Various & Sundry

Check out the electrically charged wisdom of St Jerome (showing again that intimacy is not optional):

It is hard for the human soul to avoid loving something, and our mind must of necessity give way to affection of one kind or another. The love of the flesh is overcome by the love of the spirit. Desire is quenched by desire. What is taken from the one increases the other. Therefore, as you lie on your couch, say again and again: “By night have I sought Him whom my soul loveth.” (Song of Songs 3)

He waxes poetic amid the asceticism:

Be like the grasshopper and make night musical. Nightly wash your bed and water your couch with your tears. Watch and be like the sparrow alone upon the housetop…Say to yourself: “What have I to do with the pleasures of sense that so soon come to an end? What have I to do with the song of the sirens so sweet and so fatal to those who hear it?”

And one more:

Born, in the first instance, of such parentage we are naturally black, and even when we have repented, so long as we have not scaled the heights of virtue, we may still say: “I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem.”

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Author Tom Robbins writes in his memoir about being born on the cusp of Cancer and Leo, on July 22nd, and how his Cancer half wants to “live in a cave like a hermit and rarely come out.”

Astrology is frowned upon by the Church, but only, as I understand, to the extent we use it to discern the future or see the stars as superior to or replacement to God, rather than simply used to understand ourselves better. But while it seems nonsensical and irrational that the very month/day you were born could matter in personality, I certainly seem a fit to the Cancer astrological sign given my own hermetic tendencies. Perhaps it's not so irrational anyway. For one thing, there's often an underlying wisdom to ancient thought or custom that only becomes evident to science much later. And secondly, would it be so odd that someone conceived in the autumn and who grows in the womb during the cold, bitter months of winter, picks up some of the hibernatory feelings of his mother and father? The baby in the womb is far from insensate of maternal emotions and the winter is, normally, a less social time.

More from Robbins, in an interview:

I particularly like [writing] on rainy days with the skylight up above and the rain pouring down. There is something really cozy about it and comforting, and it has a tendency to turn one inward, to make one introspective and get down into what Hume calls “the bottom of the bottom of the soul.” The rain, it stimulates my literary juices.

If the astrological signs have any truth, and I'm not saying they do of course, then it seems the would apply as well to Jesus given he was fully human. The downside is we don't know when Jesus was born. Based on biblical and other evidence, John the Baptist's birth (based on his father Zechariah's time as High Priest) and other data, September is the mostly likely month of his birth, making Jesus most likely Virgo:

Virgo exists in the mind, everything is inside. To the world, Virgo presents a calm and collected exterior but on the inside, nervous uncontrolled intensity in the mind, trying to figure things out, how to improve everything, analyzing and thinking. Virgo has a constant drive to improve and perfect, this can lead to extreme pickiness and finickiest. They are pure, their motives are honest never malicious and they want to accomplish something.

Certainly that desire for improvement and perfection and wanting to accomplish something seems much like Jesus. And to the world he certainly presented a calm and collected exterior but one that matched interiorly.

What's interesting to me about natural inclinations is how much God intends them to be operative. Despite the fact that Creation is good, the flesh is weak and the spirit prized, so I'm not sure how much we should honor or accept the flesh. I guess the catholic view is grace builds on nature, rather than replacing it.

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So, it's always feels like a whole different world when the boys come over. Our quiet-as-a-monastery home gets filled with hustle and bustle, laughter and tears. Filled with life in other words. It certainly feels like time is suspended or in some way altered. My consciousness raised or lowered, ha, I'm not sure which.

We started goldenly, with Kentucky Fried Chicken (I'm sticking to revered old name and not the KFC- initials abomination that strips pride of place). We ate out at our picnic table in “the forest” at the back of our lot. I'm always impressed by the different look and feel of simply sitting somewhere other than on our back patio. Whole different perspective.

What I've learned about children aged 2-4 is the tremendous amount of personality they possess, even at such an absurdly young age. The other thing that occurs to me is the incredible amount of learning and life lessons they will need to go through over the next few decades. It's stunning how much they don't know, of course, despite being “competent toddlers” given their sphere of ability. As do we adults, of course.

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Read more of the Tom Robbins interview in a Kindle single. A hippie through and through, he wants to produce a reality show where they take middle-aged corporate men and given them a large dose of LSD and then follow them for the next 24-48 hours. “Fungi for the Straight Guy” he humorously titled it. Interesting premise, ha. Given my often unsavory and/or unpleasant dreams, it's hard to believe I would have anything but an awful acid trip.

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From latest National Review:

You observe in [modern man] a flattening of the soul like the flattening of personality - the numbing of the life-spirit - detectable in those who, to escape the succubae that prey upon them, take medications that reduce them to a uniform mediocrity of temper, a dead level of tranquilizing inanity. It is the tragedy of Whig progress that, if it comforts the body, it dulls the soul - issues in a sedation of spirit that leaves so many of us unable to apprehend the divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.

Hmmm….well we've had a drug, namely alcohol, since the invention of agriculture so it's not a modern Whig thing, as he implies.

He also seems to link comfort - surely one of the gifts of modern civilization - as a bad thing, as something that leaves us unable to apprehend divinity. I can't really believe God wants us to live in huts in order to apprehend him better?

Still, his point about bodily comfort dulling the soul hits extremely close to home. There's a reason St. Thomas More wore a hairshirt and it wasn't for bodily comfort but for soul comfort.

Tom Robbins writes that: "Meditation, by the way, while generally effective at reducing anxiety, is useless as an aide to literary composition. By its very nature, a writer's mind is a monkey mind - and meditation, alas, kills the monkey."

Desperation is the mother of good writing? And good spirituality? witness Mother Teresa?

Stuff Mostly Unrelated but Tied Together By Helpful Asterisks

My beer coaster with Kindle backdrop

The gospel the other day could be read not only as criticism of the Pharisees but, if reversed, the characteristics of God?:

“Observe all things whatsoever they [the Pharisees] tell you, but do not follow their example. For they preach but they do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them. All their works are performed to be seen…They love places of honor at banquets, seats of honor in synagogues, greetings in marketplaces…

Reversing we have:

Observe all things whatsoever God tells you, and follow His example. For He practices what He preaches. His burden is light and He'll help to carry it. Many of his works are performed in secret, not to be seen…He loves places of honor at soup kitchens, seats of honor at sinner's houses.

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I feel like I'm in full “shark” mode, book-wise. Am hungry for text and hungry not just for the ineluctable delights of Kindle but also hungering for print editions as well, especially for classics. Burton's 17th-century classic Anatomy of Melancholy is on my short list, even more so given the high praise of Dr. Johnson (who said it was one of the few books he could read in the morning and smile, he apparently having a disgruntled morning disposition). Then too it'd be nice to have Joyce's Ulysses as well as a Chesterton Complete Works edition (though Ignatius Press's offerings are lame to the extreme - ugly paperbacks! At least if you're going to do paperbacks made them attractive, i.e. use gloss.)

Anyway my Bible-mania is spreading. The proximate cause of this itch was receiving a Folio magazine. (I checked Anatomy of Melancholy on the Folio Society website and it's $180!  No way Jose.)

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I love the poetry of Isaiah! I dipped into it a bit in the spectacularly gorgeous Oxford edition. It sings, it singes! Yes the prophet does both!

Read a bit of Chesterton's poetry this morning. Dreamy. Certainly uneven but still there's a vivid image here and there and coupled with a Christian underpinning, something rare in most poetry I come across.

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Somehow I'm not surprised that the 13th century interlocutor of St. Christina the Astonishing didn't reveal the details of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory as seen in Christina's vision. Somehow it seems like God holds these sorts of secrets close to His vest for obvious reasons (i.e. to discourage presumption or despair). We can speculate and some visionaries have given us numbers of a sort: most folks in Purgatory, some few to Heaven and significant group to Hell. Ah but wouldn't that be a bit prosaic, and thus unlike God, for us to die and find the reasonably predictable outcome of the above ratios? Isn't that too human a judgment? Wouldn't it be far more surprising to see 80-90-100% go to Heaven or, heaven forbid, those numbers going to Hell? I remember reading a Medjugorje seer quote those approximate numbers and felt almost disappointed. But ultimately I guess I don't understand how everyone can be going to Heaven when we've already seen in the angelic world a significant host choosing the devil and Hell. It seems unlikely that humans are somehow exempted from the awful cost of free will.

(On that happy note...let's end on something more positive:)

Sundry

Spectacular sunset on the way home from work today: massive, muscular clouds surrounding streaming chords of color. Just the briefest of glimpses possible since I was driving, but it felt important to acknowledge it. As an Irish poem goes, “We wish to a new child / a heart that can be beguiled by a flower.”


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Bought my mom The Message: Catholic Ecumenical Version since she's ever confused by St. Paul's letters and I'm thinking that will help, even though it's a paraphrase and thus understandably frowned upon. It's amazing how the same verse, with the same meaning, can feel so different depending on how colloquial or formal the translation. It's all English and yet The Message sometimes makes me laugh, inappropriately, due to the informal language. Knox never does that. What I cannot know is how formal/informal the language sounded to the original listeners in the Greek or Hebrew. Of course languages change so fast that I suspect that for most of the past couple thousand years the language of the Bible has sounded slightly archaic and once it sounds fetchingly “other” and stylistically formal then it's hard to go back. Witness the KJV phenomenon.

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Interesting comment on the Catholic Bibles blog:

Do you think these 'themed' Bibles (like the “Social Justice Bible”) are really a good idea? It would certainly seem to question regard for the integrity of the text. It smacks a little of the 'medicine chest' approach of Gideons - go to page 80 if you're depressed etc. Coming from a Benedictine background I would certainly consider this approach as contrary to 'lectio'.

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There have been a lot news stories about the impending fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination and it's easy to see the killing as an unprovoked, senseless tragedy and wonder about what might have been had it not happened, especially in regards to Vietnam. One gets the feeling that if the motorcade had simply gone another way through Dallas bloodshed would've been avoided. But I'm not so sure.

Was the assassination unprovoked? Kennedy was reportedly bent on killing Fidel Castro. According to one book on the subject, this reckless foreign policy made the assassination appear likely.  Certainly there would have been a lot of motivation for our leaders afterward to have tried to minimize Oswald's ties to Cuba and Russia as a face-saving measure, since they knew we couldn't risk a showdown with Cuba and thus the Soviet Union.

The phrase “lives by the sword, dies by the sword” came to mind and so I googled that with Kennedy's name and there's actually a book by that title with exactly that scenario, that Kennedy would've been killed by somebody sooner or later given all his (or the CIAs) persistent (and botched) attempts to kill Castro.

Certainly the whole U.S. practice of knocking off heads of state fell into disfavor immediately after the Kennedy assassination. Which is telling.  There's the sense that we learned our lesson and even forty-some years later we refused to kill Saddam Hussein except in the context of a formally announced war.

It kind of makes the Kennedy myth less “romantic” given this feud with a leader of another country. Could the killing have been the rational act of a leader (Castro) who was trying to protect himself?

Patriarch Joe Kennedy Sr. repeatedly told the young John Kennedy: “Can't you get it into your head that it's not important what you really are? The only important thing is what people think you are?” In that way Joe got his way. People think of JFK as a martyr whose death was as senseless as the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor.

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I was too young to remember the assassination, but my wife remembers it, even at two weeks shy of four years old. Says it might be her earliest memory. She was coming in from playing and saw her mom crying and, at the time, couldn't understand why she was crying about someone on tv. But she knew it was big.

I checked the weather records database for 11/22/63 in Columbus: high of 68. Clement weather for playing outdoors.  

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I feel that familiar post-baseball season malaise, a type of missing limb syndrome caused by the abrupt and final loss of that daily rhythm. The pure dailiness of baseball, with its scores and soap opera turns, is something I miss during the five long months without it. Other sports are sporadically interesting and frequently sporadic: pro basketball is the closest thing I suppose given the near dailiness of play but it's never been the same since LeBron left Cleveland. That was what drew me to pro basketball: the spectacle of a basketball genius available to be seen every day or three (since I'm in the Cleveland FoxSports television market). It's pretty hard to get used to Kenny G once you've heard Mozart.

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Read more of the sobering Thomas Peters story. A saint in the making, and his wife of six months as well. I was struck dumb by how a priest said Peters' ministry was actually more effective now, to the extent Peters offers his suffers up.

Anyway, the Peters post was a useful reminder of how difficult some people have it and how easy I do. Today I was thinking about the Psalm that goes, very roughly, “I do not think about what is too deep for me, that which is beyond me.” In the past I've considered that meaning in my life to not try to imagine how the Trinity works, or how many will be saved, etc… But perhaps it could also mean I will not try to trod the paths of those who have experienced much greater pain than me, who have been asked to carry heavier crosses. Perhaps the “depth” that the Psalmist speaks can be thought of not only as the mysteries of God but the great mystery of suffering.

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Tis the season: from First Things blog (Maureen M.):

Cajoling the dead is a pragmatic measure, pre-Christian counterpoint to a religious shudder. Yet it is not without a certain tenderness. It suffers an understanding that living and dead are bound together in defiance of extermination.

Christian trust in the communion of saints is a stream fed by more than one spring.

Sundry

J.G. Ballard, 1977

Well that doesn't happen every day. We were on the brunt end of a helluva thunderstorm. “It looks like a war zone,” said neighbor Bud, looking at all the trash and downed trees. We weren't entirely spared - we lost the top fifteen feet from our evergreen out front, some of the maple beside it, and gobs and gobs of the maple out back – it now has a gaping whole in the middle of it. The neighbor lady on the corner lost her 40-year old apple tree, the biggest I'd ever seen. The giant rootball was hanging eerily in the air.

We apparently lost electricity because one of neighbor Bud's tree tops snapped off and is sagging the line. Thousands are without power and I'm thinking it's really going to be awhile before we're restored since our particular outage is so localized - all the neighbors on the other side of our street have power. So there's not much incentive to come out to fix the line given that maybe four or five houses are in play. It's slightly discombobulating to be without power even though on paper it shouldn't be problematical at all. I brought home chicken salad, so no microwaving necessary for dinner. Beer's still cold. Ipad and Kindle still work.  Temperatures not too hot so a/c not particularly missed yet. We're really roughing it…not!

 

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The work day passed reasonably speedily. Before work read savorously of the new encyclical, which certainly reads like Benedict. Very, very interesting to see addressed what for many may be taken as THE question: why God doesn't appear to us individually? In other words, for example, why have Moses relay the message? The answer seems to be that shared knowledge is the “knowledge proper to love” and is not appreciated by those with an “individualistic conception of conscience”.

Also liked how Isaac's birth was referred to as “Abraham's Christmas”, a sort of incarnation event.

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Interesting to hear Fr. Rob on Lino Rulli's radio show concerning the Francis tapping of John XXIII. The sainthood thing is something all the last three popes have just gone crazy about. All of them seem to be upping the ante: John Paul II, besides canonizing the most folks ever, waived the first miracle for Juan Diego, Benedict waived the five-year waiting period for Mother Teresa, and now Francis says, “Second miracle, second schmiracle! The guy's a saint! Let's not stand on ceremony here.” What's next, canonization of the still living? Haha.

With Blessed John XXIII, you might be tempted to take the fact that his body is said to be incorrupted as a sign, a second miracle, although I've always kind of wondered if that was due to special embalming.

The secular media is all saying it's because Francis wants a “liberal” and a “conservative” pope together at one ceremony, but I just learned that this month is the 50th anniversary of John XXIII's death, and the Church loves anniversaries. Just loves to mark them. Maybe also some of the Vaticanistas who love John XXIII are getting nervous about his canonization chances given that he's fading from memory now that most of the people who remember Vatican II are getting older. Got to strike while the iron's hot sort of thing.
Anyway, it's fun being Catholic. You get papal encyclicals and a “Hall of Fame” for the all-time Christian greats.

Various & Sundry

Read a fascinating piece in New York magazine about how Hasidic Jews took over the local school board and cut the public schools' money way back (all the Jews go to private schools). Didn't paint the Hasidics in a very flattering light but very interesting, the politics of it. Lots of inbreeding led to many kids in need of special education which the Jews couldn't afford so they took over the school board partly in order to allow their handicapped kids to get state funding for help which the previous school board was hesitant to do. (Apparently for understandable reasons since now the Hasidics are getting in trouble for drawing too much.) We see lots of unintended consequences: the old school board awoke the “sleeping giant” by not catering to the emergency majority (i.e. the Jews). The Hasidics then exacted their pound of flesh when they came to power. It makes me wonder if that's what life will be like when minorities (Hispanics) come to dominate our politics. Will it be payback time for Republicans not catering to minority demands of European-style socialism?



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The Dispatch mentioned how a petition to rehire a fired gay teacher at Columbus catholic high school has gotten 100,000 signatures. It mentioned that a new petition supporting the diocese has only 500, but I added mine just now. The paper says the story has gone international. Wow have times changed. This would not even be a story at all twenty years ago. The thing I never really got when I was in my teens and twenties and even into my thirties was just how fast-moving cultural norms and mores are. How much more dramatic the change must feel to those of my parent's generation, who witnessed even greater change.

I don't think our bishop knew what hit him given the backlash. It feels par for the course given the Church's painful record with public relations. Cardinal Dolan recognizes this which is why he hired Lino Rulli has his communication consultant. Bishop Campbell didn't even offer a statement until like three weeks after the firing which is a lifetime in the current communication environ. God bless him though. One thing it brings home is that you can't pick your fights. The gay rights controversy is surely not what the Church would like to be talking about. And he probably should've been prepared just given the circumstances, how the lady put her significant other on her mother's obituary. It paints the stereotype of the church being out of touch as well as cruel and secularists love that.

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Book by Kenneth Clark on nudes arrived yesterday and there's a lot to digest even in the first few pages. The author emphasizes how rare this form of art is in the history of art, how it is limited to just a few periods, and how it was invented by the Greeks in the 5th century B.C.. Clark says that it falls out of favor for various and sundry reasons, including a penchant for asceticism. He says that the form is most congenial to those countries on the Mediterranean and is almost completely opaque to the Chinese and Japanese mind. Which is really a startling statement. It seems as though Greek influence is the key. What is it about Greeks, as opposed to the Chinese, that went the full monty in depicting the nude human body? Is it a mere accident of history?

He says this is partially because painting nudes is different from any other natural subject. He aim to perfect, to idealize, not simply draw. Imperfections in trees or animals are not seen as unpleasing, but in a naked human it's different. It's kind of interesting in that we see the same thing on a moral plain; we are critical of moral flaws in humans that we aren't in animals. It's almost like inborn within us there's this drive not only towards physical perfection but moral (my gloss, not Clark's).

Clark also admits forthrightly that it's simply impossible to eliminate the erotic element given we have a biological drive to perpetuate ourselves. Thus he disdains a famous and oft-quoted art professor who said that any nude painting that incites base desires is not art.

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Read a Thomas Friedman column in which he said that he feels an unease over this world where you can't just show up for work anymore:

I find a lot of this scary. We’re entering a world that increasingly rewards individual aspiration and persistence and can measure precisely who is contributing and who is not. This is not going away, so we better think how we help every citizen benefit from it.

That last sentence is kind of humorous on the face of it: “let's think about how we can help every citizen be aspirational and motivated” (dream on, lib Friedman). I'm thinking he means: “let's think about how everyone can be in the top twenty percent in terms of contribution” - a mathematical impossibility of course.
But his column rings true, and he mentions how much skills matter and how much we need networking and mentors. In other words, you need the constant refresh of “hard” skills as well as the “soft” skill of networking. Makes me glad I'm toward the end of my career. But what's interesting about this hyper-measuring is that if it's true that 20% of the people do 80% of the work, I'm not sure how being able to measure the 80 versus the 20 is going to change things that much (other than remuneration potentially). It seems there's safety in numbers inasmuch as they can't fire 80% of the employees (although they could, of course, outsource everything to India so it's not as though we're only competing against our fellow workers).

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The bright shine of May, days long with light, I hie to a town historical walk where I learned that  the trains came through on Tuesdays and they didn't do the laundry then because the clothes would get smoky. There was a really good lumber mill and a Masonic lodge as well as one for the Oddfellows, another male fraternity. Apparently they were Really Big on fraternities back then.  They used to have a town “character”, a guy like Otis Campbell but not a drunk, a homeless guy with one tooth. Was a hard worker - used to clean the streets for free. Eventually the town fathers thought it was wrong that ol' Johnny was homeless, so they set him up in an Airstream-like trailer on some vacant ground. And they bought him meals at the one restaurant in town.


We toured the Lodge, bought by the Masons soon after WW I, and built as a “consolidated school” back in 1870.

It's nice that our guide had such a sense of “place” and seen the radical change such that it's almost unrecognizable. How much can history influence the current zeitgeist of a town when the town ballooned from a few hundred to 30,000 in a very short time? Can the Methodist influence, for example, be felt at all still? Regardless, it helps put a soul in the soulless suburb to see these fine folks trying to provide history where so little exists.

It reminds me of how my employer is now emphasizing it's roots by displaying the original office of the long-dead founder, and by hiring a company historian. I like this sudden interest in history by previously ahistorical institutions. Back in the 90s, there was no interest in anything that happened before last Tuesday and my suburb was likewise an amnesiac. I wonder what has happened that has made it suddenly fashionable to seek roots. It can't be a coincidence.

The Masonic lodge was alluringly creepy. Old posters with the famous "eye atop a pyramid" staring at you. Chairs arranged all along the sides; up front a stage with a throne chair with two smaller side chairs. A big “G” hanging down for reasons unknown (I asked the Mason guy what the “G” signified and he said he didn't know. Which seems fishy.) In the center of the room a strange-looking monument apropos of nothing. Upon entering I'd said to the Mason, “Into the secret room!” and he smilingly said, “no, the room where there are secrets.” He was then quick to add that no alcohol was permitted in the lodge, which seemed a bit of a non-sequitor.

Joe K. later said he was surprised I didn't turn into smoke, a Catholic going into a Masonic lodge like that.

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Read a bit of a book called Manufactured Depression, the latter about the rise of depression from part of the human condition to a disease. The author says that his post-divorce depression was perhaps “my initiation into the reality of how hard life really was.” He says: “I just figured I'd had a disaster in my life and my unhappiness was the consequence of it, as surely as whacking my thumb with a hammer would have left me injured and in pain and really mad at myself.”

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Was thinking today about Taylor Swift's astonishing popularity and I think it can at least partially be ascribed to her authenticity, or what appears to be at least. Watching her perform a song live in Canada, there's never a false note. Her face and body language are completely convey the ingredients of a performer: energy and enthusiasm. Her face radiates joy or pathos such that you could never tell that this was a job for her (and I find it hard to believe that she feels emotion 100% of the time on stage).

The Letterman generation grew up on irony as the mark of the authentic (Letterman had a sort of meta-awareness of the schlock of show business), but Swift seems to have found a way to be authentic in a wholesome, non-ironic way. Regardless whether authenticity is of the Letterman or the Swift sort, it's clear that it's what this generation longs for. Which, of course, makes it even more crucial for Christians to be authentically Christian and why this pope perhaps has a chance to get through to this some of the young (even though John Paul II was authentic in the way kids define authenticity – Benedict being too cerebral for their tastes – but without too much impact).

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Curious about Argentina, I looked up the country in the CIA World Fact Book and learned that although the country is “90% nominally Catholic, only 20% are practicing.” (So now the CIA is determining whether someone is a CINO? Hmmm….). But if the figures are close to be correct it's a bit discouraging that our pope wasn't able to turn the situation in Argentina around. That's surely an unfair burden to put on him, especially since conversion is a work of God and of man's free will. Perhaps the lesson of Pope Francis, like Mother Teresa, is that success is not the measurement but fidelity instead, and both Cardinal Bergoglio and Mother Teresa were nothing if not faithful. The “little way” of convented St. Theresa seems now the way even of popes and missionaries! No wonder she's considered such an important saint of the modern age.

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The gospel the other day had one of the most amazing statements in all of Scripture in it: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.” Unfortunately it's not left to stand on its own but is caveated/fine-printed with “…if you keep my commandments.” But then it ever has to be in order to ward off the twins of presumption and despair. The gospel is for everybody and every possible fall.

But glorious is “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.” I immediately thought about something that had nagged me in the past, the Father's affirmation at the Baptism of Jesus: “this is my beloved son, with whom I am well-pleased.”

I read the meditation from Word Among Us:

When I think of how the Father looks at you, Jesus, I am speechless. I can try to imagine the Father gazing on you with deep pleasure and joy, but words fail me. And then to think that you, Jesus, look at me with the same love, seeing the goodness I was created to have in your image, seeing your approval of every step I take toward you—I can only bask in this love, filled with wonder and awe.

Yes, the Word Among Us seems the right tonic for pessimists like me!

This & That

Something is afoot here, namely there's an unknown character around these parts: the sun. And a warm one. I'm really getting the sense that spring and summer aren't merely distant rumors. This new thing, this radical weather change, is coming.

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Oh how cruelly fast days off go when the sun is out and I indulge a nap! Like Carl Lewis on speed. Tis a sad but wondrous thing to be outfitted with great gobs of sun and to be able to return to the beloved back porch. I've missed it! Fifty degrees but I'm a gamer since the wind is still.

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Read lazily last night of a dreamy travel book through depressing Eastern Europe. Some things never change, the author states, like the sort of dreary Soviet feel of Hungary and Romania.

Paul Theroux has some very harsh things to say about luxury travel, including cruises, and I don't doubt he's got a point. The problem with comfort, he says, is that it's the “enemy of observation” (although Lord knows I was awfully observant of the bikini clad girls on the cruise ship) and induces such a good feeling that you “notice nothing”. Seems a tad unfair since I noticed a thousand more things on the trip than I would've at home or work, for sure. From the fishy denizens of the Caribbean to the gorgeous waters of the Atlantic to the devotional items of my Mexican cab-driver but tis true I didn't exactly learn about foreign cultures or talk with natives. Theroux says comfort “infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world” which I suppose is true. There's no question that wealth cocoons. He says traveling with the wealthy is a trial because they never listen and they (ironically) constantly grouse about the high costs of things.

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Am transfixed by the blogger over in Dayton, Maureen at Aliens in this World, who has published a book on amazon, a very “other-directed” book, in fact a translation:

The famous medieval commentary on the Book of Revelation, translated into English for the first time in 1200 years! This book meditates on Revelation's connections to the rest of Scripture, quotes great early Christian sources, and provides timeless advice for living in a world where not every Church member acts that way.

Not surprisingly I'd never heard of the original author, a Beautus. Maureen O'Brien has a penchant for obscure-ish books even though it may well be as famous as advertised. I downloaded the first chapter and tried to like it but a good part of the problem is that I'm not a huge fan of the Book of Revelation, so there's that. But I do admire the dedication and selflessness shown by one Ms. O'Brien and hope her book succeeds.

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Searching for news of Fr. Groeschel (in the hopes that he's doing okay in these, his 'post-fame' days), found a comment from a Catholic blogger a week ago referring to Fr. G: “Fr. Benedict Groeschel told me on the phone the other day that it is a poor Church that is needed.”

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From Pope Benedict's book on Jesus: "Ultimately, in the battle against lies and violence, truth and love have no other weapon than the witness of suffering." Wow. That's slightly unexpected. It teeters on the brink of love = suffering? Read my Catechism and prayed the Lit of the Hours. Some good things. A line from a Psalm resonates: “Your love is better than life.” NABRE notes say this is the only time in the Old Testament that something placed ahead of life on the goodness scale. Sometimes (always?) you have to choose between the two, as Christ did when he gave up his life for us.

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Felt uptight lately; blood pressure at an interstellar 151/90. Tired as well. Perhaps because there's a sense of anti-climax - I recall the thrill of watching the NCAAs at work with the “boss button” on the screen for quick exits. Now the tourney is for all practical purposes over. I recall, of course, the “thrill” of Lent, the possibility that anything could happen during the season of grace. And I recall Easter, the big denouement, even if technically it is still Easter. Seems understandable to have difficulty coming down from those mountaintop experiences, all jammed together: Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter…

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While Examining the Spot Where My Great-Grandfather Fell Back in 1899

It all looked so pedestrian
this street like a thousand others
these tracks like any other
though history happened here
and the street seemed ennobled
until I realized that it's not so much
that this spot is exceptional
but that everything is.

Sundry & Various

I find a disturbing tendency in myself to marginalize any good work by thinking it's not going to have any “real impact”. This despite Mother Teresa's instruction that we “build anyway” despite what we are building will likely be destroyed.

This thought came to mind when I read a study of the program Head Start, and how there are no statistical benefits to it discernible by the time the participants reach the third grade. When even something as noble as Head Start doesn't work, something that is much more along the lines of “teaching someone to fish” rather than giving them a meal, you have to shake your head.

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It's amusing that these modern day iPad journal apps have “reminders” available in order to make you into write. Kind of hilarious given how much I write without any need of reminders. It's also sort of amazing to me how frustrating keeping my first diary was, how much I loathed it after the first week or two. That was at age 12, where I kept it up for 3 months and it felt a remarkably onerous duty. Now I write, each day, much more than at that time and without having to coerce myself.


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It's obvious and apparent that there was a early need for popes given the rampant heresy in the early church but it's unseemly, reading about it now, that the date of when Easter would be celebrated was so rancorous. There needs to be a standard, one seemingly possible to find in this world except by apostolic credential. At least that's what Christian history has taught us - the way the early Christian churches could come together is by appealing to the authority of an apostolic succession.

*

The rarest coincidence of confluent events: good spring weather on a weekend. Sunday it reached 71 degrees, a gaudy enough number, and I prepared by bringing out the back and front patio furniture. When nature rewards, I aim to take advantage of it.

Such delicious weather - what to do with it? We lost an hour due to Daylight Savings Time, the scheme which giveth in fall and taketh away in spring. I sat out in the sun and read, constantly fighting off the urge to sleep. Read some of a $1.99 book by Ivan Doig on Kindle, a sort of old-fashioned yarn set in Montana around the turn of the 20th century. Nice, fragrant images that are a fine complement to Michael Chabon's ultra-modern stylings. Things like, “Our father's pungent coffee, so strong it was almost ambulatory, which he gulped down from suppertime until bedtime and then slept serenely as a sphinx.”

It feels an eon since I'd last sat on the back patio. I would guess maybe October sometime. Four months or so. They say time flies but it sure feels like a long time since I've had the annex of the back patio available.

*

I look at my threadbare clothes, specifically a favorite work shirt that now has the dreaded rip along the elbow (which didn't prevent me from wearing it Friday anyway), and realize that having lame clothes is somewhat of a necessary tradeoff towards the goal of taking plenty of vacations. Books, vacations, charity - these uses of money “make sense” to me. But clothing not so much. Nor do expensive meals, cars, or houses.

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. 

*

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.”

*

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:

This & That

My subterranean longing for poetry oft gets expressed in non-poetical activities, at least in the literal sense. For example, coffee at the bookshop with the smell of wafting ink and glue and roasted beans, or a hike in the woods with trees like censors carrying the incense of flowery scents. Rarely do I "hit the books" and directly mainline poetic prose or prose-y poetry.
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Took the dog hiking Saturday. I loved the variety of barks of the arboreal kind, some smooth and light-colored, others shaggy and craggy, still others ridged like rivers seen from a height. A favorite was garnished with a ring of green leaves as if a shiny bow on a gift.

The trees seemed to divide themselves into the straight and the crooked, the beautiful and ugly, but then I saw one beautifully straight with a crooked limb that had been incorporated into that marvelous trunk. A metaphor that God can make us, in the end, straight. And that gives hope.

The forest quiet left me thirsting for one of those St. Therese Retreat Center retreats. It's a weekend in which we play as monks, with tiny but clean rooms and thick St. Joseph edition Bibles on the writing tables. April was so busy I missed both retreats, meaning nothing till September now. The prayers at the center are frequent as a pious Islamist's. There's also the smell in the book-lined lecture room and there's the promise of all sessions being optional which means I could always steal away at any point and have the chapel to myself. So much time to think and pray and study the Bible! But I remind myself you can't become a contemplative in 48 hours. "Instant contemplative" is more oxymoronic than "jumbo shrimp". But there's that hope that all the cells of your body will, in that rareified air, be soaked with the Spirit. The times I remember best there are the moments with the ugly green Bible which becomes comely by association with that prayerful atmosphere.
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Prayed part of the Divine Hours in the 10-15 mins before Mass and so "hit the ground running" at Mass instead of feeling numbed-out for the first half. I never know for sure if I'm supposed to like the songs. If they're too schmaltzy I think I'm effeminate for liking them.I know the ice cream Haagen Daaz is okay, but not the Marty Haagen and his friend Daas.  :-)
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Enjoyed some peace and quiet reading National Review which included an interesting review of Roger Scruton's I Drink Therefore I Am by John Derbyshire. There was also a Douthat review of the film Date Night starring Tina Fey and Steve Carrol, and an ambling story by Richard Brookhiser concerning his reading of Proust. Just 3-4 pages but all gold - makes me want to dig up my old NRs and start reading them again. It seems to have fallen by the wayside.