The Pope's Letter

It's extraordinary the fuss the reversal of four excommunications has stirred. Sure it was a painful PR disaster, but what a distraction from the more important work the Pope must do. As a good teacher would, he's using it as a teachable moment.

The very strength of this Pope - the professorly interest in truth without obsessing over news cycles and opinion polls and the service of a soundbite culture - is also his weakness, since those unwilling to give him the benefit of the doubt will eat him alive at every "misstep", such as the Regensburg address concerning Islam in 2006 and now this.

More Auden Snippets

On G.K. Chesterton in Forewords and Afterwords:

Chesterton challenged the Whig version of English history and the humanists' version of cultural history...Our school textbooks taught us that...civilization had ended with the fall of the Roman Empire and was re-born in the sixteenth century, between which dates lay twelve centuries of barbarism, superstition and fanaticism...Whatever the Renaissance and the Reformation might signify, it was not a revolt of reason against fanaticism - on the contrary it might be more fairly described as a revolt against the over-cultivation of logic by the late Middle Ages.

Oddly enough, since he so detested them, Chesterton inherited from the aesthetes of the eighties and nineties the conviction that a writer should be continuously "bright" and epigrammatic. When he is really enthralled by a subject he is brilliant, without any doubt one of the finest aphorists in English literature, but, when his imagination is not fully held he can write an exasperating parody of himself.

In "The Ethics of Elfland" Chesterton tells us how his own pattern was derived from fairy-stories. If I can always enjoy reading him, even at his silliest, I am sure the reason is that many elements in my own pattern are derived from the same source. There are, I know, because I have met them, persons to whom Grimm and Andersen mean little or nothing: Chesterton will not be for them.

Not always via media, this via Auden and Christianity by Arthur Kirsch:

Of all the Christian Churches, not excluding the Roman Catholic, the Anglican Church has laid the most stress upon the institutional aspect of religion. Uniformity of rite has always seemed to her more important than uniformity of doctrine.

To build modern church buildings like an air-port...flooded with cheerful light, [is] a complete falsification of what we really feel: our hearts are not cheerful, and our heads not clear.

Those of us who have the nerve to call ourselves Christians would do well to be extremely reticent on this subject. Indeed, it is almost the definition of a Christian that he is somebody who knows he isn't one, either in faith or morals.

The Christian theologian is in the embarrassing position of having to use human language which by its nature is anthropomorphic to deny anthropomorphic conceptions of God.

From a W.H. Auden Essay

From "Forewords and Afterwords":

The Christian faith is always a scandal to the imagination and reason of the flesh, but the particular aspect which seems most scandalous depends on the prevailing mentality of a period or a culture. Thus, to both the gnostics of the fourth century and the liberal humanists of the eighteenth, the Cross was an offense, but for quite different reasons. The gnostic said: "Christ was the Son of God, therefore He cannot have been physically crucified. The Crucifixion was an illusion." The liberal humanist said: "Christ was physically crucified, therefore He cannot have been the Son of God. His claim was a delusion." In our own day, the stumbling block is again different. I think most Christians will find themselves in understanding sympathy with Simone Weil's difficulty: "If the Gospels omitted all mention of Christ's resurrection, faith would be easier for me. The Cross by itself suffices me."

Ashley Ridgley Sings "Tulsa Time" By Don Williams

 ...listen here.

 I didn't know Don Williams had fans in Holland.

Hope This Isn't True...

Forecasters are wrong about as often as they're right, but this is the first time I've heard a prediction of an evangelical collapse. That would be catastrophic for the country.

Best Books of '08 from Ignatius Staff

Everyone loves lists - I'd missed this when it first was published.

"Ratzinger's Faith" gets a few mentions as well as this novel:

Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger. A terrific first novel by Enger. The wide acclaim of the book is well-deserved. A great coming of age story, with real life, family-style adventure, Christianity and, if you worldview will allow, miracles. Make of it what you will.

William Hazlitt's "Reading Old Books'

...is here:

For myself, not only are the old ideas of the contents of the work brought back to my mind in all their vividness, but the old associations of the faces and persons of those I then knew, as they were in their life-time -- the place where I sat to read the volume, the day when I got it, the feeling of the air, the fields, the sky -- return, and all my early impressions with them. This is better to me -- those places, those times, those persons, and those feelings that come across me as I retrace the story and devour the page, are to me better far then the wet sheets of the last new novels from the Ballentyne press, to say nothing of the Minerva press in Leadenhall Street. It is like visiting the scenes of early youth.... A sage philosopher, who was not a very wise man, said, the he should like very well to be young again, if he could take his experience along with him. This ingenious person did not seem to be aware, by the gravity of his remark, that the great advantage of being young is to be without this weight of experience, which he would fain place upon the shoulders of youth, and which never comes too late with years.

David Frum Feels MSM Luv

From the Corner:

Well, well, well, David has arrived! From nowhere to Newsweek in a nanosecond, and now, the pièce de résistance: swapping yarns with Chris Matthews about Rush Limbaugh's "race problem."...

The ring-master cracked his whip, the sea lion flopped around with the race-ball on his nose, and everyone oohed and ahhed. Then Matthews decreed, "Well, you know what I said when I came out here, David. You have changed your life with this article. You will be the man that shot Liberty Valance. You will be the guy that took on Rush Limbaugh." Congratulations. He must be very proud.

Photo for a Tuesday

French bookstore in NYC via "The Elegant Variation"

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

Reality is objective; our consciousness of it is, to some degree, our choice. --Steven of Flos Carmeli

The semi-comforting, if admirably modest, motto of the Fall River, Massachusetts police department: "We'll Try." - - Dylan of "dark speech upon the harp"

One would think that historical criticism is primarily concerned with, well, history. It isn’t...Writes Legaspi, “What was once an intellectual project for making sense of the Bible appears to have become a sociopolitical proposal for regulating dialogue.” Biblical scholars are important primarily as gatekeepers. They are academic officials who designate what does and does not count as “responsible” interpretation of the Bible…As Collins writes in an approving summary of the history of his discipline, “Where medieval culture had celebrated belief as a virtue and regarded doubt as a sin, the modern critical mentality regards doubt as a necessary first step in testing knowledge and the will to believe as a threat to rational thought.” The postmoderns [are] welcomed into academic debates for one simple reason: They help undermine belief and sow religious doubt. - R. Reno of "First Things"

Everyone is carrying the pain around, along with the hope and grace that does, indeed, glimmer, even faintly. It is maybe not so sensitive and might actually be an act of self-absorption to simply dump all of our own pain on anyone who happens to walk by - we can't do that, for in indiscriminately pouring out our souls we are revealing an indifference to what others are prepared to hear. Crosses, we call them. Everyone is carrying a cross. Heavy crosses. Perhaps part of the Christian life involves recognizing that reality at the core of every person's life and a delicate balance of being careful not to add to the burden, but to be open, at the same time, to allowing Christ to work through us, if he chooses, to help them bear it...for just a little while. - Amy Welborn at Via Media

I don't understand the notion of raising taxes on the rich. Personally, I've never received a family-sustaining regular paycheck from a poor person. If the President has his way, fewer families will receive them from rich people. - Bill of "Summa Minutiae"

The crisis is systemic. It is the financial sector. They should have fixed that first, not last. - Joe Scarborough tweet

In his column in the February 15, 2009 bulletin, our pastor writes, "it is difficult to understand why some Catholics excuse themselves from Mass for the slightest reason." In the same column he goes on to say "As part of the Lenten observance, I will not be telling a 'story' until after Easter." The story refers to the joke he tells just before the final blessing. He once explained that jokes aren't supposed to be inserted into the Mass, so he calls it a "story"….At last Sunday's 11:00 a.m. Mass he underscored a homiletic point by noting the translation of the Gospel we're using is no longer the prescribed one. - longsuffering Terrence of "The Provincial Emails"

If the modern world will not insist on having some sharp and definite moral law, the modern world will simply be given over as a spoil to anybody who can manage a nasty thing in a nice way. - Chesterton, via John at the Inn a the End of the World

We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others. - Blaise Pascal

Self-righteous authoritarians naturally gravitate to venues where they can impose their wills on others (well, and also Blogspot), but the loudest voices aren't always the best measure of the way of life from which those voices come. - Tom of Disputations

Origen has his own image to express the difficulty of working out the proper approach to reading the Bible. When preparing to offer a commentary on the Psalms he tells of a tradition handed down to him by his Hebrew teacher.

The Hebrew said that the whole divinely inspired Scripture may be likened, because of its obscurity, to many locked rooms in our house. By each room is placed a key, but not the one that corresponds to it, so that the keys are scattered about beside the rooms, none of them matching the room by which it is placed. It is a difficult task to find the keys and match them to the rooms that they can open. We therefore know the Scriptures that are obscure only by taking the points of departure for understanding them from another place because they have their interpretive principle scattered among them.

- R. R. Reno

Now, I'm all for people seeking privacy when they're having sex. (It's not something I want to watch other people doing.) But I don't think there's some right to privacy regarding whether one is known to be sexually active, because sex is an act that has social ramifications. It creates a bond between the actors (whether acknowledged or not). It's the cheapest, most efficient way for societies to obtain new citizens, so in a sense I find it rather odd that the government should have been subsidizing this in the first place. If anyone should be subsidizing birth control for female college students, it's the guys who benefit from it. - score one for Mrs Darwin

Books I'm Attempting to Stiff-arm

I'm ridiculously sensitive to advertising and word-of-mouth when it comes to books. Merely knowing that helps, since I can try to wait out the impulse. This was especially helpful in Philip Jenkins' "Lost History of Christianity" which I would've bought had I not been more patient. And it would've been a waste of money.

Some of the books callin' my name (say like Clarence Carter) presently are:

"Roads to Quoz" - William Least Heat-Moon
"Farewell Summer" - Ray Bradbury
"The Questioner's Prayer" - Robert J. Baker
"The Yankee Years" - Joe Torre
"Family Planning: a Novel" - Karan Mahajan
"The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America" - James M. O'Toole
"The Women" - T.C. Boyle
"End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life" - Fr. Charles Arminjon

And just noticed that "American Babylon" by the late Richard J. Neuhaus is out now.

Weigel Writes about Baseball

George Weigel discusses baseball in his latest column, including this that caught my eye:

Yet the moral confusions of the steroids debate are nothing new, for today’s excuse-making was previewed in the debate over whether Pete Rose—an admittedly stellar player—should be in the Hall of Fame despite betting on games. To which the proper answer is: absolutely not, for every professional baseball player from the lowest minors on is told, and in no uncertain terms, that gambling on games gets you a lifetime ban from the sport, period. Pete Rose bet on games; the Hall, rightly understood, is an integral part of the sport; therefore, no Pete Rose plaque at Cooperstown, no matter how many confessions Rose eventually makes. That’s what Catholics used to call “temporal punishment due to sin.” The sin may be forgiven, but it leaves a residue that requires purification. Purgatory in this case means “No Cooperstown.”

I'm not sure the analogy works since I'm sure Pete would be scratching his head trying to discern the forgiveness part even if the punishment is clear. I would say you would demonstrate forgiveness by allowing him to be involved in the game again, including managing. (Purgatory can be partially explained from Scripture by King David, since although David was forgiven by God for his adultery and subsequent murder, he still suffered temporal punishment in God saying "The sword will never leave your house" (2 Sam 12).)

As far as the HoF, I agree with Weigel that the purpose of the Hall encompasses more than statistics:

None of them should be in the Hall of Fame, because the Hall ballot instructs voters to measure character as well as statistics, and they all disrespected the game by breaking the rules—the implicit moral rules, as well as the legal and professional rules.

1994 is generally the big before and after year for many fans. That was the year that the World Series was cancelled due to billionaires and millionaires not working out their differences and there was something deeply symbolic in that, a tearing of the temple veil, a rending of the historical fabric of unbroken World Series's going back a century. The Series had survived world wars but not greed.

Before '94, I was collecting cards and going to games. Afterwards I saw it all as a big ruse. I was yawning during the '98 home run race between McGwire and Sosa, seeing it as a cartoon.

There are still moments I care such as when the Red Sox broke the curse (I felt for the fans) and the Marlins in the Series (skippered by a daily Mass-going Catholic).

But baseball now for me is more about aesthetics than active rooting - an excuse to sit under the sun and drink beer and enjoy the green grass and fine fielding plays. Just as I don't see the ballet as a competition or "root" for any of the characters, so too do I look upon baseball. Where once I went to six to eight games a year now I'm lucky to go to one. Perhaps I'm insufficiently forgiving, but it's hard to summon caring let alone when the caring is optional.

In retrospect, baseball turned out to be merely the canary in the coalmine. It wasn't so much that baseball was flawed as it was that our culture was (and is) flawed. Baseball perfectly presaged Clinton's perjury a couple years later, the pedophile priest scandal a few years after that, and now the collapse of the banking system. The whole thing rotteth, which makes the failure of baseball more explicable if no less sad. Baseball used to be an oasis from corruption and money and now it's a reminder of those things.

Springs & Falls

(image via Mikia Boom)

Life in a high-rise can make you hungry
For things that you can't even see. - "Fly Away" by J. Denver

The world feels very Walker Percy Love in the Ruins-ish, a prospect which seemed somehow far more invigorating ten years ago. Back then I was reading of dramatic chastisements from the Medjugorje seers, including three days of darkness, and I thrilled to the news since I was more interested in God showing Himself than the prospect of that occuring under the mantle of judgment. Besides, I was dumb enough to think I could ready myself in a few days. Whip myself smack dab into saintly shape!

But I digress. This is a post more about the spring than the harvest. There was a day in mid-February this year, I don't remember exactly when, when I smelled spring in the air for the first time.

I wasn't sure if I was merely assigning warmer-than-average weather a designation undeserved or whether there was truly something deeply buried in my limbic system that awoke me to a border crossed. I tend to think the former because there are moments of disorientation in early spring in which I imagine it to be fall, the opposite if temperamentally similar season.

Now the signs are unmistakable of course. The maples are full of engorged red nipples, precursors of life and leaves, and the ground is soft as the eyes of the trusting after a Hail Mary.

It seemed an opportune moment to take our dog on a long hike in the ruined woods, still disastrously ugly with the natural garbage of leaf mold and fallen limbs but at the same time sensationally alive in that cliched truth that "spring is in the air".

The earth was a pleasing clay, soft on joint but not shoe-spoilingly muddy. The ground felt enlivening and I tried to think of the Greek god of the earth, and how odd it is that those former gods, once treated as powerful and sacrificed for, have now become the subject of poetry, the names symbolizing the opposite of the modern and banal: Zephyrus, Erebus, Minerva, Perséphonê, Iris, Glaucus, Morpheus, Andromeda... such that they find themselves even in a John Denver song:

Smoke rings in a galaxy
An endless flight through time
Lyra gave her harp to him
And left him free to climb

A winter's journey from the moon
To reach the summer sun
To rise again, to sing for you
A song that's yet unsung

Apollo taught me to rhyme
Orpheus taught me to play
Andromeda cast down her sign
And Vega lights my way

Up and down hills we went and incongruous songs came unbidden to mind like "Roll on Mississippi...you make me feel like a child again..." by Charlie Pride and "It Takes a Lot to Rock You Baby" by Dwight Yoakam. Much later, ensconced in my study the title heading "Down an Ancient Valley" from William Heat-Moon's book "The Roads to Quoz" lends to mind the kitschy "Down by the Lazy River" sung by Donny Osmond. ("The whitest thing you ever wrote," someone recently emailed me when I attributed "Sweet Home Chicago" to the Blues Brothers, but this paragraph challenges.)

Coincidentally (God's way of remaining anonymous said Einstein), I read Heat-Moon writing of memory and looking to the past shortly after reading Ray Bradbury on the same subject in "Dandelion Wine". Heat-Moon sees recollections as a high recompense: the ability to live one moment a score of times. He says "backseated children able to find only boredom beyond car windows - if they're looking out - are nevertheless laying a foundation for meaning to arise one day when they'll need significance far more than experience." Everything is symbolic, so love says, and I assign that symbol to mean men on the road to God.
_____

"Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and always will be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced right there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy."
 -Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine"

"Dandelion Wine" makes me long for "things you can't even see" to quote Denver. And things I can, like the new Impala:

"It glided. It whispered, an ocean breeze. Delicate as maple leaves, fresher than creek water, it purred with the majesty of cats prowling the noontide."

In the preface Bradbury offers a Greek god-laden poem:

So we grew up with mythic dead
To spoon upon midwestern bread
And spread old gods' bright marmalade
To slake in peanut-butter shade,
Pretending there beneath our sky,
That it was Aphrodite's thigh...
While by the porch-rail calm and bold
His words pure wisdom, stare pure gold
My grandfather, a myth indeed,
Did all of Plato supersede...
And uncles, gathered with their smokes
Emitted wisdoms masked as jokes,
And aunts as wise as Delphic maids
Dispensed prophetic lemonades
To boys knelt there as acolytes
To Grecian porch on summer nights;
Then went to bed, there to repent
The evils of the innocent;
The gnat-sins sizzling in their ears
Said, though the nights and through the years
Not Illinois nor Waukegan
But blither sky and blither sun.
Though mediocre all our Fates
And Mayor not as bright as Yeats
Yet still we knew ourselves. The sum?
Byzantium.
Byzantium.

A Very Palpable Hunger

This wasn't damage control, it was taking honest responsibility. And as such, in any modern American institution, it was stunning. --Peggy Noonan

There's nothing that so easily provokes a craving for something good as experiencing its prolonged absence. And I think lately there's been a critical mass achieved in this country towards the desire for responsbility.

The Weekly Standard recently printed a piece titled The Age of Irresponsibility; the author Matthew Continetti was interviewed by the sainted, mostly-retired Brian Lamb on C-Span. It felt like Ted Williams interviewing a new young kid pitcher.

Lamb asked the toughly innocent (or innocently tough) questions: how can someone purportedly religious like Jack Abrahmoff, who was said to be inspired by "Fiddler on the Roof" and wanted to become an Orthodox Jew, be so corrupt? How could the party devoted to spending control, the Republican party, be so free spending? Continetti said it was human nature, and human nature doesn't change. All you can do is have the standards, preach the standards, and try to honor the standards.

Peggy Noonan feels it too. Her latest column talks about a military jet crash which killed four civilians, and about the accountability that ensued:

The crash, said Maj. Gen. Randolph Alles, the assistant wing commander for the Third Marine Aircraft Wing, was "clearly avoidable," the result of "a chain of wrong decisions." Mechanics had known since July of a glitch in the jet's fuel-transfer system; the Hornet should have been removed from service and fixed, and was not. The young pilot failed to read the safety checklist. He relied on guidance from Marines at Miramar who did not have complete knowledge or understanding of his situation. He should have been ordered to land at North Island. He took an unusual approach to Miramar, taking a long left loop instead of a shorter turn to the right, which ate up time and fuel.

Twelve Marines were disciplined; four senior officers, including the squadron commander, were removed from duty. Their military careers are, essentially, over. The pilot is grounded while a board reviews his future.

Residents told the San Diego Union-Tribune that they were taken aback by the report. Bob Johnson, who lived behind the Yoons and barely escaped the crash, said, "The Marines aren't trying to hide from it or duck it. They took it on the chin." A retired Navy pilot who lives less than a block from the crash and had formed, with neighbors, a group to push the Marines for an investigation, and for limiting flights over University City, said after the briefing, "I think we're out of business." In a later story the paper quoted a retired general, Bob Butcher, chairman of a society of former Marine aviators, calling the report "as open and frank a discussion of an accident as I've seen." "It was a lot more candid than many people expected."

This wasn't damage control, it was taking honest responsibility. And as such, in any modern American institution, it was stunning.

Theo-Thoughts

I mentioned the outlines of an online exchange I'd had with Steven Riddle to my pastor, concerning testing in Genesis and reconciling it with God's love.

He acknowledged that Genesis portrays things as I'd said but added, "God and humans are deeply intertwined in history, shown most powerfully by Christ's death for us."

Asked why God created imperfect creatures he said simply that "only God is perfect so how could it be otherwise?"

Not surprisingly he emphasized freedom, that God wanted to make free creatures and the only way to do so would be to have a test in order that we might choose. I asked how one might look at freedom positively given its results in history and, more importantly, the catastrophic possibility of hell?

He asked if I'd ever known a family in which the parents were extremely controlling, in which the children were micro-managed and manipulated. He said that invariably, at age 30, those children do not have a good relationship with their parents, do not love their parents. Whereas those parents who give their children a certain measure of freedom, parents who are not into any sort of mind-control (he said "getting into their heads"), will, when their children are 30, much more likely be genuinely loved by them.
______

At morning Mass today, a different priest mentioned how it may seem unfair that God looks at the state of our souls at our death, as if it's a crapshoot whether we'll be saved or not (depending on whether we'd mortally sinned and been to Confession in time, etc...).

"Shouldn't God just measure the good of our life versus the evil and make a determination on the whole," he said, "like the scales of justice? It can seem like luck to some, like the roll of the dice, as far as whether you're in a state of mortal sin or not at the precise moment of death. But that's not the way to look at it at all. God doesn't make mistakes. A person's actions may look good on the exterior, but if he falls in the last moments of life it's because God, who knows hearts, sees that that person's whole life was not about love of God but about mere external appearances. The whole of the life is reflected in that last moment. God doesn't make mistakes."