GOTQ
Naomi Riley in “God on the Quad” says that what divides Catholics is not the liturgy or view of matters sexual but their take on ecumenism. An example is whether to avoid prostelyzing Jews –liberals are comfortable with that while conservatives would ask why prohibit Jews from the truth? I wonder if the true divide – caution you are entering a Bias Zone – is more that conservatives see the church as their parent (i.e. Mother Kirche). Conservatives accept Church rules just as we accepted our mother's rules because we believed her when she said it was for our own good. We brushed our teeth as children trusting that the temporary boredom of the action promised some future unseen good. But I have trouble remembering the last time a progressive wanted the Church to do something that was for some spiritual good that wasn't attached to some obvious temporal benefit. Not that I've given much thought. Remember, you entered a Bias Zone.
“God in the Quad” is a very interesting read. She mentions how not all students at Thomas Aquinas College are Catholics but that “many will (convert) after they read Augustine’s “City of God” their sophomore year.” Alas, another classic book I haven’t read. (Jeff Culbreath wants to read it too. I will if you do? Can I get a witness?) She says the great debate at Thomas Aquinas College is Plato vs. Aristotle. Since Augustine used Plato and Aquinas used Aristotle, is this the source of the of the Augustine/Thomist divide (happily, an unthreatening divide) in the Church? Knowing little of Augustine and Thomas and less of Plato and Aristotle, I’m wondering how the Augustinianian/Thomist debate manifests itself “one layer up”, i.e. when you get to my undereducated level.
June 11, 2005
Hilton Head Trip Log
I was on an hour hike, a break on the way to Hilton Head S.C., in the North Carolina mountains when I realized it had been too long. There was the ache of my forgetfulness of the Great Smokies, the trails flooded with rhododendron and glistening with washed moss, the ferns, the conifers, the mountain streams with hue’d rocks. It triggered a contemplative episode years ago when on a five hour hike I’d sat on a rock in a creek stream with the Beatles song running through my mind:
Sit beside a mountain stream
Watch her waters rise!
Listen to the pretty sound of music
as she flies.
The air was drunk on moonshine and superoxygenated by a trillion photosynthesizing leaves. It led to a sense of awe but awww there’s the rub: "sense" of awe. Awe by senses. Awe for things you can’t see is of more value. But nature is in her glory here and the slow arching hawks seem to mock men who would deny the goodness of creation.
Hiking the hills not far from the Virginia border reminds me of the 19th century and of Virgina’s Civil War battlefields. I long to see the battlefields again. I remember how the pastor at my parent's church went to Gettysburg five or six consecutive years, each time spending a week there. People can be interesting. I would’ve thought that might be just a tad of overkill. And one might get the impression this pastor, with such reverence for history and patriotic impulse would be a traditionalist in matters religious. But instead he's happy to plant doubts about where Jesus was born (not big on Bethlehem) and he once called Mother Angelica "an eccentric old nun who’s trying to pretend Vatican II didn't happen." People can be hard to predict.
I came across a restored homestead originally built in the 1850s. The cabin and farm are complete with information posts with pictures of the settlers, the Hutchinson's, and they look so alien in their dress and manner. They squint with those hard 19th century faces, so blank and devoid of expression. On the drive there I passed a Baptist church with a sign that said "This church rated PG: pure gospel". Cute. Corny, down here where they "drink the corn from a jar" (although presumably not the good Baptists). I can’t help thinking how times have changed. These hardscrabble pioneers who drank the doctrine of that hard Calvinistic whiskey are the spiritual fathers of those who put up corny signs.
Driving to Stone Mountain State Park I get a vertiginous view of a green mountain with a house on the top and it looked like Heaven: distant but possible. And within these mountain walls I can see how residents might have a greater sense of place. Their land is marked not by an arbitrary boundary like the farmer's in Iowa, but by the personal green castle walls of their holler. So when the Civil War came, even while not having much slavery to protect, they might've felt the threat of Northern will more keenly? Stone Mountain is aptly named. It’s like one of the stones from a stream got misplaced while at the same time getting magnified a million times. A big billiard ball of gray stone, it was a wonderously large and yet...and yet like a grass blade to an ant, big only to us.
_
I-95 in South Carolina is the cruelest highway. The scenery is relentless and ever the same, the highway flanked by seemingly identical pines of identical heights. And so it goes for fifty, sixty, ninety miles. It’s like in cartoons or old Westerns where they show the same repeating background. The smaller “blue highways” that William Least Heat Moon wrote of are so much more interesting. In just the few miles we drove to escape a backup on I-95 we saw a house with a six-foot Marine Corp rug hanging upright and on the other side was the same-sized Confederate flag. Just stuck in the middle of their front yard as if it grew there.
_
“And suddenly you’re in a different place,
Where everything seems to happen in waves”
– Elizabeth Bishop, from poem “Letter to NY”
I’ve discovered it's not easy to be leisurely in advance. Even knowing that loads of time stretch out before me I seem unable to proactively tap into that future lack of hyper. In the pell-mell rush to the beach, I carry gargantuan quantities of stuff and smash my foot with the cooler. As the song goes, "we’ll get there fast and then we’ll take it slow." I recommend getting there slow so that you’ll be ready to take it slow when you get there.
And pick your location carefully. Finding a good spot is akin to curing cancer – possible, but unlikely. I try to avoid those playing music since it’s inevitably bad music. Only in Heaven do you hear the Chieftains. I also try to avoid immodestly dressed women, which is like trying to avoid Italians at an Italian festival. There's more butt exposed here than at a plumber's convention. Observational prowess is no virtue here in the Island of the Nearly Unclothed Female, and I’m hoping that the propulsive nature of words will serve as a subliminative. I do my part for beach beautification and the prevention of salacious thoughts by eschewing Speedos and thongs. I give and I give.
Today we experienced that rarest of birds: the man who can’t stop talking to his wife. He’s in his late 50s and via the miracle of a walkman "I know nothing" (say like Klink.) But my wife unavoidedly hears his opinions on everything from anti-depressants (a waste, no one should take them) to the European Constitution (not really). Bloviators are uncommon on the beach (pot, kettle, I know), but when it turned out that it wasn't his wife he was talking to I felt oddly relieved, for no man talks to his wife that much. Which is fortunate for wives everywhere.
_
Like Mexican cliff divers
pelicans plummet,
reminding me of Tennyson’s line
“And like a thunderbolt he falls”.
_
There’s a map of Europe on my chest etched in scarlet from missed splotches of sunscreen. Sicily hurts. It already seems a long time since we arrived and I noted Applebaum’s "Gulag" in the time share; I was surprised someone left such an expensive and unlikely beach read there. I usually end up leaving the beach in far better physical shape than when I arrive. Beach bling (skin is bling to the male eye) makes me restless so instead of reading I run, bike and swim. Every day a triathlon. Philosopher/runner/writer George Sheehan once wrote that racing is the love-making of running, so while out for a jog I spied a bunch of folks lining up for a race and I found that irresistible so I lined up myself, about ten yards away. It’s a sprint to the surf, about a hundred meters, and the six and seven year olds all wear expressions of great seriousness. At the finish line is the day care worker or teacher and we’re off! Those kids really have a good first step and I find myself lagging early. Teach gives me a wide grin as I hit the water.
My two o’clock rule (before which I’ll drink no ale) feels arbitrary and wicked here under the blazing beachball sun. My IQ falls twenty points under this gladsome sun tide; I was reading “God in the Quad”, hardly “War & Peace”, but after going outside it feels near burdensome. I sift “Treasure Island” and “Sanibel Flats” to the top of my book bag.
My wife moves the cooler to use as a foot stool. I’m genuinely impressed. I say, “all the time I’ve been down here and I didn’t think of that!”
“Babe, I’m an expert relaxer,” she coolly replies.
But I should never mistake this for retirement. Three beers and a beach in front of me. Nay, retirement is probably shuffleboard and dyspepsia. I’m reading “Early Bird”, the account of a 28-year old joke-writer for David Letterman who burned out on his job and went to live in a Florida retirement community. The book vaguely depresses me, for reasons I can quite put my finger on. And yet it is extremely absorbing and witty and humorous. But the depiction of the community sounds so frivolous and superficial. Both too much seriousity and too much frivolity wear. Balance, where art thou?
The people who live there are depicted one-dimensionally. They gossip and talk about their health problems. There’s no mention of the spiritual. It reminds me of spring break for college kids – there seemed to be no there there. No family, no cooking (the film Babette’s Feast makes cooking seem sort of holy, but at the very least there is something indicative of “roots”), no religion.
Those who age best, it seems, are those professors who still love learning and still enthuse over Romantic poetry. Or retired symphony conductors who lead a small town band for free. Or St. Vincent de Paul members who give out bread and go to daily Mass. Or priests, whose power to consecrate remains undiminished.
Later, I’m sitting in a chair that the ocean is slowly reclaiming. The guy next to me is fishing and reels something in. It’s a small fish, small enough that I might’ve confused it for bait. He turns towards me and I give him a look of sympathy, as if to say, "aw that’s too bad." But he’s proud, nay, he’s exultant. He’d turned towards me not for sympathy but congratulations.
_
Buy mass market paperbacks
for the scent alone;
where memories of Weekly Reader
mix with coffee and scone.
_
The island soil is black and crumbly, richly allusive of all that went into the making of it. The dank smell of decomposition is present in the moist green interior, all things fermenting, just as thousands of grapes make up a wine. One state to the north, up in the mountains, there are patches of soil the color of lamb’s blood, little splotches of farm-ploughed hillock. The only thing in nature that seems unnaturally straight is the ocean’s unblinking horizon.
I wonder: do artists have a completely different painting experience when painting nudes compared to flowers and landscapes? Is one a different aesthetic experience? Are they like the Scripture scholars who toil over minutiae without fever for the Lover it describes? Do they paint nudes and landscapes for similar or different reasons or does that depend on the painter?
The picture of the island I’d most like to take but have never gotten around tp it would be the newspaper stand where the stairs from the time-shares end and the parking lot begins. There the expectation of pleasure is intense, the unseen ocean just beyond, the sun streaming triumphantly from the gloom of the dark stairs:
Brine-blud
son of an Englishmun
blind, gum’
here in the summer sun,
bliss this
plenteous shall miss.
Hie thee blood,
to the wave’s rud!
Rhythm thee,
to the break of the sea!
The sail, lo’
hail, so
hear the whale blow!
_
WWSHD?
Went to Mass and saw Scott Hahn and family. They obviously go down the same week we do every year since this is probably the fourth time I’ve seen him there. I know I wouldn’t want to preach a homily with Scott in the audience if I were the priest! But the padre makes the point in the homily that St. Matthew would probably have not volunteered for martyrdom, as he eventually did, when he was first called by Christ. This was said to illustrate the need for ongoing conversion and how it’s a process, not an event. To “look ahead” and wonder if we are ready for some huge task like being tortured or killed for Christ is probably not a good idea; better to just take whatever challenge comes to us. Dickens, in “Bleak House”, has an ingénue say, “I thought it best to be as useful as I could, and to render what kind services I could to those immediately about me, and to try to let that circle of duty gradually and naturally expand itself.”
Saw statue of Mary at Holy Family Church with exposed heart, red and large. It’s slightly distracting but then I consider: what more handy symbol of our Mother’s love? Her claim to fame is not the white with which she is robed or her veil, but her maternal heart, her love for God and us.
_
Grim is the last day
when clouds fall
a scatter of drops
“this is what it sounds
like when doves cry”.
The problem with Hilton Head is it becomes improbably beautiful in inverse proportion to how much time remains. Am I more given to reverie because I’m finally relaxed, or because it’s the last day? Meanwhile, the water appears the color of envy, washed white by foam clouds...
I was on an hour hike, a break on the way to Hilton Head S.C., in the North Carolina mountains when I realized it had been too long. There was the ache of my forgetfulness of the Great Smokies, the trails flooded with rhododendron and glistening with washed moss, the ferns, the conifers, the mountain streams with hue’d rocks. It triggered a contemplative episode years ago when on a five hour hike I’d sat on a rock in a creek stream with the Beatles song running through my mind:
Sit beside a mountain stream
Watch her waters rise!
Listen to the pretty sound of music
as she flies.
The air was drunk on moonshine and superoxygenated by a trillion photosynthesizing leaves. It led to a sense of awe but awww there’s the rub: "sense" of awe. Awe by senses. Awe for things you can’t see is of more value. But nature is in her glory here and the slow arching hawks seem to mock men who would deny the goodness of creation.
Hiking the hills not far from the Virginia border reminds me of the 19th century and of Virgina’s Civil War battlefields. I long to see the battlefields again. I remember how the pastor at my parent's church went to Gettysburg five or six consecutive years, each time spending a week there. People can be interesting. I would’ve thought that might be just a tad of overkill. And one might get the impression this pastor, with such reverence for history and patriotic impulse would be a traditionalist in matters religious. But instead he's happy to plant doubts about where Jesus was born (not big on Bethlehem) and he once called Mother Angelica "an eccentric old nun who’s trying to pretend Vatican II didn't happen." People can be hard to predict.
I came across a restored homestead originally built in the 1850s. The cabin and farm are complete with information posts with pictures of the settlers, the Hutchinson's, and they look so alien in their dress and manner. They squint with those hard 19th century faces, so blank and devoid of expression. On the drive there I passed a Baptist church with a sign that said "This church rated PG: pure gospel". Cute. Corny, down here where they "drink the corn from a jar" (although presumably not the good Baptists). I can’t help thinking how times have changed. These hardscrabble pioneers who drank the doctrine of that hard Calvinistic whiskey are the spiritual fathers of those who put up corny signs.
Driving to Stone Mountain State Park I get a vertiginous view of a green mountain with a house on the top and it looked like Heaven: distant but possible. And within these mountain walls I can see how residents might have a greater sense of place. Their land is marked not by an arbitrary boundary like the farmer's in Iowa, but by the personal green castle walls of their holler. So when the Civil War came, even while not having much slavery to protect, they might've felt the threat of Northern will more keenly? Stone Mountain is aptly named. It’s like one of the stones from a stream got misplaced while at the same time getting magnified a million times. A big billiard ball of gray stone, it was a wonderously large and yet...and yet like a grass blade to an ant, big only to us.
_
I-95 in South Carolina is the cruelest highway. The scenery is relentless and ever the same, the highway flanked by seemingly identical pines of identical heights. And so it goes for fifty, sixty, ninety miles. It’s like in cartoons or old Westerns where they show the same repeating background. The smaller “blue highways” that William Least Heat Moon wrote of are so much more interesting. In just the few miles we drove to escape a backup on I-95 we saw a house with a six-foot Marine Corp rug hanging upright and on the other side was the same-sized Confederate flag. Just stuck in the middle of their front yard as if it grew there.
_
“And suddenly you’re in a different place,
Where everything seems to happen in waves”
– Elizabeth Bishop, from poem “Letter to NY”
I’ve discovered it's not easy to be leisurely in advance. Even knowing that loads of time stretch out before me I seem unable to proactively tap into that future lack of hyper. In the pell-mell rush to the beach, I carry gargantuan quantities of stuff and smash my foot with the cooler. As the song goes, "we’ll get there fast and then we’ll take it slow." I recommend getting there slow so that you’ll be ready to take it slow when you get there.
And pick your location carefully. Finding a good spot is akin to curing cancer – possible, but unlikely. I try to avoid those playing music since it’s inevitably bad music. Only in Heaven do you hear the Chieftains. I also try to avoid immodestly dressed women, which is like trying to avoid Italians at an Italian festival. There's more butt exposed here than at a plumber's convention. Observational prowess is no virtue here in the Island of the Nearly Unclothed Female, and I’m hoping that the propulsive nature of words will serve as a subliminative. I do my part for beach beautification and the prevention of salacious thoughts by eschewing Speedos and thongs. I give and I give.
Today we experienced that rarest of birds: the man who can’t stop talking to his wife. He’s in his late 50s and via the miracle of a walkman "I know nothing" (say like Klink.) But my wife unavoidedly hears his opinions on everything from anti-depressants (a waste, no one should take them) to the European Constitution (not really). Bloviators are uncommon on the beach (pot, kettle, I know), but when it turned out that it wasn't his wife he was talking to I felt oddly relieved, for no man talks to his wife that much. Which is fortunate for wives everywhere.
_
Like Mexican cliff divers
pelicans plummet,
reminding me of Tennyson’s line
“And like a thunderbolt he falls”.
_
There’s a map of Europe on my chest etched in scarlet from missed splotches of sunscreen. Sicily hurts. It already seems a long time since we arrived and I noted Applebaum’s "Gulag" in the time share; I was surprised someone left such an expensive and unlikely beach read there. I usually end up leaving the beach in far better physical shape than when I arrive. Beach bling (skin is bling to the male eye) makes me restless so instead of reading I run, bike and swim. Every day a triathlon. Philosopher/runner/writer George Sheehan once wrote that racing is the love-making of running, so while out for a jog I spied a bunch of folks lining up for a race and I found that irresistible so I lined up myself, about ten yards away. It’s a sprint to the surf, about a hundred meters, and the six and seven year olds all wear expressions of great seriousness. At the finish line is the day care worker or teacher and we’re off! Those kids really have a good first step and I find myself lagging early. Teach gives me a wide grin as I hit the water.
My two o’clock rule (before which I’ll drink no ale) feels arbitrary and wicked here under the blazing beachball sun. My IQ falls twenty points under this gladsome sun tide; I was reading “God in the Quad”, hardly “War & Peace”, but after going outside it feels near burdensome. I sift “Treasure Island” and “Sanibel Flats” to the top of my book bag.
My wife moves the cooler to use as a foot stool. I’m genuinely impressed. I say, “all the time I’ve been down here and I didn’t think of that!”
“Babe, I’m an expert relaxer,” she coolly replies.
But I should never mistake this for retirement. Three beers and a beach in front of me. Nay, retirement is probably shuffleboard and dyspepsia. I’m reading “Early Bird”, the account of a 28-year old joke-writer for David Letterman who burned out on his job and went to live in a Florida retirement community. The book vaguely depresses me, for reasons I can quite put my finger on. And yet it is extremely absorbing and witty and humorous. But the depiction of the community sounds so frivolous and superficial. Both too much seriousity and too much frivolity wear. Balance, where art thou?
The people who live there are depicted one-dimensionally. They gossip and talk about their health problems. There’s no mention of the spiritual. It reminds me of spring break for college kids – there seemed to be no there there. No family, no cooking (the film Babette’s Feast makes cooking seem sort of holy, but at the very least there is something indicative of “roots”), no religion.
Those who age best, it seems, are those professors who still love learning and still enthuse over Romantic poetry. Or retired symphony conductors who lead a small town band for free. Or St. Vincent de Paul members who give out bread and go to daily Mass. Or priests, whose power to consecrate remains undiminished.
Later, I’m sitting in a chair that the ocean is slowly reclaiming. The guy next to me is fishing and reels something in. It’s a small fish, small enough that I might’ve confused it for bait. He turns towards me and I give him a look of sympathy, as if to say, "aw that’s too bad." But he’s proud, nay, he’s exultant. He’d turned towards me not for sympathy but congratulations.
_
Buy mass market paperbacks
for the scent alone;
where memories of Weekly Reader
mix with coffee and scone.
_
The island soil is black and crumbly, richly allusive of all that went into the making of it. The dank smell of decomposition is present in the moist green interior, all things fermenting, just as thousands of grapes make up a wine. One state to the north, up in the mountains, there are patches of soil the color of lamb’s blood, little splotches of farm-ploughed hillock. The only thing in nature that seems unnaturally straight is the ocean’s unblinking horizon.
I wonder: do artists have a completely different painting experience when painting nudes compared to flowers and landscapes? Is one a different aesthetic experience? Are they like the Scripture scholars who toil over minutiae without fever for the Lover it describes? Do they paint nudes and landscapes for similar or different reasons or does that depend on the painter?
The picture of the island I’d most like to take but have never gotten around tp it would be the newspaper stand where the stairs from the time-shares end and the parking lot begins. There the expectation of pleasure is intense, the unseen ocean just beyond, the sun streaming triumphantly from the gloom of the dark stairs:
Brine-blud
son of an Englishmun
blind, gum’
here in the summer sun,
bliss this
plenteous shall miss.
Hie thee blood,
to the wave’s rud!
Rhythm thee,
to the break of the sea!
The sail, lo’
hail, so
hear the whale blow!
_
WWSHD?
Went to Mass and saw Scott Hahn and family. They obviously go down the same week we do every year since this is probably the fourth time I’ve seen him there. I know I wouldn’t want to preach a homily with Scott in the audience if I were the priest! But the padre makes the point in the homily that St. Matthew would probably have not volunteered for martyrdom, as he eventually did, when he was first called by Christ. This was said to illustrate the need for ongoing conversion and how it’s a process, not an event. To “look ahead” and wonder if we are ready for some huge task like being tortured or killed for Christ is probably not a good idea; better to just take whatever challenge comes to us. Dickens, in “Bleak House”, has an ingénue say, “I thought it best to be as useful as I could, and to render what kind services I could to those immediately about me, and to try to let that circle of duty gradually and naturally expand itself.”
Saw statue of Mary at Holy Family Church with exposed heart, red and large. It’s slightly distracting but then I consider: what more handy symbol of our Mother’s love? Her claim to fame is not the white with which she is robed or her veil, but her maternal heart, her love for God and us.
_
Grim is the last day
when clouds fall
a scatter of drops
“this is what it sounds
like when doves cry”.
The problem with Hilton Head is it becomes improbably beautiful in inverse proportion to how much time remains. Am I more given to reverie because I’m finally relaxed, or because it’s the last day? Meanwhile, the water appears the color of envy, washed white by foam clouds...
June 03, 2005
Various
Overheard our secretary say..."Short weeks are always the longest." So true and yet so counterintuitive.
In news that will be minutiae to everyone but me, one of the Dominicans (Fr. Tancrell) at St. Patrick's downtown is leaving. He said Mass with such beautiful reverence though mostly he was the confessor (lines are long even on weekdays there!). It'll be sad to see him go. I googled his name and saw that he responded once to Diogenes. Small world. How beautifully he wrote: "The Blood of Jesus spilled in the fire of charity exceeds our deepest concept of power and remedy."
Overheard our secretary say..."Short weeks are always the longest." So true and yet so counterintuitive.
In news that will be minutiae to everyone but me, one of the Dominicans (Fr. Tancrell) at St. Patrick's downtown is leaving. He said Mass with such beautiful reverence though mostly he was the confessor (lines are long even on weekdays there!). It'll be sad to see him go. I googled his name and saw that he responded once to Diogenes. Small world. How beautifully he wrote: "The Blood of Jesus spilled in the fire of charity exceeds our deepest concept of power and remedy."
June 02, 2005
Good Advice from an Irish Grandmother..
...to her grandson before he travels Ireland on a donkey. From Kevin O'Hara's Last of the Donkey Pilgrims:
...to her grandson before he travels Ireland on a donkey. From Kevin O'Hara's Last of the Donkey Pilgrims:
"Days are lengthening now, but when they grow short, you'll need to seek your byre early. Before knocking don't be afraid to say a decade of the Rosary. There's great power in prayer, and the `Hail Mary' will ease your countenance and give you the look of trust at any door."
"Amen, Grannie."
"And always do your best to attend Mass on Sunday. There's a wealth of grace in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Imagine, you'll partake the Holy Bread in churches all about the country. Do you know, I've heard Mass in sixty-two different churches during my time?"
"Sixty-two!" I was truly astonished. "You've kept track?"
"Why do you find that so strange? I read in the Irish Press how a Dubliner boasted of having a drink in all of Dublin's seven hundred forty-three pubs? Wouldn't he have been better off going to seven hundred forty-three different churches?"
"I suppose so," I conceded, though I knew which feat I was more likely to accomplish.
Quote
On why the British left seems willing to make common cause with hardline Islam:
On why the British left seems willing to make common cause with hardline Islam:
We must always remember the Western radical intellectual’s wish to identify with the world’s rising and most frightening power. Coleridge spoke of Napoleon’s British admirers possessing a ‘prostration of the soul’. But British Napoleonists differed from British Stalinists, and were similar to today’s Muslamists in one respect. They did not want the foreign power to rule Britain. Byron said that Napoleon was his hero ‘on the Continent; I don’t want him here’. Those feminist columnists and academics — proclaiming Islam’s great past — do not want to have to go veiled in their native Camden Town or Islington. Their game is to use Islam to demoralise Western bourgeois life.
--Frank Johnson in the London Spectator
Serving My Customers
You might recall my adventures in the company cafeteria. Well today I went down for food and when it was my turn I said to the cafeteria worker, "roast beef".
He looks up, recognizes me, smiles broadly and says, "hey you have to say the whole thing!".
But this time the menu just said roast beef. Not "Roast Beef Medallions garnished with parsley and stewed with fried okra". And I was tired and couldn't think of an embellishment. So I said, "well I thought that joke might be getting old."
"No, it makes my day!"
I melted. I have a mission.
You might recall my adventures in the company cafeteria. Well today I went down for food and when it was my turn I said to the cafeteria worker, "roast beef".
He looks up, recognizes me, smiles broadly and says, "hey you have to say the whole thing!".
But this time the menu just said roast beef. Not "Roast Beef Medallions garnished with parsley and stewed with fried okra". And I was tired and couldn't think of an embellishment. So I said, "well I thought that joke might be getting old."
"No, it makes my day!"
I melted. I have a mission.
Guide to Liturgies
I like Tom's colorful graphs but don't feel confident enough in my gif-making skills to create my own. So I thought I'd borrow his even though it doesn't really fit. But it is easy on the eyes. And if you can't borrow from a fellow St. Blogger then who can you?
Liturgies
Some 'splanation is in order. The pastor at the Byzantine Catholic church I attend often mentions that "we are a Resurrection People" (a subtle distancing from the Roman rite's emphasis on the cross even though this Byzantine church is in communion with Rome?). Anyway, that phrase tends to make me cringe since normally "Resurrection people" gets bandied about by liturgists who think James Taylor's "You've Got a Friend" is an excellent opening hymn. And although I've gone to only two Tridentine liturgies and thus am unqualified to pronounce judgment, my initial take is that it is very reverent if a bit gloomy (represented by the red hue). But the Ruthian Byzantine liturgy is extremely reverent while also maintaining the cheerfulness of a "Resurrection People" (represented by the green hue). The two liturgies represent the "two lungs of the Church" as Pope John Paul II wrote. "Such a wealth of praise, built up by the different forms of the Church's great tradition, could help us to hasten the day when the Church can begin once more to breathe fully with her 'two lungs', the East and the West" (John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater, 34).
Fine Print:
--I define reverent here as recognizing that God is Holy, i.e. Other, i.e. not us.
--Not all Novus Ordo liturgies fall into the "Less than reverent" half of course. (A drawback of using someone else's picture.)
I like Tom's colorful graphs but don't feel confident enough in my gif-making skills to create my own. So I thought I'd borrow his even though it doesn't really fit. But it is easy on the eyes. And if you can't borrow from a fellow St. Blogger then who can you?
 |
|
Fine Print:
--I define reverent here as recognizing that God is Holy, i.e. Other, i.e. not us.
--Not all Novus Ordo liturgies fall into the "Less than reverent" half of course. (A drawback of using someone else's picture.)
Spanning the Globe To Bring You The Constant Variety Of PostsQ is for Quote you like – “Never let anyone outside the family know what you're thinking.” Don Corleone in the original Godfather. Good advice. Which I violate daily. Right here. - Ellyn of Oblique House
You see, if it isn't some external crisis, I can conjure enough profound internal crises to plunge me into my semi-annual funk. I don't think I'll do that this year--it's tiresome and tedious and not conducive to my own mental health. - Steven Riddle of Flos Carmeli
Well, it's always awkward to have to correct the Pope, but isn't that why God made Dominicans? - you know who said this :)
As Thoreau said, we are fools to box up one of the most beautiful sights in the world—a living fire—and keep it in the cellar. Smash the television set, turn out the lights, build a fire in the fireplace, move the family into the living room, put a pot on to boil some tea and toddy and have an experiment in merriment, a sudden, unexpected hearth, the heart and first step in the restoration of a home... - John Senior, author of "The Restoration of Christian Culture"
And, mirabile dictu, about halfway through Mass I got a gentle nudge to the ribs. In a whisper, I heard: "Look, Daddy--I'm praying!" So she was. - Dale Price of "Dyspeptic Mutterings" on a first trip to a Tridentine Mass. (Funny, that's my problem with prayer. As soon as I'm aware that I'm praying, I'm no longer praying.)
I don't want to blog but I would feel like the wicked and slothful servant who hid his one talent in the earth. That talent—perhaps quite common—is a singularity that leads me to make and write things that would otherwise not exist—not because they are difficult but because they are not wanted, at least before they are made, and perhaps for a long time afterwards. But the Giver of the talent wants a return on it, and I try to give it back with interest. Actually, of course, it is not my talent, but “thy talent”—“his lord’s money.” If I have identified it right, I have obeyed my vocation; if not, then, still, “all is grace.” Unlike you I crave an audience and praise, but I have had enough of both to know that I shall only be satisfied by One. - Leo Wong on St Blog's Parish Hall on why he blogs
I have noticed that when it comes to discussions on liturgical music and church architecture on my blog and on others that there is a direct correlation between the theological views of the commenter and whether they like or dislike something pertaining to those subjects.... Why is that? If beauty is supposed to be so subjective and in the eye (or ear) of the beholder, then why does opposing or support develop along theological fault lines? - Jeff of The Curt Jester
Our conversation grew out of the sense that God did not so much need Christ to die as we needed Christ to die. I think of it in terms of what Jesus told the Jewish people regarding the law of divorce. It was not that divorce was a good thing, or even really an acceptable thing, but rather that it was a thing granted to them because of their hardness of heart. If there had been any other way to break the hardness of the human heart other than the death of God Himself, God would have used it. Indeed, through time He sent prophet after prophet after prophet to tell the people of Israel how much He loved them and how enduring His love was. They could not hear this--they killed the prophets or ignored them. The hardness of the human heart sets diamond to shame. - Steven Riddle
[Blogs] can give a sense of communion to Catholics who for whatever reason don't feel close to their fellow parishioners. (This has some obvious limits beyond which bad things start to happen.) - Tom of Disputations on why some St. Bloggers blog
Personally, I find it outstanding that Shelley (of all the Romantics, Shelley!) was so well attuned to the idea of grace that he could write a poem that shares themes with St. Therese's The Story of a Soul and Thomas a Kempis' The Imitation of Christ. Shelley is spot on about many things, too. He recognises, for instance, that we are completely dependent on (God's) grace in our spiritual lives, but also, paradoxically, the only way to stay faithful to this grace is to shoulder on when it is denied to us, and to trust that it will not let us down if we remain true to it. - Enbrethiliel of Sancta Sanctis
An Individual in Community
From Ignatius of Loyola: Pilgrim Saint by Jose Idigoras
From Ignatius of Loyola: Pilgrim Saint by Jose Idigoras
Martin Luther had just radically liberated everybody from the mediation of the Church. The Manresa pilgrim [St. Ignatius] did not wrestle with a similar temptation, nor did he ever contemplate taking such a step. Just the opposite: he participated in the sacraments, he immersed himself in traditional devotions, and he took his problems to his confessor, whose direction he blindly obeyed. At the same time, he clearly understood that apart from all of these matters, God and God alone taught him as a schoolmaster teaches a young boy. He had no fear of the Church, which, even though ever suspicious of possible illusions, would one day choose the following passage from the book of Deuteronomy (32:12) as the Entrance Antiphon for the Mass of St. Therese of Lisieux: "The Lord nurtured and taught her...The Lord alone was her leader." In this same sense, the Lord was the director and teacher of Ignatius. God did not teach him a new lesson. This pupil that He was illuminating, however, now seemed to see new meanings in old truths he had learned from the study of his catechism...He learned the infathomable depths of things about which we speak today in terms that have all but worn out by overuse.
All the Best Gifts are Re-Gifts
There's an icon of Mary Magdalene at the local Byzantine Catholic church and in it she is depicted as holding a vial of oil, representing the scene in Luke's gospel where tradition holds that the sinful woman annointing Christ with oil and wiping his feet with her hair was Mary Magdalene.
And it struck me for the first time that she was not so much showing us her gift to Christ, but was showing us Christ's gift to her - her repentance and love for Him was in some way a gift to her, because all of our gifts are actually re-gifts and apart from Christ we can do nothing.
There's an icon of Mary Magdalene at the local Byzantine Catholic church and in it she is depicted as holding a vial of oil, representing the scene in Luke's gospel where tradition holds that the sinful woman annointing Christ with oil and wiping his feet with her hair was Mary Magdalene.
And it struck me for the first time that she was not so much showing us her gift to Christ, but was showing us Christ's gift to her - her repentance and love for Him was in some way a gift to her, because all of our gifts are actually re-gifts and apart from Christ we can do nothing.
June 01, 2005
Knocking In The Dark
When we play the card game "31" at family gatherings we knock on the table if we think we're holding a better hand than at least one other family member. Everyone except the knocker is then given a card and the cards are shown, producing many (temporary) winners and one loser. When there's a lot of family gathered around the table, the odds are pretty slim that you'll be holding the weak hand. So some bold folks might "knock in the dark", which is to say they knock before they've even looked at what they've got, trusting that their unseen hand will suffice.
Today's first reading was astonishingly beautiful. And there was a strong sense that Sarah, the daughter of Raguel, was 'knocking in the dark'. She was praising God even in her darkness, even in her depression, even when she didn't seem to have any particular reason to praise Him:
When we play the card game "31" at family gatherings we knock on the table if we think we're holding a better hand than at least one other family member. Everyone except the knocker is then given a card and the cards are shown, producing many (temporary) winners and one loser. When there's a lot of family gathered around the table, the odds are pretty slim that you'll be holding the weak hand. So some bold folks might "knock in the dark", which is to say they knock before they've even looked at what they've got, trusting that their unseen hand will suffice.
Today's first reading was astonishingly beautiful. And there was a strong sense that Sarah, the daughter of Raguel, was 'knocking in the dark'. She was praising God even in her darkness, even in her depression, even when she didn't seem to have any particular reason to praise Him:
That day, she grieved, she sobbed, and went up to her father’s room intending to hang herself. But then she thought, ‘Suppose they blamed my father! They will say, “You had an only daughter whom you loved, and now she has hanged herself for grief”. I cannot cause my father a sorrow which would bring down his old age to the dwelling of the dead. I should do better not to hang myself, but to beg the Lord to let me die and not live to hear any more insults.’ And at this, by the window with outstretched arms she said this prayer:‘You are blessed, O God of mercy!
May your name be blessed for ever,
and may all things you have made
bless you everlastingly.’
News You Can't Use & Other News
The other silly blog I occasionally update has been updated. The secret service post reflects a real life incident involving my bro in law.... And while on the subject of blogs and bloggers, thanks go to Jeff Culbreath and Jeff Miller (Jeffs and Bills are 50% more likely to read this blog) for mentioning me as a favored read in a recent Ignatius Insight article. (And a note to Mr. Culbreath: thanks to your book meme I read the linked review of "The Restoration of Christian Culture" so memes can't be all bad. God writes straight with...)
The other silly blog I occasionally update has been updated. The secret service post reflects a real life incident involving my bro in law.... And while on the subject of blogs and bloggers, thanks go to Jeff Culbreath and Jeff Miller (Jeffs and Bills are 50% more likely to read this blog) for mentioning me as a favored read in a recent Ignatius Insight article. (And a note to Mr. Culbreath: thanks to your book meme I read the linked review of "The Restoration of Christian Culture" so memes can't be all bad. God writes straight with...)
What's Really Amazing...
...about the deep throat story is that any three people (or more) in D.C. could keep a secret that long. Very impressive.
...about the deep throat story is that any three people (or more) in D.C. could keep a secret that long. Very impressive.
Multitudinous Religions
One of the things I liked about baseball when I was a kid was that I thought it was a complete meritocracy. An oasis of utter fairness in an unfair world. Boy was I naive.
I recall arguing with my dad about it.
"If someone is hitting .282 in Triple A, he'll be brought up before someone hitting .280! A manager won't go against the statistics!"
After all, that would be irrational. I hope I was very young when I said that. At least I wasn't cynical. But I was certainly "insufficiently nuanced" when it came to understanding that a baseball player was more than his batting average.
But even if batting averages were all that mattered, Dad insisted there was some cronyism in the game, some of that "it's who you know" disease, and that came as a complete surprise. Of course the fact that if you were black you couldn't play in the big leagues until 1947 should've been a huge clue.
Then I recall being shocked yet again that even science - that bastion of supposed objectivity - has to rely on mistaken scientists to die, not to be proven wrong, in order for the scientific world to move forward. (Don't take my word for it - Max Planck said it.)
So this is prelude to saying that it should be no surprise that where there is so much disagreement on what we can see that there will be loads of disagreement on that which we cannot see. Which explains why there are so many religions. I was watching O'Reilly's show last night and he tried to be fair to Scientologists, which was painful to these ears.
Ultimately if there's unity to be found among Christians (for which we can have legitimate hope due to the power of Christ's name) it's obvious it will take supernatural help. But since grace builds on nature we can't eschew apologetics and history and all the things which persuade some. Today's saint, Justin Martyr, was certainly a hero in that regard.
One of the things I liked about baseball when I was a kid was that I thought it was a complete meritocracy. An oasis of utter fairness in an unfair world. Boy was I naive.
I recall arguing with my dad about it.
"If someone is hitting .282 in Triple A, he'll be brought up before someone hitting .280! A manager won't go against the statistics!"
After all, that would be irrational. I hope I was very young when I said that. At least I wasn't cynical. But I was certainly "insufficiently nuanced" when it came to understanding that a baseball player was more than his batting average.
But even if batting averages were all that mattered, Dad insisted there was some cronyism in the game, some of that "it's who you know" disease, and that came as a complete surprise. Of course the fact that if you were black you couldn't play in the big leagues until 1947 should've been a huge clue.
Then I recall being shocked yet again that even science - that bastion of supposed objectivity - has to rely on mistaken scientists to die, not to be proven wrong, in order for the scientific world to move forward. (Don't take my word for it - Max Planck said it.)
So this is prelude to saying that it should be no surprise that where there is so much disagreement on what we can see that there will be loads of disagreement on that which we cannot see. Which explains why there are so many religions. I was watching O'Reilly's show last night and he tried to be fair to Scientologists, which was painful to these ears.
Ultimately if there's unity to be found among Christians (for which we can have legitimate hope due to the power of Christ's name) it's obvious it will take supernatural help. But since grace builds on nature we can't eschew apologetics and history and all the things which persuade some. Today's saint, Justin Martyr, was certainly a hero in that regard.
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