Grinch to Human in 1 Hour

It's amazing how I can be a grumpasaurus just before Mass and afterwards feel transformed. You've heard the line, "don't talk to me before I've had a cup of coffee"?, well don't talk to me before I've been to Mass.

Indoor Cats

Wearing nature’s costume
a subterfuge, a camoflauge,
striped for sleeping, stretching,
bowing before food bowls
          and window-gazing.


Let There Be

In the throes of Winter
I long for longing
and the eaves of light
that cast themselves upon a Miami courtyard:
it’s always the light we remember,
right?

The light
      easy on the dew-fields
of softball mornings

The light
      burnt on dusty diamonds
blinking off sweat

The light
      dying as we play tag
-not it!


Rosey Glasses

Oh but for the slight sail of wind
on an Oxford summer eve
or the bulbous part of the day
fat in the print of novel
the top worry-down
the days caressed, blessed by
carols, courts and churches
building body, mind and soul.

Speaking of Books...

...my amazon.com shopping cart is getting awfully heavy. I've got to get organized and prioritize. The Loyola Classic books are coming out soon and I've got to get lean, mainly by no future buys. Books weighing down my shopping cart:

Blog : Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World - Hugh Hewitt;
Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology Of Ghostly Tales - Russell Kirk
Back from the Land : How Young Americans Went to Nature in the 1970s, and Why They Came Back - Eleanor Agnew
The Enemy Within: Straight Talk About the Power and Defeat of Sin - Kris Lundgaard
John Henry Newman: His Life & Work - Brian Martin;
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare - Stephen Greenblatt;
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (Widescreen Edition) - Michel Gondry; DVD
The Conservative Bookshelf: Essential Works That Impact Today's Conservative Thinkers - Chilton Williamson
Mary Poppins (Odyssey Classics) - P. L. Travers; Paperback
The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair : And Other Excursions and Observations - GEORGE PLIMPTON

The Book Game

Julie has posted a list of books that she got from someone else. The game is to remove authors who you do not have in your library and replace them in bold with ones you do have. Here is mine:

1. Margaret Mitchell
2. Haruki Murakami
3. Jacques Barzun
4. Jane Austen
5. CS Lewis
6. JRR Tolkien
7. Peter Kreeft
8. P.G. Wodehouse
9. Garrison Keillor
10. William Shakespeare

Mark Roberts & Infancy Narratives

Want to get this in the archives - concerning the infancy narratives.

Good Company

Bill Luse quotes the Pope:

...from the Pope's Apostolic Letter, Salvifici Doloris: "In bringing about the Redemption through suffering, Christ has also raised human suffering to the level of the Redemption. Thus each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ..."...

If I am wrong, at least I am wrong with my Church, to whose infallible character I have sworn allegiance. Perhaps I'm overly sentimental in clinging to the fervent hope that God's mercy would extend to those who, though not of their own volition matriculating members of that Mystical Body, might in their last moment of terror have cried out in the spirit, beseeching God that he would not abandon them; that He might consider them among those who, though "not of this fold", He would gather to Himself.

I will not say - if he truly holds the contrary on this last point - that Mr. Hart's assertions are absurd, obscene, or grotesque, but will be content with the conviction that he is in the grip of grave error.

Joseph Butler once that if "we had set down the world according to our specifications, it would not be the world as we know it". William Buckley responds in "Nearer My God":

It's amazing what the Butler Escape, as I'll refer to it, does. This singular invitation to imagine reordering the world by you. (No rock music say.) But to disport with Butler at any length is to experience the awful thinness of the air at the summit of Hubris. We climb down from the mountain and find ourselves face-to-face with only two alternatives: reject the Christianity that asserts the unwelcome doctrine; or accept Christianity, irrespective of our incapacity to understand, or our disinclination to approve of, this or that doctrine.

Excerpts from Isak Dineson's Out of Africa

On the farmer's desire for rain:

He cries to the sky: "Give me enough and more than enough. My heart is bared to thee now, and I will not let thee go except thou bless me. Drown me if you like, but kill me not with caprices. No coitus interruptus, heaven, heaven!"

Regarding poetry:

The Natives, who have a strong sense of rhythm, know nothing of verse, or at least did not know anything before the times of the schools, where they were taught hymns...As they had became used to the idea of poetry, they begged: "Speak again. Speak like rain." Why they should feel verse to be like rain I do not know. It must have been, however, an expression of applause, since in Africa rain is always longed for and welcomed.

On the evenings of the Masai Reserve:

The plains with the thorntrees on them were already quite dark, but the air was filled with clarity, - and over our heads, to the West, a single star which was to grow big and radiant in the course of the night was now just visible, like a silver point in the sky of citrine topaz.

Jeopardy

You are sitting beneath the white hot studio lights. The Grand Inquisitor, Alex Trebek, has moved to the bonus round intoning: "the difference between Christian detachment and Stoicism". The question: "What is Christ?"

I looked off Steven Riddle's paper for this one; he suggested something along those lines in a cool blog just discovered. Steve describes detachment as a means to the end of a closer relationship with Christ, not an ends in itself or a means towards a self-generated peace as with Stoicism. (Bishop Sheen, by the way, once wrote that his difficulties with chastity were most pronounced when he was least close to Christ.)

Sorrow for sins has to be similarly viewed with respect to Christ. The order of sorrow ought be to 1) God, 2) others 3) ourselves. Legalism, the brother of stoicism, flips the order and skews the priorities. F.H. Buckley, in the latest Crisis, reviews Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons and offers this money quote:

Wolfe's characters inhabit a purely pagan universe, in which we are offered a grim choice between narcissistic abandon and a stoic attention to abstract duty, between joyless vice and unfeeling virtue.The first recognizes others, in their regard for us, but not the self; the second recognizes the self, a soul "without quotation marks," but not others. Neither view holds out much prospect for an integrated life...

More Books!

Amy Welborn has been busy. She's been acquiring printing rights of old books, as the editor of Loyola Classics.

That Helena book by Waugh looks especially inviting. George Weigel writes:

In fact [Stannard] suggests that the character of Helena, the mother of Constantine to whom tradition ascribes the discovery of the True Cross in Jerusalem, is the key to grasping both Waugh's sense of himself and his mature vision of the Christian life in the world...in its spare narration and crisp dialogue, in its deceptive simplicity, in the ongoing collision between myth and history that gives rhythm to the narrative line-in sum, in its subtle deprecation of literary realism as a mode of discerning the truth of things-Helena was, Stannard concedes, "a vital technical experiment, neither modernist nor realist, but postmodernist, metafictional."

But Helena was also Waugh's most intentional statement about the truth of Christianity and about vocation as the heart of Christian discipleship. As Stannard puts it, the satire of the early Waugh had been characterized by a "jubilant malice" that reappeared, to the applause of the critics and the crowd, in The Loved One. But even before the war the author himself was being driven by other concerns. "Purgatory obsessed him," Stannard writes, "the painful road toward his destiny as St. Evelyn Waugh."

For that is what Waugh had discerned he must become: a saint.

Musings

Came across a humorous Tom Disch poem...

Four years ago I started reading Proust.
Although I'm past the halfway point, I still
Have seven hundred pages of reduced
Type left before I read the end. I will
Slog through. It can't get much more dull than what
Is happening now; he's buying crepe-de-chine
Wraps and a real, well-documented hat
For his imaginary Albertine.

A year or so ago, enthralled by Updike's notion and the Christian understanding that all moments are of grace and therefore deserve attention, I began recording every waking moment from 7am onward. After 100 words I was up to about 9:30am, driving in on I-70. I began to realize that not only did the exercise look surreally narcissistic on paper (personal pronouns will do that), but it wasn't coming out very Proust or Updike-like. Is it ironic that it takes extraordinary writers to write about ordinary moments? And that less talented writers must rely on phantastical events (notwithstanding Flannery O'Connor)? There's also something funny about how Updike's writing, rich and baroque, appears to undermine the very message he is trying to send. There is beauty in the mundane, at least if have your spiritual lenses on. Or if you're reading Updike and not O'Rama.

Aid to the Victims

O'Reilly nails the bias:

The [New York] "Times" didn't mention that Americans donate billions to overseas charities when the paper called the U.S. government cheap in dispensing foreign aid. Again, the "Times" somehow left out the fact that private donations account for 75 percent of foreign giving...

Surreal that a supposedly reputable newspaper can have a story about the amount of giving in the U.S. and ignore gifts to religious organizations like Catholic Relief Services. But then it is mainly used for fishwrap, isn't it?

God's Love & Human Failing

Excellent reminders from Fr. Jim Tucker here and here.

In Search Of...

   ...the perfect political party

Political parties supposedly exist only for their own continuance, although the Democrats may give lie to that given their battlecry: "Give me abortion or give me death!" (pardon the redundancy). And there is also their lack of enthusiasm for defending America. Lots of self-hating in the Hate America First crowd.

But I've gotten off on a tangent already. This post is not to criticize the Democratic party or wonder at its self-destructive tendencies. It's to point out that the Republican party, as a strategy aimed only for its own continuance, spends money like a drunken sailor. It also worships the Hispanic vote and will do anything for it. Would Gonzales be getting the nod for Attorney General if his name was Smith? I think not. Should Gonzales's comments concerning the use of torture rule him out as AG? Absolutely.

And of illegal immigration? Be a lot worse if there were Muslims coming over the border and not Catholics. As it is, I'm growing more sanguine about it. Peter Brimelow in The Worm in the Apple says "America fails its children both rich and poor. Unless it reduces or removes the teacher union monopoly, that is not likely to change. So President Bush is proposing instead a Saudi education policy: import low-paid Mexicans to do the menial work and clever Asians to win science doctorates. That way America will do well even if Americans don't."

Fat Obsession....

Interesting Slate article, via NRO (you know I'd never read Slate if not guided there). Ramesh Ponnuru points out, "Laura Kipnis is not being wry in the following sentence, which is what makes it so amusing: 'For some reason, the majority of women simply would not give up the pursuit of beautification, even those armed with feminist theory.'" More:

Take the chapter by anthropologist Rebecca Popenoe, based on her fieldwork among desert Arabs in Niger. This is a society with no media influences or beauty industries, where women strive to be as fat as possible. Girls are force-fed to achieve this ideal; stretch marks are regarded as beautiful. Yet somehow this beauty norm doesn't create the same sense of anguish that afflicts Western women striving for thinness, leading Popenoe to suggest that it's the Western obsession with individualism and achievement that bears the blame—not media images, not a top-down backlash against feminism, as Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth has it. In Niger, failing to achieve the prevailing beauty standard isn't a personal failure; it just means someone has bewitched you, or you have a thin constitution.

From Kathy the Carmelite

I'm sure KTC won't mind if I blog this (in other words, I'm violating my email policy):

There's a book called The Enemy Within by Kris Lundgaard. It's a twentieth-century synthesis and paraphrase of the writings of Puritan John Owen: namely, that you need to divide and conquer the various parts of your mind. Sometimes the devil uses your intellect to deceive you; thus, you must renew your mind with the Word (otherwise known as "CORRECTLY FORMING YOUR CONSCIENCE"). Sometimes we can be sentimentally led by emotion, or memories--"Let God be true and every man a liar." Owen and Lundgaard recommend doing what Jesus did when Satan tempted Him: use the Word to parry off the threat. And in order to know which "club" to pull out of the "bag," it helps to discern which function of your mind is being manipulated. John of the Cross was ALL ABOUT THAT. ...And, BTW, the first one to identify different "compartments" as parts of one whole mind was Thomas Aquinas.

Owen and John of the Cross were more or less contemporaries. I doubt they plagiarized each other; obviously God revealed to each information He thought important to disseminate among the earnest believers in both camps.