Something Other Than Politics

Was startled by beauty recently in the form of a red fox meandering along our fence line. I love the wildlife we see in our own backyard. I called the dogs but the fox was long gone. A beautiful animal, almost like a mirage or a firework - there for a second and then disappearing.

Naturalist Hal Borland writes of the “incredible wealth of beaten gold” beneath the maples, the fallen leaves (have I ever consciously connected “Fall” being called so because of the fall of leaves? Surely when I was a kid.) 

Borland writes of how dependable the movement of the stars each fall:

There is eternity in those star patterns. They have been substantially the same in each October, each April and June as well, since man invented the calendar. Caesar saw those same stars in the same places as we see them, and so did the earlier Pharaoh. The Stone Age caveman saw them and was awed by them. And they will still be there 10,000 years from now. Look at the sky, these October evenings, and see the certainty of forever. 

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Meanwhile days list in the meager desert of politics befitting no man. The vice of the quarter-educated as Russell Kirk said. But I cling to Chesterton’s line about religion and politics being the only things to talk about... 

A wanderlust invades if only because the lockdown impends. Sure, the virus, maybe, but as much as anything the chains of really. cold. weather.  Reality has tided now, with tomato plants overnight sickened by frost. Thirty degrees with a twenty mph wind in these parts, not fit for man nor beast. Only nordic dogs and eskimos go out in the windblown frost. 

Italo Calvino: 

You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger’s passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.

Suzanne Noffke, OP:

     The Greek word mysterion was translated into Latin by two terms: mysterium and sacramentum. In later usage the term sacramentum emphasizes the visible sign of the hidden reality of salvation which was indicated by the term mysterium.

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Let us now speak of famous Christians. 

I have a soft spot for Eugene Peterson, the Bible translator and Presbyterian pastor who recently passed.  Part of it was not knowing much about him and thus having the bliss of ignorance. I found where a couple years ago Peterson said he would officiate a gay wedding.  No wonder Bono loves him.  A day later he backed down after the hubbub. And not due to a high view of Scripture, as he explained. 

On the one hand, if you’re not Catholic and you’re ok with contraception then it’s hard to see what logically is bad about gay sex from a reason point-of-view. Both are orgasms divorced from reproduction. But from a faith alone/Scriptural point-of-view it’s easy because there are passages against homosexuality if not contraception. So Peterson isn’t quite as “Bible alone” as his fellow Protestants, he wants to use reason, and that got him in trouble. He’s a man without a country on that one. 

I also ponder the meaning of Bishop Barron endorsing the infamous Fr. Martin’s book on prayer. A Twitter cynic said that they made Barron a bishop to compromise him. I wonder if the leftward drift of hierarchy like himself and Cardinal Schonberg are out of a familial duty to “follow Peter.”  Barron’s starstruck meeting with the pontiff certainly was eye-opening to me at least. The pope is Bono for Barron. 

Prayer implies discernment, something Fr. Martin would seem to lack. (But who am I to judge!?) But the mystery of a “holy boldness”, if not “sin boldly”, holds within it something attractive.  As (Protestant) Eric Metaxsis said in his book on another Martin (Luther, who was another inexplicably self-confident heretic): 

“It was far better that someone try to understand God and truth with the possibility of getting some things wrong than to depend on others to understand these things. Freedom with God, with the possibility of growth and death, was better than the safe fetters of childhood.” 

The Catholic would argue that the pasture is wide open for the sheep to wander theologically, with only the far cliffs denoted by warning signs.