All is Relative...except for things that aren't
Enjoyed flos carmeli's take on the weather:
It amazes me that anyone likes cold weather. I get slow, stupid, relucant to do anything, and terribly anxious. Oh wait. . . I'm describing my base state of being. I have long considered that I would like to move back to Virginia in (as they say) the fullness of time. On his trip, I have decided otherwise.

Sounds like my base state of being. What is ironic is that I've often felt like a good move would be from Ohio to Virginia, and to thus shorten and de-sting the winter and also to enjoy the surreal beauty that covers much of that state. Steven Riddle wants none of the cold of Virginia. But if you are used to Florida I can see how Virginia looks chilly, just as the Minnesotans must grin at my Ohio complaints. It does wear off eventually - my Maine friend, after eight Ohio winters, is no longer laughing at the mild winters. He's now as convinced as the rest of us that the weather sucks.

Progressively Abled
Caveman, thru circumstances of time and geography, lived short, brutish lives in chronic hunger, cold, etc. And the poverty of their lives was matched by the poverty of their spiritual existence - by a dearth of Revelation, knowing not the consolations of grace, the Spirit, Jesus and not even having been given the Law, which, imperfect as it was, was an improvement over the pagan notion of religions which imagined the deities cruel and heartless. The idea of "God is love" was still foreign. The progressive nature of revelation is comparable to the evolution of a seed developing into a young plant developing into an oak. The tiny plant has the worst time of it – it is subject to degrees of cold and is vulnerable to an extent the mature oak is not. That is nature. So why should God not show us, through the physical laws, his plan for the spiritual? Is it because we think we are better than the oak, that human life is more precious and that humans should be coddled? The problem therein is that we are told that we were coddled and that we, via Adam, spoiled it. We were born to a greater dignity. But we chose the harder way - the progressive revelation path.

The Minstrel-Boy   

The Minstrel-boy to the war is gone
In the ranks of death you will find him
His father's sword he has girded on
And his wild harp slung behind him.
"Land of Song!", said the warrior bard,
“Though all the world betray thee,
One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard
One faithful harp shall praise thee."

The Minstrel fell! But the foeman's steel
Could not bring that proud soul under;
The harp he lov'd ne'er spoke again,
For he tore its chords asunder;
And said "No chains shall sully thee,
Thou soul of love and brav'ry!
Thy songs were made for the pure and free
They shall never sound in slavery! "

***
An emotionally stirring and inspirational song, "The Minstrel Boy" was written by Thomas Moore (1779-1852) who set it to the melody of "The Moreen", and old Irish aire. It is believed by many that Moore composed the song as a memorial to several of his friends he had met while a student at Trinity College and who had participated in the 1798 rebellion of the United Irishmen. Due to its popularity, the song was a favorite of the many Irishmen who fought during the U.S. Civil War, primarily on the Union side.
  - Lesley Nelson's Folk Music Site

The Big Question
CNN's Evans and Novak used to preface the last question for their guest with: "Next, we will ask the Big Question", said with proper ominousness. Amy asked that today:

Columnist David Carlin has a good column concerning Nancy Pelosi, a piece that also gathers in former Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy, and could have, but didn't throw in Tom Daschle as well, all Catholics of A Certain Age, given their Catholic educations in the supposedly Golden Age of the 1950's, when all was well, and solid and everyone knew what Catholic meant - and it certainly didn't mean supporting abortion. Carlin quite reasonably asks - was this Golden Age really so Golden, if it could produce a generation thick with Catholic pro-abortion politicos? He writes:

"It certainly looked healthy on the outside, but inside a cancer was eating away. What was this cancer? If we could identify it, we would go a long way toward understanding how to restore American Catholicism to real health."

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this, because it really is an intriguing question.

I know when and why my mother left the Church...Whether she is representative, I don't know. And I'm also unsure of the extent of her knowledge of theology & the catechism. I suspect weak. As one Prot put it, "you Catholics have 20 minute answers for every question". That is both our blessing and curse. It's a blessing given that there is an ocean to play in, for those who have the intellectual stamina to play in it. It's a curse to those who, like my mother, want soundbyte answers to our knotty issues - the sexual issues. Should it be surprise that the Church's difficulty in coming up with convincing answers in the sexual arena, combined with a sexual revolution of the '60s would damage the Church? Look at Nancy Nall - isn't most of her anger directed at Church policy on gays, birth control, -i.e. sex? The pope understands this and in Love and Responsibility tries to take a more "personalist" approach rather than just relying on natural law arguments.

Perhaps the weakness is that American Catholics find an undemocratic Church a scandal in of and itself. Democracy is in our blood; dissent as natural as breathing. Tocqueville wrote about us in 'Democracy in America': "Two things must here be accurately distinguished: equality makes men want to form their own opinions; but, on the other hand, it imbues them with the taste and the idea of unity, simplicity, and impartiality in the power that governs society. Men living in democratic times are therefore very prone to shake off all religious authority; but if they consent to subject themselves to any authority of this kind, they choose at least that it should be single and uniform."

My mother dates her break with the Church to 1968, and the confusion born mostly because authority became fractured and no longer uniform. She went to a priest after Humane Vitae about the use of birth control and the priest told her, "it's okay, that's not really a sin". Tocqueville continues, "Religious powers not radiating from a common center are naturally repugnant to their minds."

The tendency in a democracy is to hold one's opinion as gospel, unless there is a single, uniform authority. Once the strong unity of doctrine of belief and dogma broke in the mid '60s, the centre could not hold. Once that authority was fractured in '68, by dissenting priests and even bishops, we began down a path Alexis de Tocqueville presciently predicted.

Is this a good message to send?

    

Too funny...from www.oldlutheran.com via Amy. Not sure a beer label is the best place to put the words "sin boldly".

Peggy Noonan's latest
"Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plane, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves." So wrote James Joyce at the end of his great short story "The Dead." They are famous words; it's a famous passage. Joyce's snow didn't fall over the house, or the city, or over his sensitive characters in a neighborhood in Dublin. Snow was falling all over Ireland, and touching everyone, as if they were together.

***
Bad weather, bad news makes you part of something: a community of catastrophe. You see your neighbor, and this time you don't just nod or keep walking. You call over, "Wow--you believe this?" And you laugh. You make phone calls. Weather makes you outward.

And then when the storm passes or the earthquake is old news, people retreat back into their aloneness with their own thoughts. They get quiet again. It will take another snowstorm or a hurricane before the ad hoc community of catastrophe springs up, and makes them a member of something.

****
On a totally unrelated matter, it looks like ol' Emerson is firmly in Shelby Foote's camp of art uber alles as far as one's priorities.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, via Mirari

Although silence is golden, in lieu of polishing that medal I'll post this thing, written back in '99 (as was the Brenner piece). It is proof positive that ye olde journal is nearly completely mined:

Remembering imaginary Uncle Coot
We were sitting in a duck blind, drinking sour mash and cheap wine. As a kid I pondered the rope-like sags in his neck; it looked like some sort of corrugated cardboard. He had hands with skin soft and pink on one side and brown, reptilian on the other. I stared as his hands wondering how they got the way.

There was something in Uncle Coot I longed to emulate although I wasn’t quite sure what it was. It wasn’t the drinking, although I’d done that in quantities and eventually found that I’d get too far behind in my reading if it continued. It wasn’t the perennial bachleorhood - Coot hadn’t had sex since the Ford Administration. It wasn’t the duck hunting, because the inertia it took to get up at 6 am and stand in the middle of a Tennessee bog was hard to overcome. I couldn’t quite put a finger on it, try as I may. It might’ve been that care free attitude or that rebel streak. He smoked Camel cigarettes and never once worried about lung cancer or lip cancer or cancer of the esophagus or cancer of the lining of the throat. He didn’t much care for the Surgeon General, saying that “that sum-bitch prolly's afraid to go outside.” Ol' Uncle Coot was an earthy sort and I miss ‘im.

Been pondering Amy's claim that the teaching on religious freedom changed and on the debate going on over at Catholic Convert questioning the continuity on "no salvation outside the church". Perhaps the continuity or non-continuity is not ultimately important. Certainly to non-Christians, the bible has many contradictions. They see the God of the OT as wrathful and stern, while the NT as merciful and loving. And even if we limit ourselves to Jesus' words alone, there are paradoxical messages concerning the issue of salvation. It certainly isn't surprising that the Church would reflect that over the ages. Jesus's purpose was surely to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted" by forcing us not to either be too comfortable with our own salvation nor with losing heart. This is the delicate balance that every Christian faces.

Jesus appealed to us with both a carrot and a stick. The Church, thinking with the heart of Christ, attempts everything she can to help us reach salvation and will emphasize one or the other to the extent that she feels it will be effective. To that end, she tailors her message, much as the Gospel writers did with their respective audiences.

See this interesting article on the subject:
During World War II a certain nun had a reputation for being very honest. Her convent in occupied German territory had secretly offered asylum to a number of Jews. If found out, it would mean death for both the Jews and all the sisters. When asked by a German officer, outside the convent, whether there were any Jews inside, she answered that there were not, and the officer left. I have not met anyone willing to say that she erred in her action, though what she said was not literally true. Some have argued it was true in the sense that she had no certain knowledge of all the ancestry of each person, or their inmost beliefs, but she did know that, to the government that the officer represented, a Jew was a person who deserved to be torn from his home and family, worked as a slave, and then killed, so she could honestly say there were no persons like that there. So she made an inerrant statement that was not true in the common literal sense.

It should not be thought that the sister in question sinned venially or acted against the moral teaching of the Church in making such a judgment. Paragraph 2488 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

“The right to the communication of the truth is not unconditional. Everyone must conform his life to the Gospel precept of fraternal love. This requires us in concrete situations to judge whether or not it is appropriate to reveal the truth to someone who asks for it.”

And is followed by:

“Charity and respect for the truth should dictate the response to every request for information or communication. The good and safety of others, respect for privacy, and the common good are sufficient reasons for being silent about what ought not be known or for making use of a discreet language. The duty to avoid scandal often commands strict discretion. No one is bound to reveal the truth to someone who does not have the right to know it.”

The truth is eternal, but error may be time and circumstance dependent. So to say that someone was protected from error when they said something, does not necessarily guarantee that it was true in the sense that most people might interpret it at that time.

A two-fer
It is a sign of my natural preversity that a handicapped lot prohibited by red traffic cones seemed an irresistable parking target. (I didn't.)

Reminder to self
Respect and love ought to be extended also to those who think or act differently than we do in social, political and even religious matters. In fact, the more deeply we come to understand their ways of thinking through such courtesy and love, the more easily will we be able to enter into dialogue with them.

This love and good will, to be sure, must in no way render us indifferent to truth and goodness. Indeed love itself impels the disciples of Christ to speak the saving truth to all men. But it is necessary to distinguish between error, which always merits repudiation, and the person in error, who never loses the dignity of being a person even when he is flawed by false or inadequate religious notions. God alone is the judge and searcher of hearts; for that reason He forbids us to make judgments about the internal guilt of anyone.

Since all men possess a rational soul and are created in God's likeness, since they have the same nature and origin, have been redeemed by Christ and enjoy the same divine calling and destiny, the basic equality of all must receive increasingly greater recognition. - from The Documents of Vatican II

Luminous people chanced our lives, people who seemed to live richer, and not just materially. Two that come to mind are as different as the sun from the moon - the Brenner's & Aunt Mary. The Brenner's were ethnic and I loved ethnic because we were as plain and ordinary Americans as there ever could be. I hungered for myth, for family histories and old graves, for stories of the old country or Civil War veterans. We had none, zero, our family tree evaporated inside three generations like a slither of ice in the sun. Grandpa’s dad died in the flood of 1913. Our ancestors came over from Ireland due to the famine. One line stories, no faces, no names. The great myth of Irish storytelling seemed lost on my relatives. We were now utterly Americans, invisibly middle-class, everyman’s man. We ate hamburgers and hotdogs, belonged to the majority religion, spoke without accent, went bowling, read the local newspaper, watched the local news.

The Flood of 1913 was the only history anyone cared about, and it riveted me. Every time I passed the river into Hamilton I would imagine the waters turned surly, nasty, angry. These boringly benign waters were once Killing waters! I noted the high watermark and then tried to conjure it higher, nearly wishing another flood.

The Brenner's may’ve been as American as we were but they pretended otherwise, & I lived it too. Their parents were German immigrants, they had been to Germany, had living relatives there. They sent mail to the Communist East, and the thought of officials censoring it thrilled. They told of “Checkpoint Charlie” and the horrible Wall where people tried tunneling, ballooning, anything to get over it and usually failed, shot in cold blood. I imagined ways I would try to escape. I dreamt of going there, visting West Berlin and trying to escape into East Berlin, and wandering into the East German countryside, hiding there because I was good at hiding. I was small and thin and thought myself clever.

The Brenner's lived like Europeans - they went to the opera, to plays, to the symphony. They traveled, made and drank wine out of dusty ancient bottles, and rattled off words in German. Mary Ann taught me the song Give My Regards to Broadway with a Brooklyn accent. I thought it was the coolest thing and never forgot it.

Aunt Mary was the opposite. She never traveled, never drank, and though she read I couldn’t remember a thing except a spiritual book or two. She lived in an old part of town. Everything about her life was different from ours. Her house was old and deathly quiet, with quaint furniture and books behind class cages as if they were too dangerous to let out. She had a basement - something we never had - and the creepy downstairs fed the imagination. She served different foods from us - like hot cereal. That was exotic to us. She served strange dishes on old plates. Mary made even spinach taste good. But nothing, at no time before or since, tasted like city chicken. Served on a kabob it woke me up to food as something more than just something to do before going back out to play. Food as the main entertainment. Poor aunt Mary was always hobbled and one would think would have little to offer a child. She lived a simple lifestyle, and it going to her house was like going on a retreat. Like a monastery, her house was spare of words, spare of ornament, and the morning chants were sang by whipporwills which I listened to in rapt atttention. Aunt Mary and the Brenner's showed two sides of life. Life lived restrained, disciplined and bereft of ornament or one rich, baroque, full of travel and wine and art. Simple vs complex, nature vs city, active vs contemplative.

Last Rites
Charles Baudelaire inhaled the scent of fleurs de mal
   ignoring, it seems, divine decrees,
and yet he lay beneath his funeral pall
   muni des sacrements d'eglise.

Belief must baffle minds which think
   assent should show itself in deeds,
that logic of the lucid sort must link
   the mind and will of thinking reeds.

Not so, God's mercy disobeys our laws
and we, thank God, are shriven without cause.
  - Ralph McInerny in Crisis

Vater unser im Himmel,
Geheiligt werde Dein Name.
Dein Reich komme.
Dein Wille geschehe, wie im Himmel
so auf Erden.
Unser tägliches Brot gib uns heute.
Und vergib uns unsere Schuld,
wie auch wir vergeben unseren Schuldigern.
Und führe uns nicht in Versuchung,
sondern erlöse uns von dem Bösen.- in German
  - the Lord's Prayer in 1221 languages

In fairness...
I do think that the penalty "driving while black" exists while "driving while Irish" does not exist. I think that black drivers are more likely to be pulled over and harrassed by police officers. But I think that the criminal justice system is on the whole fair to minorities, with the possible exception of death penalty cases. The criminal justice system is more unfair to the poor than to be blacks- to be rich is to afford good legal help. But then to be rich is also to afford better medical care. Utopia does not exist, otherwise we'd all move there. Liberals should cogitate awhile on why it is that so many want to move here.

Misc
On EWTN (Franciscan University Round Table), heard a screenwriter describe art as the closest thing we have to God since it expresses mystery. God is not the catechism, she points out, to which I heard Scott Hahn say to her, "that's in the Catechism!" - i.e. that God cannot be contained in a book.

***
That darn Richter show has me mentally substituting "Irish" for "black" now whenever I read something about bias. For example, saw this on another blog:
I am dismayed at the dearth of black characters in many of the current TV shows and movies.
Come to think of it, I am dismayed at the dearth of Irish characters in many of the current TV shows. And I don't get to watch "Ballykissangel" anymore. It's no longer on BBC America.
***
Flos Carmeli maintains radio silence. Is this a pentential act? At Mass today, the priest's purple robes reminded me this is a pentential season. That I needed to be reminded is not good.

***
Found this compelling:
From 1946 until her death, Mother Teresa resolutely refused to give any details about the inspiration to begin the Missionaries of Charity or about the process of discernment that led to the official establishment of the new institute on 7 October 1950. Mother Teresa's silence reflected her reverence for the sacredness of the gift she received in the depths of her soul. As she wrote to her Sisters in 1993, "For me Jesus' thirst is something so intimate so I have felt shy until now to speak to you of September 10th. I wanted to do as Our Lady who 'kept all these things in her heart.'" - via Rosa Mystica