Loretta



&

Lil' Jimmy Dickens in 1957

More Drinkin' Songs

I hope it doesn't ruin her reputation, but it turns out that the Venerable's best friend Donna Marie Lewis has forgotten more drinking songs than I can recall. She sent a list of ten or so but the one I couldn't believe I forgot was one fun merely to say aloud let alone sing: Don't Come Home a' Drinkin' (With Loving on Your Mind) by the inestimable Loretta Lynn.

Also conspicuous by its omission was that song about lost shakers of salt - Buffet's Margaritaville. Straight Tequilia Night by John Anderson was another good one. Also Friends in Low Places and Sunday Morning Coming Down.

This link is particularly helpful. Oh my, Keith's Beer for my Horses. And Set 'Em Up Joe by Vern Gosdin...

Macabrely Hilarious

Link:

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Responding to the demands of local reporters and a handful of Buckeye fans, Coach Jim Tressel addressed the Ohio State football team’s 41-14 loss to Florida in a macabre press conference yesterday...
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“At first, I didn’t know what else there was to talk about once I admitted we had a lousy game and that fourth-and-one call turned out to be a bad idea,” Tressel said as he took his seat at the Woody Hayes Center. “But I’ve come to realize we have great fans and friends in the media who can’t move on—can’t do their jobs, can’t feed their pets, can’t love their children—until they’re assured, again, that our coaching staff doesn’t like getting beat by 27 points.”

Tressel then placed a small box on the table in front of him.

“I could sit here and talk to you all day about how much this loss hurts,” he said. “But instead, I thought I’d just show you.”

Tressel opened the box and tilted it toward the reporters, several of whom passed out at the sight of severed human body parts.

“In here is a finger from each of our assistant coaches,” he said, adding that while every coach had a finger cut off to atone for the upset loss, not everyone had to part with the same finger.

Reaching into the box and pulling out a discolored thumb, he said, “This belonged to (defensive coordinator) Jim Heacock. Jimmy called three solid hours of prevent defense, and so for the rest of his life, he’ll be holding his toothbrush with a different hand. I think you’ll see us make better defensive adjustments next season.”

-- Danny Russell

Various

'Lord, won't you bring me some brain dead work'...(sing to tune 'Lord Won't You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz').

Every blue moon (once a financial quarter) I have to do repetitive "brain dead" work on the 'puter. In the pre-Internet days, this would drive you certifiable. But now I can listen to podcasts like this one, and this one, and this one. Embarrassment of riches.

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Unrelated, I was perusing a book on the Apocalypse by a fellow named Feret, and he quoted Pope Pius XI in 1938 saying that very young children would see, in their lifetimes, the world's glorious return to Christianity. Or words to that effect. I tried to find the full context on the 'net but haven't found it. Seems he was really going out on a limb given that he'd just written an encyclical condemning the Nazis and the threat of war loomed on the horizon. He certainly seemed the optimistic sort. I kind of like his prediction if only because it is/was so refreshingly contrarian. Every tom, dick and harry says the world is ending tomorrow; that sort of pessimism is easy. It seems like you need that sort of optimism in order to be a doer, and Pius was a doer. From Catholic Culture:

Pius XI was before everything else a reformer. Nothing in the Church remained quite the same after he had touched it and it is a paradox that the historian, the lover of things dead and gone, felt no compulsion on him to leave things unchanged merely because they "had always been that way." It was the late Cardinal Cerretti who said that his Pontificate was one of the most personal and individualistic on record. To those about him he seemed possessed of a perfect fury to correct all that was wrong or relaxed in the Church, and to get it all done in a hurry before the shadows fell. There is not a single one of us whose life is the same as it was before he came. He literally shook the Church up.

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Time Warner guy came over to try to sell me some premium channels. HBO, Showtime, etc. He looked to be in his mid-to-late '60s, lots of energy; incongruous was his aged face and white hair with the new-fangled bluetooth that matched the color of his eyes. A kindly old gent it seemed. And yet he bragged on Sex in the City, a show which induces vomiting in me despite having seen only half of one episode. Certain pop culture markers become more than the sum of their parts, and that show has become symbolically for me at least a great evil. There was also the fact that HBO was having, on a Thursday evening at 7pm, some pornography sex show. Time Warner guy was amazed I didn't want the channels. How could I explain that Hollywood is synonymous with "crappy movies"? He said he couldn't just give me a price break, but he could give me the channels for free and then I could cancel and receive the price break. Games companies play.

From an Email...

Spirit & Flesh

Recently came across Cantalamessa's The Mystery of Pentecost. Too often we might think of St. Paul's message of "flesh" versus "spirit" as literally carnality vesus reason. But Cantalamessa points out that sexual intimacy can be spiritual (within the bonds of marriage) and deep philosophical thoughts can be of the flesh (if they lead us away from God).

Too often I tend to merely think of the difference between the two as anything pleasant versus anything unpleasant, but that assumes that God's will and ours are always naturally opposed. Very helpful to me is to simply recognize the difference as one between instinct and reason. My instinct is to sin, but reason tells me that the bible says not to.

Cantalamessa writes that the biblical opposition between flesh & Spirit is not only between instinct and reason or between body and soul but also the "more radical opposition between nature and grace, the human and the divine, egoism and love":

Click to enlarge:

Times they are a Changin'

The Byzantine Catholic church I frequent is going to be changing their liturgy. (By the way, I just learned Catholic author Carl Olsen also belongs to a Byzantine parish.) Liturgical changes always seem a bit of a grab-your-ankles moment; they are trying to make it as painless as possible by not telling us the changes. Let us imagine the worst, 'eh?

A phrase from the announcement letter that sends shivers is "[to assure the Liturgy is] welcoming to persons of 21st century America". "Welcoming" usually means "let's water this thing down so every tom, dick and harry can understand everything without even trying". Of course I'm grateful that the liturgy is no longer in church Slavonic so I shan't complain. They switched to English years ago and there was presumably howls.

But I hearken back to what Amy Welborn said about mystery and the liturgy, quoted lastly in this post.

Deja Vu

Just after having heard P.J. O'Rourke say much the same thing, I see it expounded on a site linked by Karen Hall:

Genuine, and global, increases in wealth -- not a mere redistribution of it -- have been a feature of the last two hundred years, something truly new in Man's economic life...Although misery has not vanished from the face of the earth, in many ways, for billions of people, it is not nearly as constant a companion, and billions more are now wealthy, not only in material goods, but in simple physical well-being, beyond the dreams of their great-grandparents.

For example, for the average worker, the cost of a simple but valuable thing, light, has probably fallen a thousand-fold since his great-grandmother's day, and light today is about 30,000 times cheaper(in constant dollars) for the average worker than it was only two hundred years ago. By contrast, the cost of light for an English worker in 1800 AD was probably only about ten times less than it had been for his Babylonian counterpart in 1800 BC. The cost of light for the average worker today is about 300,000 times less than it was for the average worker in 1800 BC. Between 1800 BC and 1800 AD, 3600 years of human history, for the average worker, the cost of light probably dropped only about ten-fold. In the last two hundred years, it has dropped a further 30,000-fold.
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Catholic -- as well as biblical -- moral thought regarding wealth was historically -- and realistically -- framed in terms of the distribution of and access to an amount of wealth that was, within one human lifespan, or even several, essentially fixed. For most of human history, wealth was a zero-sum game. If the cost of light dropped only ten-fold in 3600 years, that probably means that human beings have essentially always lived in a world that as a whole was not getting any richer over any realistic time frame. If you -- or your people -- were getting richer, it was realistic to assume that someone else -- or someone else's people -- were getting poorer. Moreover, it is very likely that the idea of becoming 30,000 times richer simply doesn't register with any human being. We're probably set up to react -- and vigorously -- to a fairly small range of economic wealth or scarcity, since that range was our lot, from time immemorial.

Thus, both our common sense 'natural' economic rules of thumb, and Catholic moral theory, are simply not set up to handle a situation in which new wealth is being produced because new knowledge is being produced. Both our common sense, and Catholic moral theory, has simply ceded that whole territory to the New Class, to figure out as best it can.

--John Kelleher in "The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology"

You can take the liturgist out of the dancer, but you can't take the dancer out of the liturgist.

Things That Make You Say 'Hmmmmm'

I'm reading Mike Aquilina's The Fathers of the Church, and Origen is fascinating to me for the obvious reason that he castrated himself. I was curious about what the author had to say about this and so skipped ahead to the appropriate chapter. Aquilina says Origen was among the first in speculative theology and the scientific study of Scripture. Extremely bright and holy guy, and yet even he had trouble discerning the difference between an allegorical reading and literal readings of Scripture apparently, for he took literally Matthew 9:12 ("There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven"). Aquilina comments:

(He would surely have been better served by an allegorical reading.) In any event, some priests rightly charged that such mutilation was a grave offense against the body; they even argued that the action invalidated Origen's ordination.

Oh to be defrocked and deballed all in the same year. The inhumanity of it. As my friend Ham would say "that's gotta hurt!"

Polysyllabic Me

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Very Sir Lord Thomas the Erudite of Piddletrenthide Under Booth Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

Via the Reverend Lord Charles the Fiendish of Much Bottom

Let He...

...who has never used a beer bottle as a microphone cast the first stone.

René Girard Prediction

Link:

...René Girard in a newly published book in which the French Academy member predicts a new Christian cultural revolution that will make the Renaissance "seem like nothing".

In a book published recently in Italian, Verite o fede debole. Dialogo su cristianesimo e relativismo ("Truth or Weak Faith: Dialogue on Christianity and Relativism"), Professor Girard writes that "we will live in a world that will seem and be as Christian as today it seems scientific", Zenit reports.

I'm chagrined to admit that immediate reaction was to say: "Barkeep, I'll have what he's having." But with God all things are possible.

I Must've Been Drinking...

...to have missed more than a few other all-time all-star drinking songs. But actually I wasn't. I was driving to Cincy at the time of compilation.

First and foremost?

Merle Haggard's Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down.

But also Hank Jr's masterful Family Tradition & Cal Smith's catchy The Lord Knows I'm Drinkin'.

Color me sheepish at these flagrant omissions.

By the way, Jeff Culbreath popped out of self-imposed blog-scurity in order to feed me those (and a few others I'm not as familiar with). Good to know he's using his time well ain't it? (I tease Jeff.) :-)

Heck now that I'm thinking of it I could add: I'm Going To Hire A Wino (To Decorate Our Home) by David Frizzell. There's A Tear In My Beer by Hank Williams Sr..AC/DC's Have a Drink on Me...

We shall not see Christ's radiance in our lives yet; it is still hidden in our darkness; nevertheless, we must believe that he is growing in our lives; we must believe it so firmly that we cannot help relating everything, literally everything, to this most incredible reality. - Caryll Houselander

Several years back, when my friends and I first discovered Calvin Trillin, we all had the same thought: NO ONE WILL EVER LOVE US AS MUCH AS CALVIN LOVES ALICE. (We were young and full of self pity.) It turns out that this is a pretty standard response. The book About Alice, however, flips that on its head. Now it's more like WE ARE NOT AS DESERVING OF LOVE AS ALICE WAS. - Jessica of "Bookslut"

But what about that "oppressed by the devil"? Well, if we manage not to smile at the backward superstition of the inspired authors, it's still hard to avoid the impression that people in First Century Judea were disproportionately oppressed by the devil. Nowadays, the devil might be thought to have a hard time getting a tempting word in edgewise between the world and the flesh. - Tom of Disputations

I think the actual trend is more interesting: things are undoubtedly moving in a good direction within the Church (and more so in America than in Britain, and more so in Britain than in mainland Europe). But meanwhile the trend in western society is increasingly against the Church. It is precisely the clash - between a re-invigorated (albeit numerically smallish) Catholicism, and a general opposition to Christianity in a rich and godless west - that is the reality before us in the next decades. The crunching noise that is made when these two clash - which not be one big crunch but a lot of grating and discomfort spread over a period of time and involving different people and events and experiences.......that noise will be the noise of the first part of the 21st century for many of us. - Joanna Bogle of "Auntie Joanna Writes" on David Hartline's "The Tide is Turning Toward Catholicism"

When God wants to accomplish something, He gets two things:  the wrong person and a really bad idea. - saying on Karen Hall's friend's computer magnet

It is curious how alienated one can feel in a modern public library, or indeed other official public facility such as a doctor's waiting room, simply because of the material that is presented all around one...It's a fine library and the computer section is superb: beautiful machines, a businesslike silence and sense of order. But......in the Religion section, row after row of rubbish-books on witchcraft and the occult.....a reasonable range of books on Christianity but the ONLY one about Pope Benedict is a gross, silly and (thank God) largely unknown one which takes the form of an attack by Edward Stourton of the BBC who opposes central Church moral teachings...why not some of the books by Peter Sewald, or Ratzinger's own memoirs. And, heck, at least a couple of the 40-odd books written by this world-famous theologian who has ended up at Pope......Oh, meanwhile of course there were two copies of John Cornwell's book attacking Pius X11 (no other book about him). - Joanna Bogle of "Auntie Joanna Writes"

One of the real difficulties with Biblical language is that we continually refer to Lord and King without any real sense of Lord and King because we lack the tradition. - Steven Riddle commenting on Disputations

I truly believe that the best way to benefit humanity is to make faces in the bus - slightly mad faces, or puttings out of the tongue suddenly at the person opposite. Think of the thrill that gives to countless uneventful lives to whom nothing ever happens. (...) This form of charity can be practiced on the way to work. - Caryll Houselander via "Relapsed Catholic"

The people of Munich take their beer seriously and I think it's because they take enjoying life seriously. I really found Munich to be a celebratory and social place where they live life to the fullest. - Samantha Brown on the Travel Channel

After we attended the Byzantine liturgy at Christmas down in Knoxville, Michael observed that one of the fruits of a liturgy like that (and remember, it was in English), with its chant, movement, constant back-and-forth between congregation and priest/deacon, incense, iconostasis, etc., was that it rouses curiosity. It prompts you to ask questions, it inspires you to think and to seek because it is not all laid out like a pancake on your plate. Face it. God is Mystery. Who is God? How can God be, what is the power of this Love and Mercy? Is it possible that in this mess of world, redemption awaits me, you, all of us, invites us, entices us? It is not about willful obtuseness. It is about, at some level, imaging the reality of God's Presence, even as we acknoweldge the reality of that Presence. That is what sign and symbol is all about. By flattening the symbols, by making all very ordinary, we communicate that God is ordinary, that there's nothing much to this religious business, nothing much at all. - Amy Welborn