Bern's Father

A public thanks to one William Luse. I like that he tries to keep my delusions of grandeur going (to steal his catchphrase), although they've been harder to maintain ever since I learned that The Mighty Barrister gets about ten times as many hits as I do. Blogging is a meritocracy. But then lessons in humility are meritorious, no? *grin*

Fr. Catoir in Enjoy the Lord: A Path to Contemplation writes that most of us grow up thinking we are especially talented individuals and then run against the untruth (and vanity) of this for the rest of our lives:

Most human beings have programmed themselves since childhood to become someone special. Consciously or unconsciously, they seem to seek their own glory. Their earliest fantasies involve the attainment of greatness...The first thing you have to learn if you are to pray well is to stop condemning yourself because you feel inconsistent, unworthy or guilty. In fact, you have to stop judging yourself at all.

By middle age most people feel that time is running out; that they haven't done anything of any great importance; that they are in fact declining in every way, particularly on the spiritual level. It is a common human experience, but remember that feelings are not facts. Expecting too much of yourself and everyone else is a form of vanity.

    Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

Camassia's blogging like a fish on fire this week. - Tom of Disputations

Fr. Murray recounted a tale of his novitiate, when he asked one of the older fathers, Cahal Hutchinson. "What is the secret of Dominican contemplation?" Father Cahal answered, "never tell the Carmelites or the Jesuits, but we have no secret other than the Gospel secret! But I will tell you the two great laws of contemplation: 1. Pray, and 2. Keep at it!" - Fr. Jesús Hernando, OP

Families are wonderful things. But some families are more wonderful than others. (Although, I'm sure yours is among the best.) A tip for those seeking someone to marry: if you have a choice and are torn between two people (no, it never happened to me either; but it sure happens a lot in the movies and in country and western songs) study the families. Go to family weddings and funerals and observe. Some families are not much fun at weddings. Some are a delight even at funerals. You want to be a member of the second. - John at the Inn at the End of the World

During the campaign, Joseph Bottum of The Weekly Standard quipped that John Kerry apparently believed that the fact that his church agreed with him about the wrongness of abortion was a reason not to act on that view. The mental tic Bottum neatly identified is a special case of liberalism's general tendency to identify reason with irreligion. - Ramesh Ponnuru in National Review

The most of the interesting arguments these days are within intellectual camps (libertarians versus conservatives, leftists versus liberals) and not between them. - Jonah Goldberg of the Corner

I've got an amazing girlfriend who's stuck by me for three years despite having little in common with me other than a general interest in Jessica Simpson's marriage and a tendency to make jokes in inappropriate situations. - Jacob of Schadenfreude

Best Book we've read in group? Tie, Till We Have Faces and The Power and the Glory. 2. New (to us) authors I'm glad we found: Jon Hassler and Richard Russo. Hands down, my favorite contemporary writers. - MamaT of Summa Mamas

Being a Godparent is about far more than honoring a family member. It is far more than a social gathering, an excuse for pictures and a party (as much a part of the Baptism as those should be). It is a solemn oath made to God, made in the Church, gathered with fellow believers, in the presence of the Church's minister (representing Christ the Head of the Body). As such a solemn oath it carries serious consequences for the eventual entrance into the Heavenly kingdom for both the parents and the Godparents. - Fr. Hamilton of Catholic Rage Monkey

Dismantling [How to Dismantle an Atomic] Bomb’s origins, Bono recalls an early version of "Vertigo" that was massaged, hammered, tweaked and lubed before it sailed through two mixes and got U2's unanimous stamp of "very good," which meant not good enough."Very good," Bono says, "is the enemy of great. You think great is right next door. It's not. It's in another country." - USA Today quote via Terry Teachout

I am fortunate to know a handful of Catholic souls who possess a very high degree of personal sanctity. Spending just a few minutes with these people can be a wonder and an inspiration - but it can also be a discomforting rebuke. - Jeff of ECR

As near as I can tell, it would appear that creation has been under assault since the fall of Satan, and from what little we can glean from the Tradition, it would appear that a) angels are the first creations of God, b) the fall of the fallen angels takes place, so to speak, instantly upon their creation and their being given the fundamental option of God or self, and c) the problem of evil superhuman spirits mucking about in the rest of creation is therefore, from our perspective, a "given". Certainly the Genesis account envisions some sort of primordial, non-human intelligence involved in the fall. And significantly, it portrays that intelligence working through other creatures to tempt us. What the account seems to clearly deny is that evil originated with us. We are given the opportunity to participate in a rebellion that has been going on since before we arrived on the scene. And it would appear from the pre-human record that it may very well be possible that such evil intelligences may have been laboring to damage and harm the Creation (all within the Providence of God, of course). - Mark Shea, commenting on Disputations' blog

Come forth from the holy place,
Sweet Child,
Come from the quiet dark
Where virginal heartbeats
Tick your moments.
Come away from the red music
Of Mary's veins.
Come out from the Tower of David
Sweet Child,
From the House of Gold.
Leave your lily-cloister,
Leave your holy mansion,
Quit your covenant ark.
O Child, be born!
Be born, sweet Child,
In our unholy hearts.

- excerpt of "Advent Summons" by Sr. Mary Francis, P.C. , via MamaT

Advent Meditation by Fr. Andre-Joseph LaCrosse, O.P.

When a woman is carrying a child she develops a certain instinct of self-defense. It is not selfishness; it is not egoism. It is an absorption into the life within, a folding of self like a little tent around the child's frailty, a God-like instinct to cherish, and some day to bring forth, the life. A closing upon it like the petals of a flower closing upon like dew that shines in its heart. This is precisely the attitude we must have to Christ, the life within us, in the Advent of our contemplation.

We could scrub the floor for a tired friend, or dress a wound for a patient in the hospital, or lay the table and wash up for the family, but we shall not do it in martyr spirit or with that worse spirit of self-congratulation, of feeling that we are making ourselves more perfect, more unselfish, more positively kind. We shall do it just for one thing, that our hands may make Christ's hands in our life, that our service may let Christ serve through us, that our patience may bring Christ's patience back to the world.

By his own will Christ was dependent on Mary during Advent: he was absolutely helpless; he could go nowhere but where she chose to take him; he could not speak; her breathing was his breath; his heart beat in the beating of her heart. Today Christ is dependent upon us. In the host he is literally put into a man's hands.

Rule-based Morality & Accidental Evangelization

Went down to pick up lunch at the cafeteria, and so to make use of the long wait in the queues I brought reading material in the form of this post from a conservative blog and this one from a liberal.

It fell out of my pocket on the way back up. So somewhere in a large corporate office (probably on one of the many elevators) lay the words of these two loquacious bloggers. Tracking down that elevator would be daunting, so I hope someone found it who needs it.

The second post, the blogger at "The Lesser of Two Weevils" discusses paragraph 25 of the CCC and rule-based morality, and is a fascinating read.

Mother Nature's Son

Christopher Hitchens reviews "BACK FROM THE LAND: How Young Americans Went to Nature in the 1970's, and Why They Came Back":

Eleanor Agnew's lovely memoir of this movement of primal innocence is at once honest and hilarious. She recaptures the period with unerring skill: a period when the Apollo mission had shown us our fragile, blue planetary home from outer space, thus promoting (first) ''The Whole Earth Catalog'' and (second) a mentality that despised the science and innovation necessary for the taking of that photograph in the first place.

Countless educated young Americans went off the map, in pursuit of Walden or some other version of bucolic utopia. They learned to chop wood and sometimes to grow crops, and they got hypothermia and piles.

Agnew is at her driest and wittiest when she describes the reaction of her sodbusting "sisters," in particular, to the hygienic arrangements and then to the knotty question of natural childbirth. More than one agreed to have a baby on a kitchen table before getting pregnant again and heading as fast as possible back to town for "serious numbing drugs."

If you look back to the founding document of the 60's left, which was the Port Huron statement (also promulgated in Michigan), you will easily see that it was in essence a conservative manifesto. It spoke in vaguely Marxist terms of alienation, true, but it was reacting to bigness and anonymity and urbanization, and it betrayed a yearning for a lost agrarian simplicity. It forgot what Marx had said, about the dynamism of capitalism and "the idiocy of rural life." Earlier 18th- and 19th-century American communards had often been fleeing or preparing for a coming Apocalypse, and their emulators in the 1960's and 1970's followed this trope as well, believing everything they read about the impending crash, or the exhaustion of the world's resources. The crazy lean-to of the Unabomber began to take dim shape at that period, even if many of the new pioneers were more affected by the work of the pacific Tolstoy or of C. Wright Mills (who used to recommend, if memory serves, that people should build their own cars as well as their own houses).

Is there a moral to point out here? Of course there is. Maybe more than one. The first is that, as Agnew deftly notes, more of her friends ought to have read about the Joad family before setting out. The second is that not all was wasted or futile. Everybody in society now has a better idea of our relationship with the natural order and our kinship with animals, and we are no longer so casual about what once seemed the endless bounty of our environment. In some ways, we have the "love generation" to thank for this.

Powerful Columbus Dispatch Story ...

...About a life-changing accident leaves boy paralyzed but creates a glimmer of hope in God for a family who doesn't believe in Him.

Fr. Jim's Book List

Book recommendations are crack-cocaine for bibliophiles, and Fr. Jim has obliged us. (Though I exaggerate my bookishness. As Marilynne Robinson had one of her characters say: "I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I have ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from," he muses.") Amen.

It's always slightly exasperating to be just on the edge of understanding Hernan Gonzalez (who scribes in Spanish). He said of books:"I resist the temptation to mention books that have helped me... but that they do not adjust so much to the proposed aim. To the majority already I have mentioned them throughout the life of blog, on the other hand...". If I catch his drift I feel similarly.

On Death, Because the Irish are Morbid

They say that to overcome fear when giving a speech you should imagine your listeners in their underwear. This is supposed to make the audience less intimidating, but given that there are some attractive ladies at my office this might only be erotic.

But I think I have a more effective remedy: to imagine them in a hundred years. All will be equal then, physically-speaking; we'll all be mouldering in our graves. This occurred to me while hiking past a city of the dead out in the country. It was set on a hill, as cemeteries often are, and it takes very little imagination to imagine a cross-section of the hill and what lay beneath: bones as lifeless as the stones that mark them.

Death can create empathy for our neighbors. Everyone of us is passing towards an equal ruin. Death is a great failure, a spectacular destruction of everything sensible about us, though not an eternal one. As Fr. Andrew Greeley wrote in "The Jesus Myth":

The Christian, then, believes in failure just as Jesus believed in failure, but he knows that failure is not the end. He believes in fulfillment though he knows that he cannot achieve it himself. He knows that he is weak and will be defeated; but he knows that with God's help he can transcend defeat to achieve victory. It is therefore impossible for him to quit; he cannot give up...When the charity of others runs out because of age, infirmity, discouragement or frustration, the Christian knows that this is not an option available to him...The question of whether life is ultimately a tragedy or a comedy, Jesus replied with the absolute assurance that it was comedy.

The Ruin of the Library Manse

The past scent fore
as the dusty library falls
         aft of Memory.

Oh, then the rotundas were studded
with the oils of patriarchs
the smell of endpapers
scrawled and scribbled
         into our very blood.


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It's in the Rocks

Beer, that is:

The refreshing bitterness of an English pale ale, the clean light taste of a Pilsener, the dark, almost burnt graininess of Irish stout. To Dr. Alex Maltman, these are prime illustrations of the power of geology.

...The waters of Dublin, sitting on 300-million-year-old limestone, are even more alkaline and require even more roasting of the barley. "What they call black malt," Dr. Maltman said. "Even then the extraction isn't that good. It means the beer has a distinct grainy flavor and it certainly means the resulting beers are very, very dark, black even." That yields the distinctive taste of Guinness and other Irish stouts.

How the Movie Ends

Moving story of a parent of an autistic child:

Yesterday I chatted with a PR person for a financial firm and asked her to send over some answers to a news story tomorrow. I told I was taking the day off to prepare our house for my son’s fourth birthday party. She sucked in her breath and clucked her tongue in the instant camaraderie that parents all recognize. "You’re having a party in your house with all those kids? I would never do that," she bantered. Then it dawned on me: Matthew has no friends.

It’s a weird relief -- as the father of an autistic child, we don’t have to invite a dozen kids over and strain with the small talk with their parents in the kitchen as the kids play games, eat cakes and fight the birthday party lull. Matthew has no friends outside of me and Regina and his older sister, Nora. Regina has a special talent for awarding the kids nicknames -- Nora was 'Yompie' and Matthew is 'Stubbie' and when she calls the six-month old Tim 'Goobus,' we heard Matthew repeat the name. He can’t say Nora but he loves to spend time with her and his bath tubs are more enjoyable with her. He said 'Baby' when Regina held the brand new Tim in her arms when coming home from the hospital in May but he has never said Mommy to the best of my memory. He does say Dada, but it can be weeks between the time that I hear my beautiful and heart-warming title.

So, no friends. And yet, we are blessed. He has beautiful eyes, a fine head of hair, a radiant smile and it is a pleasure and a marvel just to watch him think and process a thought. The hardest thing about being the parent of an autistic child -- or pardon me, the parent of a child with autistic spectrum disorders -- is to wonder where this will all lead...Does he go to college? Does he even finish junior high? Am I wrestling him into an adult diaper when he is a 200-pound 17-year old? Does he go to Harvard or a community college or into a group home and we see him on weekend trips to Wendys and maybe a movie? I have no clue. We have no idea how this movie ends.

Complementary



It seems Eucharistic Adoration and reception of the Eucharist complement one another. In the first case, the experience is one of God as Other, wholly transcendent, present on the altar in His singularity. In the second, the act of receiving Communion is God in us, His ubiquitousness and immanence shown in the multiplication of Hosts.

-photo via Inn at the End of the World

The Fault, Dear Brutus

Visited Lilek's place (gif above is his) and well, what a clean, well-lighted place. The handsome expanse of Christmas red & green, the cheering order to it, the lack of links or congestion or indigestion, the online diaristic feel, the broad expanse, the large bank of words free-flowing unobstructed by data, politics, rants, or links...

No I haven't read the post yet. It seemed long and didn't have enough data/links/politics/rants to keep my interest. *grin*

Original Sin & the Aborigine Sinner

Lots of action & reaction on the topic at Camassia's. Call it "Everything you wanted to know about evolution & the Fall but were too afraid to ask".

When Life Brings Lemons

Set Old Fogey On.

Sigh. I recall when being an altar boy was a privilege and not a right to convenient Mass times. Shows my age.

Set Old Fogey Off.