Photos...

Interesting photographs from Susana Raab. The little boy in the upper right looks a bit like Amy W's youngest. And from her blog, one interesting view on the way Americans are being perceived.

No Spanning the Globe This Week...

...stay tuned for one next week... Through the miracle of modern technology, this post has been pre-recorded on Friday June 5th.

Strangely Addicting Site...

Catty blog about Washington interns, commenter writes:

I get a kick when hill staffers refer to what they do as, "the nation's business." If anyone ran an actual business like this it would go bankrupt...quickly. Oh wait, we are bankrupt. Carry on.

On the plus side, this site is rich with unintended humor. Keep up the good work!

Iceland v. Greenland

Iceland and Greenland are locked in a tie on Friday 6/5 as far as the number of donations to Zenit. (Who says one donation doesn't make a difference?)

Impressive display by France. And Canada's kickin' ass! Singapore over the Phillipines was a bit of a surprise. What we need is a map that shows the number of donations relative to Catholic population. Not that it's a competition or anything... (i.e. please, no wagering).

Clippings from Readings....

A few offerings found lately from my read pile:

From the New York Times:

George Orwell took up a similar question in 1937. In “The Road to Wigan Pier,” he explains why unemployed folks reject the sort of frugality you prescribe — here, a wholesome, inexpensive diet in favor of 1930s junk food: “When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty.’ There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! . . . Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the Englishman’s opium.”

From Bill Luse in the latest Christendom Review:

Even if, by the end, [Terri Schiavo] was blind (as we are told she must have been) and the shadows gone, they came to her daily and kissed her on the cheek, stroked her hair, and spoke to her, and maybe she heard them from afar, as a baby in the womb hears mother’s voice, and knew they were her friends because we all know when a thing intends good to us. There was no agony of waiting because time meant nothing. Time was her friend, too, the fluid in which she swam, as do we in our dreams. The soul, no matter the state of its temple, needs love, which is its life. I like to think that God reached down into the womb of her unawareness and fed her daily, bathed her in it every night, while you and I pursued the things of this world, wrung our hands over her pitiable fate, and, glorying in our own ‘awareness’, wondered if she should really be here.

From "Called to Love: Approaching John Paul II's Theology of the Body (Granados and Anderson):

Where love is missing, the question of meaning lacks the air it needs to catch fire. Later on, when Andrew asks for Teresa's hand, this harmony of mutual understanding restores the balance she lacked on that nighttime hike. It makes her receptive to the signal of love, which is even stronger than the signals nature broadcasts to us through the silent majesty of the mountains at night. In a word, the experience of love is the birthplace of wonder, the first step along a new journey toward the fullness of meaning. If we had to choose a scene that captures the essence of wonder, we might pick the moment when a child discovers the presents his parents have laid under the Christmas tree for him. Or the face of the
mother who holds her newborn child in her arms for the very first time. No matter which picture we choose, though, the point is always the same: Wonder can be born only in the matrix of love. Even the amazement that fills us when we behold the marvels of creation makes sense only in light of the experience of love, as we will try to show in the following chapters of this book...John Paul's message to us, then, is that the source of wonder is not far from our everyday experience, but that it reveals its presence in the experience of love that accompanies every person from the cradle to the grave...Let's go back for a moment to John Paul II's warning against separating faith and life. All too often Christians have reinforced this separation by treating their own religious experience as a foreign body alien to everyday life. Some critics of Christianity have mistaken this caricature for the real thing and have complained that the Christian religion destroys happiness and spoils the enjoyment of life by teaching man to seek fulfillment in some faraway heaven. This objection overlooks the truth that man's quest for his identity starts from the experience of love. If love is the starting point of the human quest, then man depends on a revelation—the revelation of love—in order to find happiness. Because man's quest itself begins in love, this revelation does not blindside him like a thunderbolt out of the blue. Rather human experience is open to this revelation, tends toward it, and is an expectation of it—not in some future Beyond, but in the midst of our everyday involvement with the world around us. We don't need to escape mundane human life in order to experience love's radiance and light; we can bathe in its warmth right in the midst of our humdrum daily occupations. Now, Christianity, like love, is a revelation that man can't contrive on his own. Moreover, Christian revelation, like love, happens right in the midst of our earthly space and time: “And the Word became flesh..."

From a NY Times review of the novel "Brooklyn":

During a long-ago solo trip to Rome — a self-­assigned distraction after a difficult breakup — I remember opening George Eliot’s “Silas Marner” while sitting at the window of a high room in a cold albergo (once a nuns’ cloister) as strains of conversation floated up from the courtyard. Describing her protagonist’s new start in a new town, Eliot wrote of the relief that “minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love” may feel on finding themselves in a “new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas — where their mother earth shows another lap.” In such a setting, she wrote, “The past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.” For Silas Marner, this “exile” was self-sought. But for Eilis Lacey, the biddable daughter at the center of Colm Toibin’s new novel, “Brooklyn,” her leave-taking from Enniscorthy, in Ireland’s County Wexford, and her resettlement in New York in the fall of 1951 are imposed on her by her energetic, well-meaning older sister, Rose. Young, docile and incurious, unscarred by heartbreak or reversals of fortune, Eilis has no desire or need to quit her widowed mother, her friends, her familiar surroundings. Her “old faith and love” are intact, and she seeks no distance from her memories.

From "Little Dorrit" by Charles Dickens:

There was no wind to make a ripple on the foul water within the harbour, or on the beautiful sea without. The line of demarcation between the two colours, black and blue, showed the point which the pure sea would not pass; but it lay as quiet as the abominable pool, with which it never mixed. Boats without awnings were too hot to touch; ships blistered at their moorings; the stones of the quays had not cooled, night or day, for months. Hindoos, Russians, Chinese, Spaniards, Portuguese, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Genoese, Neapolitans, Venetians, Greeks, Turks, descendants from all the builders of Babel, come to trade at Marseilles, sought the shade alike--taking refuge in any hiding-place from a sea too intensely blue to be looked at, and a sky of purple, set with one great flaming jewel of fire. The universal stare made the eyes ache. Towards the distant line of Italian coast, indeed, it was a little relieved by light clouds of mist, slowly rising from the evaporation of the sea, but it softened nowhere else. Far away the staring roads, deep in dust, stared from the hill-side, stared from the hollow, stared from the interminable plain. Far away the dusty vines overhanging wayside cottages, and the monotonous wayside avenues of parched trees without shade, drooped beneath the stare of earth and sky. So did the horses with drowsy bells, in long files of carts, creeping slowly towards the interior...

From "The Yankee Years" by Joe Torre:

The game [baseball] that depended largely on washed-up former players and reassigned company men to build a 25-man roster became a multibillion-dollar business that attracted well-educated minds to build organizations, even systems. When Beane, for instance, promoted David Forst, another Harvard grad with a sociology degree, to replace DePodesta, he posted an opening for Forst’s former position as an assistant general manager. He received 1,500 résumés, including one from a chap who wrote, “I apologize, but I won’t be available until June because I am completing my astrophysics degree from Oxford.” Beane wound up hiring Farhan Zaidi, a PhD in economics from Cal Berkeley who earned an undergraduate degree in behavioral economics. “Guys that maybe 15 years ago spent four years at Goldman Sachs and then moved on to private equity are applying for jobs with baseball teams,” Beane said. “I remember when I sheepishly had to inform Farhan wasting his time on things I don’t have time to waste my energy on. Factions are starting up again.” Said the Indians’ Shapiro, “Don’t make the mistake, whatever is happening now, to think those teams with resources don’t have a distinct advantage, particularly with how the Yankees were for a brief period of time and how the Red Sox are now.” Teams moved beyond the popular conception of Moneyball long ago essentially because on-base percentage was no longer an inefficient market. So if all teams now recognize on-base percentage as well as the value of young players, what is the next inefficient market to exploit in order to make up the ground on the Yankees’ growing edge in resources? Beane laughed and said, “Just saying that gives me a headache. Every part of the game is measured now versus the dollar investment. It’s about turning over every rock. It’s more and more difficult. I think that’s a good thing. I have no chip on my shoulder about being antiquated.” The race is always on.

Catholics on the Court

The NY Times has a report on Sotomayor...:

There are indications that Judge Sotomayor is more like the majority of American Catholics: those who were raised in the faith and shaped by its values, but who do not attend Mass regularly and are not particularly active in religious life. Like many Americans, Judge Sotomayor may be what religion scholars call a “cultural Catholic” — a category that could say something about her political and social attitudes.

A majority of American Catholics? Ouch that seems hard to believe.

Hour at the Arts Fest

Sat I under the combustible sun on a bench away from the crowds and through the foliage I spy a bronze-green steeple far in the distance. I felt for a moment like I was in old Europe, marveling at the sight of a German cathedral. It was more thrilling than what I saw in the rows of tents at the art festival. I briefly wondered why it is that had I seen the same exact scene in a photograph for sale in one of the booths it would feel like a cliche, like it was "too sweet". Perhaps merely that I'd think the artist was lazy, not creating so much as reflecting.

I'm perenially surprised at how so little inspires me at these fests. So much of it seems not worth a first glance let alone a second which I attribute in good part to my being, primarily, into music and books and not art. Most pieces seem cloying, either in their Rockwellesque earnestness or post-modern self-consciousness or meaningless strangeness. But every once in awhile I find a jewel, a little tent holding filling paintings, such as I did today with the work of John Cheng.

Cheng, from a marketing standpoint, seems at a loss. He looks down, is always fiddling, has no website, posts no bills listing his resume or awards. He's quite unlike the other artists who stand or sit with eyes boring, unaware of the laser impact of an artists' eyes on the public: Don't they know I know they can see right through me! I think to myself.

Instead Cheng seemed a quiet, humble sort with mixed media offerings of carp and birds and Japanese women and mermaids, sometimes depicting nakedness but with a purity that is a subject of interest to me. I seek to disarm the flesh with a pure flesh, as in the way an inoculation works. Always I think, when I see a Bouguereau or a Cheng depicting female nudity and innocence that here, at last, is the secret. Cheng's portraits of mermaids curled like nautilus's on distant banks hits some nerve within me, lighting up the part of me that so likes borders (such as that of between purity and impurity) and danger (that of shipwreck by mariners smitten).

_________

   
    Not Cheng's work, but a nautical theme

Inside the White House

On the news consumption front, Brian Williams looked stiff and awkward - nervous as a suitor? - during NBC's pornful look at the White House under the messiah. To call it a puff piece would be to insult puffs everywhere. It was especially painful to see the fixation on the new White House dog, with Williams playing the part of the jilted beau (no pun intended) of Cap'n von Trapp. Ah well, kids and dogs have their own minds.

But who can blame Obama? He's reacted with gracious modesty to the sycophant and lovelorn media. BHO is far more likable than Bill Clinton if only for the reason Mike Barnicle mentioned - that much of the Clinton hatred was driven by how utterly contrived he was, the whole school uniform ruse and how he had to have a poll to decide even where to go on vacation. It was that uber calculation that was a huge turn-off. Obama may be as calculated but at least the seams don't show. The story may go thusly: with Clinton a competent job was done despite his personal faults, while Obama will ruin the country but with such likability that you hardly notice. A spoonful of sugar makes the decline go down easier.

It sounds like the Cairo speech was a good one. Speeches overseas and meetings with foes sounds like a good idea to me. I'd rather he use his likability towards trying to influencing the Muslim world than in his trying to win Catholic friends and influence Catholic voters as he did at Notre Dame. It's still odd to see such a sublime temperament and personal self-discipline as his write executive orders that fund the murdering of the unborn. Cognitive dissonance, or at least some sort of dissonance.

Fiction for a Thursday

Wyatt was a logophile who saw words as things of beauty and considered their communicatory function as crassly utilitarian.

He sprinkled the finest foreign words into his speech and pleasured himself by making up new ones that he felt were more descriptive and assonant. He was thought by neighbors as eccentric and unintelligible but regarded himself as an Emersonian individualist, not dependent on the Magisterium that is a language.

Before he became completely incomprehensible, he once argued that to re-use words in speech would devalue them, would cause people to take them for granted. Better not make them into mere coinage with which to swap gossip or business talk. He couldn't bear to see his beauties prostituted for such uses, and yet he holed himself up for long hours staring at a Scrabble-like screen of shapely offerings disconnected from their context or etymology or personal virtue. Constantly he left behind old words behind for new ones, treating them as they satisfied him.

The Biggest Danger

It ought go without saying that pro-lifers need not feel blame for the murder of Dr. Tiller. But Bill O'Reilly still felt the need to defend himself on a couple segments on his show. Kudos to Bill for not being cowed by the mau mau'rs. And to Fr. Frank Pavone as well, who says the biggest danger comes from within:

The biggest danger right now to our movement, in the light of the killing of Dr. Tiller, is the enemy within. I'm talking about the fear, the self-doubt, the little voice inside of us that makes us feel guilty now for saying that abortion is murder, that might make some people feel guilty for being too aggressive in the effort to stop the killing of children, maybe make them afraid of going out in front of the abortion facilities to intervene peacefully for the lives of those children. The enemy within that would make some people believe what the other side is trying to say, that somehow we in the pro-life movement are responsible for this violence because of our violent rhetoric and because of our decades of efforts to expose the reality of what abortion is.

But the fact of the matter is, as the Gospel of Life written by Pope John Paul II says, that we have to look evil in the eye and call it by its proper name. Abortion is a holocaust, it is the killing of children, it is murder and it's happening on a massive scale precisely because so many of our fellow citizens are blind to it.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote the letter from the Birmingham jail in response to a group of clergy who told him that his tactics were too extreme, and that, in fact, he and his colleagues were responsible for fomenting violence. And he said that's a ridiculous argument; it's like saying the fact that someone possesses money is inciting the robber to commit an act of robbery; or that Jesus preaching that He was God is what provoked the crucifixion, that He is somehow responsible for that.

Brothers and sisters, we are not responsible for the violence that is done. We are a movement of non-violence and as Dr. King and, as Gandhi before him, taught and as we teach: non-violence is neither passivity nor obscurity. It does not sit back in the face of evil and it doesn't try to cover up the face of evil. Non-violence is a force that confronts violence in whatever form it takes. And it does so courageously and boldly and unapologetically.

Ann Coulter has a good take on the issue as well:

In the wake of the shooting of late-term abortionist George Tiller, President Barack Obama sent out a welcome message that this nation would not tolerate attacks on pro-lifers or any other Americans because of their religion or beliefs.

Ha ha! Just kidding. That was the lead sentence -- with minor edits -- of a New York Times editorial warning about theoretical hate crimes against Muslims published eight months after 9/11. Can pro-lifers get a hate crimes bill passed and oceans of ink devoted to assuring Americans that "most pro-lifers are peaceful"?

Since I'm quoting the Intemperate One, she also makes a good point in Human Events about how different this imaginary right to abortion found in the Constitution is from other rights actually in the document:

The right to bear arms is honored in 21-gun salutes, turkey shoots, Civil War re-enactments, firearms demonstrations and, occasionally, at Phil Spector's house.

The right to petition the government for redress of grievances is celebrated at political rallies, tea parties, marches, protests and whenever Keith Olbermann has a fight with his cat.

The free exercise clause is observed in church services, missionary work, peyote-smoking Indian rituals, and for a few days after every time Bill Clinton gets caught having an extramarital affair.

So instead of inviting a constitutional lawyer to yammer on about this purported constitutional right, why not show it being practiced?

Thoughts 'n Quotes

I once relayed, approvingly, an anecdote to a family member about how one ex-Nazi - Rudolf Hess was it? - who confessed his crimes to a priest just before his death and how presumably he is on his way to Heaven now. This relative was not impressed with mercy here but provoked and even repulsed by it. Hess in Heaven? I like stories of mercy, selfishly figuring it gives me a better chance to go to Heaven, while my interlocuter favors justice. People are different.

Pope Benedict in Spe Salvi asserts that justice will happen: "In the end evildoers will not sit at table in the eternal banquet beside their victims without distinction, as if nothing happened."

Richard J. Neuhaus comments in American Babylon on the Pope's thought:

That would be another injustice, an intolerable one. And yet, the God of justice is also a God of love and mercy. It is not as though justice is "balanced" or "tempered" by mercy, as might be the case in a human court. Rather, the judgment of God - which infinitely surpasses but does not contradict our understanding of justice and mercy - does not only include both justice and mercy, but is both justice and mercy.

Admittedly this explanation does not answer all our questions. But that is the way it is with realities that surpass our human understanding. Despite centuries of arduous effort by the greatest of minds, there is finally no intellectually satisfying answer to the question of theodicy - the question of how to justify to man the ways of God.

_____
I'm really, really liking "Morning Joe", the MSNBC show. And Scarborough's really, really tired of presidents not making choices and how they are driven "by ideology and not arithmetic." They don't believe in math. Specifically, Bush & Obama have earned the ire of Joe S. by their failure to create a credible budget. Of course there are things I would like to say, such as "since when is out-year accounting ever a great yarn". But then aren't we entitled to a little truth-in-budgeting? Why should we be consistently lied to? I think it was Cheney who said that deficits don't matter, which I agree with up to a point. I often carry a small balance on my VISA as a (mostly imaginary) curb against further spending. The balance is small enough that it doesn't matter. But, as we all know, large balances matter. Big time. And anytime that merely paying the interest on a debt is a significant expense well, Houston we have a problem.

Jim Cramer said the GM takeover is a jobs program, something straight out of FDR's make-work New Deal. Mike Barnicle buys it. Someone else said that unions are all about collecting dues and not protecting workers. The government will choose inflation over high unemployment because the latter is more politically poisonous. "Name one successful unionized company," said Jim Cramer, and the crowd was silent. Which is disturbing since how can we recognize the legitimate value of unions when they end up routinely killing companies? Pope Paul VI once wrote (printed it off, forgot to save the link!):

The important role of union organizations must be admitted....Their activity, however, is not without its difficulties. Here and there the temptation can arise of profiting from a position of force to impose, particularly by strikes - the right to which as a final means of defense remains certainly recognized - conditions which are too burdensome for the overall economy and for the social body, or to desire to obtain in this way demands of a directly political nature.

And yet without unions how do workers protect their rights?
____
Came across this private revelation passage in Mary of Agreda's "City of God" concerning the fifth Joyful mystery:

In order that thou mayest understand better this sacrament of the Lord, remember, that the Infinite Wisdom made men capable of His Eternal Felicity and placed them on the way to this happiness, but left them in doubt of its attainment, as long as they have not yet acquired it and thus filled them with joyful hope and sorrowful fear of its final acquisition. This anxiety engenders in men a lifelong fear and abhorrence of sin, by which alone they can be deprived of beatitude and thus prevent them from being ensnared and misled by the corporeal and visible things of this earth. This anxiety the Creator assists by adding to the natural reasoning powers, faith and hope, which are the spurs of their love toward seeking and finding their last end.

WAU Meditation

Found here:

Discouraged about my lack of focus, I asked Gloria for advice. She suggested I begin my hour on my knees, praising Jesus. “Praise him both for the good things in your life and for the trials. Then sit and wait in silence for him to speak. Try leaving the rosary for your home prayers.”...

And so, the following Tuesday, I knelt before the monstrance and began praising God. I praised him for my husband and four children and all our material blessings— autos, a beautiful house, clothes in our closets, and food in our pantry.

Then I praised him for my husband’s unemployment and the cloud of uncertainty that hung over the family. I praised him for bringing us from our safe Canadian province of Nova Scotia to the strange new land of Texas. I praised him for the insanely huge and terrifying Texas bugs and for the fire ants that were all over our lawn. I praised him for the leaking water heater in our attic, for the resulting water damage throughout the three levels of the house, and for the cost of drying out the floors and walls before black mold set in.

I praised God for the frightening tornado warnings that beeped regularly on our television screen and caused anxiety in the children. I praised him for the cost of medical care in the U.S. and for my children’s health issues. I praised him for my dad’s recent death from cancer, after having survived a five-bypass heart operation.

And then I cried.

And when I was finished, too drained to have another thought in my head, Jesus whispered to my heart and filled it with his peace. I placed all my worries and fears at the foot of his cross and left that chapel feeling lighter than I had felt in a long time.

THE BUMPERSTICKER

"Someone I Love Was Murdered," it read
I said a quick prayer only to discover
that Someone I love was murdered too.

Had to laugh...

...at my wife's latest set-up to discourage the grackles and starlings from eating what is supposed to be for woodpeckers and goldfinches or other more worthy birds.

She was working from home at the kitchen table and was constantly getting up to shoo away the bad birds but then came up with the idea to string a rope through the window:

____
Meanwhile, the "BW Garden" (i.e. 'before weeds'):

It won't last but is nice while it does.

Rodak Does Roethke

The picture on this post is the sort of view I get from the pool looking up during H20 aerobics. The instructor is a fit, lean young women who despite her leanness has trouble keep the lower curve of her butt cheeks in her shorts. Could happen to anybody.

I haven't previously written about this experience since frankly I don't have the tools to write it up in such a literary and allusive way as Rodak did.