Fed by Feedly

I don't go to the attractive Feedly app/website to read blogs too often despite the fact that I find the treasures contained therein more energizing and enlightening than, say, Facebook. But oh what a thick symphony of inspirations and intrigue it contains! Art appreciation. Music appreciation. The fascinating Fulton Sheen controversy. The words of classic scholars from long ago. The words of monks and near-monks (Heather King).

Before dipping my toe in Feedly I listened to a couple Metropolitan Museum of Art talks, and then heard the complete Mahler 1st symphony for free via the Berlin Philharmonic offering. The wonders of the 'net don't quit.

On Fulton Sheen, my half-baked, could-be-completely-wrong impression is that Cardinal Egan didn't care about losing Sheen's body or cause to Illinois, but then Cardinal Dolan came in and he likes having Sheen's body in the cathedral and doesn't want to give that up. There also could be some feeling that Sheen belongs in Manhattan after getting shuttled out to the boondocks in his later years. From my perspective, the highlight of St. Patrick's is that Sheen is buried there and I can't be alone.

Anyway, the whole thing surprises me if only because public dirty laundry between prelates is rarely aired. And it certainly doesn't make Dolan look good given the agreement made by Egan and the Peoria bishop in good faith. I feel sorry for the people who donated money to the cause now if the cause is indefinitely suspended.

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From yesterday's first reading it's sort of ironic, perhaps, is how Paul says basically, “this is not written in Scripture but I feel that it is best…”. But what he's saying became Scripture!:

In regard to virgins I have no commandment from the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy. So this is what I think best because of the present distress: that it is a good thing for a person to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek a separation. Are you free of a wife? Then do not look for a wife.

And indeed a Catholic commentary notes the tension:

Paul had not heard of any pronouncement of Christ on this subject. It does not mean that the rule which follows is only a private opinion of Paul’s. He speaks as an apostle, authorized to decide in Christ’s name.

I suppose that means that Paul's letter is binding only specifically to the audience immediately intended.

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Much enjoyed Lino Rulli interview, of all people, the infamous Toronto mayor Rob Ford. I keep thinking Ford reminded me of John Candy, but it seems like Google tells me more people think of him as Chris Farley. Candy and Farley's comedic personas aren't too distinct, I suppose, and I think Ford does look more like Farley.

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More web collations:

André Gide, Journals (January 5, 1922; tr. Justin O'Brien):

"My good days of work are those I begin by reading an ancient author, one of those that are called “classics.” A page is enough; a half-page, if only I read it in the proper state of mind…"

Cf. Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Notas, 210 (tr. Michael Hendry):

"The reading of Homer every morning, with the serenity, the tranquillity, the deep sensation of moral and physical well-being which it instills in us, is the best provision to endure the vulgarities of the day."

Via Heather King:

You want to know why the innocent have to suffer, why the poor have to suffer, why the Just Man had to die.

I used not to know the reason for these things.

When I discovered the reason it was Christ Himself who told me.

You ask Him this evening; He will tell you

And perhaps He will add the phrase which meant so much to me when He was explaining that universal salvation depends on the vocation of some to pay for all.

'You shall not escape from love.'

If in the Kingdom we ask the innocent who suffered for sinners, the poor who paid for the rich, the tortured who shed blood for the powerful, whether it is just or mistaken to pay so dear, we shall hear them tell us:

'It was necessary so that no-one might escape from Love.' “
–Carlo Carretto, The Desert in the City

George Gaylord Simpson (1902-1984), Attending Marvels: A Patagonian Journal (1934; rpt. New York: Time Incorporated, 1965), p. 260 (brackets in original):

Our first stop was at the Tetas de Pinedo. [Preparing a lecture once in Buenos Aires a refined friend urged me to call them the "Mamelones," that being a more elegant word, but tetas they are to the local people, tetas they are on the official maps, and so tetas they shall be in my work.] These are two large rounded hills, standing near each other and rising above the coastal plain with an appearance, as the name implies, extraordinarily like two gargantuan breasts.

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From here:

I turned on the radio the other day while driving through my ramshackle post-industrial town, and I heard the adagio movement of a piece I know well, Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 27 in B-flat Major. I know it well because, when I was seven or eight years old, my mother had an LP of it that I would play over and over again. We had bought it while out grocery shopping; I had seen a display near the exit of LPs on sale for something like forty-nine cents, and this one had an image on the cover of one of Marc Chagall's designs for The Magic Flute -- Papageno, the birdcatcher -- though I didn't know this at the time. I begged my mother to get it. While driving the other day, I found that, though I hadn't heard the piece for years, I could sing every note of the piano solo and the melodic orchestral line. I noticed that the performance on the radio was actually played on the fortepiano, a forerunner of the modern piano, and that, delightfully, the soloist interpolated a fragment of Mozart's song "Komm, lieber Mai" into the cadenza in the coda of the last movement.

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From St. Joseph's Abbey:

Jesus is real flesh and blood, resurrected and still here with us; and his place is always with the downtrodden and needy, for he is small like them. And this morning once again he pronounces God’s blessing on human poverty, a promise of blessing for all who are oppressed.

Commentators remind us that the Greek word for “poor” in the Beatitudes means literally “beggar” not just a poor person with a few possessions, but a beggar.* The truly poor are those who have nothing at all; the poor are those who have no choice. As monks we want to take our place with them.

In some way our poverty is all we have to offer the Lord. There is too much- so many things exteriorly, more so interiorly; and we may feel like we are stuck with it all. In the monastery we become more and more keenly aware of the reality of our very real inner woundedness and poverty and our desperate need for Christ, a need, a longing to be mercied continually. It’s just the same old story.

But this poverty is everything to us; it is all we have to offer Christ, offer the Church - the reality of total dependence on the mercy of God from moment to moment.  Ours is certainly not the crushing poverty of the economically poor and destitute; we dare not compare it. Still it’s all we’ve got- all the stuff we’ve got no choice about. And we believe it’s the very place where blessing and mercy can intrude and take root- poverty as blest by God’s loving regard. We are truly blessed, when our poverty is blest as an emptiness to be filled to overflowing with Christ’s peace and most affectionate compassion. This is everything for us as monks. And what is more, we believe that our true blessedness depends upon our willingness to become ourselves mercy-doers, mercy-makers for all who are poor.

And so we hope, and each morning we go to the altar of God, the God in Christ who alone gives us joy and freedom and peace- his very self as food. So much needs yet to be accomplished and prayed through. Our lives lived together in this monastery help to notice and watch and pray.

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From "Everything That Rises" blog:

Our society’s model for the museum visit is All You Can Eat: you pay some portion of the exorbitant suggestion admission fee – now $25 at the Metropolitan Museum, I think – and then blast through the rooms, gorging on masterpieces, and wind up in the gift shop feeling stuffed, even sick.

It doesn’t have to happen that way.  With a free hour in Washington the other day, I popped into the Phillips Collection, near Dupont Circle, where admission to the current exhibit is $5 with a university ID and the permanent collection is pay-what-you-wish.

The current exhibit was of American work from the collection.  In an hour, I saw everything – well, everything except the Rothkos, which are hung (displayed is the wrong word, and so is exhibited) in a room where only three people are allowed at one time.  I saw everything – but I looked, really looked, at something like a dozen paintings, and no more. That way, I could hope to see them, really see them.

And I gave full attention to just one painting: Ben Shahn’s Still Music, from 1948.  There’s so much to see in it: the counterpoint between the soft washes of color and the firm line of the drawing; the several lines of horizontal movement (stand shelves, chair seats, chair hinges, stand bases) running over and along the intermittent vertical lines of the stands, like notation running across the bar lines of a piece of music; the tremendous energy of the painting working against the plain truth that the chairs and stands are empty. Here the music, made in this place for a certain passage of time, has gone wherever it is that live music goes.

The philosopher of art Richard Wollheim liked to spend an entire day at the National Gallery in London considering a single painting.  I could have spent a full day with Still Music.
Failing that, I now come up from the Metro at Dupont Circle relishing the knowledge that although the exhibit is over, the Shahn painting is part of the permanent collection — so is still in permanent residence nearby.   

Ye Blogs Be a Rich Repast

Really enjoying Rush drummer Neil Peart's book. Surprisingly! Who would've thunk it? I don't much care for the band Rush, I don't care for motorcycles (it's a travelogue of a motorcycle trip, thus far into Alaska) and he's said to be an atheist. But there's the common humanity and his prose is at times lyrical. He talks about his bereavement, which is affecting, and I'm interested in Alaska after watching so many Alaska television shows.

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Well-put, this argument in the second paragraph on sex below from our diocesan newsletter, buttressed by quoting, of all folks, Freud:

Many of us have probably heard single women talking among themselves about men, with one of them ending up saying, “That guy, he’s just a pervert. He’s only interested in sex.” When women detect that a man’s focus has become the pursuit of pleasure, and that unbridled sex has become an end in itself, they tend instinctively to back away. Women often intuitively understand that sex can’t be reduced to mere pleasure without hurting both individuals involved and negating other important goods such as love, family, children, and marriage.

It becomes a “perversion” when we attempt to re- direct sex into something of our own specifications, refocusing it into a form of worldly pleasure-seeking and self-satisfaction. Sigmund Freud, whom no one could accuse of prudery, recognized the basic features of a perversion in the sexual realm when he declared, “The common characteristic of all perversions … is that they have abandoned reproduction as their aim. We term sexual activity perverse when it has renounced the aim of reproduction and follows the pursuit of pleasure as an independent goal.”

Brandon at Darwin Catholic also has an interesting post on the subject of sex:

This Atlantic piece (which from what I can tell is written from what it terms the progressive point of view on sex) argues that sexual traditionalists and progressives in our culture have fundamentally different ideas about what sex is and what it's for.

Trad View:  As religious conservatives see it, the great mistake we make when we masturbate is to claim our sexuality as ours alone. All sexual activity must be about “mutual self-giving” between a husband and a wife, the church claims, arguing that masturbation is “an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.”

Prog View: In The Ethical Slut, perhaps the best-known “catechism” of progressive sexual morality, Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy make the case that “the fundamental sexual unit is one person; adding more people to that unit may be intimate, fun, and companionable, but it does not complete anybody.” Masturbation matters, they argue, not merely because it helps you learn what you want sexually from a partner, but because it helps bring “your locus of control into yourself.”

Especially given the source, this struck me as surprisingly perceptive. Moreover, it suggests that if one's sexuality is fundamentally one's own, defined by oneself and limited only by the commitments one makes oneself, there's nothing necessarily wrong in engaging in “depraved” expressions of sexuality, whether ironically or seriously.

I've long thought that masturbation is the linchpin given that it's equivalent to gay sex. If masturbation is okay, then gay sex is and vice-versa.

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So it's crazy how good the blogs have been lately. This from Eric Sheske caught my eye:

Perhaps my favorite Voegelin quote: “No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and live his life in order.” Science, Politics, and Gnosticism.

This, of course, is easier said than done. Unless your TV only gets EWTN, it’s nearly impossible to avoid the spiritual crisis since, as Max Picard pointed out fifty years ago, modern society is mass society: its spiritual disorder is pushed upon everyone everywhere through the popular media and everyday living.

Does one become a hermit, like Plato suggested (in his analogy that a man in a corrupt society must live like a man taking shelter in a cave during a snow storm)? I don’t think so, though it’s a respectable position. I’m more inclined to think that every person needs to carve out as much quiet time as possible, whether the quiet time is called “prayer,” “contemplation,” “mental training,” “communing with nature,” “sitting on the dock of the bay like Otis Redding,” or “healthy boozing.” To each lies a different path. Just try not to swim with the diseased tide … even dead things, GKC liked to point out, can do that.

Postscript: I used to spend one week vacationing in a run-down cottage that sat about two blocks from Michigan’s largest inland lake. The cottage sat among other crappy little houses, a redneck-type paradise, I suppose. I spent a lot of time in the little cottage, just reading and thinking and being bored… and watching the guy who lived next door. Every day at about 10:00 AM, he would walk out to his picnic table with a case of cheap beer (Milwaukee’s Best, I think). He’d sit on the picnic table, drinking his beer and smoking cigarettes, staring out at the traffic on M-55 (which ran about 50 yards from his house; an unpaved parking lot divided his hard-scrabble yard from the highway). With the exception of a stray visitor that would pop by to see him (whom he would receive warmly), that’s all he did. Ten years later, I remember the guy clearly. His was hardly a productive life, I know, but there was something there. And I sometimes wonder if Voegelin’s quote above has something to do with it. Voegelin taught it was an act of courage for a man to live a life attuned to the “transcendent” (one of V’s favorite words). The man on the picnic table’s daily life was hardly transcendentally-tuned, but the beer perhaps served a similar purpose, allowing him a sense of ersatz transcendence. He certainly looked peaceful enough.

Betty Duffy has a post asserting that St Maria Goretti is a saint for boys:

We cannot take as the moral of Saint Maria Goretti’s story that it is preferable to die rather experience an offense against one’s own chastity, without also concluding that it is preferable to die rather than offend someone else’s chastity.

Elena of "My Domestic Church" says Maria's feast day is also an important one for young girls:

Here is a saint who thought her purity was important enough to die for, and yet how many women just throw theirs away on less than worthwhile suitors?

Alan Jacobs opined thusly concerning a Rod Dreher essay:

Rod’s right about how deeply Stoicism saturates the culture of the South — the Old South, anyway: the homogenization of America has diluted this mix significantly for recent generations. But even when it was at the height of its influence, this Stoic-Christian synthesis — Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South describes it well — was pretty class-specific. It was among the aristocracy and those who aspired to enter it that the Stoic traits, especially the uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, were most highly valued and consistently practiced.

As Aunt Emily hints, among the lower classes — white and black alike — the story was and is different. Consider for instance the typical poor or working-class attitude towards funerals: the burial of a loved one is a time to weep, to mourn, and to do these things if necessary in a loud voice. Those of a Stoic disposition are of course appalled at such exhibitions, but it makes as much sense to be appalled by those who can bear the loss of a dear friend or family member with an unmoved countenance.

The big problem with Stoics, as I have known them anyway, in the Midwestern as well as the Southern variety, is that they tend to demand that others become as uncomplaining as they are and can be pretty unsympathetic to those whom they believe to have fallen short. I hold no brief for Binx at that moment of his life, but I have to say that I don’t care much for Aunt Emily either. Maybe Binx really does need a good dressing-down, but maybe some basic compassion wouldn’t go amiss either.

When my wife was seriously ill some time ago, people from our church contacted me to ask if we needed anything. When I replied that it was nice of people to offer meals but that Teri’s chief problem was simple loneliness — no one to talk to, as she lay in her sickbed, except a very busy husband — people were, not to put too fine a point on it, shocked. I had said something unexpectedly shameful. One person even commiserated with Teri: how difficult it must have been for her to have a husband who so openly admitted that she had personal needs in her illness. (To be sure, there were also deeply sympathetic friends, though not as many as we had expected to find.)

Of course, this whole situation speaks of more than Stoicism: it speaks perhaps most eloquently of a way of middle-class American life so consistently hectic that the one thing you simply cannot ask from other people is their time. But it was nevertheless clear that what we were supposed to do was to say that we were doing just fine and didn’t need a thing, though under considerable pressure we might consent to receiving a meal or two. To admit that illness is worsened by loneliness was several steps beyond the socially acceptable. So says the Stoic Creed, and most of the time what I say in return is: To hell with it.

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I've also been hyp-mo-tized by the circular firing squad of the USCCB shooting down Brandon Vogt's seemingly innocuous offer to provide ebooks of the Francis encyclical. Jeff Miller's been particularly interesting and clear-eyed about the matter.

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Oh so many good things to read. Scott Hahn's book, the new papal encyclical… And I just read a review by one of my all-time favorite priests, Fr. John McCloskey, of the book The Catholic Guide to Depression.  Cardinal Dolan put out a $1.99 ebook which I immediately snapped up. I've also had a hankering for some Jack London, recommended by Neil Peart in his Alaskan travelogue. How can I ever prioritize books when I can't even with blogs?

This & That Edition 4,211

Gleaned some posts from my Google Reader feeds yesterday. (Bolding of the previous sentence inspired by Brandon Vogt's blog.) Came across a handsome post from one Curt of Jester on a Vatican website tribute to Pope Benedict XVI, a surprisingly beautiful tableau in e-bookish form. Sixty-two pages of pictures and painful teaser quotes containing links to his talks or encyclicals or homilies (I say 'painful' because there's no way to absorb even half of the content of all the links). And who knew our own Jeff Miller had been tapped by the Library of Congress as one of the prime sources of papal material? He self-deprecatingly referred to it as possible spam. I await my spam any day now, Libe o' Congress!

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Our dog is absurdly polite. When we first got him (he was 6 years old at the time), it took him a couple weeks before he would soil our backyard (he insisted on going on other people's property).  And now he'll wait until I get up from the recliner for some reason before standing quietly by the door. I let him out he'll pee for ten minutes. He's the opposite of our cat, who will scratch the door loudly in ten minute increments in order to gain access to the house or yard. 

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Still some cardinals not in Rome, but I'm not in a hurry to have a new pope. It seems fitting that there not be an immediate successor. Sort of like how its unseemly to marry right after the death of a spouse? Am slowly processing things and I'm grateful for the chance to pray for the electors. Lino Rulli thinks we shouldn't be without a pope this long even. I suppose. As Catholics we're supposed to have a shepherd but what's the all fire hurry?  Though at least the cardinals ought to have been all there by now. I'm not a big fan of meetings but really now, twelve cardinals hadn't made it to Rome by Tuesday and even today there's a straggler? I think it's safe to say that they've taken themselves out of the running. No way anybody will vote for a dude who can't say goodbye to Pope Benedict or get there for the initial meetings. Seems indicative of a cleave in Christianity between theory and actuality: in theory the cardinals wear red to show that they'd be willing to be martyrs, but in actuality some aren't even willing to make it to the conclave on time.

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What I don't get - but haven't explored at all and so will likely misrepresent his position totally - is why some think Cardinal Burke will be pope while at the same time subscribing to St. Malachi's prophecy that this is the pope who will apostatize. Are they saying they expect Cardinal Burke to be Judas? 

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Monday of this week went lightning fast though due to enjoying a CNBC special about Google. Yes I got paid to watch an entertaining and compelling news show. It was a meeting notice sent to the whole company, so I made an executive decision to accept the meeting and trundle off to the big auditorium. Learned about the environment of Google, about some of the key players, how they distinguished themselves from other search engines, how fantabulously successful they are as a company (“the most successful of all time”) and about how we don't use a search engine for free - we give up our privacy in exchange for information. All that data is stored and can be used against you. “We tell search engines things we wouldn't tell our doctor, our priest, our spouse.”

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Been looking at The Vatican Diaries, a book that Julie Davis on Facebook said she wanted to read. It looks like yet another must read for me. An inside look at the Vatican, and how loose a federation it is.

“I appreciate that…at the end of the day, the Vatican is marked more by human flair and fallibility than ruthless efficiency…The Vatican remains predominantly a world of individuals, most of whom have a surprising amount of freedom to operate…there's a significant population of minor officials, consultants, adjuncts and experts who see themselves as protagonists in their own right.”

I like that “protagonists in their own right”.


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In the '80s I saw our culture as flawed primarily because I couldn't find a girlfriend and had career worries. Certainly any culture that couldn't provide me a girlfriend or a stress-free income had insurmountable difficulties as compared to, say, the arranged marriages in Asia and the “15-hour work weeks” of the typical hunter-gatherer “society” of 17,000 B.C. I had grievances, let's just say.

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It's just crazy how fast weeknights go by these days, even if admittedly often drink-aided. I'm under-read, under-led and underbred but not underfed or under-wed. I'm popeless but not hopeless. I'm in reading arrears but compensated via beers. “He wasn't cheated on beers,” is not the most edifying of epitaphs but surely accurate.

Drank something different last night, a Magic Hat Pistil made from dandelion petals. A nice change-of-pace beer from the more bitter, more hoppy and higher alcohol beers I'm used to. And who can resist a spring seasonal in early March?  (As you can plainly see, I didn't give up beer for Lent.) 

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Libraries. Reading a nostalgia-tinged piece made me want to write about my own libraric experiences. I remember borrowing books and reading them by candlelight under the staircase in our house. How beautiful that book on St. Peter's Basilica was; many years later I bought it and well, it wasn't as beautiful as I'd recalled. Books have changed over the years - better quality photographs particularly. Still, though, the ease of buying used books online makes me want to try to find old volumes of my past library, like the 1953 (I think?) edition of my mom's favorite, Terhune's Lad a Dog. But I'd probably never look at them even if I could track them down. How many times do I look at my baseball cards these days? Close enough to never, although cleaning out my desk at work I found some old basketball cards. The USA “Dream Team” from '92. Worth something like $2. The card market has tanked.

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I was bemused to hear the play-by-play of the Pope emeritus's first free day: some piano playing, watched television, did a lot of walking. God bless him, he's certainly entitled. He finally reached the level of authority where he could fire himself. Sure different than the way the secular world works!

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It was also interesting to see how Jesus interpreted the famous passage, “the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” In Matthew 21 it seems like the “stone rejected” was the Gentiles. I've always thought of it as referring to Christ, which of course it also does, but in this context it's interesting Jesus says immediately after, “Therefore…the Kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.” And the fruit of Christianity seems to have been borne mostly by the Gentiles despite the Apostles all being Jewish.

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 Really liking this iPad app called Day One for journal-writing purposes:

Rss Roundup

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:

RSS R Us

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.

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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.

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

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And Kevin Jones on American culture blindness in Iraq.

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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.

Spendin' the Hours RSS'in

(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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

My RSS Magazine

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.