Christian publishers are adding thousands of new titles for Kindle e-books

Yet another example of how evangelical publishing companies are much quicker than Catholics to adapt to new technologies...I didn't see any Catholic publishers in that group.

Thoughts After a Wedding

I have no memories of this church, so different from its precursor at which I served. This one feels more like a funeral or massage parlor, what with the comfort-sound of tumbling water (the Baptismal font) and colored windows so content-free that they could appeal simultaneously to either the grieving of any religious persuasion or the stressed housewife. It’s certainly a church desiring not to give offense, quietly whispering either “I’m sorry for your loss” or “your quads are so tight!”.

Except for a fine rendition of “Ave Maria” the music at the service was often uninspiring or unsingable and, in the case of one song in particular, cloying to the point of nails-on-chalkboard. But don’t believe me: four out of five Protestants will agree that music isn’t American Catholicism’s strong point these days.

But I digress. The priest is likable and enthusiastic and confident. And the purpose is prayer for the couple, and it feels like such a necessary prayer as they'll surely need it, as all couples do...

* * *
Wedding receptions with family I hadn’t seen in awhile can seem almost like high school reunions in which the preoccupation can be to be observing the varying effects of age on the human body. Unfortunately.

It’s July in Ohio and so therefore hot and humid (I hear them laughing in Texas), but this day not unbearably so. A mosquito bites me on the arm and I wonder if it’s West Nile.

There were people I hadn't seen before, specifically the Brahmins from Boston. One was originally named Bill who had renamed himself Will. But have you really successfully renamed yourself if other people (like Mom & Mark) mention that you were originally X and now you’re Y?

It’s funny but I never thought of renaming yourself an option. It would have to be a pain for future family genealogists. Like Will (I mean Bill) O’Reilly, I’m pro-parental rights, which includes the right to name their offspring whatever they want. Worse, it seemed changing his name was superfluous from a superficial point of view since he was the sort of handsome leading man who would've made Cary Grant envious. Slim and silver-haired and the brother of my now departed aunt. Mom told me about how aunt's eyes, in her last days, were so different, so cold and dead. It was because she was so warm in life that the eyes that the disparity was so startling. It reminds me of the vulnerability sickness incurs, and how I used to fear that on my death bed I would in a feverish haze uncontrollably say curse words and x-rated words, like those with Tourette’s syndrome. Now I fear different things. Given enough time you move on I suppose.

A family member succinctly described the dilemma alcohol presents when she got up to speak to someone she didn’t know well – saying you don’t want to approach them given how much wine you’ve had, but at the same time it’s the wine that gives you the impetus to approach them. Life is full of catch-22’s…

Stream o' Consciousness



An undiscovered trailhead we sift
abutted by wheat or field grassses disguised
by space a happy castle in the far
or so I imagine in Quixotic fashion
(La Mancha was a dump you know).

Oh glorious winding path
can't see 'round the Next
ez to suspend disbelief
believe it goes forever
the mind's love for infinity
glimpsed in this rare
privacy with a long view.

I reach for Heat Moon,
while Proustian songs
go off in my head:
"And so I wrote this down for Matthew...
And hey it's good to be back home again."

Work days I exit the house
startled by beauty
by brill sun on black 'sphalt
the grass multi-hued,
light-green where sun sits
elsewhere hunter.

By Sunday I'm suspectible to beauty,
hungry for words I can't write
like the itch you can't scratch,
like the irreplaceable feel
of another's hand on your skin.

I miss her now
up here on this little house prairie
or Bald's Knob
for in the books there's always a wife
a partner to save from the Injuns
as Heat Moon sings in the background:
"What truer children of Kansas
than those taken aloft by the South Wind?"

Afterwards the book room sits like the sacred room
in some ancient Newgrange where
the equinox lights up
here promptly at 7
alit by west-by-northwest windows.

NPR Sings the Blues Happily

(Warning: not for the easily offended.) Bad economic news = gleeful liberal anchors? Parody is Therapy updated here. I tease our liberal friends.

There's also a tongue-in-cheek parody of Amazon Kindle mania.

Excerptable

I'm greatly enjoying Reid Buckley's memoir of his family. It's a very tasty read:

A press agent approached him. "Mr. Buckley, for a fee of three hundred dollars a month I'll guarantee that you and your wife and children will appear once a week in society columns and at least monthly in social magazines."

I pity that man. I pity his having exposed himself to the ice-blue fullness of contempt in eyes of uncompromising candor. "I'll pay you the same amount to keep me and my family out of the papers."

Father was next to broke. It was going to take him 18 years to come back. But hunger for personal publicity, Father felt, showed that a person was unable to approve of himself on his own terms, lacking in the strength and certitude of his own worth.* That's poverty. Where he was reared, plain survival tended to prove a person and tended to translate into prosperity. Economic class distinctions were rare. Success was like a fine quarter-horse stallion: to be admired or envied, not, should one happen to possess it, to be ashamed of. Money was good to have; it was for building beautiful horses and raising packs of children and giving them the best education. But the worth of a man as a person was what counted. As children, we were taught neither to fear material poverty nor to despite riches.

* - In this and in so much else (including integrity), he was the diametric opposite of old Joe Kennedy, determining the very different stars that his children chased.

Wow. Everything in that excerpt feels so counter-cultural. From the loathing of publicity, to the certitude of one's own worth, to the lack of fear of material poverty - it feels like something from a very different era.

Eulogy for a Book Shop

Being from the hinterlands means never having to say you're sorry for being the last to know. Hence I just found out, a year out, that Gotham Books of "Wise-Men-Fish-Here" fame went the way of all flesh.

I'd found out the old-fashioned way: with shoe leather. I'd hoofed up & down 47th street looking for it in vain. Turns out it had moved to 46th street in an effort to stiff-arm the Reaper.

So now it can be told: the Village Voice from last year tells the sad tale:

Could it have been just a Sherlockian "death" over the Reichenbach Falls? Was it a Tom Sawyer funeral after all? Did the renowned Gotham Book Mart never actually die? "Something's cooking," said one former employee, reached by phone last week, while another central source spoke optimistically of "important things happening"—implying the possibility of a settlement that would resurrect the store and erase its ugly end.

The obituary was ignominious. In the back of the Business section of May 13's Times, under an announcement for a clearance sale of bras and panties, appeared the notice for a "Marshal's Auction," with tiny print and the wrong name:

>>Tremendous Inventory Books, Furniture, & Memorabilia >> Of The World Famous Literary Landmark Gotham Book Store

If the notice seemed a little crass—with "furniture" jammed in like a barker's bait..

Elsewhere on the web, another obit:

Goodbye, Gotham Book Mart
Another brief post, marking what is truly the end of an epoch.

The Gotham Book Mart has been evicted, its merchandise snapped up by its landlord at auction for $400,000, its new premises to be rented to someone who can pay more.

Why is this a big deal?

The Gotham Book Mart ([Photo via Rollerboogie]), in its former home and incarnation, was widely considered one of New York's greatest bookstores. Founded in 1920, it was one of the finest repositories of original and rare literature in the city, and, during the long tenure of former proprietor Frances Steloff, a major haunt for many notable American and foreign writers of the 20th century...

I always loved going in there because of the pleasant, attentive, knowledgeable staff members, a rarity at bookstores these days, and because I'd often find obscure poetry books--sometimes published 20 or 40 years before--still sitting behind other books (because they practiced double-packing the books!) on the shelves, waiting to be extracted, explored and purchased rather than returned to moulder a publisher's or distributor's warehouse.

Many writers I know, and especially those of previous generations, have a Gotham Book Mart visit story or three. It was one of the City's longtime literary beacons, outlasting many of this larger competitors, like Scribner's, Doubleday, and Brentano, and outliving peers like Eeyore and Shakespeare and Company, only to fall prey the rent monster...

At any rate, sic transit gloriae urbis....

The Faults of the Left & Right

The Right likes its charities
tempered by worthiness:
the unborn a natural fit
having no sin but the Original.

The Left wants justice now
Amen and without limit
though doomed to terminal disatisfaction
for God created nerve-endings.

Hot Mic Misdventures: Blogger Edition

*psssst!*

"I don't much like the way Tom of Disputations talks down to Catlick bloggers, talkin' about the call to holiness and personal virtue. I'm going to cut his [bleeped] off!"

Doh! I didn't realize I was on a live blogophone!

PS: Seems Jesse wasn't too happy with Obama last year either. I wonder if there's jealousy involved. Pure speculation of course. Am I jealous of Tom? Damn strait! *grin*

Linkin' Around...

One of George Bush's problems was he never felt the need to defend himself or his positions. Michael Novak never makes the same mistake with respect to his country. He examines American giving in First Things:

Anyone traveling to Europe this summer will surely marvel at how different it is from the United States—and how Europeans have trouble understanding the difference. “Individualists,” they call Americans, but the facts show far more personal social concern in the United States.

Here’s an example: In Europe, many leave philanthropy to the state. For Americans, the personal element—in giving, volunteering, and philanthropy—form an indispensable principle of democracy. According to this principle, people who do not want to depend on the state for all of their needs and wants must seek another source of funds. The best source—the most reliable source—derives from the tradition of reasoned giving.

* * *

Eric Scheske helpfully tutors those lacking in online civility (oxymoron alert!). Indeed, the Byzantine Catholic forum had to close its doors.

Sad, but not too surprising. In our fallen nature we become more vicious to the extent an activity is untrackable (or trackable only by God or computer nerds).

* * *
Phil Albinus has an interesting photo and caption:

The Surge Obama Didn’t Vote For — Part 1. Roughly 1200 soldiers re-enlist in Baghdad at a ceremony yesterday. They must not be reading the Huffington Post.

* * *
About five or six years ago I titled some reveries "Lamentations and Exaggerations". Dylan picks up the theme. I never read it, but didn't Gail Sheey's Passages predicate we'd be grumpy in middle-age? I so hate predictability that I think I'll be cheerful. A good meal would help.

* * *
As Bill Luse said, with friends like Commonweal who needs enemies? A recent article was titled "Why Catholics Don't Have to Vote Republican", which I agree with, only the article wasn't defending write-ins but Obama. Truth in advertising would've been to call it "Why Catholics Can Vote Democrat". I'm always pleasantly surprised when I see them defending the faith, such as a recent article contra Chris Hitchens' book "God is Not Great". I suppose the new atheism might actually bring us all together for awhile.

Mr. Luse pointed me to Dale Ahlquist's strong rejoinder to reports of Chesterton anti-Semitism:

I read the article in the New Yorker. For the record, I sent the following response to the magazine. I don’t know if it will get printed, but here's an excerpt:

For those of us who love Chesterton, we are always distressed to see him subjected to any vile charge. But we’ve gotten a little tired of the charge of anti-Semitism. He’s been absolved of that one too many times for us to count – from the tribute by Rabbi Stephen Wise to the official statements of the Weiner Library (the archives of anti-Semitism and holocaust history in London). Mr. Gopnik has added a new technique to making the charge stick – declaring that Chesterton’s admirers should not defend Chesterton against the horrible accusation. Hm. That is certainly one way to end the debate. I would meekly suggest that a better way would be for people to stop repeating charges that have already been dropped.

But we are still going to take Mr. Gopnik’s article as a sign of hope. Fifteen or twenty years ago, Chesterton was simply dismissed by the literary establishment as an anti-Semite and not taken seriously. Now he is at least being taken seriously before being dismissed as an anti-Semite. As the Chesterton revival kicks into high gear, we expect the trend to continue to the point where Chesterton is simply taken seriously without the obligation to mention anything about how Chesterton judges the Jews or how the Jews judge Chesterton.

In the meantime, we regret the unfortunate turn in Mr. Gopnik’s otherwise brilliant essay. There is something a little too desperate, too anxious in his attempt to prove that Chesterton is anti-Semitic. He is dancing as fast as he can to explain away Chesterton’s Zionism and his outspoken stance against Hitler for oppressing the Jews. (“I will die defending the last Jew in Europe.” What does it take to convince some people?)

Among the worn out arguments Mr. Gopnik uses is: Chesterton should not treat the Jews as if they are different because…well…they’re different. But far more troubling is his argument that Chesterton, the Catholic convert, has this pervasive nastiness woven into the very fabric of his philosophy. Whether consciously or not, Mr. Gopnik has broadened his implication to include the whole Catholic Church. Perhaps some future literary critic will be discussing Mr. Gopnik’s anti-Catholicism rather than Chesterton’s anti-Semitism. He can only hope that he will one day be considered so noteworthy a controversialist.

For now, however, the most important consideration should be of the following passage from Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man:

“…the world owes God to the Jews… [T]hrough all their wanderings… they did indeed carry the fate of the world in that wooden tabernacle…The more we really understand of the ancient conditions that contributed to the final culture of the Faith, the more we shall have a real and even a realistic reverence for the greatness of the Prophets of Israel. [W]hile the whole world melted into this mass of confused mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow, precisely because he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal enough to be universal. He was as narrow as the universe…”

Doesn’t exactly sound like the writings of an anti-Semite. Sounds more like someone who has a deep respect for the Jews. Also sounds like a pretty good argument for localism. Chesterton has thrown Mr. Gopnik’s main point into serious jeopardy. Either Chesterton is right to defend localism, which is what preserved the Jews, or localism is a menace and the Jews should have melted into their surroundings three thousand years ago. Mr. Gopnik cannot have it both ways.

* * *
Often this blog feels far too bourgeois, especially after reading this and this. With writing, gotta crack an egg if you want an omelette.

The Liberal Feminist and the Book of Job

I caught a bit of the latest C-Span "In Depth", this time with pro-choice feminist Katha Pollitt. I did it in solidarity with any left-wingers who might've watched George Weigel last month.

Fortunately this wasn't too painful. No blood pressure meds were required during this airing. First and foremost, she has a sense of humor and playfulness which, like charity, covers much. All in all a very likable person.

She's a poet and a polemicist, someone with whom I obviously share few views, but I was edified by her humility in exposing herself to fellow feminist shrapnel: she had the guts to write of a failed relationship, of how she, the feminist, gave him the big office in her house. She admits she's a feminist who wants a man, saying that although it's said that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, "some fish want a bicycle".

She's a nonbeliever who respects people of faith, saying she's dismayed by the new atheists who haughtily demean the intelligence of believers.

She discussed the Book of Job (she's writing a poem about it, which looked pretty good from the brief view over her shoulder C-Span offered). I found her commentary about it interesting, because I like to see exactly what the obstacles to faith are. Her main objections were:

a) To paraphrase: "This book is God at His ugliest. God's answer to Job is 'Hey, where were you when I created the world? Huh? Huh?'".

b) The supposed happy ending - the recompense of God at the end of the book - was sorely lacking in her view. God took away Job's children earlier in the story but they were merely replaced, as if children are replaceable. She says: "God doesn't understand humans at all, as if quantity is all we care about." (Me: Breathtaking assertion; the Creator doesn't understand the created? Isn't it more likely the other way around?)

At the time Job was written, I'm sure the happy ending envisioned by the biblical author was very pleasing. I think it highly unlikely that people took the ending in Job as anything other than wonderfully satisfying, or simply as a parable that justice will be done. But God had more in store, as the New Testament attests. And God has much more in store ahead.

So I think she misses the point. The Bible was written in real-time, that is to say it was written to fill the capacities (intellectual and spiritual) of a people at that time. We tend to read the Bible solipsistically as if it were meant only for us, when of course it was meant first for a particular, concrete place and time, and secondarily for all time with the help of the Holy Spirit and the guidance of the Church. Our God is a living God. Job does teach universal truths, such as how man judges God and God judges man and it's only when Job meets face-to-face with God that Job apprehends. It's ironic that we are so often tempted to use the Book of Job in order to judge God, when Job learned that judging God was foolish.

So she's reading it literally, in a Fundamentalist fashion. God's answer to Job was not in words - which Pollitt says, accurately, were inadequate - but in the meeting, as Peter Kreeft eloquently puts it:

The ending answers another problem in Job: Why is Job satsified even though God does not answer a single one of Job's agonized and very good questions? Job is not a meek, humble, easily satisfied man. He's from Missouri. Fr. George Rutler is right: we must not speak of the "patience of Job", but of the impatience of Job.

Job is satisfied by the only possible answer that would satisfy such a man. If God had offered words, Job would surely have questioned those words again, and the verbal batle would have gone on eternally, as it does among philosphers. Instead of answers, Job got the Answerer. Instead of words, Job got the Word. Job got what St. Thomas Aquinas asked for shortly before his death, when the Lord, speaking form the crucifix, said to him, "You have written well of me, Thomas; what will you have as a reward?" Thomas gave the world's best possible answer: "Only yourself, Lord."

Her decision against God came early. She says at the age of six she was viewing a sunset with her friend and she knew, contrary to her friend, that God had nothing to do with the sunset.

And they say believers have simplistic views that were merely inherited from their parents!?

Writers who are in their own place and challenge it from the specific - that felt so universal to me, reading Mark Twain, reading Faulkner, reading Flannery O'Connor. I didn't always know what was going on, but the strangeness of the music, the peculiarity of it, just swept me along. And that means you don't have to be as performative and showy as someone from an older tradition has to be - people having to manufacture freshness and interest by feats of novelty and bombast and linguistic daring, where the style is essentially the story. - Australian poet Tim Winton

I have found that when it comes to diehard wrestling fans, they are either some of the dumbest people you will ever meet or the most intelligent. There’s no intellectual middle class in pro wrestling, compared with American Idol viewers or NFL fans, where I would imagine the IQ level of the vast majority of fans likely hovers around the pedestrian level. I was not shocked to learn that Flannery O’Connor liked rasslin’, for example. - Jack Hunter of the Charleston City Paper

Awaiting vacation reveals a will to live. It's exactly for this reason that vacation can't be a vacation from our 'self'. So, summer can't be an interruption or procrastination from taking life seriously. By means of the commitment to the ideal in our free time, we will learn to pursue it as a hypothesis even in the rest of our time, where the pressures of duty and contingent influences make everything tougher." - --Fr. Giussani via Fred of "Is it Possible?"

I remember reading the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet as a cynical teenager and thinking that nobody could possibly pull off something so sappy. Then my English teacher screened this adaptation of [Zefferelli's] Romeo and Juliet for us. I couldn't eat my words fast enough. The whole movie is so beautiful and it makes a too-familiar story seem new each time I watch it again.- Sancta Sanctis

I'm not surprised to hear that he had issues with the Catholic Church. Most comedians of his era had problems with authority of any stripe and, of course, God is the Ultimate Authority. - Catholic Media Review on comedian George Carlin

I understand he was supposed to be controversial, brash and iconoclastic, which, translated from media-speak, means he said absolutely nothing to contradict modern received opinion and instead focused on making fun of anyone who wasn't in the room at the time. In any case, it is a good and fitting thing to pray for the dead. - Matthew of "Holy Whapping" on George Carlin

It seems that many of the relationships which give us a sense of purpose, wholeness, love, or meaning are also among the most stressful things: Love is reassuring, but also tiring! Perhaps our real difficulty is that we too often conflate happiness or "emotional well-being" with sense of meaning or purpose, when in fact they're quite distinct.... - Eve Tushnet

How do we become saints? It’s very simple: the Eucharist. Every saint has made the Eucharist the center of his or her life. If we center our lives on the Eucharist, we will become saints. We may never have “St.” in front of our name, but we will live heroic lives. The power and grace of the Eucharist is what allows saints to live extraordinary and heroic lives. Mother Teresa once said that she would have only lasted a week serving the poorest of the poor if she didn’t receive the Eucharist every day at Mass. The Eucharist is what leads the saints to do extraordinary things. - Fr. Greg of "St. Andrew's Parish"

The root of all sin, said Luther, following Augustine, is a condition described in two words: Incurvatus est--we are turned in upon ourselves. The young Augustine, like people of all times, including our own, thought he was searching for God. Yet in his mastery of all the philosophical paths, he was the master, and therein was the problem. Finally he faced the question: "What am I to myself but a guide to my own self-destruction?" Perhaps his best-known line is this: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." Rest comes with surrender, with being shaken out of the state of incurvatus est, with submission to an other, and finally to the Other. The Other is embodied, as in the body of Christ, the Church. The form of the body, most fully and rightly ordered through time, has a location as specific as the location of New York. Finitum capax infiniti--the finite is capable of the infinite. One's search could not forever stop short of the finite that is the Catholic Church. - Fr. Neuhaus via Terri of "Summa Mamas"

Tofu may raise risk of dementia...I rather think, though, they may have that the wrong way round. In my considered opinion it is dementia that causes the eating of tofu. - John at "The Inn at the End of the World"

For me (and not just for me), the heart is that innate desire for total satisfaction, a satisfaction that engages every part of the human being and not merely the emotional or the logical. For Augustine, also, the heart is restless until it rests in the ultimate. If one takes Augustine's word heart to mean emotional only, then what does one make of his intellectual quest? As intelligent as Augustine was, if total satisfaction left out reason - there would still be a nagging persistent restlessness. So, either Augustine is deluding himself OR perhaps he found something that has the capacity to satisfy his heart in totality. Another approach, which differs from Augustine and Giussani somewhat in terminology is that of Walker Percy. What tradition calls the heart, Percy terms the "self." This self seeks both transcendence and placement. It seeks both to know things and to be a part of the world which it understands...I don't care which term is used: heart or self. What's important to me is the experience of the person as unity. It's also critical to know that the impoverished notion that we moderns have of the heart (as emotional reaction) is inadequate for understanding Augustine. - Frederick of "Deep Furrows"

Naturally I’d like to believe that my own retrospection is in some way more important than the old S.V.P.’s, which, when I was exposed to it, seemed to amount to not much more than a cheap longing. But there’s no such thing as a cheap longing, I’m tempted to conclude these days, not even if you’re sobbing over a cracked fingernail. Who knows what happened to that fellow over there? Who knows what lay behind his story about shopping for balsamic vinegar? He made it sound like an elixir, the poor bastard. - O'Neill's novel "Netherland"

Parody is Therapy...

...updated with parody of Amazon Kindle mania.

The Catholic Catechism...

It surprises me there is no .txt file available of it!

Update: Blog and you shall receive! Bill White sent me the file. You can download it here if you'd like...

Gopnik's Chesterton

It's not every day you check the table of contents of The New Yorker & see an article subtitled "The Genius of GK Chesterton". In the latest issue, Adam Gopnik waxes enthusiastically about the great one. Tis always interesting to see how revered figures with Catholicism are seen outside the fold. (Gopnik is an atheist.)

Chesterton and Friends has already made note, linking to Brookhiser of "The Corner" and Commonweal, which has a few snippets:

Gopnik has many good things to say about Chesterton’s style and sensibility, about changes in English prose style in the twentieth century, and about the differences of outlook between cradle Catholics and converts. An atheist (or, as he likes to put it, a “freethinker”), Gopnik is not insensible to the appeal of religion, and of the Catholic religion in particular:

[I]t was as obvious that Chesterton was headed to Rome as it was that Wilde was headed to Reading jail. If you want a solution, at once authoritarian and poetic, to the threat of moral anarchism, then Catholicism, which built Chartres and inspired Dante, looks better than Scotland Yard. If you want stability allied to imagination, Catholicism has everything else beat.

But this, for Gopnik, is part of the problem. Chesterton’s hunger for stability and authority led him not only to Rome, but to a rebarbative political philosophy that logically entailed “Jew-hating.” Gopnik argues that Chesterton’s anti-Semitism was not merely casual or customary; it was personal (his brother, Cecil, had been one of the main players in the Marconi Scandal, a small-scale English version of the Dreyfus Affair), and it was programmatic:

The trouble for those of us who love Chesterton’s writing is that the anti-Semitism is not incidental: it rises from the logic of his poetic position. The anti-Semitism is easy to excise from his arguments when it’s explicit. It’s harder to excise the spirit that leads to it — the suspicion of the alien, the extreme localism, the favoring of national instinct over rational argument, the distaste for “parasitic” middlemen, and the preference for the simple organ-grinding music of the folk.

It is a mistake to try to defend Chesterton (or Belloc) against the charge of anti-Semitism. Looking back from this side of the Final Solution, as we must, we are bound to find many of Chesterton’s arguments about the Jews — and much of his language about them — suspect or disgraceful. Nor is it any use to try to quarantine our judgment about his attitude toward the Jews from our more general opinion of his merits as a thinker and writer. Anti-Semitism was a part of the package, though never a big part.

* * * Gopnik says all the favorite historical arguments for Jesus - "that he had to be either crazy or right, and he doesn't seem crazy; that he changed the world with a suddenness not plausible in the ordinary human... apply just as equally to Muhammad" - but Jesus did it without killing anybody, i.e. without force, and that of course makes all the difference.

For Muhammad to use power in order to create a religion is of this world and not surprising. And this is the rub isn't it? The thing we boast of Jesus - that the "still small voice" does not impel belief is also that which can be exasperating. As then-Cardinal Ratzinger once said, we could wish God would manifest Himself with greater clarity and power, but then it gives more glory to God that He not, allowing the little of the world to know the secrets.

* * *

It's interesting to me that Chesterton hated homogenization and the leveling of differences and yet celebrated the mundane, saying that we ought look in wonder while being stopped for a train, observing the red and green of the stoplight as it were the sun and moon, and becoming entranced by the long arm that falls as the train nears. (Sort of like being enthused over "spam poetry"?) Train crossings seem awfully homogenized don't they?

Chesterton loved the denseness of a city like London ("a city is, properly speaking, more poetic than even the countryside, for while nature is chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones...a city has more significant symbols than nature." Reminds me of my trip to New York. I suppose while Chesterton relished diversity he did not require it. Very Christian in the sense that for Jesus fasting and feasting was not either/or but and/both. For Chesterton it wasn't diversity/homogenization, but dealing with whatever came (preferably diversity).

Chesterton's answer to the mundane seems to be to infuse it with imagination so that it acquires what it appears to lack. Of a friend whose desk drawer was constantly jammed, creating frustration, Chesterton said "imagine you are pulling against some powerful and oppressive enemy, and the struggle will become exciting, not exasperating...an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."

Thoughts Said Aloud

Ironically, as my work becomes more important it seems to me to be of less importance. Counter-intuitive, but even as I do something that influences the decision-makers such that it directly impacts the bottom line, I can't call it rewarding because I have trouble seeing the excitement of the bottom line. I'm ashamed to admit that I feel more passion for sports teams than companies; a Reds loss is harder to take than a quarterly loss, even though the latter could directly impact me by my losing my job!

What's with that?

I think that the key is to see a job as attractive to the extent it does more than just feed yourself and your family. To the extent you give to charity it gives greater meaning to the job, although that requires a constant keen appetite for helping people, something not easily maintained. An example is my in-laws. They are sitting precariously financially, mostly through their own free choice, such that it gives greater motivation to save not only for our retirement but for others' in the family. On the other hand, when my appetite for helping others is not keen I'm more of a "spend it now, before everyone will have a claim to it". Including the government. (Of course, God has the true claim to it all.) Reading Ben Stein's book, poverty looks like "the new black" when social security is cut back drastically and pension plans begin to fail, as he argues will.

* * *
According to Sister Donna Markahm, OP, a strong sense of mission is necessary :

If persons felt that they were simply part of a service delivery system, they were at far greater risk of becoming victims of burnout... regardless of all the efforts made to ensure a healthy workplace environment.

Mission makes it, I suppose. The old way they put out fires was to have the town gather and each person passes a bucketful of water to the one next to them. A service delivery system, if you will, each person sees little impact of their individual efforts but the burning house provides much impetus.

*****
As a lover of things systematized, I'm a sucker for levels and staircases and stepladders and interior castles. The last is a reference to St. Teresa's great work, which desribes the way to holiness, and even though I'm usually drive to despair by this type of literature since I’m inevitably at square one. But this one so far is encouraging in some ways. (Though Steven Riddle mentioned that the levels are not sequential and that you can bounce all around them, which pretty much means that you can't really systemize them can you?) It seems that through the first three levels we have to seek, to put in the sweat, blood and tears, and it’s only the 4th-7th mansions where God takes a very active role, even though there is a lot of suffering in the 6th mansion. This seems perfectly in tune with reality.

* * *

Chesterton had London (see post above), and we have Manhattan. My everyman’s book of the Poetry of New York (redundant title?) still holds sway. I can recall the fresh breeze from our perch atop a double-decker bus and the reassuring rumble and rhythm of bus and tour guide. I recall the bliss of the panels of the New York Public Library periodical room, fested with murals of NYC landmarks, which I pledged to re-visit after the tour was over but had not the time. (Still, sometimes the momentariness of a memory freezes it more permanently than had you lingered.)

I remember the gargantuan breakfasts at the hotel buffet, how good the eggs were, the cereal and the fruit and the omelette and… I never was one much for breakfast, my father being the one for that, and now here I am a fellow afficiando. I was merely behind him chronologically. (The Monday after NY we went to Bob Evans at 1pm for breakfast(!) and it was heavenly.) I suppose we become our fathers, though my mother's pessimism that makes me think we inherit the weak points of both.

I recall all the people swarming outside the hotel. You felt like you were in a movie, like you could just hang out outside the hotel and have entertainment enough. At night the amazing lights of Time Square were like a permanent fireworks display. It was like the mezmering colored lights of a Christmas tree times a thousand.