People used to ask June (Carter) how she was doin' and she used to say, 'I'm just trying to matter'. I know what she means, you know, I'm just trying to matter and live a good life and make work that means something to somebody. - actress Reese Witherspoon

I come from ten generations of New England Puritans; my natural tendency is to consider anything pleasant to be wrong. Following this tendency, however, tends to make me unhappy, so if I do things that are pleasant I feel guilty for doing them, and if I don’t, I feel guilty that I am unhappy about not doing them. And this, some inner voice tells me, is exactly where God wants me to be. Since Lent is a time when one is supposed to come closest to God and to seek holiness, I sneak through Lent like a teenager who knows his parents are looking to catch him and punish him for something, and come to Easter with a relief borne of not having been caught this time at least. I also know that this is wrong. By thinking this way, I am misrepresenting God. I know the Scriptures pretty well, and I can demonstrate from both the Old and New Testaments that this is not what God is like or how He wants me to relate to Him. God, I know intellectually, loves me. I may not experience it, but the Word says it, the Church teaches it, the saints bear witness to it, so it must be true. There is something more God wants me to know by experience, and there is some evidence that He might even want me to experience it in this life. Certainly if I could experience it in this life, I might have more hope for the next.... Sometimes, however, something glimmers through the fog. Last Sunday, it was a line from Hosea: “So I will allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart.... She shall respond there as in the days of her youth, when she came up from the land of Egypt.” ... I am convinced, in spite of myself, that the Lord does want to teach me something, perhaps this Lent, if He can pierce the fog far enough. I would say that I am praying for it, although I don’t want to be trying to convince myself into some sort of religious experience. I have enough experience to know that you can’t make God speak to you; He will break in at His own time. - Henry posting at "A Plumbline in the Wind"

Pleasure certainly isn't a bad thing and... while we of course have a duty to help and serve the poor, most of us would lose our sense that life is good, our connection with the dignity of ourselves and others, perhaps our very sanity, if we did not take the goods of this life and enjoy them. The key, I think, remains in the sharing. Eating a good meal with friends and family, enjoying the food, drink, and conversation, is a good, it seems to me. Eating caviar to show how sophisticated you are is not. - Bruce Frohnen of "Crunchy Con" blog

My prayers are less for myself than for others. My life seems so inconsequential and so unworthy of my own prayers compared to the souls of others that seemed so determined to spend eternity in hell and need so much grace to avoid hell. - Patrick of "Extreme Catholic"

I was giving some of the bookcases in the den their quinquennial dusting the other day and up on one of the very top shelves amongst the pennydreadfuls where the overflows from the detective case are stuffed, uh, I mean "carefully shelved", and in the midst of a whole row of Sax Rohmer's finest, it came to me: the key to the whole Al Q'aeda terrorism difficulty: Osama bin Laden is modeling himself on Fu Manchu. Al Q'aeda is his own version of the Si Fan... If the security wonks want to get to the bottom of all this Al Q'aeda business they need to be reading more Sax Rohmer. Anyone know the National Security Agency's phone number? - John at the "Inn at the End of the World"

The observance of Lent is the very badge of Christian warfare. By it we prove ourselves not to be enemies of the cross of Christ. By it we avert the scourges of divine justice. By it we gain strength against the princes of darkness, for it shields us with heavenly help. Should mankind grow remiss in their observance of Lent, it would be a detriment to God's glory, a disgrace to the Catholic religion, and a danger to Christian souls. Neither can it be doubted that such negligence would become the source of misery to the world, of public calamity, of private woe. - letter written in 1741 by Pope Benedict XIV via Hallowed Ground

The first chapter [of Gueranger's "The Liturgical Year"]...is a sad chronicle of ever-increasing laxity. From its inception, the Lenten fast included abstinence from wine, cheese, and eggs. Only one meal was allowed, and it was taken no earlier than sunset. The first relaxation of discipline occured when the meal time was moved from sunset to the hour of None, or about three-o-clock in the afternoon, which became almost universal by the tenth century. By the thirteenth century even this was thought to be too severe, and the meal began to be allowed at the hour of Sext, or midday. Not long after this relaxation it was discovered that taking the meal so early in the day led to greater fatigue in the afternoon and evening hours, and so it was gradually permitted to drink a little bit of wine during the evening readings. However, given the rigorous schedule of prayer and services observed in the monasteries, the monks soon realized that taking only wine without any solid food could be unhealthy. As a result they were ultimately allowed to take a morsel of bread along with their wine... - Jeff of "Hallowed Ground"

For those of us who are religious conservatives, or to be more precise, whose conservatism comes primarily from our religious beliefs, we can’t be happy with an economic and social order built around the structural indifference to the spiritual and moral needs of the human person. Obviously a command economy cannot work, and there can be no such thing as perfect justice this side of heaven. Still, if Irving Kristol is right, those of us who believe in and benefit from capitalism need to put our minds to work figuring out how best to work within the system we have to make it better suited to authentic human needs – which include the need to replenish the moral capital upon which the economic order is built. - Rod Dreher of "Crunchy Con" blog

The architects of Europe's post-war welfare states were — at least many of them — devout Christians who believed, understandably, in a Christian socialism that would smooth out economic injustice, diminish the "creative destruction" of capitalism, and provide a safe space for families and faith to flourish in. Had I been born in 1930 or even 1950, I might have subscribed to this vision. But the lesson of Europe's recent past is that when you try to smooth out the difficulties of life, and aim for stability and statis rather than growth, you can end up destroying faith in the "permanent things" much more rapidly than even the "casino economy" of American capitalism. The risks and shocks of American life, paradoxically, are one of the reasons that we're still as socially conservative as we are — because they make us cling more tightly than Europeans to the bonds of family and the promises of God, and because they make us more likely than Europeans to live in the future (that is, locate some of our hopes and dreams in our children) than in a cosseted, materially-satisfying present. - Ross Douthat of "Crunchy Con" blog

Faith in the market is not synonymous with faith in materialism. [Libertarianism] often results in the important things being strengthened rather than weakened. In a chaotic world families become more important, not less. Some people realize this, and benefit from the realization. Others don't and suffer for it. And most of us come up with their own happy balance between the demands of modern society and the demands of permanent things.... But at some point what does all of this "capitalism sucks" talk matter if it doesn't translate itself into an agenda...Mankind will learn at the school of example and none other, says Edmund Burke. Well, where is the example of a crunchy system worth emulating?... Even Charles Murray's What It Means To Be A Libertarian, an outstanding book, by the way, works on the assumption that it is not capitalism but anti-capitalist schemes which erode families and communities. It is simply taken as a given in here that libertarianism is not only soulless but soul-killing. It is that unproven assertion which muddies the waters most. - J. Goldberg of "Crunchy Con" blog

If you are reading this, you know that I am not abstaining from my blog during Lent. I have always assumed that those who do abstain, do so in order to spend that time in more prayer or in some sacrificial endeavor. I commend them for it...It is funny, for some time I thought that by doing enough penances I could catch up, or make up for my sinfulness and the damage my sinfulness had done to others. Of course this spirals into more and more severe penances (I think a heresy eventually comes out of this, but I can't remember the name of it). One day, in discouragement, I realized I was sinning faster than I could possibly do penance. At that moment of grace, I was shown how much I needed God's mercy. So from then on, I didn't view penance so much as a competition, but something more joyful. Penance became a way to open my heart, or to clean it out of all those things I am attached to - so as to make room for Christ. - Jim Curley of "Bethune Catholic"

The Gold Standard in Scamming

Received a Nigerian scammer email. Previous to this one I'd probably received six or eight in a row with addresses other than Nigeria, mostly upstart Sierra Leona. I expressed my relief in my response to the scammer (I try to send responses since if everyone did it would slow their mission to steal).

Dear Mr. Cole,

I am greatly relieved to have received this email, as I have received a plethora of emails over the past year that purportedly did not originate in Nigeria. While the diversity that represents is good, I was taken aback because the true stars in the email Nigerian scammer business are definitionally Nigerians. Nigeria is to the scamming biz what the former Soviet Union was to hockey: you want them to do well if only because you want the challenge of playing the best, not cheap imitations.

Various & Sundry

Statements like the one below are precisely why Rod Dreher's Ewell Gibbons' brand of Crunchy Conservatism alienates me. He's a gifted writer and makes a lot of excellent points, but the mindset reminds me of a Pharisetical attitude eager to lay up burdens on people. It's not enough to practice NFP, you have to eat well:

"Because Julie and I are tradition-minded Catholics, we obey the Church's teaching and don't use contraception. Never have. If you use Natural Family Planning, the Church-approved method of regulating your fertility, you have to pay close attention to the woman's body. If you're doing it right, the wife should be eating healthier food (and if you're doing it right, the husband should be too, if only out of solidarity)."

I might add that if you're doing it right you won't expose your wife to air pollution, which means you'll move to Montana. And once there you won't go out of doors due to the possibility of bear attacks, which tend to interfere with a woman's cycle. And don't get me started on those damaging sun rays....Finally, if you're doing it right, you won't eat ice from fast food restaurants. (I know I won't be doing the latter any time soon!)

~

One of the paragraphs in Randall Sullivan's "The Miracle Detective" that resonates with me lo these many months since reading it concerned the visionaries and how some were asked to become nuns, which they declined, presumably politely. I had known that before I started reading it, which had put me off Medjugorje: I had thought, "if they were really visited by the Blessed Mother, they'd be holier and would be priests and sisters." Eventually it dawned on me that that also applies to me - given all the graces I've received I should be holier. So that was no longer an obstacle in determining the truth of the apparation. But what also interests me is how there was no seeming repercussion from their turning down the Blessed Mother. It seems like at Fatima there would've been more of an ultimatum: become a religious that you might save your soul. Here at Medjugorje there is no use of threat or force. Which, in a way, makes their decision - as well as our more mundane ways of saying "no" to God - all the sadder.

~

Our blogmother Amy Welborn is back from sweet Roma. I missed her. Sounds like a good time was had by all. One big surprise during my own visit to St. Peter's was how at Communion time the Italian nuns about pulled a "Who concert" by crashing in from the rows behind us; at least their enthusiasm in getting to the Lord is commendable.

Update: Got a email and it appears I left the impression that I think being a religious means you are more holy even though I actually think that the average mother of six is holier than most priests (to the extent you can even measure such a thing). My point was that the holiest individual is he/she who accepts God's calling, whether it be to the religious life or married life. If a visionary or two was called to be a religious and married, that makes the married state less holy for them, by definition. Vice-versa also applies.

Proud C-Team Member

March 7, Feast of Sts Perpetua and Felicity

Vibia Perpetua, was executed in the arena in Carthage on 7 March 203. More from the Medieval Source Book:

As for Felicity, she too received this grace of the Lord. For because she was now gone eight months (being indeed with child when she was taken) she was very sorrowful as the day of the games drew near, fearing lest for this cause she should be kept back (for it is not lawful for women that are with child to be brought forth for torment) and lest she should shed her holy and innocent blood after the rest, among strangers and malefactors. Also her fellow martyrs were much afflicted lest they should leave behind them so good a friend and as it were their fellow-traveller on the road of the same hope. Wherefore with joint and united groaning they poured out their prayer to the Lord, three days before the games. Incontinently after their prayer her pains came upon her. And when by reason of the natural difficulty of the eighth month she was oppressed with her travail and made complaint, there said to her one of the servants of the keepers of the door: You that thus make complaint now, what wilt you do when you are thrown to the beasts, which you didst contemn when you would not sacrifice? And she answered, I myself now suffer that which I suffer, but there another shall be in me who shall suffer for me, because I am to suffer for him. So she was delivered of a daughter, whom a sister reared up to be her own daughter....

Felicity, rejoicing that she had borne a child in safety, that she might fight with the beasts, came now from blood to blood, from the midwife to the gladiator, to wash after her travail in a second baptism. And when they had been brought to the gate and were being compelled to put on, the men the dress of the priests of Saturn, the women the dress of the priestesses of Ceres, the noble Perpetua remained of like firmness to the end, and would not...Perpetua began to sing, as already treading on the Egyptian's head. Revocatus and Saturninus and Saturus threatened the people as they gazed. Then when they came into Hilarian's sight, they began to say to Hilarian, stretching forth their hands and nodding their heads: "You judge us, they said, and God you."

More Economics

Lots of ponderables in The Church Confronts Modernity. Woods quotes John Ryan, an early apologist for Catholic social teaching, who opines that men are "more susceptible to religious influence and can know and serve God better when they are contented and comfortable than when they are impoverished and miserable." This seems in line with my (very limited) personal experience, but I have to wonder how closely connected comfort is to service to God.

Meanwhile Woods describes the early debate over minimum wage laws:

One of the most respected treatments of the subject was John Ryan's A Living Wage, the thesis of which will be described below, but which in general argued for a moral obligation incumbent upon employers to provide their workers with a wage that allowed both them and their families to live in reasonable comfort. But a reviewer for the Catholic University Bulletin in 1907 objected that Ryan, in his understandable zeal to vindicate the laborer's right to a living wage, overlooked the fact that, both realistically speaking and as a matter of justice, the economic value of the work done must play a key role in an employer's determination of wage rates.

Perhaps so, but it seems completely unjust that someone can't earn a living wage due to a lack of native intelligence, something that can't be controlled. In Herrnstein's "The Bell Curve" the link between household income and IQ is so firmly established that it seems there'll come a time when you'll be able to predict someone's future income not long after birth.

The unfairness becomes increasingly obvious in today's brain-based society versus the old brawn-based. The chances of a brain in a brawn-based society seems better than a brawny man in a brain-based one (though the Irish in their ninth century Golden Age didn't stand much of a chance against the marauding, brawny Vikings).

An Acceptable Time

One of the good things about Lent is it is not of our initiative. We are reactive, not proactive, though our reaction is important. As The Word Among Us puts it:

It is time to learn how to love Jesus more deeply and to pray that more people will come to believe in him. But this is also a time when God promises to pour out his Spirit upon us. It is a time when grace flows from his throne, drawing us close to his heart and delivering us from the sin that can so easily cling to us.

This combination of our dedication and God’s grace and power can make this Lent a time of real transformation for us.

And from a 1955 prayer book, see the inspirational phraseology involving the dignity of the soul:

In a Lenten sermon, Pope St. Leo said: "I preach to you the holiest and greatest of fasts. Although there is no season which is not full of divine gifts, yet at this time the minds of all should be urged toward spiritual progress, that being cleansed in heart and body, we may celebrate that mystery which excels all others: the Passion of the Lord.

Since the frailty of the body leads to relaxation of discipline, the hearts of men become defiled by the dust of worldly things. Hence this most wholesome, divinely appointed institution provides that, in order to restore the purity of our minds, we should be corrected by discipline these forty days. Therefore, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, that the soul, which should govern the body, may uphold the dignity of its rule."

Books I'm Reading and/or Admiring

There's something odd about the bloodlust 18th century Nantucket Quakers had when it came to their profession. In In the Heart of the Sea, Nathaniel Philbrick says they went about the killing of whales with such fervor that a shipowner from the era claimed it must be due to supressed anger (since the Quakers were forbidden to express it by outward actions), though that seems unduly psychological.

I happened across my old copy of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans and its patina of personal nostalgia, it being the last of my early books. Somehow it managed to survive ten or more moves between apartments and then houses - each subsequent one made more onerous by additional books. Cooper's classic looks worse for the wear; the cover is missing a large section of upper left corner and the spine is as wrinkled as a Ukrainian octogenerian. The back cover has something of a puncture wound. But I love that I have my original book just as I mourn the loss, presumably in one of those ten moves, of Albert Payson Terhune's Lad: A Dog. I've given up looking but should I find and buy the same edition on the internet it wouldn't be the same.

I wonder how old the Mohicans book is. It's a Dolphin Book, published under Doubleday, but has no published date - simply "Printed in the United States of America". In a way, the unknowing only adds to the mystery.

Looking at the list of other Dolphin titles at the back of the book induced involuntary salivation: Sea Fights and Shipwrecks by Hanson Baldwin and Samuel Johnson's two-volume Lives of the Poets.

Seasonology

Ohio is chilly about five months out of the year: November through March. This means the midway point of winter is mid-January, which means that March 4th is the equivalent of about November 26 temperature wise. But not light wise. The days are much longer now despite the similar temps.

I wondered if there is an encoded message. God, like the light, comes well before the temperature responds. He could instantly heal all those blind, deaf and dumb just as he could instantly heal all those who are spiritually blind, deaf and dumb (as he did in the unusual case of St. Paul). But He seems more favorably inclined towards the gradualism typlified by seasonal change than dramatic quick fixes.

Were the World Wars of the Twentieth Century Inevitable?

From A History of Union County Ohio, written in 1915:

Unquestionably, the greatest number of emigrants reaching the shores of the New World have come from Germany and statistics will show that, next to English blood, there is more German blood in the United States than that of any other nation. This being a fact, it is easy to account for the prosperity and morality of this country and, not only that, but it will afford an explanation for the love of learning shown by the people of this nation.

Pride goeth before the fall. No German would write something like that post-1945, especially the part about morality.

The Holy Ghost of Ice

Just read another short story from the great Flannery O'Connor called "An Enduring Chill". It moves up near the top of my favorites of her stories. (I'm more of a "Habit of Being" man myself - the superb collection of her letters - but there are times I yearn for her fiction, if in small quantities - which I've tended to assume is because I'm not as holy as she was, Walker Percy being more my speed.)

This story was just pitch-perfect and the ending as satisfying as it was reassuring. She kept me off base constantly. A small example: when the dying atheist main character, Asbury, seeks intellectual stimulation on his death bed his mother wants a Methodist preacher who collects coins to visit. Asbury guffaws, and I instantly think it's because Asbury's naive mother was equating coin collecting with intellectual thought but Asbury laughs because he thinks his mother is trying to inflict someone spiritual on him. Read the story for an explanation of the title of this post.

Separating the Sheep from the Goats

I'm sorely disappointed that the Dubai Port issue is apparently more complex than I'd originally thought. I say more complex because I see Cal Thomas says so and and I respect him. Michelle Malkin, more predictably, is also against the UAE taking control.

To me it's a slam-dunk, for reasons multitudinous but mostly related to the fact that the UAE wouldn't have operational control and angering an Arab ally in an age of Arab terrorism is transparently ignorant.

But the main reason I care is because it seemed about as good as an issue gets in flushing out the odious scent of politicians being nakedly political from those who, at least on this issue, want to do the right thing by showing a wholesome and admirable lack of ambition. Finally, I thought, a test for rascals as easy as the testing the Ph of a water sample. ("You'll know them by their limp," an Irish joke that perhaps only Ham o' Bone will get.)

The ports embroglio is one of those rare public issues that is lopsided both in terms of merit and in popularity - i.e. public opinion is almost uniformly against the UAE even though the merits are (or were to me, pre-Thomas & Malkin) glaringly obvious in favor of the UAE. In other words, the spectacular feature of this is that it is of zero cost to the politician while being of some cost to the country. This seemed a perfect storm, the issue to scent out those who care more for themselves than the country. I'm so disappointed that my PRD (Perfect Rascal Detector) has failed.

Another Hills and the Sea Excerpt:

I looked to windward and saw the sea tumbling, and a great number of white waves. My heart was still so high that I gave them the names of the waves in the eighteenth Iliad: The long-haired wave, the graceful wave, the wave that breaks on an island a long way off, the sandy wave, the wave before us, the wave that brings good tidings. But they were in no mood for poetry. They began to be great, angry, roaring waves, like the chiefs of charging clans, and though I tried to keep up my courage with an excellent song by Mr. Newbolt, "Slung between the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay," I soon found it useless, and pinned my soul to the tiller. Every sea following caught my helm and battered it. I hung on like a stout gentleman, and prayed to the seven gods of the land.

-Hilaire Belloc

Journal Excerptables

I slip into the early morning tub and feed off the prose of Randy Wayne Wright's "Captiva" and imagine the flora and fauna of Florida. The simplest of elements - heat and water - instantly makes the day warm no matter the temperature, as cavemen would gather about a roaring fire in the middle of ostensible chill.
_

What a grand pope we have! He is as charismatic as his predecessor though in a different way, i.e. the Pope for shy people, maybe even for the Norwegian Lutheran bachelors Keillor writes of. I watch, transfixed, as he gives ashes to bishop after bishop, or rather Cardinal after Cardinal, and if the camera and my watching feels an intrusion on this private man in a very public office it feels edifying to watch the way they interact, the cardinals never making eye contact, at least from the camera angle, heads bowed as is proper to the season.
_

Oh but pleasure is tripled after being withheld, which, I suppose, even the Epicureans knew. So intense the pleasure I must remind myself the purpose of the foregoing.
_

My uncle was simply ahead of me. Not surprising given that he is older than me and thus farther along the path of life? Vacation, ten years ago, and he was on a news fast. It was odd to me, news junkie that I was, to think that something as tasty as that could be jettisoned as if it wasn't restorative in and of itself. And yet now the news feels often poisonous, rife with hatred and bias; the negativity overwhelms and I can now see the attraction of not hearing any of it on a vacation.

Goldberg Crunches the Crunchies

I'm hyp-mo-tized (as Letterman would say) by the Crunchy Con debate. I can't imagine the book is nearly as good as the blog since the latter has the benefit of objections, persuasively argued.

Jonah Goldberg is especially sensitive concerning the Crunchy Conifers, and I don't say as I blame him. As a fan of Budweiser, he knows he's skating on thin ice, about to be ex-nayed from the "cool group" of conservatives who drink dark beers and eat organic onions, not necessarily together.

There's always been a tension between libertarians and social conservatives; the latter tend to be far more willing to want to re-make the world in their image, even where that image is righteous (Communism got started that way; it looked damn good on paper). Part of my early and no doubt on-going attraction to conservatism is I like not being told what I can or cannot do, an attitude more in line with "Don't Tread On Me" than one of service to my neighbor. But I say let Christ and the Church tell me what to do and not Rod Dreher, good man though I'm sure he is.

What I like about conservatism, and which Rod arguably doesn't, it's opposed to the trite "I'm this way because fill-in-the-blank made me this way" where "fill in the blank" is society, our parents, modernity, the bishops, sugar in the diet, flouride in the water, etc... Conservatism at least gives one the illusion of freedom and independence, though from a religious perspective it's untenable given our mutual dependence, a dependence so radical that some say another's salvation may partially depend on our efforts inspired by grace.