Something I constantly notice is that unembarrassed joy has become rarer. Joy today is increasingly saddled with moral and ideological burdens, so to speak. When someone rejoices, he is afraid of offending against solidarity with the many people who suffer. I don't have any right to rejoice, people think, in a world where there is so much misery, so much injustice...There is a moral attitude at work here. But this attitude is nonetheless wrong. The loss of joy does not make the world better - and, conversely, refusing joy for the sake of suffering does not help those who suffer. The contrary is true. The world needs people who discover the good, who rejoice in it and thereby derive the impetus and courage to do good. -
Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict I am fascinated by Solanus Casey. And a little disturbed. A Venerable Wisconsinite shifts the onus of personal sanctity back to the rest of us. Oh, saints aren’t only from foreign places in long ago times. Of course, we could also apply the “second bomb on the airplane” rule. You know, what are the chances of two saintly folks from Wisconsin? Tell me it wouldn’t be easier if the spiritual life worked that way. -
Ellyn of "Oblique House"While at dinner on Saturday with everyone who was working on the retreat, [my blog] came up again and a friend asked how much time a day I spend on it...She turned a penetrating gaze on me and said, "Can you make money with it?" I told her that making money wasn't the point... Her attention was claimed by her husband and I turned to Tom. "What is it that makes every other person ask that question ... as if it isn't worth doing otherwise?" "It's the American way," he said. "What's the profit margin?" -
Julie of "Happy Catholic"They are honest people who still admire the effort, seeing the hypocrisy of others who take pride in a landscape they pay somebody else to work on. What they do to make the beer taste good I have no idea. Not much, it looks like...They probably don't drink beer anyway. Too blue collar. Wine and cheese, I imagine. Bottled water. But you wait. They'll need some artery-drano not too far down the road. -
William of Apologia on his neighborsMy wife apparently doesn’t have enough to do. Late, late last night, inspired by the EWTN special where Fr. Baker tells a caller not to bring his guitar to the traditional Mass, LeXuan re-wrote the words to Johnny Cash’s immortal “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town”...
A cool young man named Billy Joe
Just loved to play the drums
A boy who thought the liturgy
Was tailor-made just for him
To show off his talent and entertain
He dyed his hair purple
But as he walked out his mother cried
Don’t take your drums to church son.
-
Jeff of "Stony Creek Digest" (snagged it anyway, didn't I Jeff?)I was in a choir, which did ecumenical services, and we opened a song with kazoos rather than the scored trumpets... because "trumpets would have overwhelmed the relatively small space." It was a moment when I recognized there are, indeed, universally recognized liturgical limits. I was very young. But the expressions on those in the congregation were priceless. -
Ironic CatholicIf you want a really scary French city, try Toulouse. We had to wait there for several hours coming back from Lourdes, and we decided to go and venerate Thomas Aquinas's relics. The poor guy is buried in a desecrated Gothic church known as the "Convent les Jacobins" (!) which was stolen and gutted during the Revolution and gingerly patched up at a later date. It's pretty much a museum. We crawled under a rope and touched our rosaries to St. Thomas' golden casket, and then prayed for our college. We came back through a boisterous rally for Saddam Husein, which involved a large circle of young Muslim men singing loudly, holding banners, and pumping their fists in the air while all the women in their headscarves stood silently to one side. Oddly enough, I got more crap from boorish males in ten minutes there than I did the whole time I was in Italy. -
Meredith of "For Keats' Sake!"I have fallen quiet of late because I struggle with some facts of faith and life that do not bend to meet my desires. When the arrow of desire is true it pierces the heart of God; but when untrue, it flies like the boomerang to pierce one's own heart--and the rest is silence. -
Steven of "Flos Carmeli"The rain it raineth every day
Upon the just and the unjust fella
But more upon the just because
The unjust has the just's umbrella. -
George OrwellI told someone struggling with [church] issues once to decrease his internet time, spent reading about and talking about scandal, and go to daily Mass, then hang out with the old guys who'd been in attendance, and were probably going for coffee right before they went to the St. Vincent de Paul center to do some corporal works of mercy. Again, it's not a call to quiescence or ignoring problems. Lord knows, I'm not into that. But in the end, Jesus' call to us to love, spread the Good News, and pour out ourselves in service to the poor. Over and over we see and hear it, and have to answer the question...what did the saints do? -
Amy WelbornThe cure is the same for the egotist and the self-loather: stop focusing on the self. It will not help the egotist to stand in front of the mirror saying 1000 times "I am not the center of the world," nor will it help the self-loather to stand in front of the mirror saying 1000 times "I am a person of infinite worth." What they both need is to get out from in front of the mirror! -
Alaiyo of "Inscapes" I was a rebel from the ground up and from the heart out. A loner and still so. It's a good and a bad place to be. I don't take anything on authority from anyone--which can make faith things hard...But God, as good as He is, never relies simply on one method of persuasion, He knows his instruments and plays them as they were made to be played, producing from each the finest music possible and never forcing the music, but coaxing it. -
Steven RiddleBut why would grown-up men and women become obsessed by [Harry Potter]? Comfort, I think, is part of the reason. Childhood reading remains potent for most of us. In a recent BBC survey of the top 100 "best reads," more than a quarter were children's books. We like to regress. I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful...Ms. Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn't known, and doesn't care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had...It is the substitution of celebrity for heroism that has fed this phenomenon. And it is the leveling effect of cultural studies, which are as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don't really believe exists. It's fine to compare the Brontës with bodice-rippers. It's become respectable to read and discuss what Roland Barthes called "consumable" books. There is nothing wrong with this, but it has little to do with the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats's "magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." -
novelist A S Byatt on "Harry Potter"I am a great admirer of Rowling’s work, and I’ve always thought that that her skill as a storyteller and world-builder outweighs her literary weaknesses. Reviewing
The Half-Blood Prince for NR, I put the pro-Rowling case this way: "… the Potter saga succeeds as few fictions do, and proves, in the process, that there's more to writing than felicitous prose or perfect psychological realism. As with James Fenimore Cooper, or H. P. Lovecraft, or any of the host of novelists whose stories linger long after their stylistic blunderings are forgotten, it's in that mysterious more that Harry Potter's success resides: not in the telling, but in the tale." -
Ross Douthat on "Harry Potter"