Hie thee...

...to a wonderful post from Thomas, misplaced no more.

He shares a quote that helps express why I've always been transfixed by Don Quixote:

‘[Quixote’s] folly closes the gap between the ‘ideal’ of God’s redemptive grace in Christ and the ‘reality’ of the earthly, allegedly world-transforming actions of Christians. In his ‘simple’ faith and his well-intentioned conduct Quixote sees the gap bridged, but as he approaches his fate and failure, it is laughably evident to everyone that it is yawning wide open. Quixote thus becomes the true patron saint of Catholic Action. He is a bit of dogmatics neglected by Catholic theologians, a tract that can be written on the Catholic side only with and by means of humour . . . ,’ (von Balthasar’s Glory of the Lord, v. 5, pg. 170).

Two other comments especially resonated: "Please pray that I don't start feeling a frisson of pleasure at my folly..." and "it's time I asked for faith instead of assuming that I have it". I think we all can relate.

Hodge-Podge of Discontinued Items...

I'm trying out a new Friday feature today - Hodge-Podge of Discontinued Items, or HPDI for short - because sometimes at the end of the week there are odds and ends that aren't quite good enough to actually make this blog. Can you imagine that? Without further ado...
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Our secretary does us no favors by providing "break in case of emergency" candy outside her desk. You'd have to be desperate to eat the stuff. She used to put those little Reese Cup candies out but they disappeared faster than Saddam's weapon cache. Apparently plan B is to put out candy that had better have a shelf-life of two thousand years because that's how long it's going to take to empty that bowl. I hear you. You say I shouldn't complain because it's 'free' but it is actually worse than if nothing was there. Because the candy sits there implying gift, offering, etc.. without actually giving anything of worth! The fact that the candy has been uneaten for lo these many years is making it morph, before my very eyes, into mere decoration.

FYI: Written for entertainment purposes only. Please no emails saying that many would love to have that candy. If this were an actual complaint, you would have been notified where to tune for further information.
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All-Time Favorite Country Songs Referring to God

1) You're the Reason God Made Oklahoma - David Frizzell
2) When I Die - Tanya Tucker
3) God Will - Patty Loveless
4) A Love Without End - George Strait
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Friday Mailbag is a regular feature here at ye old blog, if by regular one means once in a blue moon. The number of emails I've received has doubled in recent days and my sense of noblesse oblige obligates me to share them:

Lou Coffey sent me a message asking that I "get Viocdin now". A bit pushy and the subject header was misleading.

Hunter Clarke kept me abreast of his pornography products, again with a misleading subject header.

Terry of Summa Mommas sent me an email about one of my blog posts, which I updated accordingly. Good subject header selection Terry.

Nancy Nall said that she was happy her gender-writing samples came up male. "Cool! I ran three samples through, and it says, consistently, that I got a dick." What a guy thing to say.

Piquant Details

Bill of Summa Minutiae reeled off a beautiful little family reminisce here. Inspired, I thought I'd write a little something even though we don't have many family stories. But the little details that made his story pungent ("Decoration Day", "Huns", "old metal cigarette box") are the kind of things that, for me at least, don't trip off the tongue. But isn't that the pleasure of reading? A fleeting encounter with the unfamiliar?

In lieu of personal family history, I'll borrow from the neighbors. After all, it's not just milk we need, is it? We lived next door to a family of second-generation Germans who told us stories of the time before the Wall fell, of "Checkpoint Charlie" and harrowing tales of East Berliners escaping in ingenious ways. The German's capacity for both ingenuity and brutality were on display at the Wall. Intricate paths to freedom were devised; children making a misstep were shot down by guards. The horror of East Berlin was the foil that made us appreciate our own freedom.

The two Deutschlands of my imagination were represented in their home. There was the Germany of folk tales and children's songs, of yodels and bier. The other Germany was of a darker vintage, of the war-making machines of WWI and WWII, the Krupps, and the model soldiers.

On a living room end table sat a spike helmet from WWI, mute testimony of a fighting man who was in the war and collapsed and died while taking an ice-cold shower after being severely overheated. The anecdote overheated my imagination, and to this day after a hard workout I never take a cold shower. (Hope that doesn't sounds flippant.)

That Elusive Combo

The woman in the gospel reading from yesterday, Mark 7:25-30, has her prayer answered because she showed the potent combination of humility and perservance. Rather than simply accepting Christ's answer, she answered in a way that simultaneously suggested humility, by not disputing the Lord's reply, while at the same time not taking no for an answer.

From the Catena Aurea:

Theophylact: He calls the Gentiles dogs, as being thought wicked by the Jews; and He means by bread, the benefit which the Lord promised to the children, that is, to the Jews. The sense therefore is, that it is not right for the Gentiles first to be partakers of the benefit, promised principally to the Jews. The reason, therefore, why the Lord does not immediately hear, but delays His grace, is, that He may also shew that the faith of the woman was firm, and that we may learn not at once to grow weary in prayer, but to continue earnest till we obtain.

The soul of each of us also, when he falls into sin, becomes a woman; and this soul has a daughter who is sick, that is, evil actions; this daughter again has a devil, for evil actions arise from devils. Again, sinners are called dogs, being filled with uncleanness. For which reason we are not worthy to receive the bread of God, or to be made partakers of the immaculate mysteries of God; if however in humility, knowing ourselves to be dogs, we confess our sins, then the daughter, that is, our evil life, shall be healed.

The ideal bible is, of course, the one that gets read, but if I was putting together the pluperfect bible I'd include:

- Psalms from Revised Standard Version
- Rest of bible from Jerusalem Bible
- Study Notes/Guide from New Jerusalem Bible
- Illustrations from the Douay-Rheims Haydock bible
- Leatherbound (for beauty and because I'm hard on things, sayeth my wife)

Interesting article from Nat'l Review:

The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook

Easterbrook, a senior editor of The New Republic, chronicles in entertaining detail the multitude of ways in which life in America gets better all the time. Americans today have better health, more wealth, greater safety (even in the new age of terrorism), better nutrition, more leisure time, cleaner air and water, and just more stuff to play with and keep them entertained than any earlier generation. In fact, there are an estimated 80 billion people who have ever lived on this earth, and Easterbrook calculates that even poor Americans have a better material living standard than 99.4 percent of them. To have been born here and now is to have truly won the lottery of life.

In the book's second half, Easterbrook discusses the economists' conundrum of whether getting richer makes us happier. There isn't much evidence that Americans are more satisfied with their lives today than in the 1950s, an era when our parents didn't have VCRs, $800 designer teapots, treatments for cancer and heart disease, cleaner air to breathe, and so on. (Although our parents and grandparents may have been just as happy as we are, the evidence does show they were more bored. Our ancestors slept a lot more than we did, because there was nothing else to do at night.) To defend this idea that money doesn't buy happiness, Easterbrook points to data showing that chronic depression is a bigger problem in our society than ever before.

Easterbrook rightly sneers at the crass and preposterous things our consumer-driven society sometimes spends money on, but he has more contempt for the crisis-mongers in media, academia, and government who chronically complain about American life. He ridicules the daily, sensationalized news reports of "poison in the water," lost forests, the health crisis, or whatever the calamity du jour happens to be. Our latest societal affliction is "choice anxiety": so many things to choose from and so little time. --STEPHEN MOORE

The power of the blog!

Enter the Persistent

What does it mean that we must become like little children to enter the Kingdom?

I was thinking of Thomas the Misplaced Prot's recent post concerning the nearly unbearable tension between the search for a perfect church populated with imperfect people, or alternatively, the tension inherent in our own contradictions. We pray for peace in the world while dealing with the nagging thorn that says, "what hope has the world?" (Come to think of it, what are diets but the triumph of hope over experience?)

Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over all the while expecting different results, but is that insanity or a childlike hope? "Wait for the LORD ; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD," says the psalmist.

"Hopes are waking dreams." - St. Gregory

Update: See this excellent post from Two Sleepy Mommies. See also part of the inspiration for this post, about a mountain that can deceptively appear sisyphean.

The Passion

The unprecendented acclaim continues: the great evangelist Billy Graham has seen the film and cried during it, saying it was "a lifetime of sermons in one movie". I'm getting nervous; I'll be worried if my eyes aren't spigots on Feb. 25. To be honest the fragments of trailers I've seen haven't impressed me, probably because I'm desensitized to "blood and guts". Gore is to dramas what slapstick is to comedies - the easy way out?*

Part of what is driving the attention, of course, is the charge of anti-Semitism. If this is bumping advance ticket sales then it is an enormous turnabout. Why? Because the normal posture is for Christians to be in the position of providing publicity and the foil for depraved acts, like Janet Jackson's stunt (which no doubt spiked her record sales).

How wonderful it is to be on the other side for a change! Secularists are on the defensive, unwittingly plugging what they loathe.

* - Update: Interesting comment from Neil Dhingra on Amy's blog: "There is, it has been suggested, a certain pleasure that comes from gazing voyeuristically at the brutalized body of Christ - a powerful combination of guilt and desire, since Jesus suffers horribly in bearing our sins but it is through these very sufferings that we are healed. This is very similar to the pleasure that come from a torrid love affair in which the feelings of self-reproach intensify the eroticism. Now, this might make for deeply affecting cinema. One can argue that it has done exactly that in other Mel Gibson films. But it there anything religious about it? Carroll and the Metropolitan's comments suggest that the answer is "Not really."...we can worry that a Passion Play that finds itself relatively unconcerned with the resurrection has lost its very meaning. It ceases to be about communion with God; it becomes - at best - melodrama."

Cringing in Columbus

Watched Rod Dreher just rake the Vatican over the coals on Bill O'Reilly (from last week I think) concerning the mixed messages he'd received over whether the Pope said, "it is as it was". Manalive, I tell you I was inwardly cringing. You know things are bad when O'Reilly sticks up for the Vatican. Dreher was one degree of separation from saying the Vatican is engaging in 'structures of deceit' to borrow Garry Wills' phrase. We're really airing the dirty laundry these days.

Alan Keyes on Saving Family Farms

It is a sad truth, but the trouble usually comes when farmers produce too much of a good thing. As a result, prices can become so depressed that extraordinarily bountiful crops cannot be sold for a return that even pays for the costs of production, much less provides a profit.

How can economically destructive overproduction be prevented?...Our farm policy should aim rather at encouraging the development of independent and voluntary associations in the farming community to help farmers make the right decisions ... for themselves.

Another article here

I'm not a farmer although I play one in the backyard, but I think part of Alan's solution - that farmers look for alternative crops when there is an overabundance - strikes me as naive. The farmers I know are extremely cagey businessman. I may be wrong, but it seems there is a limited supply of marketable crops and growing hashish isn't an option. I love Keyes, but I'd like to have a "follow-up" as the reporters say.

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts


You threatening to cut off a debate with me is like an ugly man threatening not to have sex with me. --Kathy Shaidle to a Dean supporter, delivering a fisk as elegant as it was repellent, elegant for its brevity and the coup de grace use of the word 'ugly'.

Actually, Elvis sang incredibly well auf Deutsch. - Lee Ann of Literarium

Johnson remembered his life as a Benedictine, in which Scripture was read, listened to and prayed with five times a day, which made it absolutely impossible for him to consider Scripture as most scholars do today - as a cadaver to picked over and dissected. Rather, it is alive, an portal through which encounter with the living, self-disclosing God who lives. - Amy Welborn

Why not calculate the eigenvalue of the eigenvector of the 22 variable space that represents all issues, plot these in a rank/cluster diagram and examine the outliers for probable fit? You could use a bivariate nonparametric statistical analysis..." - Steven of Flos Carmeli on Tom's blog, to which I can only add damn straight, what he said.

In the early 90's, while Kurt Cobain screamed about the world that didn't pick him for kickball in gym class, or Eddie Vedder sang about, well, whatever, Johnny Cash sang about real people who felt guilt and regret, not ironic resentment/jealousy. The voice was like listening to an old testament prophet. His words seem to be more than emotion, they seem to be truth. It's often said that God speaks to us like a still, quiet voice. This IS Johnny Cash' American Recordings. I have cried to this album many times, esp. to Like A Soldier, and The Beast In Me. Accepting one's own contradictions is the key to loving yourself. Johnny's album helped me to do this. - amazon.com reviewer of Johnny Cash's 'American Recordings'

I think one thing that divides us moderns from our premodern brethren is this ratio of physical vs. social pain. Back in the days before modern medicine, everyone basically became enured to a level of physical suffering that we can hardly imagine...It's hard to convey that aspect of the Jesus story because it's so alien to us....Our first reaction upon seeing a crucified man, or a man walking along with his cross on his back, would likely not be, "Sheesh! What a loser!" But, apparently, the reaction of the day would have been something like that. Maybe something approaching an analogy would be our own forms of real-life humiliation as entertainment, like Joe Millionaire....A crucifixion, one imagines, would have inspired that same schadenfreude. Does Gibson get that about the crucifixion?... I think one problematic attitude I've sometimes run into about the sufferings of Jesus is that, far from humiliating him, they made him one bad-ass dude for enduring so much... If we are to believe Jesus experienced true human suffering, humiliation is a crucial part of that. Especially in that culture. -Camassia

[C.S.] Lewis's experience was very similar to my own. He loved mythology; he loved Wagner and nature (he was an avowed "Autumn fanatic" as I am, too); he had an extended atheistic period in his life (I toyed with the occult in my religiously-nominal childhood and teen years -- though I was never an atheist). Lewis -- my favorite writer, if that is not evident by now -- combined love of mythology and fantasy and imagination with rigorous logical thought (as I seek very much to do in my own apologetics). I was a nature mystic searching for something more... - David Armstrong of Cor ad cor loquitur

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.... The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether. --GK Chesterton via Philip of Musings of a Pertniancious Papist

Confession of a book glutton: gluttony, like other vices, dulls the senses yet inflames the passions. You lose that fine sensitivity to detail and, as it fades, you need more. So we come to one of my Lenten resolutions, made up right here on the spot: rather than reading everything in a rush, I will read well, read deeply and read slowly. - Bill of Summa Minutiae

One of my favorite parts about being Catholic is that Mass is every day. Church is open almost all day, depending on the neighborhood. Not just Sundays. - Therese Z of Santificarnos

I liked Thomas Merton's take on Jesus and His wart-ridden followers. I take great comfort in it. I don't want to wrap myself up in sinful habits and predispositions like a cloak (or like a "burrito', as Smockmomma's husband might say)--but I can't imagine going dead in the wits. Is that snobbishness, overfond attachment to intellectual entertainment, or simple integrity to who God made me? St. Francis de Sales would know. Read him for Lent... --Kathy Swistock

One thing I've learned over the years is that, though made in God's image, the human mind is a beast of almost intractable obstinacy; its intellect (as Newman put it) arrogant and corrosive, restless, dissatisfied, irreverent, vain and rebellious; its greatest faculty, reason, a very poor tool for unearthing truth and, if relied on to the exclusion of all else, will lead us to die happily in a hell of falsehood - in short, its inclination tending toward destruction as often as creation. -Bill of Apologia

It's in the Bible: no man can serve two masters. - Jeff of ElCamino, on why polygamy is wrong

While sarcasm and irony can be useful, they are difficult to wield with charity. - Michelle of And Then?

Put the Smock Down  ...vote smockmomma in '04!

Chicken or the Egg

I think it was St. John of the Cross who said that often we long for spiritual peace without deserving it, but isn't there a kind of spiritual peace that comes in accepting a lack of spiritual peace?

John Paul - Too Lenient?

I was recently touched by reader Jeanne's request that I offer my opinion of JPII's management of the Church. Obviously for me to judge JPII is akin to Tim, the 22-year old philosophy major, informing Kathy Shaidle why she should vote for Dean. But bloggers go where where the brave dare not go, so Jeanne, thanks for asking.

I think that it's far more important to offer ideas - which this Pope has done in spades - than to tear down. Tearing down has been tried before, most obviously with the anti-modernist encyclicals of Pius X. In the political sphere, tearing down failed when used by Bush Sr. in '92. The reason the Republican party was so successful with the "Contract with America" in '94 was because the Republicans had a positive vision. The Democrats didn't. Republicans won hearts and minds.

That's not to say that people don't long for limits and for clarity. They do. But the lack of clarity came prior to JPII, and it's easier to prevent the genie from getting out of the bottle than to put the genie back in the bottle. One need to exercise much more caution with the latter.

Philip Trower, hardly a Jcecil3 type, makes a good case in his Ignatius Press book "Turmoil and Truth" that the church of the 50s was going to weaken greatly anyway. The fact that all the Protestant churches fell apart too should be a siren call that the collapse had nothing to do with Vatican II, although admittedly many took license with faulty interpretations of Vatican II.

Ultimately it is an unanswerable question because we see the Church in its present state but we don't know what it would look like if the Pope had declared thermo-nuclear war on theologians, Catholic colleges and the like. What people don't realize is that when a leader insists on getting his way, he can be sabotaged in a million less noticeable ways. The fact that JPII gets sniped at by those who think he's too strict and those who think he's too lenient suggests he is striking the right balance. Does anyone imagine that the first John Paul would've been stricter!? By most accounts he would've made JPII look like a tyrant. Same thing with Paul VI. Same thing with John XXIII. This Pope is the most disciplinarian pope we've had since the Pius's.

George Bush's Dilemma

The international community, from the Pope on down, thought the U.S. should've gotten the full cooperation of the U.N. before launching the Iraq War. Which would have been much preferable.

But now we know that France, Russia, Indonesia and others were receiving millions of judgment-clouding barrels of illicit Iraqi oil. Couldn't they have recused themselves? Even the Russian Orthodox church was on the take.

The phrase "it's hard to fly with eagles when you work with turkeys" well applies to the U.N.. It's pretty hard to be pure in an impure world. George Bush, if he'd obeyed the international community, could've waited a year (and possibly probably still wouldn't have gotten U.N. approval). If he did, this would put the war right in the wheelhouse of the 2004 election, meaning Bush would have had to sacrifice any chance of a second term. All because France, Russia, and Germany said 'no', as they rake in the moolah. And they say the oil bidness is dirty.