the main character of the book is the city itself, New York City, with all it's gaudy, familiar-unfamiliar beauty.

Now I get to pick another read! I'm thinking maybe "White Teeth" by Zadie Smith. Or finish up the re-read of Percy's "Love in the Ruins". A re-try of "Swamplandia" is possible too.

*

Got sidetracked during prayer - or maybe not - when I thought of the poor Rupperts, a family of 11 shot by an uncle in Hamilton, Ohio in 1975. Hearing about that was one of the scariest and awfulest things of my youth. It occurred to me that I should pray for the victims and perpetrator, neither of which I can ever recall doing. Through the magic of the 'net, I found the current owner. It takes some gumption to buy a house where you can still see the bloodstains in the basement ceiling. There's also the obligatory rumors of it being haunted.

Sometimes I wonder how ex-spy Robert Hannsen is doing in his solitary confinement in a Colorado maximum security prison. He's there with Islamic terrorists who are said to often scream, cry, or pray. I wonder if he's making any progress spiritually. The former Opus Dei member still has his wife faithfully praying for him. I just wonder how he deals with life so radically changed.

*
The truck, despite never getting much use, still manages to break down in myriad ways. The emergency brake is sticking now, and we were going to try to fix it ourselves (if we could) in the 18 degree weather and so we got out there, couldn't find the jack easily (i.e. without removing the spare, it seemed) and so we said, 'let's take it to the shop". Thank God. A couple months ago squirrels had set up a nest under the hood and eaten the transmission wires, so that was costly. Truck is starting to seem more trouble than it's worth. Anyway, feel like I dodged a bullet in not having to deal with it today.

*

Two Hearted ale does a heart good.

*
They say only 10% of Catholics regularly confess their sins, and of the 10% I wonder how many confess sins of omission. I'd say less than one tenth of 1%. Dreamt I was waiing in line at a big McDonald's where I'm going to confess my sins to the Pope! Only the ground rules are a bit different (besides the odd location)...he's requesting every penitent preach a homily.

*

Already feeling the want of a new novel. Continued my search; many candidates but after "interviewing" many (by reading the first chapter) I found most wanting. I started off with the list of best novels of 2011, then 2010, according to WaPo and the NY Times and such. I've gotten extremely lucky with the last four novels I've read, by Arthur Philips, Jeffrey Eugenides and Teja Cole.

It looks like the last remaining novelistic survivors include "The Sense of an Ending" by Julian Barnes and Michael Houellebecq's "The Map and the Territory".

This minutiae brought to you by Nike, where the slogan is "Just Read It!"

*
Non-fiction wise I'm reading Scott Hahn's academic journal on the nature of biblical inspiration. It's a series of essays by authors known and unknown. Occasionally heavy, needlessly convoluted and/or repetitious, it's something I'm reading for the gem-like line here or there. Gotta kiss a lot of frogs, as they say.

*
The world is my oyster, goes the line and sometimes I feel the Kindle world is my library. Still, the one book I feel hunger to read, May Sarton's "Recovering", is unavailable on Kindle. I'll have to wait for it to be delivered or maybe see if it's at the library. Speaking of which, check out this near erotic love of libraries written by a blogger I follow:

"No matter how many times I visit the library, the premise of it continues to slay me. I can walk into an architecturally interesting building and I can read the books from here for free. FOR FREE. I can indiscriminately tug titles from shelves, read the inner flap -- or not -- and make a stack in my arms. And then I can scan them in a way that thrills my inner 9-year-old who must have, must have, played librarian at some point, take them home, rub my eyeballs all over them and then return them. Libraries. My god. A girl could lose her mind."

*
Went to store to pick up beer and cereal, the two main staples of my diet. Call them the irreplaceables. Weather is overcast as a working day is long but I listen to jazz, the music of choice. It's just so damn cheerful! Less kind souls might call it "elevator music" but I call it music to lift one's spirit on a cloud-full day! Ohioans for jazz.

*
I think this weekend was the beer tasting at the Columbus convention center. Ach, I forgot, but I think it was Saturday at 7:30 and I was shortly thereafter watching a pro football game (Denver-Pats) that turned immediately into a route, the way cotton candy immediately dissolves in your mouth upon contact. Steph said that she doesn't enjoy football too much because it makes her anxious. Indeed. And you got to watch a lot of games before you get the pay-off, that transcendent game that seemingly transfigures existence around it. I felt that after last weekend's Pittsburgh/Denver match-up. There was something so satisfying about the unlikely result, the achingly symbolic win of good guy Tebow over bad boy Big Ben. It felt a proxy for the war we're all in, the war of good against evil, and it's a spur to the virtue of hope to see good win once in awhile.

*
"All American Muslim" is one those "reality" shows and I've found it compulsively watchable. The original reality show, Survivor", I found unwatchable, but since then reality television has gone to interesting places, like in the swamps of Louisiana ("Swamp People"), a fishing boat in Alaska ("Hook, Line and Sisters") and now the Dearborn, MI Muslim community.

*
Mostly lazy day, yesterday's off day for MLK. Went to church in the a.m. and afterwards slumped into the recliner and leisurely read the newspaper on Kindle while sipping java. Purblind bliss. Also read a fine blog post by Steve Gershom that linked to a riveting section of "Surprised by Joy" by C.S. Lewis...

*

One of the mundane activities is getting one's hair cut. Interesting talk though from Barb the barber. Her daughter-in-law got in a fight with her son over a trivial matter on Christmas Day. She (the daughter-in-law) calls the police, the police arrest her because she left fingermarks on his face. She has to spend Dec 25th, 26th in jail because of the federal holiday. It feels of poetic justice, and yet force & punishment are not the answer. When D. (the daughter-in-law) was a child, her mother used to hit her in the face when she misbehaved and it seemed to have absolutely no impact on her then or now. We see also in criminals how such a high percentage of them complain of being innocent. Crime doesn't pay, but neither does punishment. It seems to me the reason to have jails is for protection of others rather than for purposes punitive. Purgatory without sorrow for sin is meaningless, but with sorrow is extraneous... similarly prison. Or so from my perspective.

Rss Roundup

2012-01-13T15:07:00.006-05:00

These two posts in my feed were appropriately bundled together, one from Maureen in Dayton and the second from Ralph Waldo Emerson, hopefully in Heaven:

Sigh

2012-01-12T09:12:00.004-05:00

Re: "I will insist on a military so powerful no one would think of challenging it." - Mitt Romney

Sheesh Louise, we already spend more than the rest of the world combined.

Sheesh Louise, we've just fought in two decade-long wars.

Sheesh Louise, I think the secret to voting cheerfully is to not pay too much attention to what candidates say.

Much Ado, Perhaps

2012-01-11T16:02:00.003-05:00

I'm becoming increasingly skeptical of the old Latin adage "Lex orandi, lex credendi", especially in the context of the "for the many" controversy in the words of consecration.

And now I see Friar Minor writes of the poverty and ineffectuality of words, at least compared to the Word:

I decided to pray one of the new Mass forumularies for the dead this morning, offering the Mass for the the recently deceased father of one of the friars. Requiescat in pace.

After Mass I was thinking about how the prayers seemed like an improvement, and how they were more supplicative and contained less presumption about the deceased having already arrived at the beatific vision. But you know what? When I went back and looked at the old prayers, they weren't much different. I thought I would be writing a post about how the new prayers better recognized continued purification after death and the need to pray for the dead on their continued journey to the fullness of salvation. I was going to sing the praises of the new translation, saying that it would help restore a pastoral consciousness of the Last Things. As it turned out, there wasn't much in the old prayers to accuse them of failing in these things.

So I guess one has to say that the widespread error of presumption with regard to the state of the departed after bodily death is not the fault of the liturgy, or at least of the liturgy as the Church presents it...

A Hodge-Podge of Discontinued Items

2012-01-11T15:10:00.002-05:00

Hambone called yesterday to tell me he was about to go on John Corby's 610AM radio show. The subject was "car stories" and he proffered one on the time he ran over a brick which put a hole in his floorboard, right under his feet, and how subsequently, dressed for church and in a hurry, ran over a puddle with sprayed 2-3 gallons of water on him. Only faux paus in the telling was that he was asked if he still went to church and said, contradictorily, "I went home, because I had to play guitar at church." Turns out "home" was actually "on"; he'd lapsed into his southern accent. Tries to get fancy and ends up ponc'ing himself.

*

Wasted too much time the other day watching the Republican debate (their voices cascaded over my brain like rushing water, allowing me not to have to think for awhile), thus getting up later than normal which caused me to miss the Byzantine liturgy that I often irrationally crave. Christ is Christ and He is present under both liturgies. But it was nice to have these last Christmas songs even if they felt akin to Christmas in July: The First Nowell, as they spelled it, "What Child is This?" and "We Three Kings". (The Byzantine service eschews Western carols.)

*

Megabus rolls by, with enticing destinations emblazoned on its side: "Cleveland", "Ann Arbor", etc... I wonder how far I have to go to encounter foreignness. One city over? One state over? One region of the country over? One country over? One hemisphere over? One world over? I'll settle for Indianapolis Art Museum. Soon.

*

What a pleasing game Sunday afternoon: Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos defeating Big Ben and the Steelers. It was storybook as everyone knows by now: 80-yard td on first play in O/T. With Tebow, besides his Christian faith, he seems an underdog. Plus the string of last second "Tebow time" victories really get your attention. But now the seemingly insurmountable hurdle of mighty Tom Brady and the New England Patriots looms. It's hard to see a scenario where the Broncs don't get their asses kicked, the Peter principle in action. But of course I'll watch the game. As someone at worked mentioned, even when Tebow's a flop, it's entertaining. The NFL's got to love it.

Evolution of Nigerian Scams

2012-01-09T09:03:00.004-05:00

I'm always interested in the latest advances of scamology, and it seems some are getting shorter, more to the point, and even show a taste for irony ("Born is dead"):

Attn: we are sorry to inform you of Mr. Allen Born's death this late. Although you might have not know that your name is written on Mr. Allen Born’s WILL; the reason for this late notification, as Allen Born’s dead, a lot of fake claims have been showing up. For more details as regards to this issue respond. Thanks, Barr Peter Morris.

Still, capitalizing "will" is a dead giveaway.

The Humility of God

2012-01-09T09:01:00.005-05:00

"Why lies he in such mean estate / where ox and ass are feeding?"

The above, sung at church Sunday, reminded me of Scott Hahn's offering in "The Letter and the Spirit" arguing that the humility of Scripture ought be recognized more, that just as Christ was rejected, looked down upon and a stumbling block, so too will Scripture, dressed as it is in humble language (the Greek often not up to par) and with difficulties abounding.

Here are excerpts from volume 6 of Scott Hahn's The Letter and the Spirit:

I should first summarize what constitutes “the humble style of biblical language.” By this I mean those less-than-appealing features of the Word that represent stumbling blocks to a belief in the Bible’s divine perfection. For instance, one thinks of Scripture’s frequent use of anthropomorphisms and anthropopathisms to speak of God, who is otherwise said to be “spirit.” Many have scorned these as the crude conceptions of an uncultivated people. One could also point to Scripture’s unpolished diction and grammatical solecisms, features that make the Word off-putting to educated minds with more refined literary tastes. So too, its penchant for hyperbole and poetic license and approximation fails to captivate those who think that the Bible should have nothing to do with colloquial parlance and speak only with scientific exactitude. Still more scandal is afforded by the numerous alleged discrepancies that make the Bible appear inconsistent with itself, with the documents of ancient history, and with the findings of modern archeology. The collective impression of these “blemishes” causes proud minds to recoil and refuse consent. It is a reminder that unbelief will always remain an option and even the default position of many who find no way to account for Scripture’s apparent lack of sophistication.

*

Recognition of Scripture’s humility invariably raises the question of its purpose. Why should God express himself and his will101 in the humble letter of the Bible? My own conviction is that it invites reason to embrace the knowledge of faith, and that it confronts pride with a summons to intellectual humility. The humility of the Word first of all represents a challenge to the supremacy of reason in the apprehension of reality. Reason, we are prone to forget, has inherent limitations with which one must come to terms. Not only is the intellectual faculty incapable of demonstrating the mysteries of faith disclosed through revelation, but it is also incapable of discovering the plans and purposes of God in history. This is a serious handicap when it comes to interpreting the Bible. It is not that we should retreat into fideism in our study of Scripture, but that we should avoid the irrationality of pure rationalism. One can say that reason functions properly when it accepts its limitations and acknowledges that there are questions it cannot answer.

*

I believe that the humble expression of the Word invites us to be healed of intellectual arrogance. This is obviously related to the foregoing comments about reason and its limits. But the fact is that even when faith and reason are working in tandem, the latter is tempted to impose unreasonable restrictions on the former. In the realm of biblical studies, this takes the form of methodological skepticism, otherwise known as “a hermeneutic of suspicion.” Not only does this approach mean that the Bible’s sincerity and truthfulness must be proven before it can be accepted, but that the interpreter stands in a position of judgment over the Word, measuring its claims according to his or her own standards. This is to turn things upside down. The folly of divine condescension urges that we lay aside our hypercriticism and our educated conceit in approaching the biblical Word.

I thought though that it's precisely this humility of "Christ incarnate and Christ inspired", that is of Word and word, that makes His indwelling in me possible, in "mean estate". So the next time I struggle with a seeming contradiction in the Bible I ought simply remember to approach it as indicative of my own hope in salvation.

This & That

2012-01-09T09:00:00.000-05:00

Oh what celestial event is occurring in the Ohio sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, no -- it's the sun! To what do we owe the privilege of this surprisingly strong sun coupled with fifty+ degree temps? Oh. Yeah. Likely global warming. Which means I can't *really* enjoy it, seeing how it's a bug, not a feature (that's assuming humans are contributing to it, concerning which I have no idea). But that's to indulge in the tyranny of the anecdotal; one warm temp does not global warming make. And every so often the stars align to produce freakishly positive weather under the unlikeliest of circumstances, mainly a 50 degree sunny low wind Saturday afternoon in January. As one FB'r put it, "is this Indian winter?" The biggest surprise is that it would coincide with a day off work, given the 2/7ths chance. So this is how southern Tennesseans live? Is this their "winter"? Took advantage of it by jogging a couple miles, walking a couple miles, and then sleep-reading on the back patio under that startling sun.

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There's ever the thrill of finding out what lands next on my Google Reader, and today's gem was a bit by Friar Minor about the epiphany:

"Maybe I notice this every year and forget, or maybe I never caught it before, but it's interesting that Leo the Great, in the Office of Readings today, recommends for our imitation not the magi but the star. 'The obedience of the star calls us to imitate its humble service: to be servants, as best we can, of the grace that invites all men to find Christ.'"

I rather liked that because it soothes the old ache of seeing creation as cold and impersonal, as an evolution-inspired thing. Seeing the created world as God-made lets us not have to wait for supernatural events in order to praise the Lord. The beauty of the sun and trees - those things I can actually SEE - shows me that there is something beyond me, a greatness. It's the rare time that my senses actually work for me instead of against me.

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Am re-reading "Love in the Ruins" by Walker Percy, which included this rather direct dialogue: "You know what's wrong with you? You don't love God, you love p-ssy!" Yes, pretty darn direct. The world in a nutshell: worshiping the wrong thing.

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So finished up the Judy Collins saga. She followed a Heather King arc, though without the Christianity: drank for 20 years, miserable, blackouts, depressed, found rehab, it "took" and she's been sober with respect to both drink and romance, the latter which had been a revolving bed affair. One does get a sense of just how powerful knowledge can be, since she was never told - and had no idea - that it wasn't that she drank because she was depressed, but she was depressed because she drank. After more than a decade of "therapists" who recommended free love in order to help solve the underlying issues that they said provoked her drinking, it was revolutionary to consider the reverse. Turns out some people are just of an addictive bent and thus get bent. Her life did seem to change on a dime with sobriety, beginning with her love life: she met her husband shortly thereafter and they've been together since '78.

Why's My Bookbag (or e-reader equivalent) so Heavy?

2012-01-06T09:49:00.005-05:00

From the novel "Open City" by Teju Cole, which suffers from political correctness and some typically modern, moral obtuseness yet has some vivid images:

sat on one of the hard benches near the listening stations, and sank into reverie, and followed Mahler through drunkenness, longing, bombast, youth (with its fading), and beauty (with its fading). Then came the final movement, “Der Abschied,” the Farewell, and Mahler, where he would ordinarily indicate the tempo, had marked it schwer, difficult.

Most of the group, on the day I went, were women, many with that beatific, slightly unfocused expression one finds in do-gooders.

I have always had a problem with the shoeshine business, and even on the rare occasions when I wished to have my scuffed shoes cleaned, some egalitarian spirit kept me from doing so; it felt ridiculous to mount the elevated chairs in the shops and have someone kneel before me. It wasn’t, as I often said to myself, the kind of relationship I wanted to have with another person.

It’s an expectation that works sometimes, I said, but only if your enemy is not a psychopath. You need an enemy with a capacity for shame. I wonder sometimes how far Gandhi would have gotten if the British had been more brutal. If they had been willing to kill masses of protesters. Dignified refusal can only take you so far. Ask the Congolese.

the way to be someone, the way to catch the attention of the young and recruit them to one’s cause, was to be enraged. It seemed as if the only way this lure of violence could be avoided was by having no causes, by being magnificently isolated from all loyalties. But was that not an ethical lapse graver than rage itself?

It would do little good to describe for him the subtle shades of meaning evoked in an American ear by saying “Jews” instead of “Jewish people.”

I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard.

I made an effort to develop a mind of winter. Late last year, I actually said to myself audibly, as I do when I swear these oaths, that I would have to embrace winter as part of the natural cycle of seasons. Ever since I left Nigeria, I’d had a bad attitude about cold weather, and I wanted to put an end to that.

I was out earlier today to see the Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center. They performed one of the Bach cantatas, the one about coffee....Coffee, coffee, the young woman sang, I simply must have coffee. Three times a day, or I will shrivel up!

his prostatectomy, he had told me, had effectively killed off any sexual urges that had survived the other ravages of old age. But the strange thing he found, he had said at the time, was that this freed him to have more tender and uncomplicated relationships with people.

incessant bereavement [is] one of the hidden costs of a long life.

And a couple from Chesterton essays "In Defense of Sanity":

They are at the same time soft and strong. The smoothness of them has the same meaning as the smoothness of great carthorses, or the smoothness of the beech-tree; it declares in the teeth of our timid and cruel theories that the mighty are merciful.

Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

Lamentations & Exaggerations

2012-01-06T09:48:00.002-05:00

Argh!! What fresh hell is this? It's an all day meeting off-site called "Champion training" that promises to test my sanity. Oh how I've gotten used to the zen of working at my desk. Our new leader, Holly, is peeing on her tree, hell-bent on leaving her mark. She's a big believer and enthusiast of business fads, extrovert that she is.

But I see in my negative reaction to this change the seeds of what is wrong with society in general. Read an interesting piece in Wall Street Journal on the long, slow slide of Kodak, which is on the verge of bankruptcy. You wonder how such a well-respected, profitable company couldn't see the future of digital and adjust accordingly. It's fascinating and sad to see a country, company or individual fail to adapt to changing conditions, and I find it especially compelling given my own difficulty with change.

With our country, I find it hard to believe that we are in this situation debt-wise. It seems like the solution is so simple: spend less than you take in. There's a denial that can set in, denial that our leaders won't NOT do something about it in time. It seems we're drifting towards an abyss that everyone can see, and it's not the abysses you can see that "should" determine fate. It's the unknowns that should be problematic. So just as Kodak, you'd think, would be able to reinvent itself in plenty of time before its current apocalypse, you'd think the U.S. should. Part of the reason Kodak couldn't was said to be the very expensive pension cost of retirees, which sounds suspiciously similar to the problem with America today.

Meh...

2012-01-06T09:10:00.005-05:00

How out of step I feel! Except for Jeff Miller, Jennifer Fulwiler & the Anchoress, this list of top 20 Catholic bloggers seems unremarkable. Missing bloggers include Betty Duffy, Heather King, Darwin Catholic, Steve Gershom, Tom of Disputations, Tim at Catholic Bibles to name just a few. Fr. Z's popularity is ever a source of puzzlement to me, seeming just the conservative version of say, Fr. L. Neither floats my boat.

I Suspected As Much...

2012-01-05T11:30:00.003-05:00

I wondered aloud recently whether we (i.e. Americans) weren't all the 1%, especially by historical standards. But even by current standards many of us are:

It only takes $34,000 a year, after taxes, to be among the richest 1% in the world. That's for each person living under the same roof, including children. (So a family of four, for example, needs to make $136,000.)

Two Links

2012-01-05T08:48:00.009-05:00

Why Simcha Fisher is voting for Romney. I applaud her blogesty (blog + honesty). I'll probably vote for Romney as well; I like RuPaul's anti-war stance but he takes it a bridge too far, sounding at times Michael Moore-ish. (Oh balance, where are thy?) Santorum, by contrast, seems too hawkish and gives little indication that he's learned the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, or the hellish costs. Huntsman has yet to catch fire for whatever reason, perhaps in part because the MSM seems oddly well-disposed to him (Huntsman is more conservative than most think, and I like his anti-torture stance). Gingrich has trouble governing himself which wouldn't bode well for the key leadership position in the federal government. (Plus, as a Midwesterner, I'm congenitally disposed to dislike egotism in others.)

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And a beautiful offering from Fred of Late Papers, who is more concerned with the why of weight loss than the how:

According to Myfitnesspal.com (alias freder1ck), I've logged in 184 days in a row, and have lost 57.5 pounds. I was recently asked how I did this. My first answer (why) is that I've been lucky— I've come up against something that has reordered my desire, made me more reasonable, and strengthened me. My second answer (how) is various: I eat less and exercise more (Catbert); have studied a bit on fitness and overeating (The Culprit and the Cure, Overcoming Binge Eating); use online tools (myfitnesspal, Runtastic app).

People are typically more interested in the how than in the why. However, there's not much of a secret about the how— as Catbert's advice suggests.

What's more interesting to me is the why. To begin with, I noticed that there are many products out there to control appetite, but I recognized that I ate contrary to appetite. I ate when I wasn't hungry and when I was full, and my eating was increasingly disproportionate to my hunger, as if attempting to fill infinite desire with finite matter, or to stop up an infinite desire with finite materials. If the reason for eating is prolonging life, overeating has the opposite impact— an action that betrays an unreasonable attittude.

In 2002, I heard a beautiful song that promised "liberty that Abraham Lincoln could not have given me." This was at the presentation of Luigi Giussani's book The Religious Sense in Atchison, Kansas. In 2007, I attended Spiritual Exercises of Communion and Liberation in Winona, Minnesota, on the theme of "Christ in His Beauty Draws Me to Him." Two points in this weekend fascinated me: 1. instinct is good and 2. instinct is ordered toward totality. As soon as I heard this, I perceived that it would be possible to live in freedom. At the same time, I realized that I would not be content to only lose weight or only to be free of 'the dictatorship of desires.' Only totality, only infinite beauty would be enough.

Why did it take years for me to discover a new relationship with food and exercise? Freedom is a long road, but in the last 6 months things have come together for me. If you're following infinite beauty, you're content to wait a bit for this or that finite beauty. At any rate, Camus wrote that “It is not by means of scruples that man will become great; greatness comes through the grace of God, like a beautiful day."

Along the way, I'm discovering other beauties— the beauty of walking in all kinds of weather, the beauty of raking and bagging leaves: the beauty of sunset and cold while raking leaves, the beauty of combing over the lawn and counting every leaf, the beauty of taking care of my lawn and discovering a relationship with these trees we have.

From Men's Health magazine...

2012-01-01T16:04:00.001-05:00

RULE No. 11: Respect the Sacramental Wine
It's no accident that alcohol is front and center in lots of religious rites. In the Roman Catholic Eucharist, wine symbolizes the transit from brutal violence to redemptive hope. Our taste for faith meets the same need as our taste for fume blanc—our longing for linkage. The word "religion" is derived from the Latin religare, meaning "to tie or fasten." (Care to tie one on?) And just as we sing those hymns in search of common ground, we share a drink to find a way across the space between us.

If we had any interest in exalting drinking, we'd describe it as a hope that a barely-there buzz might silence the judgments in our heads and help us open our hearts to the rest of God's children. "You shall not withhold yourself," theologian Martin Buber suggested, is the secret to a full life. A man could do worse for a motto; a drink just might help him live up to it.

Today's Lit Quote

2011-12-30T11:22:00.000-05:00

Gotta Meet that DUI Quota

2011-12-30T08:48:00.007-05:00

I got a star on my car and one on my chest,
A gun on my hip and the right to arrest
I'm the guy who's the boss on this highway
So watch out what you're doin' when you're drivin' my way
If you break the law, you'll hear from me, I know
I'm a-workin' for the state, I'm The Highway Patrol

- Junior Brown song

So dinner with Bob* last night at "The Levee", a little Cajun cooking hole-in-the-wall praised by the Bass Brothers on the local radio station 610AM. I shied away from gustatory boldness and got a chicken burrito (which was delicious).

Afterwards we headed to Macs saloon for a couple of beers, literally two for me, but only one for Bob. He of the small bladder went to the bathroom at 7:15 but then finds, on the ride home at 8, that he has to go again. Badly. There is no where to stop. He waits and waits through the hour ride until, 3 minutes from home, he knows he'll have an accident in the car. He takes a side road, pulls over to the shoulder, then finds his car on a decline. He puts the breaks on but the car is still inching forward, at about 1 mile per hour. He ends up in a ditch and can't get out. He goes to pee, then comes back to the car. He calls home and asks his wife to get a tow truck. A local police officer comes by and talks with sympathetically. The state highway patrol apparently hears the local officer calling into the station (apparently monitoring that frequency) and radios the local officer to hold Bob. About an hour later up walks the highway patrolman like he's God's gift to the world. "What happened?" he snarls, and Bone tells him. He says, "I don't believe you. Look at these tire tracks - I think you loss control of the vehicle and drove over the ditch. And I don't believe you had one beer - how come you smell so bad?" So Bob had to go through all the humiliating rituals, hopping on one leg, eye exercises, reciting alphabets, etc. Finally the cop says he'd let him go, but said he still doesn't believe his story. "If there were one scratch on that car I'd have written you up for reckless op." Another law-abiding citizen treated like a common criminal.

* - Name changed to protect the innocent.

This & That

2011-12-30T07:22:00.005-05:00

Saw an old black man in deepest Hamilton, Ohio on Christmas Eve, his face like a topographical map of age and wisdom, walking not far from a corner Mom & Pop grocery, his hands clutching a brown paper bag which presumably held a 40-ounce beer or a bottle of vino. It was about 4 pm, and I instantly saw him as alone, but then/now think he could have a wife or son or daughter and was merely buying something to share with them. But somehow I doubt it. Kinda sad.

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I like what St. Patrick's does to honor the "already and not yet-ness" of the Advent season: they put up Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and kings but no baby Jesus until the actual day. Next time I'll have to do that although admittedly the baby is hardly noticeable on our mantle. But I would know he's not yet there. I like the idea of the manger scene being up during Advent because it keeps the goal in mind: the Incarnation. There's no question that Advent & Christmas are my favorite liturgical seasons, by far. Lent reminds me of suffering, His and my own tiny amount, while Easter seems always of a false cheer quality, a premature celebration given our own lack of resurrected bodies. Ordinary time is, well, a tad ordinary, albeit there's nothing ordinary about the Mass and Eucharist of course! But Advent and Christmas? Pure bliss. I think if this season came in January I'd be slightly more a fan of that dastardly cold month!

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Last night saw the movie "The Descendants" starring George Clooney and the Hawaiian land/seascape. Rather dismal despite the latter and was universally panned by those who saw it, although it did hold our interest.

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Today or tomorrow would be a good day to go to Darby Metro Park. I recall walking the long path up to the place where wild deer, once in a blue moon, might be seen, walking those steep-raked hills like ghosts. The surprise of seeing the unexpected in nature recalls the spiritual surprise of seeing God in the quotidian.

Mornings are not broken when it comes to vacation mornings. I enjoy the pacific tendency of early to bed/late to rise. I gather breakfast in a leisurely fashion, sometimes as late as 10:30. Today we had a guy drive down from Cleveland to put in an alarm system. I found it alarming, to say the least, when every time you open a door you hear a loud "ding, ding!". Fortunately Steph read the owner's manual and was able to soften that down to a dull roar.

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Heather King had a guest blogger yesterday. That's usually English for "you can skip this post." But the priest was so incredibly in my comfort zone talking about comfort zones; I was simultaneously encouraged and discouraged, encouraged that even a priest has such issues but discouraged that my own laziness and love of creature comforts was so nakedly exposed.

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So now I listen to more of Josh Groban's hymns of Christmas because I haven't heard any since the morning of the 25th. Like the flip of a switch, the radio stations have determined Christmas season over. They who so assiduously and early announced to us Christmas now announce it done (since no more gifts are being purchased), thus skewing the twelve days of Christmas to Dec. 13-25. Got to go to the iPod as a corrective.

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It's not widely known, but December 26th is also known as "National Introvert Recovery Day".

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One of the great ways to pass long drives is to listen to downloaded Brian Lamb's C-Span podcasts. Enjoyed the author Simon Winchester's hour-long interview, he of "The Professor and the Madman" fame, a book I've long thought about reading.

They Almost Fell On Their Swords

2011-12-30T07:12:00.000-05:00

I was amused by the abrupt about-face down by the Boehner's crew. Even I, a political novice, knew that protesting a two-month extension of the payroll tax isn't a good place to spend your political capital.

I'm thinking the House Republicans wouldn't make good poker players. They'd raise the pot while holding a pair of deuces. God love 'em, they go around looking for Pickett charges: places to die politically. I don't get why they wanted to make their stand in what is a short-term conservative victory (two months extension of payroll tax cut, I think - I don't much follow politics closely enough but still feel the need to holler.) What makes the tea party particularly fascinating is the political tone-deafness. It's their nemesis and their saving grace all at once. They show it's not "business as usual" by never having read a political science book. They don't play the "gotcha" games of D.C, so they get had by the Dems nearly every time. They don't want to be good at both politics AND policy, as if the two are mutually exclusive.

Power and the Flesh

2011-12-27T08:09:00.003-05:00

There's a liberal priest who blogs and who is avidly followed by a family member. The priest recently criticized the pope obliquely by comparing him, unfavorably, with the average CEO. Our numbers aren't improving - Christians make up only about 17% of the world's population - therefore our "CEO" isn't doing his job. This is false on so many levels, beginning with the fact that we look without when we should be looking within, but even given that I don't think we can measure our success with numbers. And I think it's because we are confused about power, as said so eloquently by far and away the best priest blogger I'm aware of, the Friar Minor:

Reflecting on Christmas, and especially our Holy Father's Christmas homily in which St. Francis plays such a part, I've been thinking about contemporary disbelief in God and how maybe it relates to our wrong ideas of power.

Perhaps part of what makes it so hard for folks to believe in God--and even for us religious folks, sometimes, to act as if he exists--is that we are confused about power. God is the Almighty; he is the infinite creative power that made the heavens and the earth and sustains all things in being. And yet, when the Almighty God is revealed to us, what do we get? First, a baby born not only in an obscure place but away from home, to plain parents, and into an ethnic group that was--at least at that time--historically important by no accepted standard. Second, a tortured and convicted criminal being executed on the cross. Christ crucified could not even move his hands and feet, much less control anything or make anybody do anything. And yet these are the privileged revelations of the all-powerful, Almighty God.

Perhaps when we talk about power we are too often talking about what is really the abuse of power, the leverage or ability to manipulate and coerce, to make others conform to our will, to co-opt others into the disorders of our hearts and the futility of our sins.

In Jesus Christ the highest power is revealed as self-emptying humility. If we were to come to really understand and practice our own wills to power in this way, maybe it would be easier to believe in God. Indeed, perhaps God would become as self-evident as he necessarily must be.

Not that it's easy. To embrace the true power revealed in humility is hard on the flesh, which has lusted for the violent domination of others ever since Cain killed his own brother. The crown of thorns cuts and digs when we put it on. But is the crown of the true royalty of this world, of those who bear the real power that is the only source of peace.

Books & Authors

2011-12-22T09:15:00.003-05:00

Writers and their personal libraries for $200 Alex!

Jonathan Lethem:

"People sometimes act as though owning books you haven't read constitutes a charade or pretense, but for me, there's a lovely mystery and pregnancy about a book that hasn't given itself over to you yet—sometimes I'm the most inspired by imagining what the contents of an unread book might be."

Politics...

2011-12-22T09:13:00.005-05:00

It seems to me one of the "x-ray machines" of a political party's soul is to see how, when in power, they apportion legislative districts. The Republicans in control of the Ohio have gotten hilariously creative in drawing districts and this, to me, is a sign of corruption. It's a graphic - literally - display of the dearth of fairness and common sense versus their own self-interest. Ridiculous gerrymandering is the last refuge of a political scoundrel and like pornography you know it when you see it.

The other sign of corruption is that the Bush Derangement Syndrome of yesteryear seems to have its corollary with Obama Derangement Syndrome. How else to explain the rise of Herman Cain, Donald Trump, and Newt Gingrich in the Republican primary polls? This desperation bespeaks less a desire to win the election than to beat Obama up in the debates. Anger makes one less than politically astute, among other things.

A Tale of Two Interpretations

2011-12-20T08:57:00.009-05:00

Angel appearing to Zechariah

Interesting to hear the differing takes of two priests at the downtown Dominican parish concerning the visits of the angel to Mary at the Annunciation and the visit to Zechariah. (And given, of course, on different days.) One priest said that the reactions of Mary and Zechariah were similar, so why the difference? Because the difference in condition. Mary was treated differently, he argues, because she *was* different - she was conceived without sin and had no original or other sin on her soul. This is one of the biblical clues we have that Mary was uniquely created.

The other priest there said that there was a difference in response and intention: Mary was asking - purely as a practical matter - how this could happen (i.e. give birth without losing her virginity), while with Zechariah, it was obvious how it would come about and it wasn't something that hadn't already happened before in salvation history (see Abraham and Sarah). Plus the priest said Zechariah's tone was different, which doesn't come through in the English so well but was more of a more scoffing attitude.

The first priest's interpretation seems to favor one of predestination. His homilies are big on praising God and not looking at ourselves so much, not trying to take credit for any improvements or become discouraged with lack thereof. The second priest's emphasizes human response and tends to emphasize our role in salvation. So in retrospect it's no wonder that they look at the same biblical story in different ways.

UPDATE: The Friar Minor has worthwhile thoughts on the same subject.

This & That Monday

2011-12-19T08:55:00.004-05:00

Two reads:

"...to lose physical sight, it is thought, is to gain second sight. One door closes and another, greater one, opens. Homer’s blindness, many believe, is a kind of spiritual channel, a shortcut to the gifts of memory and of prophecy."

- from novel "Open City"

"O God who wished Blessed Margaret be blind from birth so that the eyes of her soul enlightened by your grace, might more clearly see the value of spiritual realities..."

- from novena prayer to Blessed Margaret of Castello.

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From Betty Duffy:

My brother-in-law discovered that he could create a musical communion in the bar from his I-phone, by sending a virtual request to the I-tunes jukebox to play any song he chose, without ever getting up from the booth. No one would know who requested the song. He selected Andrea Bocelli singing Ave Maria.

From the very first notes, the other patrons of the bar were alarmed. The bartender went to the jukebox to see what was playing. Another patron went with him, and together they tried to override the song. But it couldn't be done. The bartender tried to comfort his customer saying, "Well, it's sort of a pretty song."

To which the patron replied, "I'm going to throw up."

This is one of those very rare cases where technology thrills me: you could potentially request an I-jukebox song from your I-phone, without ever even entering the bar. If you want the pool-hall patrons to spend the evening listening to Gregorian Chant, sit in your car, and request (for a small fee) all the songs you desire, from your phone.

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Pray that Maureen secure employment!

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It's funny that the last mortal thoughts of Christopher Hitchens might well be on that most Catholic of English writers, GK Chesterton.

Amazon Search Results

2011-12-19T08:53:00.003-05:00

Unlikely juxtaposition of results:

Christendom Review Up

2011-12-16T15:45:00.005-05:00

Striking Christendom Review images:

Translating Cheers

2011-12-16T14:01:00.006-05:00

High school jeer/cheer that will apparently forever be lodged in my head went:

"Go Back! Go Back! Go back to the woods! Your coach is a farmer and your team is no good!"

Alternative renderings include:

"Retreat! Retreat! Retreat to the pines. Your coach is a rancher and your team is not exceptional."

Dylan has some much better ones:

Unto the woods convey yourselves with haste; for, as your coach is adept at nothing save tillage of the soil, your team, O hapless foe, is of truly mean estate.

and...

No laurel of victory shall come your way, O wretched contestants of the gridiron! It would seem that your athletic director is incapable of anything but making the earth yield produce in abundance; therefore, O team, return with all due haste to the rural atmosphere; indeed, go back to the bucolic spot which gave you sustenance.

Links & Thoughts

2011-12-16T13:20:00.009-05:00

OP Reach likes Isaiah too.

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Pope Speaks of Something Greater Than Answered Prayers

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Being of a conservative, risk-adverse bent, it took me many years to accept the notion that alcohol had been tested by humans long enough in order for me to indulge, and so it's odd I'm so willing to being part of this on-the-grid experiment.

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Been watching a very watchable movie in 30 minute increments: "Crazy Heart" starring Jeff Bridges. It's about an old time country music star finding love and meaning. Really well-acted by Bridges, whose gruffness and frankness sounds authentic, to my ear anyway. It's like a Western, only with no gunplay.

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Grey and overcast, greyest overcast. The weather has a charismatic quality simply in its newness, in its freshness and its omnipresence. There's always weather, always some differing quality of light and temperature. I want to find the bright side, pun unintended, of this gray-ly authentic December weather. It's very fashionable, very much "of the minute", very much of the season. The grey-ness is not the artificially static climate of southern California but one capable of donning many disguises, from a dapper "London fog" sort, to a Nome-ian snow blitz, and in summer to an equatorial heat. Meanwhile a second squirrel nest has come to lodge in a nearby maple.

*

A wonderful writer, I think of Christopher Hitchens as the H.G. Wells or George Bernard Shaw of our time, a man of deeply flawed convictions but capable of very loyal friendships. At the end he began to see our weakness in the face of disease and death, or at least see that that which does not kill us does not necessarily make us stronger. Only God can make us stronger, in body and spirit, and I would that he would know that now.

There were more similarities between Christopher Hitchens and William F. Buckley than many think. Both were boarding school survivors, hedonists, contrarians, great writers, and intellectuals. Both had an especial talent for friendship and were charismatic. I can't be alone in being a fan of both and to feel the pain when they left this world. Advice for the young: don't pick older writers as favorites. They'll die on ya.

First reading today:

Let no foreigner who has attached himself to the Lord say, ‘The Lord will surely exclude me from his people.’ Let no eunuch say, ‘And I, I am a dried-up tree.’ Foreigners who have attached themselves to the Lord to serve him and to love his name and be his servants – all who observe the sabbath, not profaning it, and cling to my covenant – these I will bring to my holy mountain.
- Isaiah 56

Life After First Things

2011-12-14T08:55:00.003-05:00

Riveting read about the recent success of Joseph Bottum's Dakota Christmas.

This & That

2011-12-11T23:18:00.005-05:00

Above me a blue skylight, or "solatube" casts the dying rays downward. The blue gets deeper and deeper as time passes. Ten feet away stand the stalwart volumes of the 1911 Britannica Encyclopedia, standing athwart history yelling, "Stop!" How gladsome those soldiers make me feel! They seem too distant from my recliner, and so I imagine ways to integrate them more fully into my life without risking that they lose their salt, so to speak. Right now I look more than touch.

So I have a broad margin of time today as I hole up in the "temple of peace", the library, and read the novel "Open City" by Teju Cole which includes the 'graph:

"His reverie took him out of the everyday, away from the blankets and the bag of urine. It was the late thirties again, and he was back in Cambridge, breathing the damp air of the fens, enjoying the tranquility of his youthful scholarship."

Ah how I love that phrase: "the tranquility of his youthful scholarship". How high the stakes seemed, holding to my coveted if meaningless goal of graduating "cum laude", the fruit of having acquired a 3.5 on a 4.0 scale over the years. And how true it was that the scholarship was played out in a tranquil fashion on those long evenings at King Library. I would wander over to the periodicals after studying and feed on some of the vitality of those wondrous, eclectic magazines. Oh how the ache of learning was slaked in those days!

Now I have this dream stretch of time available on the heels of a beer-free Saturday (a chance to spare the liver and cleanse the palate, or vice-versa.) Got the Bengals on the DVR for later, their fate not necessary for current conditions. For now I drink a Two-Hearted Ale, a crisp remnant from vacation bliss, while reading and writing. I finished "The Marriage Plot" yesterday, experienced the dubious ending but can find little fault in a writer that so engages.

On Guadete Sunday I read Pope Paul VI's apostolic exhortation "On Christian Joy", which cleansed me of any irritability. I was filled with joy, appropriately, especially when the pontiff, with exquisite sensitively, said that we need not be discouraged if we're not full of Christian joy just yet. To my mind, we've had a good long run of excellent popes, from John XIII through the present one. It's fitting somehow that Paul VI, so long type-cast as the shepherd who was mournful and depressed, writes on joy such that even some thirty-five years later, a priest at a parish in downtown Columbus takes the time to print off copies for parishioners.

Watched an HBO documentary on a private detective in Calcutta, fascinating on both a human and photographic level. Then COPS ("Ho, Ho, Ho!" about prostitutes -- always figures of interest given that they sell their souls, it seems. It may be the world's oldest profession, but it also seems the most... disturbing.)

On Joy

2011-12-11T08:08:00.003-05:00

Paul VI Apostolic Exhortation
http://www.ewtn.com/library/papaldoc/p6gaude.htm

Let us now pause to contemplate the person of Jesus during His earthly life. In His humanity He had experienced our joys. He has manifestly known, appreciated, and celebrated a whole range of human joys, those simple daily joys within the reach of everyone. The depth of His interior life did not blunt His concrete attitude or His sensitivity. He admires the birds of heaven, the lilies of the field. He immediately grasps God’s attitude towards creation at the dawn of history. He willingly extols the joy of the sower and the harvester, the joy of the man who finds a hidden treasure, the joy of the shepherd who recovers his sheep or of the woman who finds her lost coin, the joy of those invited to the feast, the joy of a marriage celebration, the joy of the father who embraces his son returning from a prodigal life, and the joy of the woman who has just brought her child into the world.

It's perhaps of interest that Paul VI wrote that in 1975, when he was in old age and after Humane Vitae's poor reception, when he was said to be downhearted and discouraged. Later he writes:

Here below this joy will always include to a certain extent the painful trial of a woman in travail and a certain apparent abandonment, like that of the orphan: tears and lamentation, while the world parades its gloating satisfaction. But the disciples’ sadness, which is according to God and not according to the world, will be promptly changed into a spiritual joy that no one will be able to take away from them.

"I Dare Not Risk the Sweetness of the Title"

2011-12-09T08:53:00.002-05:00

Ha, I've said something similar to this in the past on my blog:

I remember the buying of my "Anatomy of Melancholy" (that I have never read, nor ever mean to—I dare not risk the sweetness of the title); two big beautiful volumes, with a paper label on the back of each, they stood imperious on the shelves.

Robust Low-Hanging Fruit Leveraging Outside the Box Thinking

2011-12-09T08:48:00.001-05:00

Most hated buzzwords...

Back to Back Tweets in the Twitter Feed

2011-12-06T11:48:00.002-05:00

Whoda thunk these back-to-backers?:

I'm sure they don't follow each other.

How Doctors Die

2011-12-06T08:42:00.002-05:00

Interesting link via Elena on how doctors die. (Hint: they're not keen on chemotherapy.)

Book Quotes

2011-12-06T08:41:00.001-05:00

Found from various & sundry places...this first quote is an argument against nominating Newt Gingrich for president.

Shakespeare seems to have sensed very early—what the world at large has still to learn—that he who cannot rule himself is not entitled to rule a city, still less a nation. - Goddard's "The Meaning of Shakespeare"

*

After the birth of a human being his early years are obscurely spent in the toils or pleasures of childhood. As he grows up the world receives him, when his manhood begins, and he enters into contact with his fellows. He is then studied for the first time, and it is imagined that the germ of the vices and the virtues of his maturer years is then formed. This, if I am not mistaken, is a great error. We must begin higher up; we must watch the infant in its mother's arms; we must see the first images which the external world casts upon the dark mirror of his mind; the first occurrences which he witnesses; we must hear the first words which awaken the sleeping powers of thought, and stand by his earliest efforts, if we would understand the prejudices, the habits, and the passions which will rule his life. The entire man is, so to speak, to be seen in the cradle of the child. - Tocqueville's "Democracy in America"

*

Unlike every other famous tourist sight Mitchell had seen in his life, the Acropolis was more impressive in reality; no postcard or photograph could do it justice. The Parthenon was both bigger and more beautiful, more heroically conceived and constructed, than he’d imagined. - Eugenides's "The Marriage Plot"

*

a snapping turtle lumbered down the center of the asphalt like an ambulatory helmet. His long tail dragged, blunt head jutting out of the lapidary prehistoric sleep of shell.

the drowned boy blurred as much by memory as by water, molded toward an essential, remote ideal. Longing, of course, become its own object, the way that desire can make anything into a god. - Doty's "Fire to Fire"

If Thinking With the Church Were Easy, Everybody Would Do It

2011-12-06T08:40:00.001-05:00

Here's National Review's take on the new translation:

On Looking Forward to Friday (in this case, today)

2011-12-02T10:54:00.007-05:00

There's a thin line between passion and pathology, goes Heather King's motto, and similarly there's a thin line between looking forward to some earthly good and looking TOO much forward to it. "Seek first the kingdom of God and all else will be added," is gospel truth.

There's a catch-22 nature to addiction and/or looking too forward: something has to be really good for it to be looked forward to too much. By striving to find transcendent experience one is unwittingly striving to find addiction. You can't really have one without the other, it would seem. Drug addicts have found the most obvious and seemingly dependable source of pleasurable experiences while simultaneously finding the most addictive and destructive. And, of course, the thrill wears off even as the need for the the substance doesn't.

I suspect one reason to not to look forward so much is because by definition you're not living in the moment. By definition you are, in a sense, "wishing your life away" and we know how precious life is. It's not particularly helpful or conducive to gratitude, to be bummed that it's Monday instead of Friday, say, and gratitude is arguably the mark of true religion.

Happened across a Psychology Today link:

The circuitry connecting the orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum is a beautifully crafted machine for learning what you like and pursuing it with single-minded purpose. Its fuel is dopamine. And this machine sends messages directly to the premotor and motor cortex. It guides behavior, action, in pursuit of the good things in life...We can learn to go after anything, full bore, if it attracts us. And that's how we get ahead in life.

But it's also how we get addicted. The goal-pursuit circuit is a bit too flexible. Cocaine high. Oh yeah. That feels good. Want more. Got to get it. That drink at the end of the day. Feels good. Want it. Stop at the liquor store on the way home. These tendencies eventually cause us a lot of suffering, but they are simply byproducts of a brain that evolved to seek rewards, based on their attractiveness, and to pursue them with almost relentless energy.

When your back-ache gets bad enough, you start doing physio or yoga, so that you can use your upright spine to its best advantage. When your addiction gets bad enough, you'd best figure out how to use the goal-pursuit circuit for what it's designed for: to be successful and happy, to avoid suffering, and—of course—to feed the little ones back at the cave.

David Foster Wallace

2011-11-30T09:11:00.007-05:00

Heather King references a David Foster Wallace book in her post title here and mentions a New York magazine article:

Eugenides got to know Wallace, with whom he’d had a rapid-fire correspondence about religion after the publication of Infinite Jest. Like Eugenides, whose search for faith is a major element of The Marriage Plot, Wallace quietly sought out spiritual answers and flirted with joining the Catholic Church, as Karr later did. (When they were together, they tried to pray every day.) He told Eugenides those letters held a lot of meaning for him.

______
Heather has some sharp pictures of her Christmas decorations on her blog:

RSS Roundup

2011-11-29T08:55:00.003-05:00

Some interesting tidbits found here and there... On "iPad madness" Pat Snyder writes:

I cannot blame readers alone for this electronic indulgence, though. The iPad bug had been building over two months of schlepping a laptop to graduate school classes in positive psychology – a field that ironically (1) teaches that buying more gadgets does not bring lasting happiness but simply sentences us to a “hedonic treadmill” and (2) warns against being a “maximizer” – that person who goes nuts trying to make the right choice out of way too many choices.

“Are you someone who has trouble choosing just the right dish on the menu?” the professor had asked. “Do you get stuck looking for the very best solution?” He urged us to become “satisficers” instead – people who do not agonize but go for the “good enough” choice.

From Brother Charles at A Minor Friar on the new translation:

I certainly notice how I hear the Latin behind the English (is that the right metaphor?) I hear the mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa in the new English Confiteor, the double dicens before the words of consecration in the way we now say 'saying' instead of 'said.' And of course I hear the calix sanguinis mei and the pro multis. Does this mean anything that I should hear the Latin under the English? I guess that goes to some of the hard questions at hand. What does Latin mean for western Christianity? Is it a historical accident? Or does God mean for it be that way? I think most folks I know would subscribe to the former theological assumption. For a sort of sed contra on a similar question on the history of human language and revelation, go read the Pope's infamous Regensburg speech, not the part that caused all the trouble, but the part about the Septuagint.

From Msgr. Pope:

I, like you, have read with interest the reactions of many to the new translation, after its first week of use. Most of the remarks I have read are quite positive. A smaller, though not insignificant number, are negative, some strikingly so...There is one strain of negative reaction I would like to address however, since it goes to the heart of a common misunderstanding of the Liturgy. The negative reaction basically stated is:

I can’t easily understand what Father is saying in those long, run-on sentences. It doesn’t make sense to me and I get lost in all the words.

...But here we come to an important insight that, though it is not politically correct, is still true: The priest is not talking to you. He is not directing the prayer to you, and the first purpose of the prayer is not that you understand it perfectly. The prayer is directed to God, (most often, to God the Father). The priest is speaking to God, and is doing so on your behalf, and that of the whole Church. And God is wholly able to understand the prayer, no matter how complicated its structure.

Too often in modern times we have very anthropocentric (man-centered) notions of the Sacred Liturgy...Intelligibility, while not the most important thing, IS important... But, frankly, it is not essential. Otherwise the faithful could not validly attend Mass in foreign lands, and the Mass could not be offered in Latin.

Fr. Barron's Documentary

2011-11-28T09:50:00.003-05:00

Watched some of Fr Barron's Catholicism project on EWTN. Nice. Preferable to the book, since when he's discussing some overly familiar aspect of the Faith I can zoom out/zone out and let the amazing photography flow over me. It's part travelogue, or virtual pilgrimage, and I wondered, while he explained dark night of the soul so confidently, whether he'd ever really experienced it. It seems like the vast majority of us haven't and yet that seems to be the key to life because it gets us close to God. To see the prison wall where that great spiritual giant, St John of the Cross clambored down was something else. Or to see Lourdes, or the convent of the great St Teresa of Avila. Pretty cool.

The Sea

2011-11-28T09:23:00.000-05:00

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul...- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can... There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me." - Moby-Dick

Let's Play...Why's My Bookbag or E-Reader Equivalent So Heavy?

2011-11-28T09:22:00.010-05:00

From Mark Doty's "Fire to Fire":

...a snapping turtle lumbered down the center of the asphalt like an ambulatory helmet. His long tail dragged, blunt head jutting out of the lapidary prehistoric sleep of shell.

From Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville:

Henceforward every new discovery, every new want which it engendered, and every new desire which craved satisfaction, was a step towards the universal level. The taste for luxury, the love of war, the sway of fashion, and the most superficial as well as the deepest passions of the human heart, co-operated to enrich the poor and to impoverish the rich.

*

From the time when the exercise of the intellect became the source of strength and of wealth, it is impossible not to consider every addition to science, every fresh truth, and every new idea as a germ of power placed within the reach of the people. Poetry, eloquence, and memory, the grace of wit, the glow of imagination, the depth of thought, and all the gifts which are bestowed by Providence with an equal hand, turned to the advantage of the democracy...

From Goddard's "The Meaning of Shakespeare":

This was Shakespeare’s enunciation of a belief he never abandoned: that ideal young manhood is a union of masculine and feminine qualities. “Men who have the woman in them without being womanized,” says George Meredith, “they are the pick of men.”
*
There are two ways of fitting into one’s environment that are as opposite as night and day. To fit into one’s age as mud does into a crack, or to be molded by it as putty is under a thumb is one thing; to fit into it and to use it creatively as a seed fits into and uses soil is quite another.
*
In proportion as they master them, men grow skeptical of their own professions. When they come to know them, they see through them.
*
It would be folly to try to subsume Shakespeare’s works under one head, but, if we were forced to do so, one of the least unsatisfactory ways would be to say that they are an attempt to answer the question: What is the cure for chaos?

First Sunday of Advent

2011-11-28T09:22:00.007-05:00

So it's the First Sunday of Advent. It's the beginning of the church year, which is a far meaningful beginning than January 1st, the secular beginning. I surprised myself by stumbling on the "And with your Spirit" several times at Mass. I think I only got it right twice out of five tries. I thought that since the Eastern rite says "and with your spirit" that I would have little trouble with it. I guess not, especially since they chant it and we say it. But it's good as a dose of humility!

Our pastor mentioned the image of God as potter in the first reading and I thought about how often that image has occurred to me in only a spiritual sense, as if we were made, physically, independent of Him! But the pastor spoke of it mainly in terms of our physical selves, how each of us ("even twins") is unique. And so there's another reason to thank God. Too often I completely ignore the fact of my physical creation; I take it for granted or minimize it.

*

(Before I forget, Fr. Martin in "Between Heaven and Mirth" humorously mentioned a spiritual adviser who told him he was 'shoulding all over himself', a rather colorful image of those who are always saying, 'I should do this, I should do that...').

*

From the unlikely source of the novel "The Marriage Plot" by Jeffrey Eugenides, a character in the story describes reading St. Teresa of Avila's "Interior Castle", quoting the saint as saying that those who find themselves in the castle at all ought be grateful: "it's a great gain that they found their way in at all." Perhaps it's a temptation to a "reduction of desire," as Heather King put it, but I do sometimes think that instead of complaining that I'm not at the fourth or fifth or seven level of the castle that I should be thankful merely for the fact that I've been Baptized -- even if I'm still in the swamp outside the castle to borrow from the saint's imagery.

*

Potent gospel last Sunday, perhaps the most potent of all. It's the daunting Matthew chapter 24 in which we learn how we are judged. And I thought about how Christ is indeed hungry, thirsty, naked, in prison, ill, because He is within the least of us. It goes beyond mere identification with, or empathy for. The verses I often have taken as a very hard goal for us to achieve, can also be taken another way: as a way of saying how much He loves us. It's not enough to do good, the pastor says, but to see Christ in what we're doing and who we're doing it for.

*

Wow, Jennifer of Conversion Diary says what I've been thinking:

"The same force that drives people to slot machines is what drives me to my computer. I realized that when I mindlessly get online, every time I click it’s like pulling the lever on a slot machine and hoping to hit the jackpot. I’m hoping to hit a virtual jackpot — a blog post that changes my life, an email that blows me away, a hilarious video on YouTube, etc. And the truth is that there’s enough stuff online that if I clicked on enough links or spent enough time on email I would get that payoff I’m looking for. But, just like with slot machines, I need to be careful about spending endless amounts of time just sitting around pulling the lever."

Of Human Bloggage

2011-11-28T09:20:00.005-05:00

Really I just wanted to blog this because I like the title. I never come up with good titles.

One thing that's sort of surprising about blogs is that it doesn't seem like very many are glorified diaries. (Or maybe I just don't read them.) It's pretty darn rare where you see someone writing, "Today I went to the grocery store and had dinner with X followed by a movie." You'd think there would be a lot of crossover between diaries and blogs*, but so many people - at least in the Catholic blogosphere - have profound things about politics, religion or culture. That's more helpful to the audience, and is more audience-centric. The trip log feels inappropriate simply because I can't think of any other Catholic blogs post long trip logs like that. It feels nakedly self-indulgent. It's funny that even in something as idiosyncratic and independent and (mostly) invisible as our blogs we still want to conform to everybody else's. We are social animals indeed.

* - perhaps that's what Twitter/Facebook have become for some.

Ye Olde Trip Log

2011-11-28T09:00:00.002-05:00

Saturday

Modern technology's weak link is the battery. Freshly charged keyboard died immediately upon entry and now I'm left high and dry for the week. But who cares when we're above the clouds and the sun is present and it feels idyllic just being on the plane, the gentle motion, those surprisingly tasty airline cookies simply via association.

We got upgraded to an exit row and have legroom aplenty. The flight's only two hours and I wish it could be longer to half-sleep, half-dream, think of the past, of band camps in spring, of how we have this entire continent of memory and yet can only access such a pitifully small fraction of it, at least on earth.

*

Check-in smoothly. Best Western rules. To the beach! I forget, when landlocked, how when I get to the sea I want to read sea books, mythical books really, books that contain no dialogue but the sea's breath, a vast compendium of ocean poetry linked together. "Now the scalloped sea engulfs me....".

Sea reads are not the only type appealing on trips: travelogues in general are, notwithstanding the difference, say, between strolling through Paris and lounging on a beach. I'm reading John Baxter's "The Most Beautiful Walk in the World" about Paris and he mentioned something I hadn't heard before: the English love sun, the French love shade. Makes sense given that only "mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun."

We spend the day on the sands but dusk comes early to mid-November Florida. It changes the color of the Gulf from a leaden flatness to a brilliant white, at least where the sun strikes it. Winds produce a fine spray of white sand; like mist it travels over the malleable hillocks.

SUNDAY

1988. A poet in Monterrey, California. I was there on vacation and his book seemed a vast improvement over the kitschy souvenirs, for what could improve upon a poet of the place? More than even rock or soil, a writer sings of the distilled essence. And yet that particular souvenir gathered dust. I was more interested in collecting than in experiencing. I was more interested in the idea of re-experience than in actual real-time experience. And yet I knew, or suspected, that the book couldn't live up to my idea of the place, and so it goes... It's like love or God: you feel no one can live up to your idea of love so you collect glimpses, fragments of love and put them away for a rainy day, not realizing every day is a rainy day.

Felt good to be back at the beach, despite the long delay (3pm). The day got behind us too quickly: Mass at 10am after which we went a mile down the rode to see a professional sand sculpting display (they even charged an entrance fee but it was quite worth it), followed by lunch at the Beached Whale. Time spun away from us and it was with a sense of relief I regained a temporary beachhead and the quiet - the blessed quiet! - of wind and wave. We'd been pummeled by noise at the restaurant, where a thousand screens showing pro football games were accentuated by whoops and hollers. Before that we rode 9 miles along a busy thoroughfare with plenty a motorbike. Yes it was good to arrive back at the beach, pleasantly fatigued and ready for books and beer and the music of the breeze.

*

It's been surprisingly difficult to figure out nationalities just from appearances. For example, I rode up the elevator with one of the more American figures I'd ever seen, like John Wayne with a off-brand ball-cap and that all-American touch of impatience. But when he spoke to his wife I couldn't even identify the language. In hindsight, he held his books - yes, plural, another dead giveaway - too high against his chest. American men are taught from little on that the higher books are held against the body the more feminine the pose. Plus the books were enclosed in a ziplock bag, which seems, again in hindsight, a bit fussy for the average laid-back American paperback reader. Leider (German word for 'unfortunately') I couldn't see the title of the books, nor did I ask him where he was from. He looked pretty blue-collar to be taking books to the beach.

Another difficult case was the man wearing a large hat and a Speedo swimsuit. That would suggest not an American, but he had such a Texas look about him, and he was overweight, which is an American characteristic.

*

And so to the electric prose (literally): the Kindle and its pleasing array of literature. I feel a bit of a pull to continue reading about glamorous Paris though the scene in front of me is glamorous as well: the swells of waves beyond which carry a pirate ship, complete with authentic-sounding booms (I know, because I've heard pirate ship cannons in movies).

I read in the Paris book of how Hemingway said that the modern world is so full of mechanical oppressions that it's a good thing we have alcohol as a mechanical relief. Surely we're now more, in ways technological, even more mechanically oppressed now. Or not. I don't feel particularly oppressed at least at this particular moment. And I don't think of Hemingway as in any way worthy of emulation except in his writing prowess.

The early retreat of the sun cannot be reversed - at 4:50 it's sitting low in the sky, sort of like the way men are supposed to carry books. Sandpipers hunt and stilt-walk their way along the shallows. The sand under my feet is packed neither too hard or too loosely. All of these facts seem somehow of import.

MONDAY

Steph woke up with a mild sickness and so it was to the doctor we went, a walk-in clinic, where the old gathered in the waiting room as if in living proof that as we age we breakdown, and all "getting better" is merely temporary. They come to the clinic honestly and we see our future: one of us routinely waiting in doctor's offices or emergency rooms as if it were a hair appointment. It's not unpleasant, reading the Kindle with the distraction of the noise of Kathy Lee Gifford on the television. Most of the visitors are neither reading nor watching tv but simply sitting and waiting with perhaps the patience of an older generation, or one comfortable with, and interested by, their own thoughts. I hadn't seen Kathy Lee since the days of Regis's little show and I wondered if she'd been able to resist the omnipresent desire of older women to go under the scalpel. She looked fake-young to me, with long yellow hair. In this world the phrase, "She's looking older," is apparently worse than "She looks like she's had surgery" and I think we're the poorer for it. Taking care of oneself is great but knives, well...A huge billboard in our neighborhood, advertising for a politician named Young, says it all concerning our society: "Act Young, Be Young, Vote Young".

Afterwards there was the issue of the prescription, with the closest pharmacy cross island. We waited for a trolly, not the most punctual of modes of transportation for the patience-impaired. Vacation has unwittingly forced me to slow down. After a wait we made our way down the long Estero Boulevard of paradise regained to the CVS. American efficiency reared its pretty head and within ten minutes we had the medicine, after which we waited 45 minutes or so for the next trolley, after a few false starts of "special trip" vehicles.

Back at the hotel by 1:30pm, and to the beach I went. Under the Brisbane-ish sun I ran down the beach a mile and back, enjoying the second half more than the inertia-breaking first half. I decided an early happy hour was in order and proceedeth thence to open a Dogfish Head "Rasion D'Etre". I sit in the same spot, the spot where the sun unfailingly seems to shine as if making a path to the sea just for us. Shining diamonds crystal in front of me while the pirate ship booms. Two German lesbians lay out to my right, an extended family to the left.

The weak link in this vacation is the food: breakfasts are continental with hard-boiled eggs, functional only. Dinners are micowaveable since there is no conventional oven. So it's not a pretty picture unless and until we go out, which we did on Sunday with a sun-defying visit to The Beached Whale (whose t-shirts we definitely don't want). The carbo-rich breakfasts and dinners make me feel as though the weight is being put in exponential fashion.

The childhood pool game Marco Polo is being played nearby. We varied it, back in the late '70s, by replying "Polo, ol' chap". I think we thought Marco was British or something. Plus it was a cheeky way of saying "you can't catch me", via the extra syllables said in that detached 007 way.

TUESDAY

The definition of a leisurely morning: a walk on the beach with the concomitant pleasure of a shoreline of seashells that line the Gulf like trinkets. Early on we have the beach nearly to ourselves while later many share the view. I find myself looking, as often as not, towards the empty terraces and balconies that lace the shoreline. So many vantage points from which to see the sea, so many with that same exhilarating scene from lofty heights.

Then we got on our bikes and headed towards the "Times Square" area for an American breakfast at a Greek cookery. Yum, if undaring. We followed with a bike-ride past the pastel buildings of the Square to the quiet harbor before putting out to Bowditch Point, at the extreme end of the island.

To the beach at 11am where I started to run: oh how I'd secretly craved a run! I sprinted down the beach "like a gazelle" Steph said. I felt in better shape today than the first day down here. Beer and sun will make me run. (Er, that didn't sound right.) Who wants to read when there's ground to cover, fleeting sand underfoot, barefoot down the beach past gliding pelicans and piping sand pipers (I refer to pretty much all sea birds other than gulls as 'sand pipers' because it's the only type I know.)

Speaking of Europe, my "can you spot the European" game show continues with today's slam dunk: a blonde woman with bunched shoulders wearing white shoes with black socks. Nothing says "European" like an unlikely flirtation with black. The easy way to tell a foreigner is simply anytime you notice them, since one tends not to notice the overly familiar. Thus when I was talking to a guy from Ottawa, technically a foreign country but who gave off all the signals of an American, I said without realizing he was one: "there are a lot of foreigners here." Not that there's anything wrong with foreigners of course. Some of my best friends happen...

Is the popularity of tattoos a metaphor for the modern tendency towards short-term thinking and live-for-the-minute? The conventional wisdom is that tatts may look good now, but will they when you're 60? "They're not thinking about 60," goes a school of thought. On the other hand, if everyone in your generation is getting tattooed, then it seems like what "looks bad" will be culturally defined downward by the time they get to 60. In a sense it seems a risk worth taking given how much beauty is culturally influenced. What surprises me about tattoos is how there's a segment of the population that becomes addicted to it, and keep going in for more.

The vacation is starting to get long in the tooth, Thursday being our last full day. I feel a bit nonplussed about it, assuming I know what nonplussed means and I'm not sure I do but I know what I'd like it to mean. Saturday was a travel day, Sunday a semi-travel day given the long journey down Estero, and Monday a semi-travel given the illness. Today is the first full day of beach, nothing but beach.

WEDNESDAY

Woke up with disquieting dreams, including one in which I was back in high school and the powers-that-be suddenly added a new requirement: crucifixion. Yes, we all would be crucified our senior year. Needless to say I was very upset and agitated about this development. Perhaps this speaks to my subconscious protest to our having to give ourselves completely to God. Needless to say we Christians are expected to, if not be crucified, at least carry our cross towards that end. Perhaps it's guilt at being able to go on so many vacations.

So it's day five already and a bit of fatigue has resulted from the fatigue and exercise. The weather ebullient, as it has been all week, although tomorrow is supposed to cool down, relatively speaking. This week the weather has been decided warmer than normal, for which I am not ungrateful.

Got out by 10:30 or 11-ish and enjoyed the fine sea breeze while reading the surprisingly engaging "Eyewall", about a fictional cat-5 hurricane striking a Georgian sea island. A nice light beach read, perhaps the pluperfect one. No "Drood" today, though a spot of Kingsley Amis' "Every Day Drinking".

The great hours at the beach are 10:30am-12:30pm and 3pm-5pm. In the first, you get the "thrill up your leg" as Chris Matthews might say that the day is young and the sun is high and you're high on that sunshine. By 12:30 or 1pm, I feel ready for some movement, exercise, something else. Too much sitting/laying about. By 3pm, I'm usually drinking, which is its own reward as drink and drug (can't we say "and/both" despite Chesterton's admonition that both drunk and teetotaler miss the fact that alcohol is a drink, not a drug.)

Spotted an amorous display of affection involving a guy wearing a speedo. Is that a wise move given the visibility of sexual appreciation in the male? A good reason not to wear speedos. Speedos often reflect the quintessential mistake: "as I think, so will females". "Skin to win" is a mostly ironclad rule from the male perspective but most females are not so sight-motivated. Of course I generalize here. Some men have an exhibitionist fetish (hence the prevalence of male streakers and Anthony Wiener-type tweets.) There's nothing quite as dispiriting as seeing a group of naked bikers with the great majority being male.

The sun is so blinding off the water that when people walk by they become silhouettes, surrounded by the glory and glamour of the sun. Even average-bodied figures become as transfigured, acquiring a kind of transcendence and poetry.

4:30 and the clouds have blocked the sun to egregious effect. Cool winds zephyr up our legs and down our backs. I put on a shirt and Steph covers with a towel. Beer, the great warmer-upper, helps but the cloud bank is huge and extends for half the sky and it's cool as an Irish fall evening. Boats nod in the choppy waters. The wind feels exhilarating, it gives a feeling of windswept nostalgia like the grainy videos of JFK at the Cape. Or it could be that no one is more melodramatic than me on the penultimate day of vacation (or really any day on vacation for that matter).

Never bet against the Sunshine State. No sooner had we retreated to our unit when the sun shone bright beneath a huge dark slab of cloud. The sliding doors, facing west, flood the room with savor-able light. Parisian painters of the 1800s used to appreciate the "melancholic light" of 5-7pm. Me, I appreciate any given that I live in Columbus, aka "Cloud-umbus".

And now the sun begins its precipitous decline. 5:20 and we live on borrowed time -- but then don't we anyway? Isn't all time borrowed? Meanwhile Steph is reading my Kindle (I've created a monster!) and so I can't get back into Goddard's rich Shakespearian feast.

So the winds blow through the hunter-green fronds of the palm in front of our balcony. A single spear juts from the base of the palms. White sand and water complete the endlessly appealing backdrop. And sky - so much sky! The fronds wave as if weaving goodbye; they look so creaturely for plant life.

THURSDAY

It's funny what the water brings in. Yesterday a half-pumpkin the size of a canned ham. Also an ear of corn. But no note in a bottle, alas. Until yesterday the beach was clean as a lick, with just light-colored shells undulating along the shoreline. Then, apropos of nothing, driftwood and bamboo sticks in quantity appear, marking the beach with dark matter for a mile or more.

Lots of "Heaven and Mirth" followed by a mirthful 20 minute run followed by a beer & malted milkshake runs. The weather is of paradise, which is how Ft. Myers markets itself. To my knowledge no one calls Vegas, or the Grand Canyon, or Niagara Falls paradise but I saw two road signs claiming such, and one bike rental operator refer to the sunshine, warm temps and beach as such.

"A fish just ran over my foot!" complains a 20s-something youth. A lot of rowdy "civilians" (non-hotel residents) at the beach today, presumably because of the holiday.

Overheard elsewhere: "The water is muddy-looking, probably from the dredging they're doing." There is a sand restoration project going on as I write this: a big ship in the distance runs an underwater tube to the shoreline from which great gobs of sand are emitted.

FRIDAY

So it's "Black Friday", so-called because it's when retailers get in the black economically but for me it's a black Friday because I'm heading north back to the land of cold and shadow.

We got up early and walked the beach one last time. The sunshine state delivered yet again, I thought to myself. On the ride to the airport we met yet another transplant: this time from Tennessee by way of Michigan, last time via New Jersey. Tempting that... I like that Steven Riddle move south.

On the Cusp of Weekend

2011-11-18T08:39:00.004-05:00

Lazy Dog in His Natural Habitat

Last night suckled two fine beers, different as night and day but equally refreshing: a Columbus IPA with its apricot-y high hops flavor followed by the ever-rich Edmund Fitzgerald Porter, another local brew. I used to be dubious of Ohio beers, as if their popularity was a sign of bias or "homerism", but these two brews are as fine as any I've tasted.

*

Just me, for about ten minutes yesterday, before the Blessed Sacrament. Honored to be guarding the Host. Then an older woman happened in and slowly made her way a few rows in front of me. In her hands was "Shirt of Flame". I felt a moment of connection with Him, the small feeling that my donation to the reading table was not in vain!

*

Very enjoyable half-hour at my desk today reading of the magical prose of Jeffrey Eugenides. Ah I've been going through fiction withdrawal without realizing it! What pleasure in his printed word I took, savoring the highly digestible sentences. Poetry without affectation, I tell ya.

*

Likely made a tactical error in blowing off the Lunch & Learn yesterday, the AVP's pet. Admin assistant threw me under the bus by mentioning loudly that I wasn't there, something that wasn't lost on my boss yesterday. I chided her this a.m.: "You busted me out didn't you?" I should've picked up on the signal that this wasn't an optional meeting by the fact that she kept asking us if we were going to be there: the quintessential "tell". The usual corporate passive-aggressive enforcement tactic. I'm somewhat glad I didn't fall for it. (Famous last words.) The meeting, about the financial concept of goodwill, gave me an excuse: "I didn't go because I already know what Goodwill is - I donate there!". Hardee har har. (As always, your experience of humor may vary.)

Link O'Rama

2011-11-17T09:04:00.001-05:00

Compare and Contrast What Our Libraries Say About Us.

Tales of a Bibliophile

2011-11-17T09:02:00.003-05:00

Good stuff, found here, on Arthur Balfour's reading habits:

...From Blanche E.C. Dugdale, Arthur James Balfour, First Earl of Balfour K.G., O.M. F.R.S., Vol. 1. (G.P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1937), pp. 135-136. Blanche Dugdale was Arthur Balfour's niece.
Nothing ever interfered with his reading. He always had several books on hand at once. The latest work on science might be found propped up on the mantelpiece of his bedroom to vary the process of dressing, and Lady Frances once declared that she suspected him of "making a raft of his sponge" to support a French novel while he took his bath. It was seldom that some work by Edgar Wallace or P.G. Wodehouse was absent from his bedside after these authors rose to fame, and the table by his arm-chair was always heaped with books of history, or Memoirs. It would be difficult to define the limits of his reading. Its range could astonish even his oldest friends, as for instance when, staying with Lord and Lady Desborough at Taplow Court on the eve of a General Election, he carried off to his bedroom a manual on chess, a game which since his boyhood he was never seen to play. Serious fiction was perhaps the only class of book upon which he was cautious of embarking. He never began a new novel until he was assured that it ended well. If no such assurance was forthcoming, he fell back upon Scott, Jane Austen, Kipling, and Stevenson.

He chose "The Pleasures of Reading" for the subject of his Rectorial Address to St. Andrews University in 1887, and there gave his personal answer to that most personal of questions—what to read and how to read it. Mr. Frederic Harrison had lately given forth some portentous warnings against "gorging and enfeebling" the intellect by over-indulgence in carelessly chosen literature. Balfour suggested that the analogy between the human mind and the human stomach might be pressed too far. He had never himself met the person whose natural gifts had been overloaded with learning. No doubt many learned people were dull, but not because they were learned. "True dullness is seldom acquired. It is a natural grace, the manifestations of which, however modified by education, remain in substance the same." People should not be afraid to read what they enjoyed. Idle curiosity, so-called, was a thing to be encouraged. Here follows a passage which might well mislead posterity into supposing Balfour a newspaper addict, ingeniously defending his favourite vice. The exhaustive study of the morning and evening papers was "only a somewhat unprofitable exercise of that disinterested love of knowledge that moves men to penetrate the Polar snows, or to explore the secrets of the remotest heavens.... It can be turned, and it should be turned into a curiosity for which nothing...can be wholly alien or uninteresting."

Such being his views, Balfour was naturally a lavish book-buyer. The library at Whittingehame is a large room, well stocked before his day with standard works of every kind. Soon it overflowed, and other rooms were lined with shelves. His own sitting-room was packed from floor to ceiling, mainly with books on philosophy and theology, and its sofas were heaped with flotsam and jetsam of current publications. The books at Whittingehame had an alert look about them, as if expecting to be pulled out at any moment. They were, in fact, often temporarily lost, for the ever-growing library was too large to be kept in order by the family's spasmodic efforts at arrangement, continually begun, but never ended. If Balfour was found wandering down the corridor at unwonted hours he was most likely in search of some book, and his relations would rush to proffer conflicting evidence about the present position of the missing volume.

"Read everything you find interesting and nothing that you don't," was nearly the sum-total of his advice to the younger generation with regard to literature. It sounded easy, yet to try to keep up with him along any of his primrose paths to knowledge, was to discover how deceptive was that apparently leisurely pace.

This & That Thursday

2011-11-15T09:00:00.011-05:00

A fine couple tidbits from Eve Tushnet:

* This is third-hand, so bear with me, but one reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan is that when the story is finished and Jesus asks, "Who was his neighbor?" and the Pharisee says, "The one who showed him mercy"... the Pharisee is placed in the role of the wounded man. The one who thought of himself in the powerful role, the role of the man extending his hand in charity, instead sees himself as the wounded man in need of mercy. And Jesus not only acknowledges his wounds and dirtiness and pledges to cleanse, heal, and forgive him, but also gives him the task of going and doing likewise--now from a position of gratitude and humility, rather than a never-sullied position of privilege and power.

* We were asked to think of three concrete ways God has shown us mercy. I had a few in mind, but after hearing from several of the other participants I realized that I had only identified places where I have been lucky. Privilege, basic health, good work, and financial security are things I'm immensely grateful for, but God's mercy is a fiercer thing.

*

Heard about St. Christina the Astonishing today. She could smell sin, and it wasn't pleasant. She went about hiding in closets trying to avoid the stench. Yikes! She rose from her own coffin and set up camp in the rafters to avoid the smell of the congregation. I reckon I wouldn't smell too good my own self. It seems so hard to believe, that of Christ's unconditional love, such that I'm faced with the truth that my sins do not define the compass of Christ's love, smell or no smell.

*

Our pastor Sunday talked about the upcoming changes and mentioned the "for many" versus "for all" controversy and said that the reason for "many" is that we all know that some reject Christ and thus even though Christ died for all that some reject Him.

But this seems a bit iffy in the face of the assertion that Hell could be empty. How can we say "many" when we don't know the eternal fate of a single soul?

As one friend said, it seems to elevate human choice. On the other hand, if we take the long view we see that the Church has almost always elevated human choice since the word has been "many" for a long, long time before the New Mass came in. So I can't get too excited over it given the history. The Church has survived worse.

*

It felt bracing and "empowering" (as the corporate-types so want us to feel) to blow off one of those egregious "Lunch 'n Learns" (meetings held in lieu of lunch that I alone appear to view as optional) despite it being politically inadvisable. It's amazing how you have to please so many more people now. Directors, AVPs, VPs...I get so much face time with higher-ups now and that's just not in my favor.

Feel uncomfortable with authority figures, primarily priests and assistant vice presidents. Hence I have difficulty with the semi-yearly sit-down chats. I would love to know the genesis of the fad to personally meet everybody on the planet. Blessed obscurity, where art thou? Flying beneath the pretty radar, how canst I?

*

Am reading "The Compass of Pleasure" and the author promises to go into the heart of the subject: why does every human, and many animal, culture seek out ways to alter their brains via substances like alcohol or caffeine or hallucinagens? Have to wade through a lot of science & dancing dendrites along the way though.

Why's My Bookbag (or e-reader equivalent) so Heavy?

2011-11-14T16:22:00.003-05:00

Excerpts from Eugenides' "The Marriage Plot":

In Madeleine’s face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.

*

In Plato’s Phaedrus, the speeches of Lysias the Sophist and of the early Socrates (before the latter makes his recantation) rest on this principle: that the lover is intolerable (by his heaviness) to the beloved.

*

“The flip side of self-loathing is grandiosity,” Leonard observed. “Right,” Henry said. “So if you’re going to crack up, you want to crack up like Robert Lowell.”

Bookroom pictures:

Poet Mark Doty excerpts...Unfortunately I lost all the formatting of Mark Doty poems when getting via web so...

Tiny girl in line at the café—seven, eight?—holding her book open, pointing to the words and saying them half-aloud while her mother attends to ordering breakfast; she’s reading POMPEII…Buried Alive! with evident delight. Pleasure with a little shiver inside it. And that evening, I thought I was no longer afraid of the death’s head beneath the face of the man beneath me.

*

that spiraling like climbing the steep winding of the cathedral in Barcelona, the Sagrada Familia, stone steps built to the mathematics of a narrow seashell, feet obscured in darkness, a built night, and then in a while, many whorls up, the terrifying small balconies perched at the back of spires of conch or chestnut burr or what ever spiked and tiled intensity the architect pronged from his melting fantasia,

*

Almost audible: weft of continuous color, blocks of mint, green-yellow glaze, olive floating above a violet underpainting, contentious against the citron and yellow-flung, seamless texture, like the hare of the cicadas, ceaseless music through which outbreaks of blue assert themselves.

*

In the flashpoint summer of 2002 it was possible to feel where we were headed, sun screwing its titanium compress down on human foreheads in the parking lots, thin tamarisks on the margin shimmering a little as if seen through fumes of gasoline, and I was in the absolute darkness of Fresno, past the middle of my life. As if I’d been colonized by the long swathes of car lots, flapping pennants stunned under the mercury lamps,

Quotable

2011-11-11T11:24:00.002-05:00

"...anyone with even the most superficial acquaintance with embryology must have been struck by the marvelous way in which complexes of cells group themselves to form an eye that as yet has nothing to see, hands that have nothing to handle, feet that have nowhere to go, and so on. Everything, while contributing to the life of the embryo, seems subordinated to a life of a quite different and higher order yet to come. The embryo has an integrity dictated to it as it were by the future. The meaning of each organ is read back into it by the function it achieves after birth."

- from Goddard's "The Meaning of Shakespeare"

Funny Stuff

2011-11-11T11:00:00.001-05:00

See reviews for this shirt. A parody of the consumer search for the salvific amid the mundane.

King & Duffy, Not a Law Firm

2011-11-11T10:58:00.000-05:00

I'm becoming somewhat of a pacifist concerning argumentation, in emails or on the web. Not from anything loftier than a bare utilitarian impulse, since it seems I have an equal and opposite effect from that which is intended. There's a reason reverse psychology is a term familiar: we are most resistant to ideas that are exactly what we most need to hear, self most definitely included. I'm more convinced than ever of the truth of Archbishop Sheen's line "win an argument, lose a soul."

The context for this is that that which I hold dear is mercy (if not on my interlocutors, ha.) And Heather King's works are rife with it and thus I hold them dear, especially the latest, "Shirt of Flame". In it she says, with some delicacy, that she can even understand the sins of pedophiles or words to that effect. Rut-row! That set my friend's "liberal gieger-counter" off and he saw red. Never could he imagine feeling the least pity for the child molester. She lost a reader and I lost if not a friend, one who trusts my judgment.

I made a similar mistake with my father-in-law, another justice guy. He was appalled when I told him of an ex-Nazi who confessed his sins to a priest before his death and thus was presumably in Purgatory instead of Hell. The story I had cherished repelled my f-i-l. I have this tendency, sometimes, to assume my mindset is the same as everyone else's. But people are different.

Of course my love of mercy could be cheap and shallow. I have not been a victim of, nor do I know any victims of, sex crimes or Nazi genocidal maniacs. I concede that I may not be able to identify closely enough with the victims. More sinning than sinned upon is me.

But still I can't help but think of St. Philip Neri's famous identification with Judas: "Oh Jesus, watch over me always, especially today, or I shall betray you like Judas." Here was a saint who didn't hold himself above the worst sinner in history, the man who Christ Himself said it would be better than "he'd never been born."

*

"They know not what they have," was my envious thought upon reading Betty Duffy mention she's in charge of a religious education class. That may not be true, of course, some may know and appreciate her. Others may think that she's just a "handsome woman" as Lino Rulli might say. The only reason I realize she's of such depth is from reading her blog. I have that advantage. But then I got to thinking: how many other extraordinary people are walking around that I completely miss as being extraordinary? And then I realized how flawed that whole mindset itself is, since isn't everybody extraordinary given that we are all made in the image and likeness of God and will end up either as angels or devils, metaphorically speaking?

Her latest column in Pathoes - ironically enough given the subject matter - was like crack cocaine to me. Reading about one's affliction has a sort of ameliorating effect, or at least gives you momentarily sufficient distance to understand what's happening. It certainly "fits" for me, this pleasure-till-you-drop mentality, the serial affections.. I have to gear up for suffering as seriously as I gear up for pleasure. I need to take that time and say the Rosary in lieu of listening to Lino on the ride home from work or music on the way in. Even better I need to "be still and know that He is God". Prayer is like oxygen. Effects not long-lasting, but neither is optional.

Veterans Day

2011-11-11T09:04:00.001-05:00

A fine tribute found over at American Catholic:

War is a curious part of the human condition. It is a summary of the worst that Man is capable of: violence on a massive scale, cruelty, greed, hatred, and the magnification of every human vice. Few of us are more “anti-war” than those who have had the misfortune to fight in one and witnessed all the folly, loss and endless pain produced by the inability of men to frequently resolve their differences without resort to the sword. Yet, in war we also see men rise to the heights of what we are capable of at our best: self-sacrifice, courage, love and the magnification of every human virtue. War as the direst of human institutions is to be bitterly regretted, but we must ever pay homage to those who find themselves in this terrible maelstrom and acquit themselves with honor.

And so on Veteran’s Day we honor all those who took time out from their regular lives to stand between the rest of us and danger. We especially remember those silent heroes who paid the ultimate price for us and who never came home. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. (John 15:13) Our gratitude, praise and thanks is small enough compensation, but it is the poor best we can give. We are creations of a loving God, and when we return love for love we demonstrate that.

Banned in O-hi-O

2011-11-07T09:46:00.002-05:00

Seems Rich Leonardi of "Ten Reasons" has lost his radio show. Anyone knowing Rich from his blog, and the reputation of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, could figure that the two weren't a good fit and that it might come to this.

Oddie Biography of GKC

2011-11-07T09:31:00.006-05:00

There's a quote from Chesterton's autobiography that refers to a William Henley poem which begins:

"OUT of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
for my unconquerable soul."

Contra that, the GK Chesterton writes:

"I had wandered to a position not very far from the phrase of my Puritan grandfather, when he said that he would thank God for his creation if he were a lost soul...I thanked whatever gods might be, not like Swinburne, because no life lived for ever, but because any life lived at all; not, like Henley, for my unconquerable soul...but for my own soul and my own body, even if they could be conquered."

What a profound sense of gratitude!

I was interested to read, in William Oddie's biography, Chesterton's view of Wilde and the decadents and I found, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, a strong moral streak that preceded his conversion. Even as a semi-pagan he recoiled, almost instinctively and without the defense of doctrine, from pleasure-seeking as the end all and be all:

"[Walter] Pater's root mistake, revealed in his most famous phrase [asking us] to 'burn with a hard, gemlike flame' is that you cannot handle flames. You cannot handle passions. His error is precisely that he wishes us to treat flames as one treats gems. He will burn his fingers."

And then of Pater's insistence of "enjoying the moment for the moment's sake" Chesterton wrote:

"You cannot have glorious moments and enjoy them 'simply for those moments' sake'. For suppose a man has a truly glorious moment, not something about a bit of enamel, I mean, but something violently and painfully happy. A moment of ecstasy in first love, for instance, or a moment of victory in battle. The lover enjoys the moment, but not for the moment's sake. He enjoys it for the woman's sake. The warrior enjoys the moment for the sake of the flag. The cause of the flag may be foolish. The love may be calf-love and last a week. But the patriotic soldier thinks the flag immortal; the lover thinks his love will never die. These moments are full of eternity: these moments are splendid because they do not seem momentary. Man cannot love mortal things; he can only love immortal things for an instant."

We're All the 1%?

2011-11-04T11:02:00.007-04:00

If class envy is a problem, perhaps it would be helpful to look at the big picture. In the history of mankind, nearly all present-day Americans would have to be classified in the top 1%, wealth-wise. If there were time-travelers from a hundred years or more ago they might well be protesting when they went back, knowing what we have. The whole thing is so relative. And if there's anybody who should be occupying something, it's the poor in Africa and elsewhere, many of whom are poor even by historical standards.

The other thought I had concerned the ubiquitous anxious question, "Will our children be better off that we will?" as if that's the end all and be all. I cringe a bit when I hear it because it rather nakedly poses that material happiness is the criteria upon which we base our society. I'm not sure, for example, it's crucial that my grandchildren have 4,000 square foot homes, instead of 3,000 square foot ones. Mika B. on Morning Joe mentioned today how French adolescents were asked to make drawings that reflected what they thought of Americans and one girl drew a person eating money. (Of course the French should talk but...).

This is not to say that the middle class hasn't been getting squeezed over the past four decades. Incomes aren't rising all that much, so even staying even is problematical. The thing about capitalism is that it does seem like if you're not striving to have better lives materially, you'll lose even the current standard of living. Which is what seems to be happening in Europe.

Takes Faith to Have Faith

2011-11-03T21:43:00.004-04:00

Read an interesting web item on how massage therapy promotes the release of oxytocin which leads to feelings of trust. But, ironically, she says that it takes trust in order to be open to receive the gift of trust. Sort of like faith?:

"This is the miracle of the modern world. It’s usually safe to wander back streets in other people’s countries, and engage in transactions with nothing but gestures and smiles. Modern trade requires a huge amount of trust, which took centuries to build. We should celebrate that trust instead of taking it for granted. Most people fill their heads with the calamities on the news and don’t notice how often things go right...

That’s the irony of massage. It stimulates the neurochemical “oxytocin,” the feeling we experience as trust, but you have to start with a lot of trust for it to work."

Of Books

2011-11-03T16:41:00.005-04:00

Went down to the cafeteria for a civilized half-hour reading "Swamplandia", a novel set in the atmospheric swampy Everglades about a family who own a tacky tourist trap involving alligator wrestling. Tasty Florida kitsch. The author is coming to Columbus tonight, to the Thurber House. Wouldn't mind going if it were hassle-free, which it's not. In the end I'd rather be reading her novel than listening to her read it and doing whatever else happens at book events. (She can't sign my Kindle, so there's no book-signing possible.)

Later worked out and read the eminently readable "After America" by Mark Steyn. I don't know why, but these financial collapse books seem to unduly fascinate me. Am on my third book that describes the events of 2008 forward. Maybe it's just the authors - Mark Steyn and Michael Lewis are always great reads. Or it's just that the topic of collapse and decay appeal to the pessimistically inclined.

In Honor of National Novel Writing Month!

2011-11-03T08:55:00.004-04:00

She was born in the summer of her 67th year, she often joked, making reference to a song that few shy of her age would recall. It was then that she found God and a mate, both belated suitors it might've seemed to her even though in fact both had been waiting for her all her life.

Born prickly, her younger siblings preceded her in death as if adhering to her natural order of things. She would have her way, and her way was not to leave the stage without taking the requisite bows. The wonder of it was how she managed a full social calendar despite her abrasive personality. People just got used to it, or maybe they feared her, figuring it was easier not to make a scene or an enemy. It seemed on the surface at least that she had more than a few friends. Like family, small town neighbors were those you had to get along with since you saw them so often.

She ran an unsuccessful business out of her home because she was the only one who would have her as an employee. Her gloss was that no employer would live up to her standards. Regardless, it was a rare point of agreement: she and potential employers agreed she was not suited to work for anybody but herself.

But all of this changed the summer she turned 67, much to the surprise of the local pastor who'd long ago written her off: "Focus on the young. The old are too set in their ways," he often said. Ironically it was he who was too set in his ways.

RSS R Us

2011-11-02T11:43:00.008-04:00

Netted some good blogposts, such a blogger making the point that our worth is not tied up in our usefulness:

"Last month I listened to a radio program . . . that made me groan out loud . . . . about adoption . . . . Who knows what gifts and treasures an adoptee might bring to the world, if they're only given a chance ([the commentator] said). For proof, just take a look at what Steve Jobs accomplished! And the same has been used as a rationale against abortion: don't deny the unborn a chance to become the next greatest CEO!

"What rot. Children, refugees, women, men, the elderly, the disabled, the severely disabled, the unborn, are of extreme value because human life is valuable. Period. People are worthy of our service simply because they are people and as such have inestimable dignity.

*

Eric Scheske said what I've often thought: that the sign of the end of civilization is upon us when adults stop giving out Halloween candy to children.

*

On embracing the unknown, from a soul-baring would-be Augustinian monk.

*

And Kevin Jones on American culture blindness in Iraq.

*

Also listened to a bit of blogger Steve Gershom on Catholic Answers radio show yesterday. Didn't sound gay (he admitted on his blog before that he's pretty good at not setting off any gaydar). I didn't realize his was a pseudonym, but I can certainly understand why he uses one. Certainly makes one feel freer to share.

Saints & Sinners

2011-11-02T07:22:00.008-04:00

It's funny how a single word can throw me. Thousands of times I've recited my favorite prayer after Communion, "Soul of Christ, sanctify me / Body of Christ save me....". But this time when I got to "Passion of Christ/ Strengthen me" I thought of passion not as the crucifixion as I normally do (while focusing on self, in terms of praying that some of His strength rub off on me), but His passion in the sense of love, as in his passion for us. Afterwards I thumbed through the Jerusalem Bible and came across an incident in Luke 7, an illustration of how Jesus, Master of the Universe, wants our love. Which is a strange and humbling thing on the face of it. The account was of a sinner and a Pharisee and how the sinner loved Christ because more was forgiven her. It's a telling reminder that Jesus doesn't want our rote acts of fealty but our love, our passion. And He linked that to forgiveness. What makes God most lovable? Not His power or even His perfection - what God has is forgiveness. That is the coin of the heavenly realm. Is it a chicken and egg kind of thing, in that he who has forgiven much, loves much, or is it he who loves much is forgiven much? The gospels express it both ways. And in the end Jesus says it was the woman's faith that saved her. Faith in His forgiveness, it would seem.

Still, I'm left with a paradox, the woman had sins, "many sins", and yet great love. Aren't the two mutually exclusive? How does purport to love God and yet be a big sinner? A lack of sin doesn't necessarily make you a great lover, but the contrary seems true: being a sinner means you aren't a great lover since to sin against someone is to say, in some way, you don't love them (or God). Perhaps it's as simple as seeing her sins in the past. She *was* a sinner who didn't love much, then she became, in that moment with Christ, a lover who didn't sin much.

*

I've long been fascinated by the stories of saints whose bodies remain incorruptible after death. It's strange of me to think of this as a "reward", since it hardly matters whether someone's body is molding in the grave or is in great condition because in either case they are dead and their spirit is elsewhere, concerned with bigger things. But it seems to me a touching, an imprimatur from God, a little act the Creator bestows on the created, a little sign of love that may or may not ever be discovered by the masses. This incorruptibility seems like a tangible reward, an honor God bestows on the few, the pious, the Marines of the spiritual world. But even this is not a surefire way of identifying the saintly. Many saints did become corruptible and some incorruptibles may not be holy. Too often I also superstitiously note the lack of saints who died in accidents (have there been?) and think Thomas Merton may not be one due to his unnatural end. All of this can "misunderestimate" how passionately God loves us, whether or not our bodies corrupt or what sort of death we experience. We look for little droplets of kindness unaware we live in a sea of Love.

Excerpts from Goddard's "The Meaning of Shakespeare"

2011-11-01T13:20:00.002-04:00

How well the first two paragraphs seem to correlate to Biblical criticism and not just Shakespearian:

To find out first what Shakespeare really wrote sounds eminently sensible. But it is not as objective an inquiry as it seems. Even in determining the text, love is as necessary as learning, for only he who recognizes Shakespeare’s voice and has penetrated into his spirit is fitted to make the delicate choice among possible readings or to catch the “inspired” emendation. And so it turns out that we must know Shakespeare before we know what he wrote precisely in order to be capable of finding out more nearly what he did write.

to read some of the historical critics you would think that only a learned student of Elizabethan society and the Elizabethan stage can pretend to understand Shakespeare.

*

“The Lord at Delphi,” says Heraclitus, “neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign.” Dreams have the same Delphic characteristic. So does poetry. To our age anything Delphic is anathema. We want the definite. As certainly as ours is a time of the expert and the technician, we are living under a dynasty of the intellect, and the aim of the intellect is not to wonder and love and grow wise about life, but to control it.

We want the facts for the practical use we can make of them. We want the tree for its lumber, not, as Thoreau did, to make an appointment with it as with a friend.

*

Neither [Cadwal nor Belarius] is a mere passive receptacle for the narrative. Each participates in, contributes to it. But how differently! The elder acts it out, spirit and body combining to be the story and its hero. The younger re-creates it imaginatively, striking life into it by revealing his individual reaction to it...But translation is rarely creation, and there is a step beyond it. There is nothing that makes a story come to life like linking it with the experience of the moment.

But if it came to a choice, who can doubt where Shakespeare’s deeper sympathy would lie? And so I hear him adding: “But there is another way of taking my stories that I like even better. I like to have you strike life into my speech by lighting it up with your own experience, as Cadwal did the speech of Belarius. Yes, I love to have my stories taken as dramas, but I love still more to have them taken as poetry.” That at any rate is the way Shakespeare treated the stories of others.

*

“‘Never be afraid of an author,’ he said, ‘an actor is a free artist. You ought to create an image different from the author’s. When the two images-the author’s and the actor’s-fuse into one-then a true artistic work is created.’

*

How many masters of how many arts have expressed delight when they have found some Cadwal to strike life into their own creations: “I write to you,” says Chopin in one of his letters, “without knowing what my pen is scribbling, for Liszt is at this moment playing my Etudes and he transports me out of my proper senses. I should like to steal from him his way of playing my pieces.”

You and I and the next man are not entitled to read anything we take a fancy to into a symphony or a play. It is only in so far as each of us is an artist that his freedom to interpret a work of art will not degenerate into license. Fortunately, however deeply buried, there is an artist in every man.

*

only the imagination can apprehend the imagination.

*

The criticism of the first period (often called neoclassic), instead of striking life into Shakespeare’s works, sought to subject them to a set of rules and a conception of dramatic art inherited from the past, something that was not at all its “own conceiving.”

The critics of this age admitted that Shakespeare was a kind of rough genius but contended that he lacked art-which he did, in their sense. They served a purpose in pointing out some of Shakespeare’s excesses. But they showed how powerless reason is to grasp imagination.

The romantic period, which followed, was poetic rather than intellectual, and produced, at its best, as good criticism of Shakespeare as has ever been written. But it had the defects of its qualities; and in its lesser writers, in its greatest ones at their worst, and in their later imitators, Shakespearean criticism degenerated into extravagance and fancy-for alongside the man who finds his own soul, and so the soul of everyone, in a work of art, is the man who reads into it his own prejudices and opinions, makes it a point of departure for some sheer invention, or uses it to grind his own axe—all of them fatally different things. As Cicero remarks in Julius Caesar, men may construe things after their fashion, Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.

*

“Let us get rid of all this subjective business,” cry all these critics in unison, “and get back to Shakespeare himself.” Shakespeare himself! As if Shakespeare himself were acquainted with any such person, had his own neat theory of Hamlet, or held the same conception of his characters a decade later as on the day they were created. “I must observe that I have often been mistaken,” says Chekhov in one of his letters, “and have not always thought what I think now.” All free minds say that.

*

Shakespeare’s lifelong pity for “the fools of time” suggests what he might have thought of this way of approaching his works. A thoroughgoing historical critic is a man attempting to explain the flower by an exhaustive examination of the soil. It cannot be done. “If anything is humanly certain,” says William James, “it is that the great man’s society, properly so called, does not make him before he can remake it. Physiological forces, with which the social, political, geographical, and to a great extent anthropological conditions have just as much and just as little to do as the condition of the crater of Vesuvius has to do with the flickering of this gas by which I write, are what make him.”

*

the objective business that is the object of their search is neither a whit better nor a whit worse than the subjective business that is the subject of their scorn. The two are extremes that meet. Suppose that in a drop of water an oxygen sect were to appear clamoring for the extinction of all this hydrogen business—or vice versa. It would be a parable of the factual critics. For what thev leave out is one of the two constituents of life itself. What they forget is the dual character of the imagination. Imagination is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two...

*

The reader with a poem before him is like a youth with life before him. In spite of all that the guides and drivers say, he must be faithful to the text and to himself: two lions at the gate of his adventure to keep him from wandering off into the desert of custom or the jungle of fancy. This is the answer to those who hold that opening the doors on individual interpretation is opening them on anarchy. If it is, we are to blame. It need not be. We read a poem as we live—at our risk.

Jotting...

2011-11-01T12:24:00.001-04:00

On Sunday read some of Goddard's "The Meaning of Shakespeare" and it's just so revelatory. He speaks of the distinction between the literal meaning of the text and its poetry, and clearly he seems to suggest a view of Scripture: that there are two extremes - one is that it means only what the author intends it, or it means only what we intend it. Both are false; there is some middle ground in which we see meanings in Shakespeare the Bard didn't see or, in the analogy, the sacred author didn't see.

On The Catholic Channel, heard Martin Sheen discuss his film "The Way" with Archbishop Timothy Dolan and I wonder if the archbishop squirmed at all when Sheen explained how pertinent the theologically discredited liberation theology is in his faith: "It's Daniel Berrigan who keeps me in the Church" was the gist of Sheen's speech. The archbishop did not use the time for lecturing or hectoring but instead diplomatically mentioned Dorothy Day, whom everyone can admire.

Yes Indeed

2011-10-28T09:32:00.002-04:00

"Amazon is investing (and hiring) while many other American corporations are milking incumbent businesses, under-investing in research and development, and hoarding cash. To the chagrin of some traders, Amazon is distinctly NOT “maximizing near-term profits” — it is sacrificing near-term profits. It is making less money now in the hopes of making more money and creating more value later. And it is ignoring the howls and screams of short-term traders who couldn’t care less about Amazon’s long-term prognosis, add nothing to the economy, and just want to make money now.

If more American companies started to do what Amazon does — ignore short-term pressures, sacrifice near-term profits, and invest for the long-term — the American economy would start to heal itself quickly. America would create more innovation, more jobs, and more long-term wealth. And, just as important, more Americans would be able to go back to being proud of our corporations and innovators and entrepreneurs… instead of camping in parks and protesting them."

--Henry Blodgot, DEAR AMERICA: It’s Time To Say A Big ‘Thank You’ To Amazon

On Point

2011-10-27T10:16:00.003-04:00

As a collector of corporate neologisms (such as the term 'deck' being used to describe a Powerpoint presentation), I note with glee a new one found in an up & comer's note:

Hi guys. Are you familiar with this data? Not sure who pulled it the first time... Please let me know who is on point and when we expect we'll be able to deliver.

I suppose "responsible for this" is now passé and a bit wordy.

Oops!

2011-10-25T09:41:00.021-04:00

There's an error in the title of this book: Know Your Bible: All 66 Books Explained.

Hate when that happens! Doesn't inspire confidence.

Ways to fix this include but don't preclude:

Know Your Bible: Lots of Books Explained

Know Your Bible: 90.41095% Biblical Books Explained

Know Your Bible: 66 Books of Either 66, 73 or 75 Books Explained Depending On Whether Your Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox

Let's Play...Why's My Bookbag or E-Reader Equivalent So Heavy?

2011-10-25T09:40:00.003-04:00

From Heather King's "Shirt of Flame":

Msgr. Albacete’s story leads me to reflect that maybe this is why we need suffering, and why we need love: because without one or the other of them to blow us apart, we will comply with the letter, rather than the spirit, of the law like sheep. We will suffer from a fatal reduction of desire. We will dumbly go along with the dictates of our culture.

Love is the wild card that gives us the incandescent drive to subvert all power systems. Desire is the unpredictable x that throws off all bets.

Had I fallen through the cracks completely, as I’d secretly feared since birth I would?

I began to see that to ache for tenderness myself was to ache for the world. I began to see that in my loneliness, I entered into the loneliness of Christ. I began to see that to hold the tension of my longing, frustration, and fear was to help hold the tension of a husband who wanted to cheat on his wife; a college student who was contemplating making a quick buck by working at a strip club; a teenager, in despair over a crush gone wrong, who wanted to pull the trigger.

From "Boomerang" by Michael Lewis:

Given the chance to take something for nothing, the German people simply ignored the offer. “There was no credit boom in Germany,” says Asmussen. “Real estate prices were completely flat. There was no borrowing for consumption. Because this behavior is totally unacceptable in Germany. This is what the German people are. This is deeply in German genes. It is perhaps a leftover of the collective memory of the Great Depression and the hyperinflation of the 1920s.”

A German traffic jam is a peculiar sight: no one honks, no one switches lanes searching for some small, illusory advantage, all trucks remain in the right-hand lane, where they are required to be. The spectacle of sparkling BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes in the left lane and immaculate trucks in a neat row in the right lane is almost a pleasure to watch. Because everyone in the jam obeys the rules, and believes that everyone else will obey them, too, the cars and trucks move as fast as they can, given the circumstances.

From Kingsley Amis's "Everyday Drinking":

A team of American investigators concluded recently that, without the underpinning provided by alcohol and the relaxation it affords, Western society would have collapsed irretrievably at about the time of the First World War.

I feel that there is very little we can safely add, in discussing our motives for drinking, to the verdict of the poet who said we do it because “we are dry, or lest we may be by and by, or any other reason why.”

“If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I would teach them should be, to forswear thin potations.” —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (Falstaff, Henry IV, Part 2)

From "The Marriage Plot" by J. Eugenides:

All over College Hill, in the geometric gardens of the Georgian mansions, the magnolia-scented front yards of Victorians, along brick sidewalks running past black iron fences like those in a Charles Addams cartoon or a Lovecraft story;

That Alton and Phyllida had driven up from New Jersey to see her graduate, that what they were here to celebrate today wasn’t only her achievement but their own as parents, had nothing wrong or unexpected about it.

The Next Bubble?

2011-10-21T12:37:00.004-04:00

Interesting thoughts from James Taranto:

Here's a puzzle: Try to figure out what we're describing.

It costs a lot of money, so much that most people have to go into debt to buy it. It has considerable intrinsic value, but it is also understood to be an investment. And it is a status symbol--indeed, almost a necessary condition for achieving middle-class status.

Its acquisition by as wide a swath of the population is widely seen as a social good. Thus the government heavily subsidizes it through tax incentives and other means. That, however, creates an artificial demand that drives prices up and, in a vicious circle, spurs demands for more subsidies...

In the current economy, it has turned out to be considerably less valuable than promised. As a result, many Americans are under water, with debts that they will not be able to pay off easily.

What is it? A house, but that's the obvious answer. We're thinking of a college education. The similarities between the housing bubble and the higher-ed bubble are remarkable, aren't they?

"The amount of student loans taken out last year crossed the $100 billion mark for the first time and total loans outstanding will exceed $1 trillion for the first time this year," USA Today reports. We'd seen that $1 trillion figure before--last Saturday, at New York's Zuccotti Park, where a 23-year-old Occupy Wall Street protester named Taylor was carrying a sign that read "Where's our bailout? $1 trillion in student loans outstanding."

You can see why young people like Taylor would feel aggrieved. Growing up, they were told they needed a college education as a ticket to a productive life. Now they find themselves deeply in debt, their employment prospects limited in the Obama economy. So they're lashing out at the banks that hold their debt and at the corporations that have made a college degree into a license to hunt for a job.

Their anger is understandable but misplaced. The banks were merely doing what banks do; if they had refused to make student loans, these youngsters would have been just as upset. As for the corporations, the reason they demand college degrees, as we wrote in 2007, is that the government forbids them to screen applicants directly for basic intelligence under a doctrine of antidiscrimination law known as "disparate impact" that the U.S. Supreme Court established in the 1971 case Griggs v. Duke Power Co.

Dickens: An Author of Demonic Energy

2011-10-19T16:47:00.001-04:00

TIME magazine piece on a new biography.

Lapsed Atheism

2011-10-19T12:59:00.000-04:00

From Fr. Charles:

In other words, the religious person is not someone who has become special by adopting some extraordinary outlook or worldview, but someone who has become ordinary by just accepting things as they are.

On Good Authority...

2011-10-19T12:55:00.000-04:00

Some are quite worked up over the new words to the Mass, in particular the infamous "for many" in the words of consecration. I'm not fond of the changes, but the pedigree for using the new translation seems astonishingly good; here's the persuasive way our bishop explains it:

And the Orthodox use "many" as well.

National Review's Take on the Occupiers

2011-10-19T09:14:00.004-04:00

"It is true that many kids finish school with a heavy debt load they find it hard to pay. But that is an argument for rethinking the way we encourage young people to borrow to get overpriced degrees — not for funneling even more taxpayer resources to a relatively privileged group of Americans.

We trust that the liberals and Democrats who are attempting to ingratiate themselves with or burnish the reputations of the protesters — Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson declared, “I love every little thing” about the protests, with no explicit exclusion of the defecation on a police car they have entailed — will at least blush the next time they denounce the alleged radicalism of the tea parties.

But mockery, and the use of the protests to discredit liberalism, should not be our only responses to this spectacle. We do not believe that the public burns with a desire to punish Wall Street (or to protect it from punishment); but it does have a justified concern that the Wall Street–Washington axis does not work to its advantage. And while many of the layabouts on the streets would have sub-Marxist thoughtlets in their heads under any circumstances, it is also true that hard times can radicalize young people — even people who are not directly affected by the hard times, and especially people who have been miseducated. There is reason for worry as well as scorn."

In the same issue of NR, James Lileks more pithily expresses something I wrote on Parody is Therapy a couple years ago. He says, "Last week's drum circle was intended to raise awareness about consciousness."

This & That Wednesday

2011-10-19T08:22:00.015-04:00

Sat in the bookroom petting our German Shepherd mutt this morning for some ten minutes, simply enjoying the "temple of peace". I love books, but that is precisely what led me to go the e-reader route. I bought so many of them and am so reluctant to give any of them up that it would irresponsible to "adopt" any more of them. Already I often lose books, or at least can't easily find them. That is the point - when you can't find books you own - that it's probably time to buy an e-reader. For with a Kindle you can never lose a book again. I have about hundred books on the e-reader, a hundred books I would have to shelve, and the cost of a new bookcase exceeds the cost of a new Kindle. But the good thing is I can still enjoy the physical books, the look on the shelves; the e-book revolution came at the perfect time for me. And at $79 a pop now, pretty darn affordable. The Kindle Daily Deal has been a fun addition to my day. It's like playing the lottery: Every morning I check to see if I "won". (Winning being them offering for $1.99 some book I might actually read, which occurs maybe once a week.) I bought a biography of Bismarck and "Eyewall", the fictional story of a hurricane set near Hilton Head over the past two or three weeks.

So I looked around at the lovely expanse of books that wrap around the room. I felt a yen for Chesterton (oh but his name ought be Chesterten, for rhyming purposes), and I picked up what I thought was the Ignatius Press copy of his essays but instead was of his poetry, and a single line struck me: "Finds the wild windfall of a little kindness."

Speaking of Chesterton, read a bit of a bio which, I thought later, was no substitute for his own inimitable writing. It's like with Dickens, how sometimes I want to read his biography more than his work when it works better the other way. (A potentially interesting new biography explores the impact of love in Dickens' life and writing.)

Tempted to get James Martin's "Between Heaven and Mirth" if only because I'm curious how he squares the seriousness of the stakes of religion (eternal joy versus eternal torture) with a feeling of lightness and levity. He makes the case early that religion is too grim. A quick flip through it revealed a reference to the Protestant work ethic: "after all, it's not called the Protestant play ethic."

Went to the annual Columbus library book sale and thought almost immediately, "Why am I here"? Shades of Ross Perot's old running mate. James Stockdale. Full of old library books from the 70s, 80s and 90s, I couldn't pull the trigger and add to the books I already have. Perhaps it's natural that the combination of age and collection size would eventually flatten the desire to buy books "just because you can". (There were $2 for hardbacks, $1 for paperbacks.) The books I eventually had in my hands were middlings like "Inventing Niagra: The Story of Niagra Falls". I thought to myself that there is more gold in one page of Heather King's Shirt of Flame than in this whole sale.

*

So the big New Orleans trip is o'er. Would've been nice to have gone but circumstances weren't favorable. All my favorite bloggers went, or at least some of them. Betty Duffy, the Darwins... Amy Welborn couldn't make it due to a death in the family. I'll bet a fabulous time was had on the Duffy Merry Prankster's bus. They drove the 13 hours or so to the Gulf port and later sipped bourbon in the warm southern air. It was ostensibly an academic conference about Walker Percy, and that would've been interesting too I'm sure.

*

Three potential novels, now that Middlesex has been finished: A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion by Ron Hansen and The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafona and The Marriage Plot by Eugenides.

*

The perennial dust
on the entertainment center
bespeaks an unfamiliarity
with a dust rag.

*

I can't write a siesta
or whatever it's called
at least not while drinking.

*

Liturgy Sunday at the Byzantine parish. It feels of entering a different world ("Heaven on earth"). A comment from a priest at St. Pat's last week still resonates: the reason, he said, that Christ comes to us in the Eucharist is because it makes Him approachable. He knows we wouldn't come to Him if He appeared to us in His glory. What a unique way to look at it! And of course that's also part of the reason for the Incarnation. God became man because man perhaps had trouble approaching an invisible, all-powerful God. Eve became flesh of Adam's flesh and similarly Christ became flesh of our flesh. Thus our Creator became our Spouse, and we are even more joined to the Body of Christ than Adam was to Eve, they who were joined to each other, having shared a rib.

Read the Roman rite's readings and the first reading was from Isaiah chapter 45 about how God empowers even when we don't know it's Him. That was oddly comforting since I took it to mean he will give us strength even when we're not smart enough to ask Him for it, when we don't know how helpful he is and longs to be. If we haven't totally personally inculterated his loving nature. The actual meaning of the text may be more along the lines of God using even Pharaoh to indicate God's power but...

*

Amazing weather last weekend. Seventy degrees and blue sky backdrop to evergreens and an aging yellow maple. Certainly October has its moments; both last weekend and this weekend have been pretty tolerable, especially by late afternoon. October definitely picks its spots though: you can go a week or more with lousy weather.

Speaking of which, Ireland came under some criticism on that front by Michael Lewis through an African visitor who said that it was always raining or thinking about raining: "Who would want to live here, under an elephant?"

Lewis also mentioned the German's strange fixation with bodily excrement. From Luther to Hitler, the "clean people" are obsessed with dirt. Very odd. Lewis also mentions how Greece and Ireland are opposites: Ireland not complaining a peep about an austerity caused by their banks, while Greece violently protesting that which they themselves are guilty of (the whole country is made of tax cheats and corruption). It is quite striking how different cultures are, how there has arisen not just a single successful way to live but apparently many. Or perhaps I should say the differing cultures have found many middling ways to live.

Boomerang

2011-10-17T16:36:00.003-04:00

Riveting read is "Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World" by Michael Lewis on my Kindle. I doubt I'll ever look at Greece (or Germany) the same way after reading this. Some selections:

The [easy] credit wasn’t just money, it was temptation. It offered entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Entire countries were told, “The lights are out, you can do whatever you want to do and no one will ever know.” What they wanted to do with money in the dark varied. Americans wanted to own homes far larger than they could afford, and to allow the strong to exploit the weak. Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers, and to allow their alpha males to reveal a theretofore suppressed megalomania. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish.

*

EVEN AT THE time, the decision seemed a bit odd. The Irish banks, like the big American banks, managed to persuade a lot of people that they were so intertwined with their economy that their failure would bring down a lot of other things, too. But they weren’t, at least not all of them. Anglo Irish Bank had only six branches, no ATMs, and no organic relationship with Irish business except the property developers. It lent money to people to buy land and build: that’s all it did. It did this with money it had borrowed from foreigners. It was not, by nature, systemic... if the Irish wanted to save their banks, why not guarantee just the deposits? There’s a big difference between depositors and bondholders: depositors can flee. The immediate danger to the banks was that savers who had put money into them would take their money out, and the banks would be without funds. The investors who owned the roughly 80 billion euros’ worth of Irish bank bonds, on the other hand, were stuck. They couldn’t take their money out of the bank. And their 80 billion euros very nearly exactly covered the eventual losses inside the Irish banks. These private bondholders didn’t have any right to be made whole by the Irish government. The bondholders didn’t even expect to be made whole by the Irish government... When a bank forces an Irish person into receivership, it follows up with a letter to his blood relations, informing them of his insolvency—and his shame. “It’s not like the United States, where being bankrupt is almost a badge of honor,”

*

A distinguished American anthropologist named Alan Dundes set out to describe the German character through the stories that ordinary Germans liked to tell one another. Dundes specialized in folklore, and in German folklore, as he put it, “one finds an inordinate number of texts concerning Scheisse (shit), Dreck (dirt), Mist (manure), Arsch (ass). . . . Folksongs, folktales, proverbs, riddles, folk speech—all attest to the Germans’ longstanding special interest in this area of human activity.” .... Perhaps Hitler was so persuasive to Germans, Dundes suggested, because he shared their quintessential trait, a public abhorrence of filth that masked a private obsession. “The combination of clean and dirty: clean exterior–dirty interior, or clean form and dirty content—is very much a part of the German national character,” he wrote.

it was hard to come away from his treatise without the strong sense that all Germans, high and low, were a bit different from you and me—a point he made in the introduction to the paperback version of his book. “The American wife of a German-born colleague confessed to me that she understood her husband much better after reading the book,” he wrote. “Prior to that time, she had wrongly assumed that he must have some kind of peculiar psychological hang-up inasmuch as he insisted upon discussing at great length the state of his latest bowel movement.” The Hamburg red-light district had caught Dundes’s eye because the locals made such a big deal of mud wrestling. Naked women fought in a ring of filth while the spectators wore plastic caps, a sort of head condom, to avoid being splattered. “Thus,” wrote Dundes, “the audience can remain clean while enjoying dirt!” Germans longed to be near the shit, but not in it. This, as it turns out, is an excellent description of their role in the current financial crisis.

From 1947 Book Inside USA by John Gunther

2011-10-14T12:58:00.005-04:00

Excerpts:

Next to New York, [Cleveland] is probably the best-run big city in the country.

Cleveland has about as much charm as an automobile cemetery; Cincinnati is packed with charm. Like all the river cities partly German in origin (Louisville, St.
Louis, Milwaukee), [Cincinnati] has a certain stately and also sleepy quality, a flavor of detachment, soundness and je m'en fiche-ism....Cleveland lives in the competitive orbit of Detroit, Buffalo and Pittsburgh more than with the rest of Ohio. I asked Cleveland friends what they thought of Cincinnati. Answer: "We're quite friendly to Cincinnati, when we happen to think about it."...I asked some Cincinnati friends what they thought of Cleveland. Reply: "Cleveland is contentious, introspective, and not really part of the United States!"

The capital of Ohio, Columbus, does not think of itself as a metropolis; it is in transition from what Cincinnati was to what Cleveland is...Columbus today is a spacious and friendly town; a big issue is apt to be whether or not to cut down the trees and so make a street broader. It is a fanatic and frenzied football town; if you don't go to football games on Saturday, people think you're an odd fish and a pariah. It is a strong religious town; there are more Methodist, I hear, within a hundred-mile radius of Columbus than any other city in the world. Roman Catholic influence;, though not nearly so weighty as in Cincinnati, is also considerable; for instance the film Mission to Moscow was withdrawn from exhibition after one day's showing...As to politics, the "Catholics can nominate, but not elect," I heard it put.

Sympathy for the Occupiers

2011-10-14T08:52:00.011-04:00

Wired for Complaint

There is the smell of leftwing extremism in the Occupy Wall Street crowd, or perhaps that's just the result of a lack of bathing facilities. (And just where are they going to bathroom?) Sometimes I sense that they are merely picketing reality, that they are upset over a fallen world. And who can blame them for that? For in a fallen world you would see a divergence between jobs tailored to humans and humans tailored to jobs. In other words, in a fallen world it seems you have to go where the jobs are and wrench yourself into a very imperfect fit, rather than having the jobs come to you, designed for your temperament and skill set.

In a mature post-industrial economy, it seems work comes mostly in the form of low-paying service-oriented jobs or decent-paying white collar jobs. It's blatantly unfair that there aren't many jobs for the high-school graduate blue collar worker. In a healthy job market you'd hope for jobs for those with both brain and brawn. But then the whole history of mankind seems to be a series of adjustments to the job environment, rather than the job environment modifying itself for man.

Over the hundreds of thousands of years of the hunter/gatherers, we evolved towards a lot of exercise (running after prey) without undue mental strain in the form of mundane office work. Today we have the opposite - little need for exercise and a general favoritism for mental activity over brawn. The difficult transition to agricultural system left many at a loss; think about how devastating it was for American Indians to go from semi-nomadic tribes to an agricultural, reservation-based lifestyle.

I think there are a couple assumptions that are implicit, a sort of "social contract" (rightly or wrongly) with and by the American people. One is that if we are going to have the largest military in the world, then we want our money's worth: we expect to be safe. To the extent we are not, we will retaliate and retaliate to the max. (Hence two endless wars.) Second, the bargain with capitalism is that we go with it if we have nearly full employment. When we don't, as in the 1930s, there were fears that we would become Communist - which supposedly was the rationale behind some of FDR's moves. "I have to move left," he seemed to say, "to prevent us from going all the way left."

Herman Cain said that the protesters should be occupying D.C. rather than Wall Street and there's some truth to that although I can certainly understand the fury at Wall Street. The investment banks are treated with kid gloves since like it or not they seem to be the oil of the overall economy. They are the gate-keepers of capital and loans, the engines of capitalism. And Wall Street did have a big role in the financial collapse, by making huge uncoverable bets that the housing market would never fall. Charles Krauthammer calls Wall Street a scapegoat, but some scapegoats do give off the whiff of rightful blame.

A Diary By Any Other Name....

2011-10-13T09:30:00.010-04:00

Buddy lies sleeping flat in the dirt bed next to the concrete patio. He's a sublime dog full of aspirations and hidden demons. He will smilingly hold forth in the backseat of the car one moment and in the next bark ferociously at an innocent biker or walker. There is no rhyme or reason to his irrational hatreds; some humans pass inspection, others are apparently worth getting exercised over. My parents' dog has a hair-trigger bark induced by any event outside the house. In fact, she barked over nothing I could see. Perhaps a ghost.

An extraordinarily good weather weekend last weekend still resonates in memory if not in fact: 80 degree high and cloudless. We spent Saturday well, biking through downtown Hamilton past the old Hamiltonian (now a Marriott hotel), down Dayton Street with its Victorian mansions, down a twisting 9th avenue full of atmospherics (as my brother said, "nothing says Hamilton like a homemade sign announcing pitbull pups for sale"), and then finally to the cemetery where so many relatives lay buried.

After the bike ride last Saturday there was nothing better than that first taste of Warsteiner Dunkel. I could've drank it like I did root beer or lemonade back in the '70s: in one big gulp. It's amazing how thirst-quenching beer can be. Usually I drink it with little thirst, unlike Bill Luse who drinks it after completing grass-cutting chores on hot Orlando days.

*

To tune "Thank Heaven for Little Girls":

Thank heaven for all my books
the list of them gets bigger every day!

Thank heaven for all my books
I read them in the most delightful way!

Those little tomes so helpless and appealing
one day will weigh so much to crash right thru the ceilin'!

Thank heaven for all my books
thank heaven for them all,
no matter which no matter who
for without them, what would little me do?

Thank heaven... thank heaven...
Thank heaven for all my books!

Succumbed to buying "Boomerang" by Michael Lewis on the financial crisis in the first world simply because I can't put down anything he writes. And began Amy Welborn's tragic story of her husband's death and subsequent travel to Italy. Not sure about Fr. Robert Barron's "Catholicism" since it appears to go over mostly familiar ground.

Almsgiving

2011-10-13T09:23:00.006-04:00

Good gospel the other day in which Jesus says that God made the inside and outside and the way to clean the inside is to give alms.

I notice that I tend to donate perhaps less as the Spirit moves, and more as what moves me. I like e-readers, so I want the troops to have them. I like Word Among Us (rather than Magnficat) so I donate towards getting that publication to prisoners and service men and women. I used to like EWTN more than I do now, and thus donate less to them.

I feel a tiny bit responsible for the trials and miseries our soldiers are undergoing: I voted for Bush, who then of course put them in harm's way, apparently forever. Wounded Warriors and "E-readers for the Troops" get my attention.

I'm not sure giving to those causes that I most identify with should be the criteria. It's akin to those who have a rare disease and contribute to the funding towards a cure for that, despite the fact that cancer is claiming one out of every two people. Rational, other-directed charity demands we put ourselves in the shoes of others and try to help as many as we can in the way they need.

Reviews of Christian Smith Book

2011-10-12T09:34:00.005-04:00

I found The Bible Made Impossible enriching, and for those interested there is a review here, with links to other reviews.

2011-10-11T15:17:00.001-04:00

E-books for Troops!

Spendin' the Hours RSS'in

2011-10-10T09:07:00.006-04:00

(Extra credit for those who recognize the song referred to in the title.)

A lightning round of posts sighted elsewhere in the wild. From Reading for Believers:

No, it wasn't a dream," said Edmund.
"Why not?"
"Well, there are the clothes, for one thing. And you have been - well, un-dragoned, for another."
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis
"Crap," I thought, when Betty Duffy pointed out that I was not, as I thought, dashing off occasional notes to friends, but in some sense Blogging My Conversion, "now, since it's the next way-point, I'm going to have to write about First Confession, aka Reconciliation, aka (in these parts) Hohou Rongo, and I really don't want to do that."

People say they loved their first confession, and some practical people advise taking a large handkerchief, but my problem is with the examination of conscience. Fifty-mumble years old, committing mortal sins on a regular basis: it's Zeno's Paradox. However fast I tally the sins, I'll never catch up to the present. It's dreary work, too. It consists largely of discovering that I am far from being the person I think I am (mostly moral) or the person I pretend to be (mostly harmless).

I've also made the strange discovery that, however intimidated I have been all these years by my mother-in-law, she is more frightened of me. Poor woman. All these years when we could have been, if not besties, then at least comrades-in-arms.

But my worst problem has been a failure of memory altogether. This is partly because the Calvinist doctrine of Total Depravity combined with the doctrine of Imputed Righteousness adds up to excusing moral failure as unavoidable while passing the penalty Higher Up. Why register failure when the books are cooked? But some sin is so heinous that the Calvinist cop-out cannot cope, and then memory corruption kicks in for self-protection. "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?"

So, I had such a sin straitjacketed away, and I'd half-forgotten it. It was pretty bad. It was bad, and not pretty. It was the work of a moment. I cried off and on for about a year after I committed it. If I'd managed to fornicate on the Sabbath while committing it, it would just about be a perfect strike against the decalogue. Somehow I had suppressed the memory till this very week, till this day, Sunday.

I had forgotten it; God had not: still merciful, and still with the sense of humour. "Father," I said to our priest after Exposition today, "since I'm coming into the Church on Saturday, when would it suit you to hear my confession?" "Monday, after Mass?" he said. "Yes," I said, thinking of my half-finished Examen and this unsavoury addition, "I think I can pull it together by tomorrow." "Oh, no, how about Thursday? I have a funeral on Wednesday," he said. "Yes," I said, eyes widening a bit, "fine."

Friends, if I read this elsewhere, I would suspect the writer had sugared it up to make a better story, but I assure you this is not the case. I will be confessing this awful sin, one which has roiled years on my soul, on the ten-year anniversary of my committing it - to the very day.

See you on the other side - after my un-dragoning.

Betty Duffy comments:

I did a "general" confession about ten years ago, which is similar to what you're going through, I think. It looks back at one's entire life from the age of reason to current day. And I realized (I had forgotten, repeatedly) that a beastie has followed me my entire life. Once identified and acknowledged, I began to break free from it's various permutations. It is a grace to see your entire life in the light of Christ, to examine patterns of grace and sin, to know yourself--even when yucky things come to light.

I have wondered at times how anything good has managed to come out of my life--and doing this consecration to the Virgin thing I've been doing, it's become clear how God's mercy extends throughout space and time, sanctifying past, present and future, in spite of ourselves.

___

From McNamara's Blog:

Marquette on the Shores of the Mississippi
By John Jerome Rooney

Here, in the midnight of the solemn wood,
He heard a roar as of a mighty wind,—
The onward rush of waters unconfined
Trampling in legions thro’ the solitude.

Then lo! Before him swept the conquering flood,
Free as the freedom of the truth-strong mind
Which hills of Doubt could neither hide nor bind,
Which, all in vain, the valley mounds withstood!

With glowing eye he saw the prancing tide
With yellow mane rush onward thro’ the night
Into the vastness he had never trod:
Nor dreamt of conquest of that kingdom wide
As down the flood the spirit took its flight
Seeking the long-lost children of his God!

NOTE
Father Jacques Marquette (1637-1675) was a French-born Jesuit priest who was one of the first Europeans to explore the Mississippi River.

___

From Maureen at Aliens in this World:

Observe how frantically this particular ex-Catholic sf writer attempts to paddle away, when he hasn’t been Catholic for, like, a zillion years, and ostensibly no man pursueth. If you really don’t believe and don’t care, surely the whole argument would be a lot more distant. The only feeling you’d have would be a slight feeling of satisfaction as you roll over in bed on Sunday morning. And yet, all this effort and heat...Nobody goes around naming things for Marian stuff and giving Marian callouts unless you are looking for Mary to come help you out. It’s like saying you hate your mom and then naming your cat after her. And if you give Mary an inch, it’s not like she’s ever going to stop coming. She’s a Jewish mother, for goodness’ sake. If you never write and never call, it just encourages her. Insults? Oh, heck, that’s like a call for help.

...Why? Nobody knows. I have a hard enough time explaining humans without taking on the ineffabilities of God’s loving respect for free will. Faith, like wisdom and love, doesn’t seem to be a gift distributed in any way we can easily understand.

But the whole purpose of life is: to know, love, and serve God in this world; and to be happy with Him forever in the next. So somebody who’s an agnostic is missing out on a lot.

That one Italian cardinal said the other day, “If you’re lost in a crowd, take Mary’s hand and she’ll lead you to her Son.” This is the month of the Rosary, folks. Let’s pray for the lost, strayed, confused, and all those busy wrestling God.

____

From Bill at Summa Minutiae:

Here’s a recent interview with Esther de Waal, the author of Seeking God: The Way of St Benedict, one of my current books.
There are places for all the activities of the monastery, and at the heart of the great complex of buildings, in the very center—how audacious—they put empty space. The empty space is a garden, grass, flowers in very simple colors, white and blue, and at the very heart a fountain, a spring of living water. Compare that to a human being: We have all the demands and the various activities, earning your living, making decisions, hospitality, maintaining property, all the rest of it. And in the center, Christ is empty, uncluttered space. Around Christ is the busy walkway servicing the needs of daily life, but in the middle you can refresh yourself in the spring of living water.

____

From Steven Gershom:

The hard truth is that I don’t have to go to South America to be a saint. I can do that here, among the pots and pans and glowing rectangles of my life, by striving to remain fully awake, fully alive, living each moment in the presence of God. I can strive to love everyone I meet, not with my own love but the love of Christ — a love that isn’t always romantic or thrilling, that sometimes feels like drudgery, but only because its glory is hidden, like the glory of Christ was hidden on earth. Love in action means love where and when you are, not in the dream of some beautiful Elsewhere.

Hope's Not Just a Cynical Political Slogan

2011-10-10T08:22:00.000-04:00

Thought briefly about buying a biography of Michael Jackson. Curious about THAT MOMENT that things started sliding. In a way it's similar to my curiosity over the fall of the Roman empire - you want to find that one moment when things could've still been turned around but after which it was too late. With Jackson I thought it might've been when his hair caught fire during the taping of a Pepsi commercial. My hazy memory suggests that that is when he started getting hooked on painkillers. But of course another pivotal moment might've been the first time he got his nose fixed - after having gotten it broken in some sort of accident. His is a tragic story, because even though he wanted a smaller nose he had that natural caution against surgery - a wholesome conservatism-- until he broke his nose. That made the temptation too much to resist, and the pleasure received from seeing his new nose made it perhaps inevitable from there on: like a tattoo addict, he would get his highs from surgeries.

Of course I find it particularly poignant that he died in a quest for sleep, that most natural (though often elusive) of medicines. He ended up in a spiral of stronger and stronger drugs designed to achieve the simplest of things. A rich man who couldn't buy sleep. Heather King's influence over me is such that I don't have to associate Michael Jackson with failure but can hold out hope for "the rest of the story" as the dear, late Paul Harvey said.

Indeed, one of the things I most like about Heather is that her sense of hope is so finely developed, as well it might be after experiencing such lack thereof followed by that "lightning moment" of conversion and peace. The thing is though is that she's so not exclusionary, in fact she's the most inclusive orthodox person I know. It's the greatest mystery, she admits, as to why she was cured and others aren't. But she's quick to say that that's not because God loves her more. She's loathe to say that those who die in the gutter aren't included in the family of God, unlike St. Paul who said that drunkards would not inherit the kingdom. Some excerpts from the book Shirt o' Flame:

As an alcoholic, I’d always been interested in the mind-body connection, in the way God sometimes seems to take us “out of the world” for a period of time, possibly in order to work on our subconscious. I, too, had experienced situations from which there seemed to be no escape. I, too, had been in the grip of a kind of dark night that seemed impervious to all reason, all human help, all prayer. Grace is needed and yet grace also seems most likely to appear—as had happened in my case—when, from the depths of our heart we cry out our misery and ask for help.

*

Most likely, perhaps, but not inevitably: in fact, the seeming randomness of who gets out from beneath the obsession for alcohol and who doesn’t; who stays sober for decades and who dies in the gutter, makes this confluence of will and grace one of the deepest mysteries I know.

*

We can only be grateful when and if the lightning-quick opening occurs. We can only know that we are not loved one iota more if we get sober, or one iota less if we stay drunk. We can only hope to do the best we can with what we’ve been given.

What amazes me about HK is her ability not to bore. I suspect it's related to years honed in bars with tough crowds. I tried to read the "Everything is Grace" book she recommended by that Fr. Somebody but he seemed to bog down in boggish biographical details. HK cuts to the chase which helps given my short attention span. So far I've been getting really interested in Therese's sister Leonine's story. Why is the black sheep sometimes more interesting than the saint?

*

Mesmerizing first reading from mass the other day, mostly because of how it undermined my preconceptions. My cliched reflex is to think that in the OT there was an emphasis on justice, not mercy. And so I was taken off guard when in the fourth chapter of Jonah I read of the prophet resigned and annoyed, as it were, by God's gracious mercy. And then there's the quote about God referring to the plant that Jonah so cherished and how it was something that cost Jonah "no effort and that he did not grow." And of course that's in stark contrast to God who expends much effort (see Christ on the cross) and who does sponsor our growth.

This & That Friday

2011-10-07T09:35:00.005-04:00

Happened across an advertisement for something called "Man v. Food". A terrible idea. Man and food get along great imo, why introduce a fight? Let me be on record as having nothing against food.

*

A young, pretty blonde is waiting with me to get on the elevator. Once aboard she crosses her legs and leans against the wall. I do the same and perhaps she noticed out of her peripheral vision for she suddenly exclaimed,"We could be twins!" I was not immediately aware of what she meant, and looked at her clothing (different from mine) and shoes (different from mine) and looks (different from mine). But I smiled.

A plump, middle-aged guy gets on as she gets off.

"Quite a downgrade, 'eh?"

We laughed and I said, "well I can't disagree with you."

*

Watched television host Samantha Brown visit Boston on The Travel Channel last night. A bit underwhelmed; she's not all that into history and cliche'd travel experiences, so no Freedom Trail (I just love looking at those old Puritan tombstones in the burying grounds). Instead front and center was an Italian sausage-eating contest in Eastie. She made mention of the rough town folk as the camera panned the crowd, there for an Italian festival. My view of the mean streets of East Boston is that it contains quintessential Nor'eastern folks, a representative sampling of white folks at their most ethnic and middling class. As an ethnography experiment the show was a success; didn't realize Boston had a beach, aka Revere. Don't often hear it mentioned!

Also watched a Brown episode featuring Brooklyn and Coney Island, a famous place I'd never had the desire to go. What is it about Coney Island and the beachfront that offputs? I think it's because I don't much like crowds (though why then do I like NYC?).

*

Read galloplingly from "The Bible Made Impossible", a helpful corrective given my tendency to try to make Scripture into something that it wasn't intended to be. For example, I tend to think every bit of the Bible should be valuable when clearly some passages really aren't, such as where Paul in one of his letters asks for his cloak and a couple scrolls! Scripture is "God-breathed", but that is different from saying it's all equally important or that it's all high-minded. God condescends to us. St. Paul also insults people from Crete; it's hard to find a message today in that. Scripture isn't what we worship, Christ is, and all scripture needs to be viewed through His lens. Later I caught a video of Scott Hahn mentioning how the Bible wasn't meant to prove Christ but to remind Christians of the truths they already knew.

*

Read something interesting about Steve Jobs. Turns out he was adopted and his biological sister is novelist Mona Simpsons. Talent runs deep in those genes apparently. Curt Jester had a post about how he felt about Apple, about how they make extremely quality products but, alack and alas, the jack to my ipod isn't working well through no fault of my own and the screen cracked as well when I (through fault of my own) dropped it. Jeff mentioned how they don't plan obsolescence and that's all to the good although technology seems to plan its own obsolescence without any help from the manufacturer. A well-made car can run for fifteen years; fifteen years is a lifetime in computer terms given the propensity towards smaller CPUs and cheaper, better devices.

Me Eyes Must Deceiving Me Be

2011-10-05T13:39:00.003-04:00

Hain't seen four of a kind full suns in many a moon.

Michael Lewis on the Fiscal Trouble

2011-10-04T09:40:00.003-04:00

There's a really interesting piece in Vanity Fair that is long but well-worth the read. It touches on how and why public union employee costs have gotten out of control, and despite the general tone ends on a semi-hopeful note. Perhaps. He argues that neurologically, we're better at working with scarcity than abundance.

One blogger commented:

I was hoping the ending story would be one of a community where the stakeholders figured out that they were on a path to disaster, and managed to put aside selfishness and get themselves on a path to long term solvency, before they destroyed what made the community desirable in the first place.

Is there no such example?

Another commented:

Blaming "greed" for our fiscal woes is like blaming gravity for airplane crashes. Human nature is what it is and always has been in every corner of the world. At the start of the article, Lewis conjures up the greek debacle, so how is that explained in American consumerist culture? Why is is that with the same human nature other societies manage to thrive and keep their finances in order? Michael Lewis didn't have to travel far. He could've just gone to Utah, New Hampshire or Nebraska and asked them what they're doing different.

My RSS Magazine

2011-10-04T09:11:00.009-04:00

Surprised by how richly instructive a relatively short period of time can be. Yesterday morning, for example. I read a bit of my RSS magazine (aka blogfeed) and wondered at the surreal weight of a fellow Catholic's cross, namely Therese Borchard's, who described a misery one wouldn't wish on one's worst enemy, were we allowed to have enemies.

And shortly thereafter, on the drive into work, I listened to someone on Catholic radio describe the very persuasive arguments that the Shroud of Turin is indeed the burial cloth of Jesus. And indeed the Lord's suffering is made manifest in that cloth but also the peace, the serenity, of that face - despite the torture. I'm always amazed that I can be perennially surprised by the fact that following Jesus involves carrying the cross in imitation. How can that be surprising after all this time? And yet my mind constantly craftily seeks the low, broad, painless route and begins to fool itself into thinking that's the normal, acceptable one.

Before Therese's post, I saw where Fred of "Late Papers" fame uncorked a fine baseball metaphor on the difference between success and merit. A very meritorious post that I wish the greatest of success. Now if there were only a blogpost about how to overcome envy over the depth and beauty of other people's blogposts!

Lately much of my reading is consuming blogs, many of which have alarmingly relevant spiritual messages. Others are about beer or politics or economics or poetry. Altogether it makes for a tasty concoction. It's like a wonderful online magazine that comes out EVERY NIGHT, not weekly. I like the mixture as much as anything, the alternating tightening and relaxing of dendrites caused by reading Eric Scheske next to Heather King next to Mrs. Darwin next to M & M! All inimitable voices making up this online magazine.

There is a time for every season, and that includes the seasons of reading and writing. Too often I try to write without having done the necessary fertilization that comes with reading. But too much reading crowds my brain with thoughts wanting to come out.

*

I think it was either Donald McClary or Mrs. Darwin who mentioned, with elegant simplicity, why they like to read novels: for recognition. And I did recognize some of the poem prose of Middlesex, a novel that I savor at the gentle pace of about thirty pages a week. The selection about one girl's not-quite coming of age in high school was riveting: writing from the perspective of the future, she sees the girls who never picked up a book as ironically smarter than her, since they apparently foresaw how little books mattered to most people. I felt similarly in the years after college - why did I study so much I thought in retrospect.

*

O'Fallon's pumpkin ale is just a mite too sweet for my tastes, now that I've tasted it on more than one occasion. My palate is definitely untrustworthy without repeated drinkings. As the weather cools, I have more of a taste for the stouts or other unsweetened brews. Fruity beers feel of summer, and we've recently took a u-turn weather-wise. Very brisk weather lately, jacket weather even. Some dark, coffee-ish beer seems appropriate given the circumstances.

*

The baseball playoffs began the other night with the brightly-plumaged Rangers playing the Red Sox-vanquishing Tampa Rays. The field was striped with streaks of that sharp Fort Worth sun, while in my neck of the woods things were already dark. I wasn't quite ready to watch the game so I paused it, and magically the sun stayed still: for the next half-hour it was immobile. I'd not only cheated the dark with a televised view of a green baseball diamond in a western state, but was able further to arrest it in its fetching, original pose. It all felt semi-illicit. How often can we claim not to be shackled by time? Baseball, the game outside of time, is even more so with the help of a DVR.

Double-Paw'd Drinker

2011-09-30T09:14:00.002-04:00

And there he really might remain for ever, but that his vagrom spirit is called back to earth by a gentle but resistless, very human summons,—a gradual, consuming, Pantagruelian, god-like, thirst: a thirst to thank Heaven on. So, with a sigh half of regret, half of anticipation, he bends his solitary steps towards the nearest inn. Tobacco for one is good; to commune with oneself and be still is truest wisdom; but beer is a thing of deity—beer is divine.

- Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932), Pagan Papers (London: John Lane, 1898), pp. 48-51

From here, for today's Beer Friday post:

(Arthur Rackham illustration for Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows)

Interesting...

2011-09-29T11:33:00.009-04:00

...comment found on a blog about the (endless) poverty of Appalachia:

Then there are the post-industrial areas of Appalachia. I understand these areas because that's where I grew up. My family bought land in Lawrence County over 220 years ago, and there are seven generations buried there.

But you know what, most of those in my generation have left for better opportunities. Just as our ancestors left their relatively safe homes in the East to seek a better life in what was then the Northwest Territory (encouraged by the land grants they received for service in the Revolutionary War), we need to encourage the folks in these post-industrial areas to move on and make a life where there are better employment opportunities. Whatever the unemployment might be here in central Ohio at any given time, it's about 4x higher in Appalachia, and I don't see it getting any better - ever.

It's hard to say we shouldn't underwrite the Appalachian schools, because it's not the kids that are making the choice to stay. But there are some school districts down there who pay only 10% of the cost of running their schools - the rest is State and Federal funding. We have to, with compassion, encourage those folks to honor the memories of our pioneering ancestors, and move on to greener pastures.

That's what I think anyway.

Given the tenuous economic status of the rust belt, perhaps some day the whole of Ohio will be in that category, making it necessary to move to the South or West. What interests me is this tension between living where you have roots, versus the necessity of going to where the jobs are. Culture versus economics. The commenter deftly implied that tradition for the Appalachians is pioneering, not staying put.

Morning Ramble

2011-09-29T10:20:00.015-04:00

Hyp-mo-tized by the sweeping, self-demolition of the Red Sox over the past couple weeks, with the denouement coming last night. The neatness of the Sox demise reminds one of a planned implosion. First there was the sheer, unmitigated surprise of Tampa Bay coming back from a 7-0 deficit (proving the existence of God for Rays fans) and then nearly simultaneously the Sox lose a one-run lead late in the game (proving the existence of the devil for Bosox'rs). It all has that olde-timey Red Sox-y '86 feel to it. But they have '04 and '07 so you can't feel too sorry for them. Pity the poor Cubs.

Speaking of the Sox, good link from the Anchoress:

“For the love of God . . .” he cried, again and again, as one Bosox batter after another swung and missed, and looming before him was a ninth inning full of Mariano Rivera at his peak.

Watching at home, my son and I heard a hated rival’s naked pain, and we hooted in what might be called cruel appreciation.

Baseball fans understand each other’s afflictions. We could laugh in that moment, because our team was winning, but we recognized all too well the sound of anguish emanating from Beantown; we had felt it enough, in the Bronx. When the umpire called “strike three” at the third out, the single voice dissolved into a bellow of incoherent angst and three hundred miles away we knew the man had slumped into his chair with his head in his hand, and his heart full of hate; not for the Yankees—that was a given—but for his own team, and for the game of baseball, itself, of which the late commissioner A. Bartlett Giammati once wrote, “it breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.”

The heartbreak is what makes it great, and the source of the heartbreak is the clutch—that period of time (and it can last for a moment or for years) when everything meaningful in your life fades into a peripheral nothingness until an outcome is known. In the clutch, love is balancing—one foot, en pointe—along a thin wire of hope, and still determining if, or when, the next foot might be safely employed.

*

The virtual home of the Anchoress is at Patheos, and I heard Mark Shea is pitching his tent there as well (the cohabitation is strictly platonic). This era of blogs feels like the '90s business era of mergers and acquisitions; it all feels vaguely unsavory, a corporatization of the blogger model of the individual voice crying out freely in the wilderness. But hey, that's capitalism.

*
Relished I a white-topped donut, sitting like a Rocky Mountain on the plain of breakfast goodies this morning. (How's that for some bad writing?) It felt deserved (the donut, not the bad writing) after yesterday's slight dislocations and discombobulations. There was the shift at the food bank and then wrestling at home with a new DVR, the old one having been kaput for the last week and the new one not working either. After two reboots I called the help line, and they had me do an unplug, which (surprisingly) worked. The DVR restoration seemed to give the house a sense of order it was heretofore lacking. Too. dependent. on. technology.

(Speaking of videos, I'm sorely tempted to get the new Fr. Robert Barron series on Catholicism. Expensive, but eye-candy for the Catholic eye: plenty of mosaics and churches and Holy Land images. Or so I hear.)

While working on the DVR, I listened to Lino Rulli in the background and he said the things I've often thought, including the plain-spoken "I hate free will." He said he wants it to be easy. "Why couldn't God just make us perfect and then be done with it?" It's a familiar angst indeed and it was pretty cool to hear it expressed aloud.

*

Read some of "The Bible Made Impossible" which argues against the Bible being a "handbook" or "owner's manual". The author makes the case that there is plenty of biblical data on both sides of many controversial questions, hence divisions in the Bible Alone crowd are inevitable. The Civil War is proof; both sides felt they had the Bible on their side.

Another Spin on the Subject of Seasons

2011-09-27T09:52:00.009-04:00

Autumn
by Roy Campbell (1901-57)

I love to see, when leaves depart,
The clear anatomy arrive,
Winter, the paragon of art,
That kills all forms of life and feeling
Save what is pure and will survive.

Already now the clanging chains
Of geese are harnessed to the moon:
Stripped are the great sun-clouding planes;
And the dark pines, their own revealing,
Let in the needles of the noon.

Strained by the gale the olives whiten
Lke hoary wrestlers bent with toil
And, with the vines, their branches lighten
To brim our vats where summer lingers
In the red froth and sun-gold oil.

Soon on our hearth's reviving pyre
Their rotted stems will crumble up:
And like a ruby, panting fire,
The grape will redden on your fingers
Through the lit crystal of the cup.