Jesus does not expect us to be strong but weak. In our weakness His power reaches perfection (2 Cor 12:9). He does not expect us to be independent and self-sufficient, but rather childlike (Mt 18:3). We don’t need will-power, just willingness. He’ll provide the power and “authority to expel unclean spirits and to cure sickness and disease of every kind” (Mt 10:1). All He expects is that we give as a gift what has been given us (Mt 10:8) by laboring in His harvest (Mt 9:38). Jesus simply expects us to try and keep trying, to believe and receive, to pray and obey. - mycatholic.com meditation via Eric Scheske

My son and I see the Cross of Jesus differently. We both see a hero, someone who loved us so much to die for us. Although my son does not have a true concept of death yet, he does understand in his own way the importance of the Sacrifice. My son sees the Cross with the eyes of a child as something beautiful, something colorful and glorious, something joyful, honorable, and holy. I see the Cross as glorious and holy too, but through the eyes of sorrow, suffering, and sacrifice. The paradox is that both of these views are right. I think know the deeper insight belongs to my son. - Cowpi Journal

[C.S.] Lewis states in his book The Four Loves: "We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him, throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it." That view is drastically changed when he writes Grief. In A Grief Observed we have a very different approach. Lewis presents a very visceral response to the loss of his wife. An example of this is that Lewis states at the beginning of the book: "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing." This book shows us more of Lewis's own heart and life than almost anything else he wrote. It is a great book for those dealing with loss - either for yourself or for someone you know and love. It is often used in grief counseling, and one of the courses I read it for was on the spirituality of death and dying. This book is a gem in the cannon of Lewis literature. It will not disappoint. - SRMcEvoy of "Book Reviews & More"

I am amazed at all the crap Padre Pio had to put up with. Not just cluelessness from superiors which often thinly disguised malice, but physical and spiritual ailments. But through it all, that is how he functioned. Because He believed that God would deliver him, any problem and strife was tolerable. It simply had to be offered up. - Fr. S.T. of "Catholic RageMonkey"

I once joked to a priest friend, "You say you took Holy Orders as a celibate. As a married man I have to take holy orders everyday. My wife orders me to do this and orders me to do that...' - Dwight Longenecker who was ordanied as a deacon

Maybe in the future, when it looks like all the stunts are over and they can’t go any further, maybe one of them will pull off a real stunner and enter a convent...That’d be news. - Eric of "The Daily Eudemon" on celebrity bimbos

According to Adam Nagourney, if I understand the gist of his story, the 2008 election will be a referendum on whether America is sexist or racist. It cannot be a referendum on both pathologies, since Senator Clinton is white and Senator Obama is male, and that probably can’t be rearranged. But the editors no doubt feel it was a sound decision to take the front page of the “Week in Review” to alert their highly educated readership to the previously undiscerned pattern of electing white males as president. It is, I would go so far as to suggest, even more than a pattern. There it is, in boldface, under every one of the forty-three pictures: White Male. The format is that of a rogue’s gallery, and under each mug shot the designated offense—Robbery, Rape, Embezzlement, Drug Smuggling, Extortion, etc. Except, in this case, it is the same offense forty-three times over: White Male. - Richard Neuhaus of "First Things" on NY Times article

I don't know if you've encountered it, but there's a curious idea running around that victoriously struggling with a temptation is more virtuous than never having had the temptation in the first place. It's as if being difficult is better than being good. The emphasis on struggle seems vaguely Darwinian to me. - Kevin Jones on "Flos Carmeli"

This is an absolute respository of all things Catholic. Wow. Its absolutely wonderful and every person in the Church should own one. Regardless of whether you live within 500 miles of a Tridentine parish, get this missal. It even includes a mini-catechism. Literally, if for some reason the world blew up and an alien race came to earth 10,000 years from now only to find ruins of a long lost civilization, they could accurately recreate the entire Catholic faith if they found just one copy of the missal. In a way it kind of makes me sad...because I look at this and think "This is what the Church gave up after Vatican II?" Its really quite beautiful and includes so much more than modern missals. I'm not knocking the new mass, but I am going to wait to buy one of those missals until the new translations (and perhaps B16 changes?) are published. - Matt of 'absolutely no spin' on the arrival of his 1962 Roman Missale

Not only was Mary predestined to be the Mother of the Savior, whose consent to the incarnation would inaugurate the drama of our redemption, she would do so entirely by the power of the grace of God. Only this realization, enshrined in the infallibly defined dogma of the Immaculate Conception, can preserve the essential feature of our theodramatic redemption: that God has in his infinite freedom decided to save us in a way that respects our finite freedom but which also demands his infinite power of grace to fulfill. - Edward T. Oakes, SJ via Kevin Jones

Thoughts Sparked by AH

The Christian, who is doing it right, ought be more composed and at peace than the non-Christian, and sometimes I wonder if that in itself is not part of secular society's disdain for Christians. (Ned Flanders?) My sister and I fought a lot when were children, and what bothered me most was that she seemed to rebound so quickly. Whether she was acting or not, her post-fight composure made me mad.

In Artificial Happiness, Dworkin mentions the case of a couple who continually fought and then made up again and then things changed after she went on Paxil. Her composure made him angrier:

"Fortified with Paxil, she no longer felt the sting of her husband's behavior. On the contrary, whenever conflict looked she just sat in her chair unmoved. Her husband couldn't help but notice this seemingly odd composure, which made him even angrier. The cycle of attack, guilt, and reunion ended..."

Is there a taste of that jealousy today on Annunciations, where someone said:

I get annoyed by people "speaking in tongues," who claim to be "slain by the Holy Spirit," and those who insist on having the so-called "Baptism by the Holy Spirit." Am I, in anyway, offending God for feeling this way toward the charismatics?

More Links...

Above the fold, front page Dispatch article on Our Lady of Guadalupe Procession (in Monday's edition)...



Pretty cool and a pleasant surprise! I assume multiculturalism gives them "street cred" - the Dispatch can put a religion story on the front page since it's a facet of the growing Latino community in town. Story here.

A friend sent this link, concerning the belated signing of an ol' baseball card.

The blogger at Compostela linked to me a couple times lately and is a reminder of my own Yankee provincialism - I call Tuesday's feature "Spanning the Globe" but "Spanning a Handful of English Written Blogs" sounds unromantical. Meanwhile Deutsche blogger Scipio is giving up the drink for Advent.

"Benny and the Jets" - funny Jeff Miller line upon seeing picture of pope singing with a few cardinals

Chilling interview with an executioner. Just another day at the office...

Victorian Art

I was looking for a biography of French painter Bouguereau and came across this "true confession" from art expert Edward Winkleman:

No one who loves Bouguereau, in my opinion, should apologize for it. Again, taste is subjective. I'd have one if it were available (of course I'd install it as part of some ironic juxtaposition just to maintain my street cred, but I'd admire it secretly when no one was looking...William-Adolphe Bouguereau could paint).

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Victorians were said to be prudes and yet "Victorian nude" is hardly an oxymoron. Why the disconnect? According to this Forbes column, there was a lot of hypocrisy, of artists wanting to paint nudes and did so under the guise of high and noble purpose: "A statue of a naked woman with a shovel becomes a symbol of agriculture, a painting of a naked youths an illustration from classical mythology." Perhaps it was naivety, but I have tended to think of Bouguereau as a spiritual giant, thinking no one could lust while painting such innocence.

Stop Me Before I Warhol Again

Amy Welborn linked to this, and I got carried away:


My great-grandfather; may he forgive me.



You've heard of "Girl, Interrupted"? Call this "Girl, Drinking". (Dedicated to Bill Luse.)



Amy Welborn, after a DVC lecture in Columbus



Da Bard



Andy, Barney & Otis Campbel

From Ronald Dworkin's Artificial Happiness

In the 1950s religion stopped being the determinant factor in the American character. Religion just followed the popular culture. Whatever the popular culture preached, so, too, did the churches and synagogues. Clergymen conformed as eagerly as everyone else. Writing in 1958, C. Wright Mills, sociologist and author of "White Collar" and "The Power Elite", noted, "If there is a safe prediction about religion in this society, it would seem that if tomorrow official spokesmen were to proclaim XYZ-ism, next week 90% of religious declaration would be XYX-ist...As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate: it reacts."

Because religion stayed popular, the change was subtle. Like the America that preceded it, 1950s America was still Christian America...What changed was why people worshipped. Rather than to fulfill some holy duty, many Americans went to church to relieve themselves of anxiety, whatever the anxiety's cause - a crumbling marriage, loneliness, a lost job, or the looming Communist threat. Popular clergymen told people how to find happiness, or at least reassured them that things would go well. Norman Vincent Peale declared, "Our happiness depends on the habit we cultivate. So practice happy thinking every day. Cultivate the merry heart, develop the happiness habit, and life will become a continual feast."...For organized religion this was a fatal error - an error from which it never fully recovered. During this period the medical profession also entered the unhappiness field, through psychotherapy, causing organized religion and the medical profession to converge on a common mission: happiness...Once [they] embarked on a common mission, it was only a matter of time before people started asking which discipline did the better job and researchers crunched the numbers to prove it. Suddenly, religion's value depended on outcomes. Although religion soared high in the 1950s, it could also sink low. The medical profession only had to work a little harder at making people happy.

Jeanne, the Chinese Gal

My wife was relaying some amusing anecdotes the other day regarding her international work group, including a new hire from Bejing.

Jeanne doesn't know colloquialisms or even many non-colloquialisms. For example, two of the guys were reading aloud portions of the company's handbook on sexual harrassment and she says "what are butt ox?". She asked if you could touch someone's buttocks if you were wearing those long clown gloves they apparently have in China. The guys said that she could touch their buttocks with or without gloves. One of the guys continued reading from the manual: "you can accidently brush up against someone in the hallway twice but not three times consecutively," so he made plans to make a mental note to only brush up against the same girl twice in a row...

Jeanne said when she first come to America she worked in New York and in her first task had to work closely with a New Yorker (a fate worse than death?). He had a mustache and was "mean", so she said that when she flew to Columbus and met Andre she assumed he was mean because he had a mustache. But then he shaved it off, she said, so that must explain why he was nice!

Recent Reads

Ah yes…a good long dollop of reading yesterday. Many fat pages of “The Thought of Pope Benedict”, a dose of Mark Steyn’s “America Alone”, a smidgeon of fiction and more of the very readable “The Thrill of the Chaste” by Dawn Eden. Some of Dworkin’s “Artificial Happiness”. A few pages the night previous of “Ambitous Brew: the Story of American Beer”. Then, too, a half-hour reading Scott Hahn on Pope Benedict’s theology in his latest “Letter & Spirit”.

The problem with modern fiction is that it's just so cheerful. In "Talk, Talk" by TC Boyle, we have a sweet deaf girl who is falsely imprisoned and it's not a pleasant prison (if that's not an oxymoron). In "Terrorist" Updike displays a future suicide bomber's hatred of...well just about everything. In "Grapes of Wrath" Grampa just died of a stroke. Give me Walker Percy and his underlying humor any day of the week.

Weekend Fiction

From the journal of DR:
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Oh the Middle East--
Fertile crescent of humanity!
Your sands pile curvaceously
To the clip-clop of donkey rhythms,
From you comes the rich arterial reds of Persian carpets--
Is that the Angelus you recite so piously five times a day?
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October 21st of 1995 found David Richardson mentally inventorying his fantasy vacation to Damascus. Nothing quite transfixed him like a foreign environment coupled with the sweet scent of danger. There America was called "The Great Satan", and he considered this quaint in the same way bovine have the run of the place in India.

Part of the attraction was going where Westerners were forbidden. Iran was his first choice but the State Department warned against it so Syria seemed a safer simulacron. “Iran on training wheels,” he called it. He’d heard non-Muslims weren’t allowed to go in mosques and that made the holy places instantly appealing in the way that being photographed just beyond a sign that said No Trespassing Beyond This Point was. There would also be antique Persian rugs and large bazaares where you could engage in authentic Middle East haggling, not the ersatz American garage sale equivalent: “Would you take a quarter for the Bronco's clock?” There it was in their blood. He thought of them as nomads, lean & swarthy Monty Hall’s who carried their wares on camels’ backs and knew how to make a deal.

He found the lack of interest in friends and family members surprising.

“Syria?” they’d say, “Why do you want to go to the crazy Middle East?”

“Am I the only one who finds the scent of danger intoxicating?” he replied.

He leaped at danger as only the comfortably secure do, incarnating those of whom one of Henry VIII’s martyrs spoke: “Some brave champions have taken the initiative by publicly professing their Christianity, though no one was trying to discover it, and by freely exposing themselves to death, though no one was demanding it.”

Deep down he knew there was little danger. Westerners traveled there all the time without incident. He wondered what was driving his interest because he thought of Islamicists as little different than himself, really, though with odd notions: “Those poor benighted people!", he thought, "believing the U.S. the Great Satan! They’d be afraid of a lamb!” He wanted to go there and laugh at them until they realized their error and then they'd all laugh together. He felt little fear because he was an American citizen, backed by a government steeled by the Reagan Era. The U.S. passport gleamed in his hand and it amazed him to think of all those who longed for this small square of blue and gold leaf. The only time he appreciated America was when he left it, when he saw other people coveting what he had. The trip remained in an embryonic stage for more than half a decade.

He was taking a smoke break, the first of the day, when he heard the news. Two planes hit the World Trade Center. Islamic terrorists. Potentially thousands killed. His jaw dropped and he burnt his thumb retrieving the cigarette. After the shock had begun to wore off he remembered a trip to Florida in his youth. An alligator farm. “Aren’t those adorable? Can we pet one?” he recalled his sister saying.

“The gators have grown up,” he now muttered bitterly to himself, “and have become crocodiles.”

The Office...

Interesting New Yorker piece on the differences between the BBC's version of television show "The Office" and America's:

Referring to such differences, Kevin Reilly, the president of NBC Entertainment, has remarked that “Americans need a little bit more hope than the British.”...What distinguishes Dunder-Mifflin from Wernham Hogg is not hope but consolation. In the British “Office,” we never learned most people’s names; the American version lovingly anatomizes everyone and takes advantage of the long-take documentary format to reveal the full complexity of everyone’s feelings (we glean, for instance, that Toby has an unspoken crush on Pam, and therefore resents Jim). Lost is the condemnatory power of the anonymous British chorus; gained are both a standard American melting pot and a commedia-dell’arte stock company, featuring Kelly the Yakker, Meredith the Lush, Kevin the Letch, and Creed the Cantankerous Freak, who is just a possession or two away from being a hobo.
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How this matter plays out will define the show’s view of office life. Is this “Office” a romance, a place to find your soul’s counterpoint? Or is it a comedy of consolation, a place where dreams of love and Costa Rica gradually slip away? Michael, at least, would argue for the romance. Last season, he urged Jim to “never, ever, ever give up” his pursuit of Pam. It helped, somehow, that Michael uttered this Churchillian sentiment while wearing plastic handcuffs and shivering in the makeshift brig of a booze-cruise boat on Scranton’s Lake Wallenpaupack. The frigid weather and the correctional setting were straight out of the British original; the unlooked-for kindness was a local contribution. The BBC and NBC are two offices separated by a common language.

Disney & Dickens

Link:

In later years, according to Gabler, “[Disney] talked of how the [paper] route and its demands—the unyielding routine, the snow, the fatigue, the lost papers—traumatized and haunted him.” One thinks instantly of Dickens, and of his toils in the blacking factory. In each case, what scarred them was not pain—a job is a job, after all, and there were children everywhere subsisting in more brutal conditions—but sameness, without the prospect of relief. A thin-skinned, fanciful child will remember as torment what tougher spirits would regard as routine. Both Dickens and Disney came to believe, with a kind of humiliated pride, that their sufferings placed them in good stead with the travails of ordinary folk, who would henceforth be diverted by entertainments that would never lack for incident—that would, whatever their other qualities, swarm with animation. As G. K. Chesterton wrote, irrefutably, “Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted.”

Around the World in Eighty Sites

The "Lego Church"!

I learned today, via a link from Rich Leonardi's site, that I share the exact same birthday as wrestler John Tenta:



He has more chest hair but I have more up top.

This site is extremely impressive for its combination of voluminousness and lack of sense. It's replicated in two languages, which is two too many.

Week in Review

The film "Stranger than Fiction" is about death and I realized anew after seeing it how unbelievably hard to accept death even for Christians. Let alone to volunteer for it as this fictional character did, or as Jesus did.

Part of the thing that I think I sometimes missed when I was younger was how Jesus avoided escaping despite having the means to escape. He could’ve avoided the Cross. Or the Incarnation itself. (I used to imagine a conference between the Trinity: “Someone’s gotta go down there…Who’s it gonna be?” says the Father, and the Son volunteers.) I've always been overly fond of a means of escape. I imagined that if I did something wrong, I’d jump bail and flee to another country. (I was surprised in my youth by the seeming nobility of criminals: they so infrequently jumped the bail their loved ones had put up.) I couldn’t understand the concept of suicide because I thought when I was young, “why don’t they just run away?”. I’d tied the impulse of suicide not to self, but to others. I couldn’t imagine a circumstance where one’s own self, and not other people, was the source of problems.

The gospels speak a lot of inescapability. Jesus prays to the Father that this cup might pass, but it doesn’t. He couldn’t escape it. The means of death was telling -- is there an instrument more binding than a crucifixion, in which you are literally nailed to wood while slowly dying? Even in His birth, “swaddling” clothes are often depicted in Eastern iconography as being tightly bound. We say that within our tabernacles Jesus willingly imprisons Himself.
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Thursday night was a godsend. I decided to go to the Immaculate Conception Mass on the eve before, rather than the day of, Dec. 8. The music was spectacular: “Immaculate Mary”, a beautiful solo of “Ave Maria” at the offertory, and “Hail Holy Queen”. For years I’d been going to noon Mass on Dec. 8th at St. Pat’s and it’s always musically uninspired, being as it is a workday noon Mass and thus sans choirs or singers. But I always have a preference for the actual feast day though the night of the actual day we always celebrate my wife's birthday. But not this time, and I got there early and prayed the indulgenced Poor Clare’s Adoration prayer, said every hour of every day by the cloistered nuns in Portsmouth, Ohio.
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Grandma almost died this week. At 95 I really thought this was her time since even the experienced hostice workers were saying that her organs were failing. I had romantic notions that she’d die on Dec. 9th – the same day as both her husband and Fulton J. Sheen, the latter whom I’d been praying to so much lately for her situation. Grandma prays for only two modest things: to die before her beloved 94-year old cousin Fr. Jim (so that he can attend her funeral) and to die before she runs out of money and has to go to a Medicaid-supported facility. It seemed her prayers were being answered this week but Mom called tonite and said she made a remarkable recovery.
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Work was a joy this week, where joy is defined by its lack. I didn’t have much to do – first time in quite some time – and I was surprised how quickly the days passed despite that lack. When I had brain-numbing work to do I listened to Willie Cunningham on WLW via Internet streaming or Ave Maria radio. Bought a couple things I’d wanted for a long, long time: the first volume of the Liturgy of the Hours, and, even more so, the famous 1962 Roman Missale. Giddy, me, at the prospect of holding that old war horse and praying those antique prayers and seeing the Victorian-era illustrations that rend your heart. The leather-bound missale, published by the euphoniously-named Baronius press, has that same glowing association in memory that “Strange but True Baseball Stories” held in 1973 and “The Complete Works of Shakespeare” held in 1985. A good trend I suppose, a "trading up", though service to neighbor seems a far more accurate leading indicator of one’s spiritual temperature.
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Jesus said not to let the anxieties of this world distract us from Him and yet I seem to violate this every ten minutes or so. For example, I read of a Christian blogger saying that he “no longer thinks of swimming the Tiber” and began to conjure up responses of varying usefulness (mostly approaching zero) even though no response was called or asked for. Thomas really opened my eyes to the fact that being theologically and historically well-read is no guarantee of becoming Catholic, notwithstanding Newman’s line that to become deeply immersed in history is to to cease being Protestant. He seems to have that combination of keen intelligence and ecclesiastical rootlessness – a combination I imagined was an engraved invitation from the Mother Kirche. And yet there he is in his rootlessness and I’m struck yet again by how elusive unity is and how so much depends on God, not intelligence or anything else.
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AO wanted to talk about the train wreck that C. is participating in and it felt close to gossip. I sense that if we made it a rule to pray for someone as much as we talked about them we’d pray a lot more and talk a lot less. Economically AO believes as you sow as you should reap but as Christians we hope that we reap what we did not sow since salvation is impossible without God. So our economic system is to some extent the opposite of our spiritual system; we rely completely on God’s welfare while eschewing the idea of persistent governmental welfare, though St. Paul said that if you don’t work you don’t eat so it’s not counter-Scriptural. But part of what bothers me about my wife's niece's situation is its very predictability. She got pregnant in October, met another guy in November and quit her job, moved into his mother's garage. Married him last week. He's 18, she's 21. It seems you might be successful in America at least in earthly terms if you’re smart or you’re ambitious, but if you’re neither than you seem doomed to a life of stress and poverty. And what if you had non-churchgoing high-school educated parents who acrimoniously divorce – what chance do the children have? Slim? And yet the first reaction is that it seems a lack of human dignity that we should be so predictable. Predictability suggests a lack of free will and part of our dignity is our free will, much as we might disparage it. Isn't the phrase "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" a denial of our free will? Of course it is a truth of the faith that we are fallen, that our free will is far more limited than our first parent's and is then additionally limited by our immediate parents.
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Update: Steven emails a much better take on our "predictability" and free will:

I would say rather the predicatbility is the accumulation of circumstance and probability and that we are so much alike that we can know within limits what the likely reaction is. That's why we're always so pleased and gratified by someone who "beats the odds." I think I'd look at it as demonstrating the perfect equality of humankind. We're predictable because no matter what the outer accidents the inner processes and spiritual realities are the same...I wonder if what you are observing isn't a kind of "spiritual law?" That is, if you break certain "rules" or ways of being, they carry with them certain consequences.

R-rated Icon!

(Made ya look.)

Artist of Divine Mercy

Tommy Channing writes:

In our secularised culture of today saturated by images of every kind, the term ‘Beauty’ and ‘Image’ are sometimes very nebulous words meaning different things to different people. Due to the advent of the entertainment industry, music, movies, T.V. and magazines, advertising and the Internet, we are seeing a bombardment of images on a daily basis. Many of which promote models of life without God. It has had the cumulative effect of averting our eyes away from the purpose and beauty for which they were created and the One who created them. The images we see can form our attitudes and shape our culture. The advertising industry, mindful of the power of imagery tries to define what is our correct image and what is truly beautiful. But have we become de-sensitised in the process, especially our young people? What about the sense of the Eternal?

Here is his sketch page including one depicting Mary.