One Way to Quit Smoking....

Tuesday, a friend of my wife's relayed the story of a soldier in Iraq she knows who was smoking a cigarette. He took a puff, then held it in his hand, letting it rest at thigh level.

In the next instant he was shot in the leg. It seems snipers are taught to aim for the glow of the cigarette, assuming that's the head of the target.

The soldier vowed to quit smoking.

May God protect our soldiers in Iraq enduring these sorts of horrors.

The High Drama of the Liturgy of the Hours

There's a fine juxtaposition of hope and despair in today's LotH, which, come to think of it, is also present in the Bible (i.e. we are doomed because we are sinners but have hope in Christ for whom the impossible is possible). The Office of Readings today begins with an excerpt from Numbers chapter 12:

The Lord spoke to Moses and said, ‘Send out men, one from each tribe, to make a reconnaissance of this land of Canaan which I am giving to the sons of Israel. Send the leader of each tribe.’

At the Lord’s bidding, Moses sent them from the wilderness of Paran to reconnoitre the land of Canaan, ‘Go up into the Negeb; then go up into the highlands. See what sort of country it is, and what sort of people the inhabitants are, whether they are strong or weak, few or many, what sort of country they live in, whether it is good or poor; what sort of towns they have, whether they are open or fortified; what sort of land it is, fertile or barren, wooded or open. Be bold, and bring back some of the produce of the country.’..

At the end of forty days, they came back from their reconnaissance of the land. They sought out Moses, Aaron and the whole community of Israel, in the wilderness of Paran, at Kadesh. They made their report to them, and to the whole community, and showed them the produce of the country.

They told them this story, ‘We went into the land to which you sent us. It does indeed flow with milk and honey; this is its produce. At the same time, its inhabitants are a powerful people; the towns are fortified and very big; yes, and we saw the descendants of Anak there. The Amalekite holds the Negeb area, the Hittite, Amorite and Jebusite the highlands, and the Canaanite the sea coast and the banks of the Jordan.’

Caleb harangued the people gathered about Moses: ‘We must march in,’ he said ‘and conquer this land: we are well able to do it.’ But the men who had gone up with him answered, ‘We are not able to march against this people; they are stronger than we are.’ And they began to disparage the country they had reconnoitred to the sons of Israel, ‘The country we went to reconnoitre is a country that devours its inhabitants. Every man we saw there was of enormous size. Yes, and we saw giants there (the sons of Anak, descendants of the Giants). We felt like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.’

To read this in the spiritual sense, we feel like those Israelites. We are trying to get to the Promised Land, Heaven, and when we see glimpses we see how impossible it is. We see the saints and angels and say, "We are not able to march against this people; they are stronger than we are." How well the imagery holds - "we feel like grasshoppers compared to them"! "The Amalekite holds the Negeb area, the Hittite, Amorite and Jebusite the highlands, and the Canaanite the sea coast and the banks of the Jordan." The angels hold the Negeb area, the Hittite, Amorite and Jebusite the highlands, St. Francis the sea coast and the martyrs the banks of the Jordan. We know we have not the strength to march on Heaven, for only "the violent bear it away". And yet God wants us there, just as he wanted the Israelites in the promised land. That helps!

The next reading inspires hope, offered from one of those already on the other side, one of those saints assisting St. Francis on the sea coast -- St. Leo the Great:

The earth – our earthly nature – should tremble at the suffering of its Redeemer. The rocks – the hearts of unbelievers – should burst asunder. The dead, imprisoned in the tombs of their mortality, should come forth, the massive stones now ripped apart. Foreshadowings of the future resurrection should appear in the holy city, the Church of God: what is to happen to our bodies should now take place in our hearts.

No one, however weak, is denied a share in the victory of the cross. No one is beyond the help of the prayer of Christ. His prayer brought benefit to the multitude that raged against him. How much more does it bring to those who turn to him in repentance.

Ignorance has been destroyed, obstinacy has been overcome. The sacred blood of Christ has quenched the flaming sword that barred access to the tree of life. The age-old night of sin has given place to the true light.

The Christian people are invited to share the riches of paradise. All who have been reborn have the way open before them to return to their native land, from which they had been exiled. Unless indeed they close off for themselves the path that could be opened before the faith of a thief.

The business of this life should not preoccupy us with its anxiety and pride, so that we no longer strive with all the love of our heart to be like our Redeemer, and to follow his example. Everything that he did or suffered was for our salvation: he wanted his body to share the goodness of its head.

First of all, in taking our human nature while remaining God, so that the Word became man, he left no member of the human race, the unbeliever excepted, without a share in his mercy. Who does not share a common nature with Christ if he has welcomed Christ, who took our nature, and is reborn in the Spirit through whom Christ was conceived?

Again, who cannot recognise in Christ his own infirmities? Who would not recognise that Christ’s eating and sleeping, his sadness and his shedding of tears of love are marks of the nature of a slave?

It was this nature of a slave that had to be healed of its ancient wounds and cleansed of the defilement of sin. For that reason the only-begotten Son of God became also the son of man. He was to have both the reality of a human nature and the fullness of the godhead.

The body that lay lifeless in the tomb is ours. The body that rose again on the third day is ours. The body that ascended above all the heights of heaven to the right hand of the Father’s glory is ours. If then we walk in the way of his commandments, and are not ashamed to acknowledge the price he paid for our salvation in a lowly body, we too are to rise to share his glory. The promise he made will be fulfilled in the sight of all: Whoever acknowledges me before men, I too will acknowledge him before my Father who is in heaven.

Obama at ND Redux

In the Obama at ND debate, there are lots of ludicrousities thrown about; at the very least anyone who protested George Bush coming to ND in '01 has no right to support Obama coming now. That much is clear and easy. As Amy Welborn has pointed out, Bush in '01 was still clean as a hound's tooth then while Obama is still fresh from signing an executive order supporting abortion overseas.

Initially I thought Thomas Reese S.J., made an excellent point:

If Cardinal Egan can invite Obama to speak at the Al Smith dinner in October of 2008 when he was only a presidential candidate, then there is certainly nothing wrong with Notre Dame having the President speak at a commencement.

Although on second thought it occurred to me that the insular beltway Al Smith charity dinner, which all of five Americans/political junkies watch on C-Span, is much different than honoring Obama with an honorary degree at the largest Catholic university in America.

Really good Catholics are saying "a pox on both houses", and "both parties suck" though I wonder if such an indifference to truth really gains you much. Surely the parties aren't equally bad. Doesn't that represent a faux peace? It reminds me of how Obama handled the race issue: he used a black racist (Jeremiah Wright) and compared him to his white grandmother who was once afraid of a black man or something. And he implied there was some sort of equivalence between the two. Peace via moral equivalency.

As I've blogged before, conservative policies tend to be morally neutral at worst (with the exception regarding the use of torture, or coercive interrogations, which was never part of the Republican platform and I think was a Cheney anamoly), while many Democratic platform policies are intrinsically evil. So I don't understand exactly why conservative Catholics are supposed to be somehow ashamed of their politics vis-a-vis their faith. Since Notre Dame has shown it can't make distinctions, politicians in general probably shouldn't be honored.

Groan...

The reliably condescending Jon Meachem, on MSNBC's Morning Joe this morning, mentioned how the AIG bonuses have become a symbol of Wall Street arrogance but that symbols are important to many. He then relayed the famous anecdote about Flannery O'Connor saying of the Eucharist, "If it's just a symbol, then to hell with it!" Meachem said that this shows that symbols are important to people, when Flannery O'Connor was arguably exactly the opposite!

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

References in the Psalms to "enemies" may be understood as references to the designers of Microsoft Windows: smite them on the cheek bone, break their teeth… - Bill of Summa Minutiae

Dear Saint Blog, I can't quite find you in the calendar. I know this has been mentioned before, and not much of a satisfactory answer was found, although several approximations were: something to do with Bologna, and perhaps even a principality known as Blognia, somewhere. I suppose this isn't evidence against the existence of a saint named "Blog". - "some guy on the street" at Null Epistolary

I almost wept as I finished reading Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor. I knew the rough outlines of her life and have loved her fiction since a high-school teacher in 1968 loaned me a college anthology of stories, including “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” That reading, late on a school night in my bedroom, is among the most memorable of my life. I know it was a school night because I couldn’t get to sleep afterwards and was groggier than usual the next morning. O’Connor lived with lupus for the final third of her life, until it killed her at age 39. The horror of premature death looms throughout Gooch’s book. Since finishing the biography I’ve been rereading O’Connor’s stories which seem the best written by an American. Children, I’ve noticed, show up often in her stories, as innocents and monsters (more often the latter), especially in light of my own recent return to the classroom. Gooch quotes a letter O’Connor wrote her friend Betty Hester in 1960, reacting to a suggestion she write about a Georgia girl with a cancerous tumor on her face, who died at age 12: “What interests me in it is simply the mystery, the agony that is given in strange ways to children.” - blogger at "Evidence Anecdotal"

I don’t mean to run down modernism toute court. Its appeal was and remains understandable. There is a kind of excitement in the nakedness of modern buildings. They are unashamed of their structural elements and basic materials...Unfortunately, however, modernism was an unsustainable, ideologically driven project that brutalized far more than it beautified. Most of the time most people don’t look very good with their clothes off, which is why a nude beach can be so depressing. We need the decent drapery of life. The traditional decorative impulse humanizes life, because it covers our nakedness. The modernist fantasy of life taken raw and unadorned is just that—a fantasy. It toggles back and forth between two sides of the some self-invented, post-traditional ego: meglomania and banality. - R. Reno on "First Things"

Back then, people spent half their lives with a toothache. - overheard concerning the omnipresence of pain in generations past

It turns out that at my parish one is a Pharisee if one believes that the rubrics of the liturgy are more important than the rubrics of after-Mass donuts, see The call to holeyness. If, as Bishop Richard Sklba has written, there is a ‘heresy’ of rubricism, then, alas, St. Al's is in the grip of the Donutist Heresy. - Terrence of "The Provincial Emails"

[Evelyn] Waugh implicitly represents the Catholic faith as the "pearl of great price" for the acquisition or preservation of which every necessary earthly sacrifice should be made. While this uncompromising outlook, even more provocative today than it was for Waugh's contemporaries, does guide some of the film characters' later actions, for most of the movie, the family's religious heritage looms as an oppressive, destructive force. This shift in values -- which renders the faith's enduring fascination for the initially skeptical Charles largely inexplicable -- is reinforced by the film's final scene where his spiritual fate, subtly but definitely conveyed in the novel, is left unresolved. - USCCB review of recent film "Brideshead Revisited"

If 65 million American Catholics really understood their faith, we wouldn’t need to waste each other’s time arguing about whether the legalized killing of an unborn child is somehow ‘balanced out’ or excused by three other good social policies. - Archbishop Chaput via Kevin Jones

I think it would be easier on everyone, frankly, if Catholic universities cut the cord with politicians completely. I don’t care how prestigious you aim to be, how much you want your graduates to contribute to the fabric of American civic life, even a sitting president cannot help but associate you with a political ideology. I’m not arguing for the ghetto, at all, but we’re not talking noble statesmen here. We’re talking politicians who are divisive figures and who, Obama’s case, are pursuing policies that directly threaten Catholic institutions. - Amy Welborn on word that Pres. Obama is going to speak at Notre Dame

By inviting Barack Obama to be the 2009 commencement speaker, Notre Dame has forfeited its right to call itself a Catholic university. It invites an official rebuke. - longtime ND professor Ralph McInerny at "The Catholic Thing"

prayer is not, as some think, a way to escape reality. It is the place to encounter reality in its fullest sense, in which you consciously place yourself in Reality, which is God, and Alternative Histories lose their power. And maybe even their appeal. - Amy Welborn of "Via Media"

Ignore the acedia and work through one's daily routine -- the quotidian mysteries -- hoping and trusting that it'll go away. - Dylan's summary of the lesson of Kathleen Norris's book on the subject

Thoughts on a Tuesday

A now, a flight of fancy to cleanse the palate from a surfeit of journalism...

Through the glade of the windshield I see a big banshee of a sky looming overhead, constipated with clouds but not unlovely for it. The strife between sun and clouds for dominance has its own poetic beauty and - I sigh to myself - the life of striving is the life I lead. And ought embrace, if only so that the homecoming will be better. To quote Mr. Banks in Mary Poppins:

I feel a surge of deep satisfaction
Much as a king astride his noble steed
When I return from daily strife to heart and wife
How pleasant is the life I lead!

Strife is always easier on a full night's sleep but then it seems something less than strife, as if the true meaning of conflict is primarily the fighting of fatigue rather than some foreign entity, and thus rest merely obstructs the issue. Then I banish my inner stoic and remind myself that love is the issue.

The radio is playing a magisterial rendition of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake and I dream about how cool, if cramped, an office in the car would be.

I park the car, or "pock the cah" as the Bostonians say, and make the familiar walk into the sweeping grandeur that is our cafeteria and where I struggle against my natural tendency to just get a donut and coffee. I think it was Kostrubala's The Joy of Running that so vividly described the bodily wreckage caused merely by the daily consumption of a donut and coffee for breakfast. Apparently the caffeine and the refined sugars of the donut make your blood sugar level dance jigs and reels for the hours until you get the calming influence of protein in your system. So I choose a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich on toasted muffin, mostly because I'd eaten a light meal the night before and there was a residual hunger.

I walk past a vague acquaintance. He's an ambitious sort, having recently completed his MBA, and he's wearing a tweed jacket over an open-collared shirt sort of like a cross between a college professor and a Hollywood actor, and it strikes me how different that get-up is around our workplace. Some wear suits and ties, some business casual dockers & such, but here's a guy wearing an ensemble that suggests he actually likes clothes. For me to wear clothes like that it would feel like I'm dressing up for Halloween. Normally the only time I notice clothes is on an immodestly dressed female, although occasionally I'll notice clothes on a modestly dressed female. Rare indeed are the times I notice the clothes a guy is wearing.

The elevator doors are closing and I reflexively thrust my forearm in, the doors closing briefly before opening. There's only one soul on board and I apologetically push "door close". I'm surprised he says nothing about the late entry; normally such elevator heroics provoke comments. He must be so jaded. :-)

It is nice to work on a remodeled floor, a clean, well-lighted floor indeed. The cube walls are short though, like those of Safety Town. One young lady has pinned a monopoly "Get Out of Jail Free" card on her wall. I walk by the familiar offices and read again, for the hundredth time, the sayings on the markerboards. One says, "Jason Rogers - when can we quote suck?" Another has a bumper sticker that says "I like me", illustrating the truth that you can't love God or others if you don't love yourself. The far floor walls have single words placed at regular intervals: "Sustain", "Protect", "Trust". Typically I never notice them since I'm always distracted by the words scrawled on the markerboards.

Is Obama Worth a Mass?

Some, like Tom of Disputations, are pretty cool-headed when dealing with these largely symbolic gestures of Catholic colleges honoring the secular culture, but I have to admit to being something of a rabid fundamentalist on the subject. And Notre Dame seems to be more interested in speaking power to truth instead of truth to power. Isn't honoring a man who supports the constitutional right to end a million lives a year a way of speaking our earthly "power" to Truth by saying non serviam?

What particularly bothers me is that it's so little to ask not to invite him. It's so little to ask to suggest a Catholic school not incur the scandal of it. It's a "burden" as light as a gossamer's wings! Does Fr. Jenkins really think he's going to convince Obama to mend his ways on the life issue? Because, you know, that's worked so well in the past. Especially on our Catholic politicians. (Not!)

The singular threat to Notre Dame is NOT that the students will fail to engage modern culture or that Notre Dame will fail to live up to what Yale or Standford can offer, but that the students will totally and reliably capitulate before that culture. And bringing Obama to campus will only aid and abet that process.

Obviously it's a symptom of a much bigger and more serious problem: the adoption of a "cross-less" Christianity that wants to pay absolutely no price for being Christian. A Catholic university is honored to have the President speak and to give up that honor would cost something.

It apparently would cost so much that the Fr. Jenkins is willing to endure the anger of so many Catholics who are offended by the message sent to the already morally confused by honoring President Obama.

Personally, I can more easily sympathize when universities and nations fall due to fatigue ("as fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty") rather than the sacrilegious donning by a Catholic school of fashionable opinions and people for the paltry purpose of something as perishable as earthy status. Perhaps I am a hypocrite, loving the good opinions of others too, and perhaps I would do the same as Notre Dame if I were in a leadership position. But all I can say is God have mercy on us both whenever we attempt to ensure our own self-engineered subsistence rather than relying on God's sustenance.

Which appears to be the case with the invite of Obama. Notre Dame seems to be happily building its own Tower of Babel, seeking its own power and prestige rather than promoting God's power and prestige.

Charting My Disengagement from Pop Culture

The chart below was derived using this link, pulling off the top ten song hits from each year. If I recognized the title & artist I counted it as familiar.

It shows the impact of working full-time, the switching over to favoring country music, and likely the function of aging. The carryover of hits of yesteryear seems to be about fifteen years (eight before I was born and seven more to reach the age of reason).

Using this list of the top 100 films of all-time (in terms of box office receipts adjusted for inflation), I separated them by decade and then charted the results. Predictably the familiarity declines less with age than had music. Pop songs are more accessible to the young than movies, at least back in my day, and movies tend to have a longer shelf-life:

However, the films & songs are somewhat apples-to-orange since I'm using the most popular movies of all time and ranking them by decade while with the songs I'm measuring the most popular within a given year. Nevertheless, if we cheat and superimpose charts it would look something like this:

In light blue, the popular music line skews towards my younger demographic. I think my engagement in movies is overrated since I generally see only eight to ten a year and obviously if a movie is doing gangbusters at the box office I'll be more likely to see it.

But there's no question that I was heavily, incredibly involved with pop culture during the '80s. Almost 100% of the top movies and music commanded my attention. It seems impossible to argue that this is other than an entirely age-related phenomenon although I would argue that the '80s music and culture is more accessible. In the '90s came the rise of hip-hop and rap, which is arguably far less ear-friendly than the melodius pop of Michael Jackson or Madonna. (But then that's what every generation says, don't they? :-)

And during the '80s/Reagan era, at least based on the big hit movies, Hollywood was more likely to provide morally unambiguous (though often shallow) offerings like Ghostbusters & Back to the Future instead of the 1970s Rocky Horror Picture Show, Animal House, etc...Cultural products accessible to a large audience are more likely to be indulged in, although I still think it would be going too far to say I didn't leave popular culture, popular culture left me.

It would be interesting to graph the amount of time I spend reading and see to what extent my disengagement in popular culture has resulted in more time spent with books. But I don't have the stats on that...

Another View of the Flannery O'Connor Biography...

At Stereotypist, in cartoon form, found via En Compostela.

His Strength is also his Weakness

Took a walk in the park with our dog Obi and received many "what a beautiful dog!" comments. But what I've decided is that what makes him that way is his fine coat, and his coat is what he's constantly leaving all over the house (he's a year-round shedder).

Which is to say that, ideally, we'd vacuum hourly.

Those prone to wasting time on the 'net can pursue their hobby by viewing pictures of our dog here.

Topical Spam

I'd be the first to admit I don't work hard enough to deserve the chair in the ad at right and below, but you have to love the irony of a chair company saying "we don't care about chairs" while my own beloved non-chair company saying (at least until recently) "we care a lot about chairs". Some dream of chairs that never were, I dream of holding onto the chair I still have.

Witty Wisconsin attorney Terrence Berres spotted this bit of appropriate spam:

On Watching Brideshead Revisted

I'm impressed by the tungsten-like tough skin of the USCCB website movie reviewer, for whom it seems no horrific portrayal of Catholicism cannot be tolerated. The analogy is flawed but it reminds me of how some Americans think we had 9/11 coming.

Even more surprising is how I could have the resources of the web world at my finger tips and yet waste two+ hours on a movie that had I simply surfed to Catholic Media Review I could've spared myself. Barbara Nicolosi warned us and though I usually find her unreliable in her movie picks/pans, in this case her very lively and persuasive review would've surely done the job.

Or perhaps I might have even read the full USCCB review a bit more carefully, which warned of a film "substantially re-imagined in its essentials". Now there's a red flag, if expressed with a marvelous understatedness, one which the reviewer continues to quietly wave with the reflection that "the faith's enduring fascination for the initially skeptical Charles was largely inexplicable," a truth akin to saying that the weather can be cool in Antarctica. Indeed there is more evidence that the faith is repulsive to Charles than fascinating, or perhaps is fascinating precisely for his repulsion. Upon reading the review, I assumed that I would supply the motive for Charles when really the whole movie was the problem. Still, it was beautifully photographed. Turn down the sound and you have the mother of all European vacation slide show experiences.

Finally, I'm impressed and even edified by the fact that the aforementioned movie reviewer could apparently find the characters sympathetic. If you can care about these characters, then you must really love your real, live, flesh and bone neighbors.

Excerptable...

Interesting to see what Auden calls achievement (humility and a lack of utilitarianism?) in this quote from the prefatory material by Arthur Kirsch in The Sea and the Mirror:

Auden especially praised Shakespeare for his consciousness of these [limitations of art]: "There's something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one's life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously." Neither did Auden, and "The Sea and the Mirror," which he wrote in the shadow of war, is a testament to his own artistic humility.

The central limit of art that Shakespeare deals with in The Tempest..is that art is doubly illusory, because it holds the mirror up to nature rather than to the truth that passes human understanding. In The Tempest...Prospero renounces his art, and in the Epilogue his renunciation is associated with the spiritual reality represented in the Lord's Prayer:

Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair
Unless I be reliev'd by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

Egyptian Art Exhibit

I recently checked out the Columbus Museum of Art's current exhibition Egyptian Treasures from the Brooklyn Museum.

I was disappointed although I'm not sure what I was expecting. You go to an Egyptian exhibition and you should expect mummies and artifacts.

Chesterton has a very interesting line in Everlasting Man concerning the Egyptians: "One of the strange marks of the strength of Christianity is that, since it came, no pagan in our civilization has been able to be really human."

He also writes:

Among the more ignorant of the enlightened there was indeed a convention of saying that priests had obstructed progress in all ages; and a politician once told me in a debate that I was resisting modern reforms exactly as some ancient priest probably resisted the discovery of wheels. I pointed out, in reply, that it was far more likely that the ancient priest made the discovery of the wheels. It is overwhelmingly probable that the ancient priest had a great deal to do with the discovery of the art of writing. It is obvious enough in the fact that the very word hieroglyphic is akin to the word hierarchy. The religion of these priests was apparently a more or less tangled polytheism of a type that is more particularly described elsewhere. It passed through a period when it cooperated with the king, another period when it was temporarily destroyed by the king, who happened to be a prince with a private theism of his own, and a third period when it practically destroyed the king and ruled in his stead. But the world has to thank it for many things which it considers common and necessary; and the creators of those common things ought really to have a place among the heroes of humanity. If we were at rest in a real paganism, instead of being restless in a rather irrational reaction from Christianity, we might pay some sort of pagan honor to these nameless makers of mankind. We might have veiled statues of the man who first found fire or the man who first made a boat or the man who first tamed a horse. And if we brought them garlands or sacrifices, there would be more sense in it than in disfiguring our cities with cockney statues of stale politicians and philanthropists. But one of the strange marks of the strength of Christianity is that, since it came, no pagan in our civilization has been able to be really human.

NRO! NRO!

NRO television features the indomintable Justice Scalia, who received a 98-0 vote in his Senate confirmation.

In the latest Uncommon Knowledge, I was surprised to learn Scalia had never heard of the Chesterton quote, "The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected."

Here he is reacting to the quote, after which he added, "that sounds like Chesterton":