By now, the books have almost filled their shelves
Like some slow love affair reaching its end,
When little space is left for richer selves,
And all have spent the last cent they can spend.
The volumes lined in perfect rows await
A book or two. Then they will be complete,
Standing for hard-won knowledge taken straight
And upright, serving wisdom bound and neat.
Till then, they lean on one another, covers
Touching as they inch on toward the finish.
Who would ever think of books as lovers?
Day by day, the spaces left diminish.
--Len Krisak
October 15, 2012
Poem from latest National Review
Sundry & Various
O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?
This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?
Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?
Riveted by the first reading the other day (above) from Galatians 3 where Paul calls his flock foolish or stupid and mentions "Christ crucified" (?) in the context of condemning the Galatians tendency towards seeing legal contrivances as their salvation rather than faith. The Collegeville commentary puts it plainly in saying that Paul was asking, "were you experiences of the Spirit the result of legal observances or of faith?"
Meanwhile glad to see Steve Ray, one of the early lights of the wave of 1990s-era Catholic apologists, joining the Catechism-reading group for the Year o' Faith. He set up the "Catholic Defender" forum and billboard, a precursor to the blogs, and I loved posting on there way back when. Now he does pilgrimages to the Holy Land and says he's on the road 200 days a year giving speeches and whatnot but hopes to read the Bible and the Catechism in one year.
*
Surprised to learn on the way via His Eminence's radio show that Cardinal Dolan had sent a chastising letter to Yanks manager Joe Giardi after the latter had said that boringly usual thing, "I was raised Catholic but didn't meet Jesus until meeting him through my evangelical wife." Dolan said he wrote Girardi saying how a billion Catholics the last two thousand years have met Jesus via another woman: the Church. Kind of surprising he would publicly spar with the Yankee skipper; this seems a "new thing" where Catholic leaders more forcefully defend the Faith.
*
"Travel writer Tim Cahill summed this up for travellers in with the following truism: ‘Adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility.’ It’s a classic travel paradox: if you’re willing to suffer a little here, get scared out of your wits there, memories from your trip will be stronger – and fonder – than from one spent in action-free leisure."
*
Took a walk in the woods with our dog yesterday. Air temp moderate, but a huge wind made things interesting. Would one of the huge trees hovering over me snap a branch and kill or injury me? This fear was offset by the natural beauty of a carpet of yellow leaves and a wondrous yellow-green combination in the tall trees of this pleasing local park.
Thought about the fragility of life. Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis and that's not an abstract datum from history. I was in my mother's womb at that time, a brand new embryo and likely death would've come to us all. Even more shockingly, my brother and sister would've never been. There's nothing more haunting than the children that have never been, much more even than the victims of abortion who, at least, have the promise of eternal life if a tragically shortened temporal one.
Fr. Terry at Mass said that it's not well known that Kruscheve called Pope John XXIII and said, "Get me out of this!" And that a few days later Robert Kennedy called and said, "Get me out of this!" Two superpowers and they're appealing to a pontiff with no earthly armies, weapons or power. And this "old man in Italy" in response gave an address, just a three minute address, in which he prayed for peace...
*
I wonder if there's a common thread to my likes of running and reading. In both cases, they require little set-up and the least amount of equipment. Path of least resistance. They are both very simple. With running, you don't need much other than your legs. No expensive golf equipment or tennis rackets or greens fees or travel to course or court. You derive much joy from simply moving.
With books, similarly, you don't need anything but your local library or simply access to a computer. You are looking at scribbles on a page but you derive much joy from those simple scribbles. Art is expensive; there's a charge to go to the art museum and to buy works is cost prohibitive. But with books you can go to the library for free or purchase a classic work of literature, the literary equivalent of a Picasso painting, for less than ten dollars.
*
At Half-Price Books I'd anticipated a fulsome amount of money from the twenty-five books I gave them (I half-joked afterward that some of the books must've actually cost me money given the $3 final figure), so I gathered a half-dozen books I'd planned in getting with my found money. In my quiver was a dirt-cheap Roger Maris biography, a de Bottom book on the "joys and sorrows of work", but most beguilingly a re-telling of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" by Peter Ackroyd. Here was that famous work in the modern vernacular, which I assumed was how it must've sounded to the original readers or hearers. I read a bit of the Miller's Tale and it's just a completely different experience from reading the original, or semi-original. I was thirsty for the book by virtue of the promise on the fly-leaf to help explicate the Middle Ages (Does not pagan Rome in some ways feel more familiar to us than the Middle Ages?). But ultimately I thought I wouldn't put the time into Akroyd/Chaucer's book so I went with Thomas Merton's far more engaging letters. (Merton's letter on nuclear war and the problems with pacificism was enlightening and kind of surprising.)
I think some of the excitement of the original recipients of Chaucer's tales would be lost on me. The sort of vivid sexual punnery might now seem corny or jarring.One amazon.com reviewer calls Chaucer's work the "greatest poem ever written in Middle English", which is a bit like saying the Bengals are the greatest team in the middle part of the AFC North division. You're narrowing things there. One problem with Ackroyd's retelling is you would certainly never think it was ever a poem.
This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?
Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?
Riveted by the first reading the other day (above) from Galatians 3 where Paul calls his flock foolish or stupid and mentions "Christ crucified" (?) in the context of condemning the Galatians tendency towards seeing legal contrivances as their salvation rather than faith. The Collegeville commentary puts it plainly in saying that Paul was asking, "were you experiences of the Spirit the result of legal observances or of faith?"
*
Surprised to learn on the way via His Eminence's radio show that Cardinal Dolan had sent a chastising letter to Yanks manager Joe Giardi after the latter had said that boringly usual thing, "I was raised Catholic but didn't meet Jesus until meeting him through my evangelical wife." Dolan said he wrote Girardi saying how a billion Catholics the last two thousand years have met Jesus via another woman: the Church. Kind of surprising he would publicly spar with the Yankee skipper; this seems a "new thing" where Catholic leaders more forcefully defend the Faith.
*
"Travel writer Tim Cahill summed this up for travellers in with the following truism: ‘Adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility.’ It’s a classic travel paradox: if you’re willing to suffer a little here, get scared out of your wits there, memories from your trip will be stronger – and fonder – than from one spent in action-free leisure."
*
Took a walk in the woods with our dog yesterday. Air temp moderate, but a huge wind made things interesting. Would one of the huge trees hovering over me snap a branch and kill or injury me? This fear was offset by the natural beauty of a carpet of yellow leaves and a wondrous yellow-green combination in the tall trees of this pleasing local park.
Thought about the fragility of life. Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis and that's not an abstract datum from history. I was in my mother's womb at that time, a brand new embryo and likely death would've come to us all. Even more shockingly, my brother and sister would've never been. There's nothing more haunting than the children that have never been, much more even than the victims of abortion who, at least, have the promise of eternal life if a tragically shortened temporal one.
Fr. Terry at Mass said that it's not well known that Kruscheve called Pope John XXIII and said, "Get me out of this!" And that a few days later Robert Kennedy called and said, "Get me out of this!" Two superpowers and they're appealing to a pontiff with no earthly armies, weapons or power. And this "old man in Italy" in response gave an address, just a three minute address, in which he prayed for peace...
*
I wonder if there's a common thread to my likes of running and reading. In both cases, they require little set-up and the least amount of equipment. Path of least resistance. They are both very simple. With running, you don't need much other than your legs. No expensive golf equipment or tennis rackets or greens fees or travel to course or court. You derive much joy from simply moving.
With books, similarly, you don't need anything but your local library or simply access to a computer. You are looking at scribbles on a page but you derive much joy from those simple scribbles. Art is expensive; there's a charge to go to the art museum and to buy works is cost prohibitive. But with books you can go to the library for free or purchase a classic work of literature, the literary equivalent of a Picasso painting, for less than ten dollars.
*
At Half-Price Books I'd anticipated a fulsome amount of money from the twenty-five books I gave them (I half-joked afterward that some of the books must've actually cost me money given the $3 final figure), so I gathered a half-dozen books I'd planned in getting with my found money. In my quiver was a dirt-cheap Roger Maris biography, a de Bottom book on the "joys and sorrows of work", but most beguilingly a re-telling of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" by Peter Ackroyd. Here was that famous work in the modern vernacular, which I assumed was how it must've sounded to the original readers or hearers. I read a bit of the Miller's Tale and it's just a completely different experience from reading the original, or semi-original. I was thirsty for the book by virtue of the promise on the fly-leaf to help explicate the Middle Ages (Does not pagan Rome in some ways feel more familiar to us than the Middle Ages?). But ultimately I thought I wouldn't put the time into Akroyd/Chaucer's book so I went with Thomas Merton's far more engaging letters. (Merton's letter on nuclear war and the problems with pacificism was enlightening and kind of surprising.)
I think some of the excitement of the original recipients of Chaucer's tales would be lost on me. The sort of vivid sexual punnery might now seem corny or jarring.One amazon.com reviewer calls Chaucer's work the "greatest poem ever written in Middle English", which is a bit like saying the Bengals are the greatest team in the middle part of the AFC North division. You're narrowing things there. One problem with Ackroyd's retelling is you would certainly never think it was ever a poem.
October 12, 2012
¡Ay, Caramba!, Redlegs!
Ach, what a difference a couple games makes.
Feel a bit discombobulated by the swift and sudden Reds' left turn and subsequent demise. Once up 2-0 in a best of five, soon deadlocked at 2-2, now out. Glad I didn't crow early to old boss Rick, a Giants fan. Lord knows in baseball it's never over till it's over. And worse, ace Cueto is out with a muscle injury. What a difference one pitcher makes but then he's 25% of 50% of the game. (Four starters as a rotation, with pitching representing at least half the game.) Mike Leake got leaky with runs in game 4. If the Reds could've pitched Cueto, Arroyo, Latos and Bailey they'd have won the series. But injuries are part of the game.
Most puzzling to me is why Dusty took Homer Bailey out after seven innings of one-hit ball the other day. The game was screaming "extra innings" so why would you go to the bullpen earlier than you have to? Baker's a very good manager but he contributed to that loss. If you say, "oh but he wanted to pinchhit for Bailey" I say Bailey's a good-hitting pitcher and even if your pinch-hitter is hitting .280, that's only .080 better than Bailey, which means he has less than a 1 in 10 chance of doing better than Bailey would do. Not good math, especially since pitching is the name of the game. Bailey's coming off a no-hitter, why not ride him? Instead we were left with one of the weaker members of the bullpen to start the 10th.
But ultimately no team can lose their ace pitcher and expect to do well in the playoffs. Totally unrealistic, which means you really can't blame the Reds for going "one and done". The marginal difference between playoff teams is small to begin with, so when you lose your best pitcher you're at a big disadvantage. It's almost like you're giving your competitors an extra game lead in every season.
It seemed pretty unlikely from the outset of game five that they'd win given the huge momentum swing of going from 2-0 to 2-2. Theoretically that last game is independent of what has gone before but that's to think of humans as robots or computers. We know what has gone before and it influences us.
So it's almost like it would've been better to have to play game 5 back in SF. Heck, they may as well have played all the games in SF given the results. Fr. Rob Kegron of "The Catholic Guy" radio show was ecstatic, which means there's one degree of separation between me and two Giants fans (once with ex-boss Rick and also with Fr. Rob).
I feel the prophet since I remember saying I didn't trust Latos or Leake in the playoffs. Latos looks the part of a troubled youth. Of course Latos proved me wrong in the first game, pitching four great innings. But to consider him your game five ace just made me miss Cueto. And with Leake I just thought all season he wasn't quite experienced enough.
In the end pitching wins championships and we got only two quality starts out of the five games so really the die was cast there.
Various & Sundry
Interesting that I'm reading about Abraham Lincoln's father while a relative's financial problems continue. Thomas Lincoln was poor and always on the edge of bankruptcy mainly due to poor choices and laziness. (For example, Thomas picked about the worst farm land he could.) Lincoln's father always needed money and never changed or was able to change, and there's a lesson in that. Some people are going to live close to the edge and it's tricky to figure out how not to enable bad behavior while being compassionate. And to not become emotionally invested in trying to change them. Some people can't handle money, which seems infinitely puzzling to people who can, but I suspect it's like that whenever we encounter someone different from us, whether for better or for worse. A recipe for frustration is to try to influence financial choices. People are pretty married to their monetary habits. Perhaps part of the problem is the heretical 'health and wealth' view of Christianity. I don't think one can pray your way out of debt. God seems pretty big on letting us figure things out on our own, and to let us make a lot of mistakes. Lord knows I have and do. *
Related, from Chabon's "Telegraph Avenue":
He absorbed from his poor black and Latino clients powerful notions of the sovereignty of bad luck and death. He had suffered no ill fortune throughout the length of a tranquil, comfortable, and fulfilling life and so at any moment anticipated—even felt that he deserved—the swift equalizing backhand of universal misfortune.
*
Picked up "Arguably", a big collection of essays by Christopher Hitchens. The $9.99 e-book price seems a steal given the immense book and the undeniable erudition of the late author. (By the way, I learned recently that Fr. Barron is a fan of Hitchens, though obviously not of his atheism.) I gobbled up essays about Ben Franklin, John Brown and Abe Lincoln. Learned much, and Hitchens pointed me to a two-volume Lincoln biography that I'd love to have if money was no object (it's a ridiculously pricey $74 even on Kindle!). Lincoln had an admixture of doubt and faith to make him more interesting in some ways (to me) than saints and pagans.
*
There's certainly no substitute for looking upon the Cross and trusting that that's how much He loves us. That is the answer to all frets, fears and accusations. That alone, in one act, can solve the questions and silence the inner critic. If I think about the ways God seems absent in the world that is of no use. Instead I should ponder all the ways He seems present - i.e. in the beauty of sunshine and trees, in the astonishing sweep of mountains and sea, in the saints. God seems present to me most obviously in the Cross and Eucharist, the saints, and nature. Nature, because how come beauty exists if God doesn't care or sweat the details? The saints because they are so certain of God's love that they are able to do seemingly impossible things like love their neighbor and levitate. The Cross and Eucharist because on the Cross God chose to pin himself there for our sake then, and the Eucharist because that is where God chooses to pin himself for our sake now. Year of Faith indeed. Thank you Holy Father.
*
A couple lines from Chesterton, the prophet of joy and gratitude:
Here dies another day
During which I have had eyes, ears, hands
And the great world round me;
And with tomorrow begins another.
Why am I allowed two?
*
Wherever there are happy men
they will build beautiful things.
The Rich Prose Sylings of Chabon
From Telegraph Avenue:
Decades of avian companionship had raised a fuzz of claw marks at the shoulders of Mr. Jones’s green leisure suit, tussocks on the padded polyester lawn.*His wife, though no doubt she loved him, was the latest in a long line of experts and connoisseurs, reaching back through the army and high school to his aunties, to underrate the rarity and condition of Archy’s soul.*[She] found herself blown off course by an unbearable craving into the cumin-scented gloom of the Queen of Sheba. Steeled by a lifetime of training in the arts of repression, like Spock battling the septenary mating madness of the pon farr, Gwen had resisted the urges and surges of estrogen and progesterone for each of the first thirty-four weeks of her pregnancy, denying all cravings, battened down tight against hormonal gusts.*She flung aside the beaded strands with a left hand that could splinter pine planks and reduce cinder block to gray dust. Strings snapped. Hundreds of brown and tan beads rattled down, darting and pinging and scattering in whorls, mapping, like particles in a cloud chamber, the flow of qigong from her black-belt hand.*
Her hair was a glory of tendrils for the snaring of husbands.
The girl looked up. In those ibex eyes, Gwen saw guilt and mockery; but above all: contempt.*A small black Buddha greeted her from a low table by the front door, where it kept company with a photograph of Lydia Frankenthaler, the producer of an Oscar-winning documentary film about the neglected plight of lesbians in Nazi Germany;*The fog had burned off, leaving only a softness, as tender as a memory from childhood, to blur the sunlight that warmed the sprawl of rosemary and purple salvia along the fragrant sidewalk and fell in shifting shafts through the branches of the monkey-puzzle tree.*He had to this day never forgotten the strange horror of glimpsing one of Mr. Oliveira’s many tattoos, like something out of Nathaniel Hawthorne, consisting of a ragged rectangle, a bar of black ink scrawled across the cordovan hide of the old sailor’s upper arm in order to blot out, like the pen of a censor, some underlying name or image whose memory, for mysterious reasons, was abhorrent.*A lamentable lamentation of the door hinges, sounding like the gate on a crypt filled with vengeful dead folks being thrown open, and Valletta Moore got out of the car. Big-boned, shapely, on the fatal side of fifty, high-waisted, high-breasted, face a feline triangle. Beer-bottle-brown eyes, skin luminous and butterscotch, as if she herself had come fresh from the spray gun of Sixto Cantor....The architecture of her ass was something deeper than a memory to Archy, something almost beyond remembrance, an archetype, the pattern of all asses forever after, wired into the structure of reality itself.*...the lady most definitely giving off that heavy 1978 Spencer’s smell of love candles and sandalwood incense but, laid over top of it, the stink of cigarette, the instant-potatoes smell you might find in the interior of a beat-to-shit Toronado.
October 09, 2012
Reads Like Parody!
I rather enjoyed news of this "non-event" in my non-diocesan newspaper (click to enlarge):
Moving Letter...
Wonderful to hear of a religious vocation discerned. And I thought it was pretty good that this young lady (a worker at LifeSite News) admitted to being a birther. Kind of honest. Usually people try to sweep their old opinions under the table. She was also spot-on about supporting McCain. Good Lord I can't believe some people sat out the '08 election in some search for 'purity'. But then everybody's got to follow their conscience and that's as it should be. Also a great final paragraph from the excerpt below:By: Kathleen Gilbert, Former U.S. Bureau Chief
My Final Letter to You
Dear readers,Full piece here.
I'm sorry to say this is my final letter to you.
A previous letter hinted at my mysterious disappearance from LifeSiteNews' roster a few weeks ago. So tonight I'm picking up the metaphorical pen one last time before I enter the Carmelite monastery in Buffalo, New York, to begin my postulancy there on October 14. The feeling is difficult to describe, but bittersweet is a large part.
...Very few are so privileged as to fight evil as a form of gainful employment - I was. I am leaving one deeply spiritual work, for another.
When I began as a very nervous novice journalist in August 2008, it was only weeks away from Obama's victory. As I set to work keeping up on the election, I began reading up on this strange character with the silky intonation, and soon came to the conclusion that he was not just bad - a mortal enemy of unborn children (somehow a ho-hum feature of political candidates now) - but a real force of destruction against America and its spiritual roots.
Panicking, I dove headfirst into the birther world, clamoring before family and friends that even though McCain was a tepid pro-lifer at best, if we elected Obama, America would never be the same again. Whether or not I was right about his birthplace, I was right about the outcome. We have ended Obama's first term with Christian retailers fighting a $1.3 million dollar-per-day fine in the United States of America, just for being Christian.
I came in with Obama, and, God willing, I'm going out with him too....
It's a mission that pro-life actress Vanessa Ore summed up eloquently in an encounter with an abortion-minded friend: “I love you, no matter what you do, but ... I have to be the voice of this child right now for you.”
There is a desperate need for that voice.
October 08, 2012
In Praise of Books
Link here:
There is something about books, something wonderful, something mysterious. We have somehow symbolized reality by a miracle we call language. And one of the most precious and enduring form of language is the written word. Where did we ever think to denote our sounds with the lines and angles and curves we call letters. And where did we think to combine them endlessly into words, phrases a sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books, and libraries. Yet here you and I are now, mysteriously connected through this medium called language and the written word. Somehow these shapes on the screen symbolize reality and light up our mind.
There is an old saying, “Paper has perfect recall.” And thus, even as language and culture change, our books have held a kind of lasting memory of human thought and creativity. Even when living humans forget, books can remain on a shelf, only to be rediscovered many years later. People are forgetful, but paper has perfect recall.
This & That
Often I find myself feeling sorry for those out of the spiritual loop, while Jesus seems to say that we should instead simply be grateful for what we've been given.
Example: I think back to those of Job's time, before Christ, when every calamity meant that you had offended God. I feel so sorry for those folks. I think it unfair, a chronological unfairness. It's also totally unfair that I have the benefits of modern medicine that most generations have lacked.
Jesus didn't seem focused on the unfairness of Job's time but asks us to relish our own fortunateness. "Blessed are the eyes that see what you see," he says to his disciples. "For I say to you, many prophets and kings desired to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it." Jesus didn't seem to feel sorry for those prophets and kings but seems to want us to concentrate on our own response.
*
From Liturgy of the Hours yesterday I was struck by the famous passage from Ezekiel 37:12-14 and a perhaps rather obvious thought occurred to me after reading, "I will open your graves and have you rise from them...I will put my Spirit in you that you may live, and I will settle you upon your land." I thought about how that seemed well fulfilled in Christ, who literally had his grave opened (the stone rolled away) and how he rose and how he is now settled in his land, Heaven. (Although of course "His land" is earth and Heaven and He is at home in both). But that passage in the OT always has felt like a future promise, but it's already been partially fulfilled.
*
Wow. Reading Michael Chabon is humbling. The guy puts together sentences I can't imagine concocting. He's an artist, a jazz artist, stringing together these vivid images with pyrotechnic words. My highlighter has gone dry, or would if I weren't using an electronic e-reading device with virtual highlighting. Chabon has a vocabulary that anyone would envy and he's my age too - with all a 49-year old's slightly slipping powers of recall (or maybe it's just MY slipping powers of recall). Or maybe he just often consults dictionaries and thesauruses.
Read about 12 pages of his "Telegraph Avenue", which felt sufficiently satisfying. "Telegraph" has a full complement of artistic graces about it, a nice vigor. Riveting episode of a mother giving birth and having physical problems afterward.
Also read about beer in the fabulously priced and well-written "Tasting Beer" ($2.99). Read on iPad for all the glorious in-color pictures. Like reading about the origin of agriculture and about wild grasses in Kurdistan (almost wrote 'Turdistan'!) and how those folks were the first to figure how to cultivate wheat from those grasses. Talk about spinning straw into gold, because from wheat you can make -you guessed it!- beer.
*
For all the talk about baseball being "too slow", I thought at least there isn't the time between baseball plays as there is in football. But then I measured a bit: with football (Cincy versus Miami in this case) you wait about thirty seconds between plays while in baseball (via an old Reds-Pirates game I found on dvr) it's...about thirty seconds between pitches. That certainly undermines what I thought to be true, especially since any given football play is generally more determinative to the outcome of the game than any baseball pitch. Fortunately decent baseball announcers really make the time between pitches less an annoyance though. But I do have to give football the edge on action, even if I give baseball the edge on beauty (the average baseball field is 186% more beautiful than the average football field).
The Reds-Giants game started at 9:37pm, thank you very little MLB. Which means the game could last till 1am. Feel a bit disgruntled that St. Louis got in. They had a mediocre season, soundly beaten by the Reds over the 162 game season, but thanks to this joke of a second wild card berth (thank you very little MLB), they end up beating the Braves in a "one game playoff" (which makes about as much sense for baseball as having marathon runners run a sprint to determine the winner).
Speaking of running, learned that blogger/priest Msgr. Pope from the Archdiocese of Washington D.C. ran a 4:44 mile when he was young. That is motoring. My fastest was around 5:20. On his Facebook page there are a lot of pictures he's posted of himself. I suppose as creatures of God we all ought admire His creation, beginning with ourselves. "I am fearfully and wonderfully made...".
*
Pleasant run down High Street, past the smells of coffee and chocolate bars. Found myself in a meltingly picturesque scene such that I longed for a camera: autumnally-yellowed trees flanking the old neon sign of a bar and grill. I felt such a strong sensucht for this area called the "Short North". I wanted to visit those art galleries and coffee joints but realized that it wouldn't necessarily be the same. A runner has total access to the moment, having a task to perform and considered by others a transient.
Oh moan-sad am I, for summer hast flee'd and I have nothing but fleas to remember her by. Those golden, bolden moments in the bun-sun, run till the fun, mariachi music in my ears, swinging ham-handedly on the hammock in the glade pervade. Miss I keen already! Drinking in the sun, sunning in the drink, flim-flam, Pakistan! I rue the Rue that left me on the corner, that left me high and dry, absent my Absinthe! So long ago now, that lit spring day in olde Indianapolis - how pathetically grateful I was for the sun'd gardens beside Museum proper! Statuesque statues rimmed the drunkenly green lawns and I was instantly art-toxicated. I was in Paris, at the Louvre for all I knew. I think it all hysterics, all but fuss, and I wonder if some fair day years hence if, bitte God!, I'm in heaven, I will look back and see it all as slightly hysterical, as majoring in minors? Ah perspective, you elusive bastard! You sing your song only after the Fat Lady has already sung.
*
There's a growing sense of the truth of the old bromide, "the chickens come home to roost." If there's one pattern that seems to be consistently if belatedly followed, it's that no one, for very long, gets away with anything.
We saw it with the "original sin" of America, that of slavery and how as Lincoln said in his Second Inagural that every drop of blood drawn by the lash would be repaid by the the sword.
We saw it with pederast priests and how for so long the Church was respected enough to be let alone - until a tipping point was reached in which outrage on behalf of the victims mixed with a lessening respect for the clergy created, rightly in this case, outrage over bishops who moved priests willy-nilly.
We see it with the economic crunch: millions of people out of work because banks played a fool's game by lending money without sense or collateral.
And I think we're going to see it, sooner or later, in the fall of the U.S. from a position of powerful political and economic influence simply because waste, sloth and debt don't go unpunished.
Will we see it likewise with decade after decade of aborting millions of our own children? Or because the unborn are voiceless and defenseless, will that chicken come home to roost only in the next life?
I was reading today about how hundreds would come out to see a public execution during the early centuries in America. We think that barbaric. How much worse is the execution, witnessed or not, of defenseless babies in the womb?
Example: I think back to those of Job's time, before Christ, when every calamity meant that you had offended God. I feel so sorry for those folks. I think it unfair, a chronological unfairness. It's also totally unfair that I have the benefits of modern medicine that most generations have lacked.
Jesus didn't seem focused on the unfairness of Job's time but asks us to relish our own fortunateness. "Blessed are the eyes that see what you see," he says to his disciples. "For I say to you, many prophets and kings desired to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it." Jesus didn't seem to feel sorry for those prophets and kings but seems to want us to concentrate on our own response.
*
From Liturgy of the Hours yesterday I was struck by the famous passage from Ezekiel 37:12-14 and a perhaps rather obvious thought occurred to me after reading, "I will open your graves and have you rise from them...I will put my Spirit in you that you may live, and I will settle you upon your land." I thought about how that seemed well fulfilled in Christ, who literally had his grave opened (the stone rolled away) and how he rose and how he is now settled in his land, Heaven. (Although of course "His land" is earth and Heaven and He is at home in both). But that passage in the OT always has felt like a future promise, but it's already been partially fulfilled.
*
Wow. Reading Michael Chabon is humbling. The guy puts together sentences I can't imagine concocting. He's an artist, a jazz artist, stringing together these vivid images with pyrotechnic words. My highlighter has gone dry, or would if I weren't using an electronic e-reading device with virtual highlighting. Chabon has a vocabulary that anyone would envy and he's my age too - with all a 49-year old's slightly slipping powers of recall (or maybe it's just MY slipping powers of recall). Or maybe he just often consults dictionaries and thesauruses.
Read about 12 pages of his "Telegraph Avenue", which felt sufficiently satisfying. "Telegraph" has a full complement of artistic graces about it, a nice vigor. Riveting episode of a mother giving birth and having physical problems afterward.
Also read about beer in the fabulously priced and well-written "Tasting Beer" ($2.99). Read on iPad for all the glorious in-color pictures. Like reading about the origin of agriculture and about wild grasses in Kurdistan (almost wrote 'Turdistan'!) and how those folks were the first to figure how to cultivate wheat from those grasses. Talk about spinning straw into gold, because from wheat you can make -you guessed it!- beer.
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For all the talk about baseball being "too slow", I thought at least there isn't the time between baseball plays as there is in football. But then I measured a bit: with football (Cincy versus Miami in this case) you wait about thirty seconds between plays while in baseball (via an old Reds-Pirates game I found on dvr) it's...about thirty seconds between pitches. That certainly undermines what I thought to be true, especially since any given football play is generally more determinative to the outcome of the game than any baseball pitch. Fortunately decent baseball announcers really make the time between pitches less an annoyance though. But I do have to give football the edge on action, even if I give baseball the edge on beauty (the average baseball field is 186% more beautiful than the average football field).
The Reds-Giants game started at 9:37pm, thank you very little MLB. Which means the game could last till 1am. Feel a bit disgruntled that St. Louis got in. They had a mediocre season, soundly beaten by the Reds over the 162 game season, but thanks to this joke of a second wild card berth (thank you very little MLB), they end up beating the Braves in a "one game playoff" (which makes about as much sense for baseball as having marathon runners run a sprint to determine the winner).
Speaking of running, learned that blogger/priest Msgr. Pope from the Archdiocese of Washington D.C. ran a 4:44 mile when he was young. That is motoring. My fastest was around 5:20. On his Facebook page there are a lot of pictures he's posted of himself. I suppose as creatures of God we all ought admire His creation, beginning with ourselves. "I am fearfully and wonderfully made...".
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Pleasant run down High Street, past the smells of coffee and chocolate bars. Found myself in a meltingly picturesque scene such that I longed for a camera: autumnally-yellowed trees flanking the old neon sign of a bar and grill. I felt such a strong sensucht for this area called the "Short North". I wanted to visit those art galleries and coffee joints but realized that it wouldn't necessarily be the same. A runner has total access to the moment, having a task to perform and considered by others a transient.
Oh moan-sad am I, for summer hast flee'd and I have nothing but fleas to remember her by. Those golden, bolden moments in the bun-sun, run till the fun, mariachi music in my ears, swinging ham-handedly on the hammock in the glade pervade. Miss I keen already! Drinking in the sun, sunning in the drink, flim-flam, Pakistan! I rue the Rue that left me on the corner, that left me high and dry, absent my Absinthe! So long ago now, that lit spring day in olde Indianapolis - how pathetically grateful I was for the sun'd gardens beside Museum proper! Statuesque statues rimmed the drunkenly green lawns and I was instantly art-toxicated. I was in Paris, at the Louvre for all I knew. I think it all hysterics, all but fuss, and I wonder if some fair day years hence if, bitte God!, I'm in heaven, I will look back and see it all as slightly hysterical, as majoring in minors? Ah perspective, you elusive bastard! You sing your song only after the Fat Lady has already sung.
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There's a growing sense of the truth of the old bromide, "the chickens come home to roost." If there's one pattern that seems to be consistently if belatedly followed, it's that no one, for very long, gets away with anything.
We saw it with the "original sin" of America, that of slavery and how as Lincoln said in his Second Inagural that every drop of blood drawn by the lash would be repaid by the the sword.
We saw it with pederast priests and how for so long the Church was respected enough to be let alone - until a tipping point was reached in which outrage on behalf of the victims mixed with a lessening respect for the clergy created, rightly in this case, outrage over bishops who moved priests willy-nilly.
We see it with the economic crunch: millions of people out of work because banks played a fool's game by lending money without sense or collateral.
And I think we're going to see it, sooner or later, in the fall of the U.S. from a position of powerful political and economic influence simply because waste, sloth and debt don't go unpunished.
Will we see it likewise with decade after decade of aborting millions of our own children? Or because the unborn are voiceless and defenseless, will that chicken come home to roost only in the next life?
I was reading today about how hundreds would come out to see a public execution during the early centuries in America. We think that barbaric. How much worse is the execution, witnessed or not, of defenseless babies in the womb?
October 05, 2012
The Debate
Good column here:
The AP report on reactions to Lehrer’s “moderation” was brutal. The bipartisan consensus seems to be that Lehrer totally lost control of the debate. The use of the verb “control” is revealing: Since Obama declared his candidacy for president in 2007, his biography and message and agenda and record have been remarkably “controlled,” moderated, and protected by a pliant media.
This was the first debate in Obama’s career in which he was pitted against a viable and competitive and confrontational Republican... Lehrer, intentionally or not, upended the dynamic of the campaign by ceding “control” of the debate to the candidates. Obama was vulnerable and exposed.
Sad that a journalist of Lehrer’s talents and experience could be so insouciantly dismissed because he failed to protect the image and prerogatives of a failed president. Sad, but also telling. The wolf pack that is the contemporary liberal media is so reckless and slavish in its devotion to liberalism that it will turn on a moment’s notice against every alpha and beta and omega that strays.
Book of Job
Good Msgr. Pope post on the problem of suffering:
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In chapter 9 Job sounds passive-aggressive. He sounds like he's flattering God but has this undercurrent of aggravation towards Him. He says something like "who am I to question God?" while meaning, "hey this is not a fair fight." The homilist said that the people of that time didn't understand that sickness, earthquakes, plagues, and even rain were NOT directly from God but are "secondary actors". God isn't shifting the tectonic plates, nature is doing that. Nature was created by God but not everything that happens to us is directly done by God.
But one can't help but feel sorry for the people of Job's time then since they were laboring under this delusion that everything bad that happened was directly from God and was thus his judgment on them. You want to say, "why didn't God tell them that?" God is content to let us figure things out. He is tremendously big on giving over power to his creatures, given that we have the power to kill each other, including his own Son.
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Lately I've been impressed by how from so many different sources I've been hearing about the "new evanglization". Sherry W's book "Forming Intentional Disciples", N.T. Wright's, the Liturgy of the Hours, the "Year of Faith", Catholic bloggers.... It seems we've reached a tipping point, as if God is trying to tell us that now evangelization is not optional. Certainly the trajectory is not good, although that's to look at it in too detached a fashion. It's not a numbers game given that the good shepherd would leave the 99 for the sake of the one.
I also think back to an argument I had with a friend and how I appealed to authority but did so in a needlessly authoritarian way. I said after he railed against priests, "Your beef is with Jesus. He's the one who left humans in charge." My argument wasn't effective in part because only love is persuasive. It's like I was saying that Jesus had outsourced his job when, of course, Jesus said he would be with us always. That he would send his Spirit and that we would be animated by that Spirit. I was the one who lacked faith. What Christ would say is not "hey Jim (not his real name) you should be getting over your past hurts by now," but "hey Jim I have a bottomless well of unconditional love for you." Love is patient, love is kind, as St. Paul wrote. If six years ago Ron was telling me exactly the same stories with exactly the same venom that only corroborates his need for grace and a sense of God's love. The Eucharistic will bring him back, not arguing that church is Christ's plan.
I am part of a bigger plan. I have a place on a canvas which has both light and darkness that exist in a kind of interplay that, for his own purposes, God permits.From the latest Word Among Us:
“Enjoy” the book of Job. There is a kind of paradoxical serenity that comes to us from realizing that we see and know very little. In letting God be God, and letting go of our passion to control, and understand everything, there comes a kind of serenity.
The mysterious suffering that exists before us, is a very great mystery indeed. But it is not the only mystery. For if we are to ask why there is suffering, why is there evil? then we must also ask: Why is there love, why is there beauty, why is there justice, and why do we yearn for these?
Somehow, we know that we cannot answer these questions. If we cannot answer why there is beauty and goodness or truth, and why God has put them into our heart, then how should we expect to be answer the question, “Why is there evil, why is there suffering?”
Leave it to God. Now, he is not giving simple answers. Instead, he is reminding us that we know not whereof we speak.
In his apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris, Blessed Pope John Paul II wrote that the Book of Job “is not the last word on this subject… . In a certain way it is a foretelling of the Passion of Christ.” Jesus, though innocent, endured bitter suffering— including betrayal by close friends. And in his suffering, he not only redeemed us; he revealed the redemptive power implicit in all hardship and pain. To explain this, papal preacher Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa asked: “What do you do to reassure someone that a particular drink contains no poison? You drink it yourself first, in front of him. This is what God has done for humanity: he has drunk the bitter cup of the passion… . At the bottom of the chalice, there must be a pearl. We know the name of that pearl: resurrection!”
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In chapter 9 Job sounds passive-aggressive. He sounds like he's flattering God but has this undercurrent of aggravation towards Him. He says something like "who am I to question God?" while meaning, "hey this is not a fair fight." The homilist said that the people of that time didn't understand that sickness, earthquakes, plagues, and even rain were NOT directly from God but are "secondary actors". God isn't shifting the tectonic plates, nature is doing that. Nature was created by God but not everything that happens to us is directly done by God.
But one can't help but feel sorry for the people of Job's time then since they were laboring under this delusion that everything bad that happened was directly from God and was thus his judgment on them. You want to say, "why didn't God tell them that?" God is content to let us figure things out. He is tremendously big on giving over power to his creatures, given that we have the power to kill each other, including his own Son.
*
Lately I've been impressed by how from so many different sources I've been hearing about the "new evanglization". Sherry W's book "Forming Intentional Disciples", N.T. Wright's, the Liturgy of the Hours, the "Year of Faith", Catholic bloggers.... It seems we've reached a tipping point, as if God is trying to tell us that now evangelization is not optional. Certainly the trajectory is not good, although that's to look at it in too detached a fashion. It's not a numbers game given that the good shepherd would leave the 99 for the sake of the one.
I also think back to an argument I had with a friend and how I appealed to authority but did so in a needlessly authoritarian way. I said after he railed against priests, "Your beef is with Jesus. He's the one who left humans in charge." My argument wasn't effective in part because only love is persuasive. It's like I was saying that Jesus had outsourced his job when, of course, Jesus said he would be with us always. That he would send his Spirit and that we would be animated by that Spirit. I was the one who lacked faith. What Christ would say is not "hey Jim (not his real name) you should be getting over your past hurts by now," but "hey Jim I have a bottomless well of unconditional love for you." Love is patient, love is kind, as St. Paul wrote. If six years ago Ron was telling me exactly the same stories with exactly the same venom that only corroborates his need for grace and a sense of God's love. The Eucharistic will bring him back, not arguing that church is Christ's plan.
October 03, 2012
GoodReads review...
Found on Goodreads, a review of a biography of Pope John XXIII:
Anyone unfamiliar with the "Good Pope" will find some interesting information and anecdotes. Tobin does a good job of portraying Angelo's humble beginnings and steady rise through the Church's ranks, focusing on his diplomatic appointments in Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, and France. Yet of all these instances in the pope's life it was the account of John XXIII's passing that I found especially moving. Surrounded by family and staff, the pope endured great pain in his final days, the result of the stomach cancer which took his life. Speaking to those present before receiving the Last Rites he was heard to say
"The secret of my ministry is that crucifix you see opposite my bed. It's there so that I can see it in my first waking moments and before going to sleep. It's there, also, so that I can talk to it during the long evening hours. Look at it, see it as I see it. Those open arms have been the program of my pontificate: they say that Christ died for all, for all. No one is excluded from his love, from his forgiveness..."
Various & Sundry
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Read more of N.T. Wright's book on the kingdom-making cross. Sometimes I think of how tenuous the gospels must be for them to be so routinely misinterpreted if what Wright claims is true. (Of course even the Eucharist, pretty clearly instituted by Christ, is refuted by a third of Christendom.) The Bible seems a very fragile flower. There's a long history of this failing to understand given how most of those in Christ's time didn't see Him as the fulfillment of the Old Testament scriptures. The OT message of the suffering servant as the Messiah perhaps was understandably muted by the example of the powerful Davidic earthly kingdom.
Wright sees our mission to evangelize not as "telling people of your new religious experience" or of "informing them that there is a new prospect of a a much better otherworldly destiny" called Heaven, but to witness that now there is "another king, Jesus" (Acts 17:7). Right here on earth. Pope John Paul II in one of his writings saw the point of departure for the new evangelization as certitude that in Christ there are inexhaustible riches, beginning with Christ himself, in his person, our salvation.
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The other night I joined the first live-on-the-'net American Chesterton Society meeting. Heard Dale Alquist talk about old business, new business. Finally he drew a name for a free trip to Rome in the spring and alas it wasn't mine. I'd entered late, but I think not too late. Had a one in 150 chance which certainly beats the lottery. You could ask questions so I asked, "Dale, why didn't you draw my name?". I also asked, in a serious vein, when the Chesterton society magazine would be available via an iPad app. Dale had no idea what "iPad app" meant, and definitely I could've been clearer ("when will the magazine be made available for iPad?). One of his helpers offered that they were "working on it".
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Steph not pleased that I occasionally have my earphones on. She doesn't like to have to repeat herself. It's her pet peeve with me but then I figure it's part of making her saint-making process, putting up with my earphones, ha. Oh but did that classical music go down well! It felt as though it'd been sooo long and long it has been. I haven't listened to classical in at least a month or two.
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Not sure I'll watch all the debate tonight - sadly I think this election is over (may I be wrong!). Romney is down 7% in Ohio (even in the poll I trust, the Columbus Dispatch), and if Romney doesn't win OH I think he's out.
The Train Guy
It was kind of interesting to hear the reactions of Lino Rulli & Fr. Rob of "The Catholic Guy" radio show versus that of Greg Willits of "The Catholics Next Door". Lino and Fr. Rob mainly used it as an opportunity to goof on the guy and/or say that something was wrong there, while Greg Willits admired that something so innocent could give such happiness.
Willits has a positive view of hobbies and the small pleasures of life, calling them "gifts from God." He mentioned how one of his joys used to be reading fiction and that now he's getting back into it. He invited callers to tell him what gives them momentary joy or happiness. It's kind of unusual to hear that on Catholic radio, if only because often the message (understandably) is that we find our joy in God and that we should form a sense of detachment from earthly things.
Willits mentioned ministering to a paraplegic who, on the surface, might not have a lot to be thankful for but who was intensely fascinated by planes. He'd watch five straight hours of aviation documentaries every Wednesday night. Some might call that interest trivial and "non-productive" towards the goal of Heaven, but you could also look at it as a gift from God, as this earthly life is.
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It seems as though my priorities have shifted a bit when it comes to owning things. I'm less sentimental and souvenir-oriented. I'm as rabid as anyone when it comes to new gadgets, devices like the Keurig, the iPad, the Kindle. But at least I've lost some of that huge desire to own things like books or land or a large desk.
I used to have two big desks, one with sentimental value attached since it was given to me by my parents. But eventually Steph talked me into getting rid of them both, for space reasons and because I never used them. Circumstances change and our need for things comes and goes.
I used to love my desk and used it every Friday night to write and dream and drink on. The desktop was there but now with the iPad I can write anywhere so the desk became something of a throwback to an earlier area, a symbol of my bachelorhood and Friday night pseudo-bachelorhood. A souvenir of a previous age. But when we converted that bedroom to the grandchildren room it made no sense to stick with it. I've mostly totally forgotten about it until now, when I think back to those dark nights watching the moon crisscross the sky through that bedroom window.
Books! I have too many. I can't imagine moving them, I'd have to give away half or more. It seems they multiply like rabbits. The Kindle came along with perfect timing. I'd had my dream of ceiling-high wood bookshelves, a room of wonder, and so now it feels pointlessly burdensome to my heirs to have them have to go through all that stuff. At first when I got my Kindle I felt that ownership sensibility, the fear that I would collect a great number of books and then my Kindle would break or amazon would stop making them or some other disaster would befall. But now I'm more loosey-goosey. I don't sweat it. There will be some sort of device. Or I can always read the physical books I have now - I have a lifetime reading supply just in those tomes.
Land seems less useful too. When I was younger I desired a view, an expanse of Big Yard that extended to the horizon. But I learned, after buying our current house, that land only satisfies for awhile. The capacious backyard we bought now feels crimped, as I suspect would - after a couple years - the next house's yard, even if it were acres. It's all what you're used to and I don't intended to get on that treadmill, constantly upping the amount of acres we "need". Certainly privacy was always my main goal and the tall trees on the sides have pretty much delivered that. I choose sun and privacy over a nice view and forested acres, as nice as the latter might be.
My likes seem to be moving to more transient things: a beer, the sun, fiction, vacations, new technologies: all of these last but a season, or a night, and fade. But gifts they still are.
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Read a nice quote from Pope John XXIII about the crucifix. I get a consoling feeling about the crucifix as well and it's the first thing I see every day as well. I kind of thought it was cool that I had something in common with a holy person, that we both are strengthened by simply seeing the physical object of a crucifix. I kind of like it that Popes and saints use physical objects like bibles and crucifixes and prayer books and religious art. I like that even they, spiritual giants, feel the same sort of surge of joy, that they don't simply have a relationship with Jesus that is solely based on high-level, esoteric contemplation/communication.
October 01, 2012
Excerpts from N.T. Wright's When God Became King
A few highlights:
The key text of Mark 9:1 and parallels, so often read as an unfulfilled prediction of an imminent “second coming” or even of the “end of the world,” was never intended that way by the evangelists or, I believe, their sources or earlier traditions. Coming at the conclusion of Jesus’s prediction of suffering for himself and his followers, this is what the text says: “I’m telling you the truth,” Jesus said; “some people standing here won’t experience death before they see God’s kingdom come in power.” Faced with this, generations of post-Enlightenment scholars have done their best to fit the quart of the gospels into the pint pot of eighteenth-century political and theological imagination. They maintain that Jesus must have meant that either the second coming and/or the end of the world and/or a great political revolution would happen within a generation. Since none of these took place, these critics conclude that Jesus was wrong, or at least that the early church was wrong to put these words in his mouth.
Now, we must of course grant that the version of the saying in Matthew’s gospel does look as though it refers to the “second coming,” since it speaks of the coming of the “son of man”: “Some of those standing here will not taste death until they see ‘the son of man coming in his kingdom.’” (Matt. 16:28) Matthew 28:16–20 should have taught Matthew’s readers how Matthew at least understood this key saying (16:28). He didn’t think it referred to a time, still future in his own day, when Jesus would come again. Matthew believed it referred to the events of Jesus’s death and resurrection—which, after all, Jesus had been referring to a few verses earlier. Jesus’s death and resurrection have constituted him as, already, the one who has “all authority in heaven and on earth” (28:18).
It is the church’s widespread and long-lasting failure to realize that this was what Matthew and the others were talking about that has left the door open to many generations of misleading readings and consequent puzzles.
The four gospels are well aware that this central contention about the kingdom’s arrival—that is, the claim that God was already king of the world and had become so in a dramatic new way through the work, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus—was highly paradoxical in their own context, as indeed it has remained so to our day.
Then, as now, a claim about God’s kingdom being already present was likely to meet with the obvious rejoinder: “Of course God’s kingdom hasn’t arrived—just look out the window!”
However, they were in no danger of having what today we might call an overrealized eschatology, imagining (as some today have suggested, absurdly in my view) that the entire new creation had now arrived and that there was nothing more to hope for.
...for all the evangelists in their different ways, the kingdom was precisely not to be expected whole and entire, all at once. They highlighted, after all, those parables in which Jesus stressed that the kingdom was coming like a seed growing slowly and secretly or that it would involve strange reversals as well as sudden vindications. The kingdom was not, they insisted, arriving in the way people had imagined. That is Luke’s explicit point in 19:11, and it does not appear that he is out on a limb.
“Well,” said Jesus, “you will drink the cup I drink; you will receive the baptism I receive. But sitting at my right hand or my left—that’s not up to me. It’s been assigned already.” (10:38–40) The significance of this in our present discussion is massive. For Mark, it is clear that the two brigands on Jesus’s right and left, as described in 15:27, are the ones to whom “it’s been assigned already.”
But that means, as we might have concluded from other evidence too, that Jesus’s crucifixion is the moment when he becomes king, when, as James and John say, he is “there in all [his] glory” (10:37). That is the powerful—if deeply paradoxical!—“coming of the kingdom” as spoken of in Mark 9:1.
“My kingdom isn’t the sort that grows in this world,” he says (18:36). (We note here that the regular translation, “My kingdom is not of this world,” has contributed to, and in its turn also generated, multiple misreadings of all four gospels, appearing to suggest that Jesus’s “kingdom” is straightforwardly “otherworldly.”
This is the “truth” to which Jesus bears witness—the truth of a kingdom accomplished by the innocent dying in place of the guilty.
The death of Jesus is the expression of God’s love, as the famous verse in John 3:16 makes clear. For John, it is also the expression of Jesus’s own love: “He had always loved his own people in the world; now he loved them right through to the end” (13:1). And, with that, John introduces the powerful and tender scene in which Jesus washes his disciples’ feet. In between these two, we find the “good shepherd” discourse, where the mutual love between Jesus and the father leads directly to Jesus’s vocation to “lay down his life for the sheep” (10:15).
When Pilate says “Here’s the man!” (19:5), we are surely to hear echoes of that primal Johannine moment, the Word becoming flesh as the climax of the new Genesis (1:14). But this Genesis, this new creation, is aimed at redemption; the “lifting up” of Jesus on the cross is his exaltation as the kingdom-bringing “king of the Jews,” because the kingdom that is thus put into effect is the victory of God’s love.
How fatally easy it would be for us Westerners to sigh with relief at this point. Ah, we think, God’s kingdom is simply the sum total of all the souls who respond in faith to God’s love. It isn’t a real kingdom in space, time, and matter. It’s a spiritual reality, “not of this world.” John, though, will not collude with this Platonic shrinkage.
The work of redemption is complete; now, with Jesus having been “glorified,” having completed his work of rescuing his people, the Spirit can be given, and his followers can begin their own work. This is how—remembering how thoroughly it has been redefined!—God’s kingdom will come on earth as in heaven.
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