Seven Church Tour in Columbus

So Saturday was the Seven Church Tour with the inestimable Fr. W, who is not charismatically challenged, to put it mildly. This tour was much more engaging for me than last year both because the churches were unfamiliar and architecturally more interesting. And it really felt more devotional, more like a pilgrimage this time. Maybe it was the prayers we said or perhaps the unfamiliar architecture and statues made it feel more devotional.

Lineup:

St. Dominic: Fr. W is the pastor here. Inner city neighborhood and it looks it: bordered up houses looking like crack dens. Very Detroit-ish. A predominantly black parish (Stations of the Cross featured a black Jesus and a placard/map inside the church showed a “Justice Journey” that had Ferguson, Mo listed.) St. Dominic was originally an Italian parish but in the '50s and '60s switched ethnicities. Lovely church with granite columns that extend ten feet below ground. Have to go back sometime for 11:30 Mass there and check out the full gospel choir.

St. Aloysius: a true gem of a church. I'd seen it many years before but was surprised by its stunning attractiveness and distinctiveness. The icon mosaics behind the altar have a Byzantine feel, the Stations of the Cross amazing (painted-on glass, with real gold in the paint), and the Confessionals a rich, ornate wood with Latin phrases carved at top. I'm a sucker for art with a combination of words with structure or image. The stained glass windows are otherworldly in boldness of color and my eye apparently was not alone in thinking that since the craftsman did some work on windows for the Vatican in the past.

St. Francis of Assisi: this tour had nothing if not very distinctive churches, and this one added to the diversity. It was simple, as might be expected given for whom it was named, but there was a kind of classical feel to it. Not too busy. Very pleasing dome cupola, and the pews were arranged on three sides of the altar. Bright and well-lit, it's the church for non-hoarders, those who dislike disorder and clutter.

-LUNCH-

So we had lunch in the basement of St. Francis church and I scored this year with the Neapolitan sandwich, which was a big improvement over last year's chicken caesar sandwich. More meat! Fr. W's assistant sat with us, who told us of her six-month bout with homelessness and the struggles of trying to get custody of her child. I often get the feeling of folks who have gone through more end up having more devotion to God, surely because they've been forced to lean on God for a lack of alternative.

Then my sister & mother joined us, and they didn't want a lunch before she wanted one, sort of like how John Kerry was for the war in Iraq before he was against it. Luckily we had the assistant with us and she graced our thievery. (There were extras.)

St. Catherine of Siena - This church was pleasant enough, made unique most dramatically by the stained glass windows of all 34 doctors of the church. The windows were modern-ish but calming, and made even more interesting by the text (presumably Latin) that faintly stretched across the bottom of some of the panes. Others had not text but some symbol, which added a level of pleasing ambiguity. The altar was an island surrounded by pews on all four sides. In a side room off the vestibule was a legos structure of the church made by a nine-year old child! While this church was somewhat interesting because of the stained glass windows, the church was mostly forgettable for me.

Immaculate Conception - This one reminded me immediately of St. Therese on Broad street, the retreat center. Same romanesque, stone archways.  Nice.  I liked the image of the ship over one of the doorways, and Fr. W told us a ship was a symbol of the church.

St. Mary Magdalen - Very unique church to put it mildly! Like a snowflake, I'm sure there's no church in Christendom quite like it. Very busy, to be sure, and slightly kitschy in that respect but at the same time you can't help but be impressed. A lot to take in. Mostly you take in the incredible mosaics, my favorite being one of the Blessed Mother. The whole church in fact is pretty much covered with mosaics. I understand they did them in Italy by painting each individual stone and gluing it to a “cartoon” image underneath. Most of the church consists of a pale blue mosaic above arches resembling the St. Louis arch but actually were meant to mimic the Miraculous Medal, a devotion still strong in this particular church. Another striking feature was that of the five scenes in stone depicting the life of Mary Magdalen, one was not true, that of the “sinful woman” who dried Jesus' feet with her hair. Apparently that was originally thought to be Mary Magdalen but since thought not to be. (Full disclaimer: I wasn't there.) The altar is held up by twelve pillars with the name of each apostle, St. Peter the lone one to have a round one rather than square (“first among equals”). The altar is elevated and is covered, like St. Peters Basilica in Rome, in the a way meant to evoke the Old Testament Holy of Holies. A tent, as was said in the Old Testament. In the new the Greek has it: “The Word pitched a tent of flesh and dwelt among us.”

St. Leo - this was our final stop, a church now closed and only open for special events like this. Perhaps it was “church fatigue” or the lack of hearing Fr. exclaim on it, but this one seemed kind of average. A few nuns who lived on that street were in attendance, no doubt thrilled to be able to attend Mass in their old church.

Marital versus the Martial

I read the prison diary of St. Perpetual on her feast day the other day. Ultimately what I got from it, perhaps not surprisingly, is that conflict is the order of our lives. The Christian is definitionally involved in a war against Satan, the demons, evil, and his/her own selfish inclinations. We've been drafted into an army, even those of us who loathe conflict.

But perhaps we should focus not on the martial but on the marital aspect. Instead of viewing life as a struggle against evil within us and without us, why not view it in terms of God “marrying his creation” as Isaiah writes? Why not look at strife and suffering not so much as the coin of the Church Militant realm but as the God-chosen ways to reciprocate His “crazy” love for us?

Goldberg's Newsletter

Jonah Goldberg is high-laire in his latest cinematic-quality newsletter.  Hillary the subject, naturally. 

I got to thinking that part of the so-called Clinton Derangement Syndrome of the '90s was triggered simply by the fact that bad people were succeeding (which doesn't necessarily explain Obama Derangement Syndrome or Bush Derangement.) I mean bad, as in likely rapist-bad.  You just don't want to see that behavior get rewarded with the presidency, and the Clintons had scandals in their past that reached infinitely close to imprisonment without ever getting there.  And that led to a lot of derangement. The Clintons teased us by never, ever leaving a smoking gun (other than the blue dress) despite leaving behind more fires than a Detroit Devil's Night.

Ultimately you can't say their strategy of lying and stonewalling hasn't worked. Very successful careers. We're told to trust them.  I trust that they'll hide the smoking gun, yes.

The funny thing about the Hillary episode is it took her eight days to come up with the "convenience" defense.  I mean I'd hoped for something a little bit more.  I hereby propose to her that a private life might, in the end, be more convenient for her than public life, given the onerous demands of two email accounts.

*

More politics: I'm not disappointed that Republicans didn't commit political suicide with a DHS shutdown since it looks like that wouldn't accomplish anything.

The Dems were smart enough to fall on their swords over something substantive (Obamacare). I don't think it's smart to go to war when you're obviously outgunned and won't accomplish even the immediate goal.  Dems mostly only kill themselves when it's an important and reachable goal -- Obamacare was a longterm victory at the cost of losing the House and Senate. Dems will not/have not gone to war over gun control, despite their passion on the subject, because they know it's an important but not reachable goal.  Repubs would shut down goverment and get no longterm victory, no goal reached, with the cost of losing the House (and likely Senate).

The key: we only get one shot at really changing things. The Dems took that shot with Obamacare. The Republicans could take it by doing something equally dramatic, like abolishing Obamacare, abortion, or the IRS (although arguably some of those may not be reachable goals). But if you're going to lose Congress for six or eight years, make it worth your while.  Shutting down the government seems a poor substitute for doing things the right way: i.e. enacting laws.  And why won't Repubs repeal Obamacare?  Because they have no plan in place as backup.  Repub's big problem is they are a party with absolutely no ideas.

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So back to Hillary.  Here's Goldberg's beauty:

"As Bill Clinton said when the harem girls on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane finally announced they were over international waters: 'Where to begin?'

...The ChappaDataQuitIt or E-PotDome story (okay, we’re still looking for a better nickname) reminds me of those kinds of movies [where] the silent whistle has been blown. The sleepers activated. The old timers have been notified. I like to imagine Lanny Davis right in the middle of a meeting with an African dictator when, suddenly, his assistant hands him a note. All it reads is “Cankles Is Down.” Lanny abruptly terminates the meeting, pushes back a briefcase full of krugerrands, and races to some hellish Third World airport, telling his aide, “Let the Redskins know they’re on their own. The Clintons need me.”

Flash to a canoe on the banks of the bayou. James Carville has just caught a catfish with his bare hands and proceeds to tear apart the wriggling fish, Gollum-like. He eats the entrails first. Then, suddenly, a flare goes off above the tree line. That’s the signal. He throws the bulk of the carcass into the river, where gators churn the water to grab it now that the apex predator has departed. He makes his way to the shoulder of a dirt road where a limousine is waiting to get him to an MSNBC studio as fast as possible. His suit and tie, neatly pressed, are waiting for him along with as many hot towels as he may need to remove the fish viscera.

David Brock slinks out of his leather onesie and races to his command center, bustling with Dorito-dust frosted 20-somethings at computer terminals. “This is a level-one-alpha scenario. Cancel all leave. Turn off all X-boxes . . .”

Sidney Blumenthal, consciously dressed like that French guy in The Matrix, leaves his table-for-one, and heads home to sacrifice some creatures to Baal in preparation.

They’re all coming home.

Save for one. Poor Geraldo Rivera, locked in a reinforced steel cage deep in the bowels of News Corp, is pacing his cell like a  vampire’s familiar ordered to return to his master but unable to. The sounds of his howling, can be heard, ever so faintly, in the background during the O’Reilly Factor. Poor Greg Gutfeld has been tasked with keeping him locked up and is using his cattle prod a bit more than necessary . . .

And scene.

The fact that Team Clinton is relying on the old rat squad once again is vastly more significant than most commentators have suggested. Yes, yes, it’s bad politics. A candidate looking to offer a fresh face forward, figuratively speaking, has no choice but to keep his or her own face (John Kerry notwithstanding). But she surely has plenty of options for who she picks to represent her in public. Mrs. Clinton has millions and millions of dollars at her disposal. She has people placed at the highest reaches of the government and the media. There are over 200 people working, formally or informally, for her as policy advisors already. And yet she chooses to get the old band back together instead.
Why? There are many possible answers, but the only plausible one is that a Clinton only trusts Clinton loyalists. This fits everything we know about the Clintons. And it speaks volumes about the thickness of her bubble.

But it also speaks even louder about what kind of president she would be. If you want to know what Hillary Clinton would be like as president, you’re seeing it right now. There is no other Hillary. This is her.

This was the point of my LA Times column on Tuesday. The pathetic parsing and dishonest dissembling (excuse the redundancy, I was going for alliteration), on display in her U.N. press conference is exactly what you’d see from Madame President. For 30 years, Hillary Clinton has been defensive bordering on paranoia (with occasional forays far over the border). For 30 years, Hillary Clinton has responded to every challenge -- not just every scandal, but every challenge (like HillaryCare) -- by convening huge task forces of loyalists. For 30 years, she’s hidden from making tough decisions until events forced her to make them."

Naivety Happens

Every once in awhile I stump across a jaw-dropping, alternative-universe level of naivety that makes me despair for the American experiment. And here is today's offering, from the Alaska Dispatch News:

Obama receptive to exchange idea

Just got a letter today from the President of the United States. Although I disagree with some of his policies, he seems willing to listen, and communicate with his country.

Seems he likes my idea of building a closer-knit community among us, by have a program similar to foreign exchange students, only within the borders of our own country.

It would be a school-run program, with students receiving credits for learning about a different race, religion, or creed, by going to live with a family of different belief systems. For instance, a city kid might go to a Native family, and learn about dog sledding or hunting.

A Jewish kid might go to a Muslim family, and learn about their religion. A Christian kid might go to a pagan household, and so forth.

I presented this idea, twice, to Alaska Dispatch News.

It’s a little sad when the president of our beautiful nation has more time for me than Dispatch.
— (name withheld by me)

Now that's an awe-inspiring level of obtuseness.

FOIA is DOA

The Hillary email story prompts a smorgasbord of issues:  secrecy versus transparency, national security, Hillary's hypocrisy and sense of entitlement, how her private email account was known to the Benghazi Committee for at least six months but they said nothing either due to incompetence or because the committee is a sham.

So there's a lot to the story.  But some say it won't have much political impact because Jane and Joe Citizen won't care about what server Clinton's email resided on.  And that is certainly a possibility. Some say it's merely a media story because it's an affront to them in that if a public official is able to hide work communications it makes getting stories harder.

And I I get all that, but I'm not in the media and yet am highly exercised over this story.

Part of the reason may be that I know too much about the context this is coming in: the dramatic undermining of  the Freedom of Information Act  by this administration.  (Which was the bolder and more blatant lie? That George W. Bush would have a humble foreign policy or that Obama would have a transparent administration?  Answer: Obama's lie was bigger, because Bush had the decency not to keep saying it after it was proven patently untrue.)

This should concern us all and not merely the media.  As Scott Woodham wrote:

This trend means that eventually, if they aren't already, government officials will use private email accounts to conduct every kind of state business except to make the blandest, most innocuous statements. The face of our government will become a public mask scrubbed of all import, unresponsive to any meaningful request for information in the public interest. It's pretty close to that already.

Our technology allows unprecedented connectivity, and it is advancing faster than ever. If public oversight doesn't catch up, it could get left behind for good. And then the public's right to know will be completely thwarted.

When that happens, we'll only have ourselves to blame. We must not allow public access to the inner workings of our government to become a partisan issue instead of the civic one it always will be no matter who's in charge.

One of the seemingly most obvious things - that our public officials work for us and not vice-versa - is increasingly getting lost.

Found Poetry

I was checking out Poetry Magazine and found a couple I liked: 

Tender  by Randall Mann

There was a time
we had functional alignment.
I was your individual
contributor, you my associate

director. On Monday
I said Happy Monday,
rolling my rimshot grin.
Ring-fenced

by cool molecules,
like cattle, I battled biosimilars,
sipped local gin;
I tried my luck at affairs

and trade fairs,
optimistic as a fantasy
suite. I inked the deal,
the ink slick

...

Something was always gated
on a fragile something.
Everything
on the critical path.

The whiteboard, cruel
as conceptual math,
scope creep
like a disease.

Some of those days,
our parent showed up,
bespoke shoes bearing Leckerli.
I felt like a starlet

on a cruisy backlot,
an outpost of opportunity.
I took on a new role,
went through the motions

and the typing pool.
But the bonus was no bonus,
any more than the bay.
Like tender, it started to fray...


***

Bible Study by Tony Hoagland 

Who would have imagined that I would have to go
a million miles away from the place where I was born
to find people who would love me?
And that I would go that distance and that I would find those people?
...

Who knows, this might be the last good night of summer.
My broken nose is forming an idea of what’s for supper.
Hard to believe that death is just around the corner.
What kind of idiot would think he even had a destiny?

I was on the road for so long by myself,
I took to reading motel Bibles just for company.
Lying on the chintz bedspread before going to sleep,
still feeling the motion of the car inside my body,
I thought some wrongness in my self had made me that alone.

And God said, You are worth more to me
than one hundred sparrows.
And when I read that, I wept.
And God said, Whom have I blessed more than I have blessed you?

And I looked at the mini bar
and the bad abstract hotel art on the wall
and the dark TV set watching like a deacon.

And God said, Survive. And carry my perfume among the perishing.

Synchronicities

In one of those momentary synchronicities, I heard a priest who'd spent much time in Europe say that Americans are internationally famous for being unable to be passive and not talk. He said one European monastery has ruled out letting Americans take a vow of silence since it is so difficult for us and because so many left - hence this particular one had an American as greeter and tour guide.  Our priest said the downside is obvious with respect to prayer: we talk to God, but rarely are receptive, passive, or listening. 

Then I see this, on Karl Ove Knausgaard's trip to America:

On the way back to the car, we stopped by another place for coffee. I told him about the last time I was in New York, when a well-known American writer invited me for lunch...I tried desperately to think of something to say. We had to have something in common, we were about the same age, did the same thing for a living, wrote novels, though his were of considerably higher quality than mine. But no, I couldn’t come up with a single topic of conversation.

He talked a little, I listened, nodding politely now and then, said: “Oh, really? Is that so?” while all the time I also had to communicate with the children, who weren’t used to strangers either.

When we got back to Sweden, I received an email from him. He apologized for having invited me to lunch, he had realized he never should have done it and asked me not to reply to his email.

At first I didn’t understand what he meant. I thought we’d had a good time. So why was he apologizing?

Then I realized he must have taken my silence personally. He must have thought I didn’t find it worth my time talking to him.

I wrote back and asked him if he’d seen any Bergman movies? No one talks there either. And Finland was even worse; there, no one ever said anything to each other. I wrote that I’m always like this, that I never say anything to people I don’t know, even when they’re having dinner at our house. He never answered.

“Who was it?” Peter asked.

I told him.

“It’s deeply un-American, you know, not to make small talk. It’s a very important part of the culture of this country. You remind me a little of my dad. He didn’t know how to make small talk, either, when he first got here. Or maybe he didn’t want to. But he does now.”

Things I Don't Understand

I try not to follow the news, finding it causes dyspepsia, but two recent stories make me say "huh?".

One is the hullaboo over an ally, Israel's prime minister, speaking at Congress.  After being in the political wildnerness for a decade or so, deservedly so, Republicans finally took control and offered the most mild and milquetoast of rebukes to Obama: an invite to Netanyahu. And they had the temerity to fail to "clear it" with the White House. Because, you know, we don't have three branches of government, just one and a half, the Presidency and the Semi-Supreme Court.

So that whole non-story story was a head-scratcher extraordinaire.  "Protocol über alles!"

The other was learning that we had entrusted national security, or at least the State Dep't, to someone who decided to go rogue and set up a hackable email account.  I'm speaking of Hillary of course, whose spokesperson took the Orwell route and decided the best lie is the boldest, saying Hillary complied with the "letter and spirit of the rule".  Complied, without the "comp".

In the early 1600s Richard Burton wrote the following:

For as the Princes are, so are the people; Qualis Rex, talis grex. Their examples are soonest followed, vices entertained, if they be profane, irreligious, lascivious, riotous, epicures, factious, covetous, ambitious, illiterate, so will the commons most part be, idle, unthrifts, prone to lust, drunkards, and therefore poor and needy for poverty begets sedition.... It was an old politician's aphorism, "They that are poor and bad envy rich, hate good men..." 

Where they be generally riotous and contentious, where there be many discords, many laws, many lawsuits, many lawyers and many physicians, it is a manifest sign of a distempered, melancholy state, as Plato long since maintained: for where such kind of men swarm, they will make more work for themselves, and that body politic diseased. A general mischief in these our times, an insensible plague, and never so many lawyers: which are now multiplied (saith Mat. Geraldus, a lawyer himself,) as so many locusts, not the parents, but the plagues of the country, and for the most part a supercilious, bad, covetous, litigious generation of men. A purse-milking nation, a clamorous company, gowned vultures, thieves and seminaries of discord.  

No surprise Hillcat is a purse-milking lawyer...  Okay, set rant off.  At ease men! No more buzz-kills for at least a couple days.

I Don't Think I'll Ever View Nutella The Same Again...

Obituary of the inventor of Nutella: 

http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21644124-michele-ferrero-italys-chocolate-king-died-valentines-day-aged-89-sweet-secrets

Each product was exhaustively researched in his two labs, one in Alba and one in Monaco where he lived later, and tested out on board members. (“We eat all day,” one complained.) New technology was eagerly tried. He took five years, it was said, to find a way of bending the wafers inside his Ferrero Rocher pralines. Wherever he went he would visit shops incognito to check that his products were fresh.
...
The second woman was Maria, the Virgin Mary. He could achieve nothing without her. Each morning he prayed to her and placed his business in her hands. Every year he went on pilgrimage to Lourdes, and arranged for his workers to go. (One company legend was that the shape of Ferrero Rochers was inspired by the grotto there.) A statue of the Virgin, with white robe and golden rosary, stood at the entrance of every Ferrero office and factory round the world. Under her influence, he and his foundation channelled much of his wealth back to Piedmont. It was done, though, with no fanfare, and after a brief appearance in his dark glasses il Signor Michele would, as usual, slip away.

This reminds me of something our mission priest said this year.

"We must wrap our finite purpose within the infinite purpose - to know and love Christ...I read of a dry cleaner who cleaned stains customer couldn't see because his finite purpose - cleaning - was wrapped in larger purpose of focussing on Christ.“

Observationals

Excerpt from F. Scott Fitzgerald short story:

“He was enjoying himself as much as he was able. It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future—flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.” 

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I dread a Hillary win in '16. I'd prefer anybody else, even godforsaken Biden or Elizabeth Nefertiti Warren.

Why? Because she combines two things few candidates combine: corruption and a lack of resume.

Say what you will about Barack Obama but there was no hint of corruption in his past when he was running in '08. Hillary's is checkered, from shady Arkansas land deals, to cattle futures, to money-grubbing from foreign sources. As one liberal pundit put it, she's obsessed with money and always has been, presumably as a conduit to power. This has led her down some dark places, ethically. Add to all this how she covered for Bill and helped smear his women, one who credibly was raped, and you have an extremely ethically-challenged person running for president.

But what makes her even more special is that unlike many shady politicians, she's never been effective. She has gotten to her current position on the back of Bill Clinton. She was mediocre at best as Secretary of State; she was an average senator, the latter a job that requires no heavy lifting. Unlike George W. Bush, who also had the advantage of running on the back of someone (his father) Hillary has never governed a state.

She'll likely win simply because we tend to buy politicians, like products, based on name brand.   Coke and Pepsi often win not on merits but familiarity.

But the combination of never being an executive while having a problem with corruption makes her a particularly unattractive candidate. God save us from more years under an arrogant, corrupt presidency.

*

I recently thought of Andrew Greeley, God rest his soul, and of the agonizing end of his life, and how an accident was the culprit. I thought about Thomas Merton, who died quickly, but also from an accident. What is it about my mind that dislikes accidents as a cause of death in the near-saintly?  Superstitious of me, surely, but I thought of how both Merton and Greeley flirted with heresy, and I want to try to recall if there were any orthodox near-saints who died from an accident. Fr. Groeschel, almost, but his pull-thru was so miraculous that it scents of a grace denied to Greeley and Merton.   I'm sure there is some famous, traditionalist Catholic who succumbed accidentally, but I can't recall.

Obama the Visitor

Interesting Jonah Goldberg newsletter email:

So the question of the moment is whether Rudy Giuliani should be flayed or simply drawn-and-quartered for saying that Obama doesn’t love America. Naturally, this has led to Giuliani being called a racist, because the best working definition of racism in America today is any criticism of Obama that stings.

Kevin Williamson runs through the highlights of what is, by now, a pretty old argument. My own view isn’t so much that Giuliani is right, but that he’s not exactly wrong either.

Look, it was like a week ago that we were talking about Obama’s inability to criticize the Islamic State without first going out of his way to flagellate the West and America over the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, and Jim Crow. Is it really so crazy to think a guy who feels compelled to warn his own countrymen not to get on their “high horse” about child rapists and slavers (who are also beheading and/or immolating and/or burying alive Americans, Christians, Yazidis, and fellow Muslims) might subscribe to an, um, unconventional form of patriotism?...

More than any other president, Obama was raised with a detachedly critical view of America. He grew up abroad and in Hawaii, which is as close as you can get to growing-up abroad and still be in the United States. (Sorry, I love Hawaii, but it’s true.) At school he hung out mostly with the foreign-exchange students from Pakistan. “For years when Barack was around them, he seemed to share their attitudes as sophisticated outsiders who looked at politics from an international perspective,” David Maraniss writes in his biography of Obama. “He was one of them, in that sense.”

Byron York writes in his piece on the Maraniss book:

But Obama was ambitious. Appalled by the “dirty deeds” of “Reagan and his minions” (as he wrote in “Dreams from My Father”), Obama became increasingly interested in, as Maraniss writes, “gaining power in order to change things.” He couldn't do that as an international guy hanging around with his Pakistani friends; he needed to become an American.

So he did. One of those Pakistani friends, Beenu Mahmood, saw a major change in Obama. Mahmood calls Obama “the most deliberate person I ever met in terms of constructing his own identity,” according to Maraniss. The time after college, Mahmood says, “was an important period for him, first the shift from not international but American, number one, and then not white, but black.”

Mahmood, Maraniss writes, “could see Obama slowly but carefully distancing himself as a necessary step in establishing his political identity as an American.”

His early political years involved similar strategic positioning, from joining Jeremiah Wright’s Church to (according to David Axelrod) lying about his opposition to gay marriage. And it paid off. And when he finally burst on the national scene, he could use his detachment to his advantage. Indeed, his whole approach to politics has been, “People of Earth, stop your bickering. I’m Barack Obama and I’m here to help.” The slogan “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” implies the building-up of a seething desire to make this country different than it is and throw off the dead weight of the past. Whenever he talks unapologetically about patriotism, it is invariably in the context of trying to get the country to rally around some new government endeavor (and, more importantly, himself).

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But that’s nothing new. Patriotism for progressives has always been deeply bound up in the role of government and the cause of reform. That’s fine, to a certain extent. But underlying it is the assumption that America as it exists is a problem that needs to be fixed, if not “fundamentally transformed.” And, let’s be honest about it, there were times when progressives had the better part of the argument. But, culturally and psychologically, what endures is the pious progressive conviction that the government is better than the people it serves, at least when the right people are running it -- and that the job of progressives is to bring the bitter clingers up to the government’s ideals, as best they can.

*

Simply put, there’s a tension between the desire to change something and loving something for what it is. As I’ve said many times, if you desire something solely for your ability to have your way with it, that is not love; it’s lust.

And for generations, American reformers have argued that there’s nothing wrong with America that being more like Europe wouldn’t fix. Countless leading liberals hate -- and I mean hate -- the suggestion that America is the best country in the world. Just two weeks ago, I think, I linked to this progressive mind-porn from the opening scene of HBO’s The Newsroom. Stephen Colbert’s whole shtick for the last nine years has been to mock people who love this country too much. Indeed, for eight years under Bush we heard that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” -- a profoundly stupid and self-serving bumper sticker of a notion. It’s a very strange understanding of love -- and that’s all patriotism is; love of country -- that its greatest expression is biting criticism, regardless of merit. For eight years, every calumny and slander imaginable was hurled at Bush and the United States, and whenever anyone pushed back on it, we were told that it was patriotic. We just love our country! Dissent is the highest form of patriotism!

How would that work in a marriage?

Wife: How do you like my new blouse?
Husband: It makes you look like a fat filthy whore.
Wife: Now I know you love me!
Husband: Shut up, tramp. You tipped off the Jews about 9/11. You were in on it.

Since president Obama became president, dissent is no longer the highest form of patriotism at all. It’s often simply racist now. Indeed, dissent from Obama and his agenda has arguably become the thing that liberals hate most about America these days. I should also note that since Obama was elected president he’s shown a fondness for apologizing for America and citing himself as proof that America is on the mend. This, too, doesn’t strike me as an obvious display of uncomplicated love. “I’m sorry for my wife, she was raised by carnies. But, you have to admit, it speaks well of her that I saw fit to marry her.”

Happy Annual Half-Meal Parse Day!

Yes it's time for that extravaganza known as a "fast" day.  A fast it's offically termed despite the very gentle discipline the Church imposes. But I've personally never minded the gentle touch.

The trick is to make it significant enough to get our attention, that is, to focus on what (Who!) really matters. And yet not to make it so significant that it affects our work due to fatigue, low blood sugar, bad attitude, fainting spells, emergency room visits....

The Church prescribes two smaller meals in addition to a "normal" meal.  I've heard these mysterious non-normal events as being everything from a "snack" to "half-meal" to "one-brick-shy-of-a-full-meal".

A further complicating factor is energy expenditure.  If I shovel snow this morning, as I did, do I get more calories in my snack-half/meal-one-brick-shy meal?

And yet another factor is ye olde "compared to what".   One man's half-meal is another's full meal.

Generally, I find if I merely cut my normal meal in half that really doesn't bite (pardon the pun) into my appetite enough to trigger a proper ascetic response.* I find it needs to be approximately 41-42% of a normal meal.  I look forward to further studies related to this issue.

And, as always, your mileage may vary, past performance doesn't guarrantee future results, do not remove under penalty of law, etc...

* - proof positive is that I have the energy to write this post.

A Lenten Thought

An artist interviewed by Elizabeth ("Betty") Duffy is especially apropos today:

Under the council of the eye, who am I? I founder in the dust looking for signs of heaven and Eden growing like microscopic crystal orbs and fountains and gem trees. Even when I find them, and I do – I have seen amazing things, but it doesn’t close the gap between Him and me. My heart is still broken by the hunger. The thousands of deaths and resurrections I must undergo following the path of His blood. The only open door is the tomb. But I can see what He does with death. Death is a sweet thing, and I rejoice that my sin qualifies me for death, because my death qualifies me for the blood and for life with Him and for more hunger. I assume that I will be satisfied someday, but not until I am lying at His feet, my work being done.

Interesting View of Shroud of Turin

Art historian's comments below remind me of how Our Lady of Guadlupe was painted by God: 

Link here:

For his part, Casper has studied devotional manuals, sermons, and other printed texts that focus on the shroud from the 1500s and 1600s, the period of the 14-foot linen sheet’s most heightened and unprecedented devotional enthusiasm.

According to Casper, no one at that time thought of the shroud as a painting per se. “They didn’t regard it the same way they did Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, for example,” he says.

But the printed literature does refer to the shroud metaphorically as a painting made by God, whose brush was Christ’s body and whose pigment was Christ’s blood. Casper says these ways of discussing the shroud reveal a different conception of artifice and authenticity, which today we often perceive as binary opposites.

Contrary to what one might expect in modern times, metaphorical comparisons to art in the 16th and 17th centuries bolstered rather than undermined the shroud’s authenticity.

“There was a reverence at the time for artifice,” Casper says, “and the shroud was, in a certain way, an artistic relic that for contemporary believers gave evidence of God’s creative powers as artist.”

Forty Years

From NY Times on four sisters who had group photograph taken annually for forty years: 

Whenever a woman is photographed, the issue of her vanity is inevitably raised, but Nixon has finessed this with his choice of natural light, casual manner and unfussy preparation...

Throughout this series, we watch these women age, undergoing life’s most humbling experience. While many of us can, when pressed, name things we are grateful to Time for bestowing upon us, the lines bracketing our mouths and the loosening of our skin are not among them. So while a part of the spirit sinks at the slow appearance of these women’s jowls, another part is lifted: They are not undone by it. We detect more sorrow, perhaps, in the eyes, more weight in the once-fresh brows. But the more we study the images, the more we see that aging does not define these women. Even as the images tell us, in no uncertain terms, that this is what it looks like to grow old, this is the irrefutable truth, we also learn: This is what endurance looks like.

It is the endurance of sisterhood in particular. Nixon, who grew up a single child, says he has always been particularly intrigued by the sisterly unit, and it shows in these images. With each passing year, the sisters seem to present more of a united front. Earlier assertions of their individuality — the arms folded across the chest, the standing apart — give way to a literal leaning on one another, as if independence is no longer such a concern. We see what goes on between the sisters in their bodies, particularly their limbs. A hand clasps a sister’s waist, arms embrace arms or are slung in casual solidarity over a shoulder. A palm steadies another’s neck, reassuring. The cumulative effect is dizzying and powerful. When 36 prints were exhibited in a gallery in Granada, Spain, viewers openly wept.