WAU Meditation

Found here:

Discouraged about my lack of focus, I asked Gloria for advice. She suggested I begin my hour on my knees, praising Jesus. “Praise him both for the good things in your life and for the trials. Then sit and wait in silence for him to speak. Try leaving the rosary for your home prayers.”...

And so, the following Tuesday, I knelt before the monstrance and began praising God. I praised him for my husband and four children and all our material blessings— autos, a beautiful house, clothes in our closets, and food in our pantry.

Then I praised him for my husband’s unemployment and the cloud of uncertainty that hung over the family. I praised him for bringing us from our safe Canadian province of Nova Scotia to the strange new land of Texas. I praised him for the insanely huge and terrifying Texas bugs and for the fire ants that were all over our lawn. I praised him for the leaking water heater in our attic, for the resulting water damage throughout the three levels of the house, and for the cost of drying out the floors and walls before black mold set in.

I praised God for the frightening tornado warnings that beeped regularly on our television screen and caused anxiety in the children. I praised him for the cost of medical care in the U.S. and for my children’s health issues. I praised him for my dad’s recent death from cancer, after having survived a five-bypass heart operation.

And then I cried.

And when I was finished, too drained to have another thought in my head, Jesus whispered to my heart and filled it with his peace. I placed all my worries and fears at the foot of his cross and left that chapel feeling lighter than I had felt in a long time.

THE BUMPERSTICKER

"Someone I Love Was Murdered," it read
I said a quick prayer only to discover
that Someone I love was murdered too.

Had to laugh...

...at my wife's latest set-up to discourage the grackles and starlings from eating what is supposed to be for woodpeckers and goldfinches or other more worthy birds.

She was working from home at the kitchen table and was constantly getting up to shoo away the bad birds but then came up with the idea to string a rope through the window:

____
Meanwhile, the "BW Garden" (i.e. 'before weeds'):

It won't last but is nice while it does.

Rodak Does Roethke

The picture on this post is the sort of view I get from the pool looking up during H20 aerobics. The instructor is a fit, lean young women who despite her leanness has trouble keep the lower curve of her butt cheeks in her shorts. Could happen to anybody.

I haven't previously written about this experience since frankly I don't have the tools to write it up in such a literary and allusive way as Rodak did.

A fellow blogger in New York
the pictures make me drop my fork,
for rather I would go there now
than eat the meat of well-done cow.

I'd like to go there every year
if cash and wife not bid me here
Just claim a chair upon the Square
and people-watch away my care.

Well, the Title Fits...

PBS travel star Rick Steves has written a provocatively titled book Travel as a Political Act. Beautifully produced with lavish color photographs, Steves delivers what the title promised, although perhaps Travel as a Progressive Political Act might be even more accurate. He makes no bones about his progressive politics which he says he "picked up largely from people overseas," but elsewhere describes himself at one point in the '70s as a "25-year old hippie" which implies he picked up his politics early at the very least. (It would likely undermine the book's thesis to point out that many of his fellow hippies didn't have to go overseas to pick up their politics.)

Travel is broadening but seems at times self-selectively so. For example, Steves makes mention of talking to Palestinians and watching Al Jazeera but presents the Israel case not through the eyes of Israelis but through the disclaimer that America has the solemn commitment to protect Israel's security. It sounds as though his heart is with the Palestinians and Israel's case is dryly doctrinal. (My own disclaimer is that I haven't finished the book yet so there's possibly a different view in a later chapter.)

Steves argues that we should look at the view others have of us, which is fine. I think there is an aspect that we can't see ourselves nearly as clearly as others do and D'Tocqueville, to name but one, did us a wonderful service.

But it has to come from a trusted source. The turning point for me was seeing the world reaction to the America's attempt to enforce the conditions of the Gulf War ceasefire. The level of bitterness and anti-Americanism was far beyond what was warranted given Hussein's history. The Iraq War taught me was that what the world thinks of the United States is corrupted through a biased prism of media, of both a news and entertainment variety, and thus can't be the standard by which we measure ourselves.

Steves, a very likable guy, sometimes seems an apostle of relativism. A particularly egregious example is this: "While a U.S. Christian may be more concerned about abortion than economic injustice, a Nambian Christian would likely flip-flop those priorities." Which goes to my point about listening to a "trusted source" (such as the Magisterium). Since the theme of the book is for Americans to be more self-critical I'm sure he's not arguing for the primacy of the life issue. He's asking, unwittingly of course, for a universal, catholic church.

Anyway you can't say I wasn't warned. Now the trick is to finish the book since none of us should live in our own media echo chamber. How can I complain about his short shrift of the Israeli point-of-view while I do the same to him? (See my blog title.)

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

The more blogs I read, the more news articles, I am confirmed that God is in very clear and direct communication with his children. I would even say that God provides a sort of theme of the week--ideas that come to me independently from various sources, a conversation here, an article there, and then I read a few blogs and find out that other people are thinking about the same things. - Betty Duffy

[I] learned... just how important John Wesley was to the formation of American Christianity. I had always wondered, for instance, why churches are filled with small groups, and try from the outset to steer you into one. Turns out Wesley started that. - Camassia

I was struck by a similar example of war's power to make us long for peace in Ian McEwan's Atonement where he has something along the lines of (quoting from several years memory, since I don't have the book at hand): How many thousands of children were conceived in mind on the roads to Dunkirk, as countless men offered God their bargains: "I'll marry her as soon as I get home. And buy a cottage, and take care of her, and stay home at nights, and we'll have three children and take them to church every Sunday, if only you'll let me reach the sea alive." - Darwin Catholic

Selective sympathy.- Peggy Noonan on what liberals actually mean when they say 'empathy'

With respect to abortion, the liberal can empathize with the pregnant mother who desires to further her education before having a baby. But there is no empathy for the unborn child simply because the liberal cannot imagine a baby having “desires” of any kind. Perhaps the liberal thinks it is desire which makes us human. - Jeff of "Stony Creek Digest"

The Internet is basically a Skinner box engineered to tap right into our deepest mechanisms of addiction. - Sam Anderson

The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect. - Esther Dyson

With the modern divorce between art and tradition running parallel to the modern divorce between the unitive and procreative goods of sex, fewer and fewer artists and whores may make the necessary connections to reach the ultimate good. - Sancta Sanctis

The economist F.A. Hayek wrote a book titled The Fatal Conceit which, among other things, attempted to explain why intellectuals tend to be socialists. In a nutshell, the reason is that intellectuals tend to overvalue intelligence, preferring to err on the side of infinite perfectibility. No system is too large or complex to be managed and perfected by human intelligence. The intellectual has experienced the power of high intelligence, but he tends to disregard its limits and to deny that intelligence is unequally distributed. He disregards its limits, because if intelligence can be used to solve all problems, the intellectual is always in demand. He denies that intelligence is unequally distributed – against all evidence – because that violates his egalitarian dogma. Therefore the intellectual tends to favor “equality of outcome” scenarios. - Jeff of Stoney Creek Digest

Sotomayor might be a fine jurist but a horrible dresser. Give her some "girl time" with Mrs. Messiah, for cryin' out loud! - tweet from pcstokell

Politically she's like a beautiful doll containing a canister of poison gas: Break her and you die. - Peggy Noonan on Sotomayor

Some people hate big cities, but I find them necessary to my spiritual life - a vivid, throbbing reminder that my world is not the only world and that God's view takes it all in - not from a distance, as the silly song says - but from the inside, loving it, shaping it, being reflected in the unending diversity of people who live, thrive, fail, struggle, die and are reborn in the midst of it.- Amy Welborn in NYC

Everything—the world, history, other people and myself—can be a source of revelation, because through everything we can discern like a watermark, the face of the Risen Christ, the friend who secretly shares with each of us the bread of affliction and the wine of mirth.” - Olivier Clement via Betty Duffy

So Many Satellite Radio Talk Shows...

...but none compare Al's Kresta in the Afternoon on good old AM radio...1580 on the dial if you're in the Central Ohio area.

Orwellian

"It is simply inhumane and barbaric to withdrawal food and water. Just because Terri Schiavo is not conscious doesn’t mean she doesn’t have dignity."

Sounds spot on, right? Well switch it around and you have Michael Schiavo's lawyer's assertion:

"It is simply inhumane and barbaric to interrupt her death process. Just because Terri Schiavo is not conscious doesn’t mean she doesn’t have dignity." (George Felos)

Unreal.

Lake Effect Sun

I am listening to Dorothy Moore on the car radio sing "Misty Blue" on the way to the blue lake. If suns were like wines this one would be of finest vintage, held in winter's interminable cask but now cracked open and spilt into the goblet of a Sunday.

I settle down on a bench and read a Louis L'Amour novel, the words as crystalline as the setting, but soon I walk down towards the translucent water as if involuntarily. I think if I were designing a lake it'd be a lot like this one, full of inlets and coves, nooks and crannies.

I hike beyond the park limit down a nearby road, almost get attacked by unleashed dogs, cross a bridge and come to another lake, a jeweled beauty with an island in the center that screams "heave ho, land the canoe and claim the isle for America!" "...One small step for man," I'd say, after breaking out the lunch meat & beer.

The lakes, fifteen minutes from my house, taste like travel. From the trail's rim I can see the parking lot and the gleaming cars arriving and departing, as audibly impotent as '70s Matchboxes and hence for that reason an enjoyable sight. Off to the right there are happy cries of dogs along the canine beach, black labs frolicking with the swift changes of direction so natural to the young. Two black men stand like sentries, fishing at separate inlets, reminding me of the iconically bucolic scene of the Haitian fisherman in the distance as our cruise ship sailed away.

I want to slip into that glove of water and glide. Instead I run - I realize now why I always lose weight in the summer: my metabolism gets a boost. Instead of reading long from the virtual trail in "Westward the Tide", a real-life trail calls me to an unscheduled run.

Greedily I carry my suddenly weightless burden of excess fat over hill and dale, under sunshine and shadow. I haven't quite gotten over the James Fixxian trust in the elixir of exercise despite seeing first hand how little it's doing for our 11-year old dog. Not to mention what happened to Fixx.

The car tastes like travel too, what with the satellite radio and its strange and wondrous offerings like blues song "You Gotta Move" by Cassandra Wilson. Not unwelcome too is this indoor/outdoor aspect, the sun-roof well-named for the burst of sun through the previously opaque ceiling.

City of God v. City of Man

Interesting juxtaposition of images, from my Yahoo! inbox:

George Strait Artist of the Decade

"Lean on the gas and off the clutch" - "Run"

It was like manna from Heaven, a look-what-I-found-rebound, to happen across an oasis in the tundra of television, that is the ACM tribute to George Strait. It was mesmerizing to hear all those hits again by new artists. The show was laid-back enough to seem a throwback to twenty years ago, back before money made everybody uptight. Some artists even seemed to regain their personalities; one performer put “King George” on the back of his guitar and flashed it at the end of his tribute and asked the King to sign it. Another said that Strait didn’t talk to him much the first time he met him, making him think that Strait “didn’t like me very much”. That’s country. Fewer façades.

The band Sugarland led off and dominated “Adelaida”, a spicy cajun number. Lead singer Jennifer Nettles seemed to have the spirit for it and she also has a pretty mouth (can you say that post-Deliverance?).

Tody Keith followed up with the only song I didn’t recognize over the whole show, an old-fashioned kick-ass honky-tonker. “Got a problem I’m gong to drink off my chest,” went the lyrics. Reminds me of that iconic song “Rita Ballou”. Keith, a man’s man offered no wasted motion, holding forth with the armor of a hat slung low protecting slitted eyes.

Rarely did singer meet song so well as the mournful Brooks ‘n Dunn lead on “The Cowboy Rides Again”. Were his hooded eyes and wounded voice mere act? I wondered, if not, where the pathos came from. Today’s stars, unlike ol' George Jones, live bourgeois upper-class lives and don’t usually have time for addictions or bankruptcies or infidelities.

Taylor Swift, dressed like a ‘60s flower child, did “Run”, a song with whippet-like lyrics. Goosebumps attended her rendition; she sounded as innocent and ingenue-ish as did Suzanne Vega in “Luka” back some twenty-something years ago. The song is a gem, as simple and direct as a bullet and fast as a Hereford cattle rush. Even if it doesn’t sound like the typical country song the lyrics have the laconic directness of a lonesome cowboy in a Louis L’Amour novel.

“The Fireman,” an uptempo song, took me straight back like a time machine to a particular period of my life, those fabled early ‘90s that stretched to infinity on Saturday nights in a Newark, Ohio honky-tonk and afterwards in the dew grass of my friend’s house-with-acres, my boots carried off into hiding the next morning by Brent’s rugrats. Those old country songs of loss and self-pity and under-doggedness seemed so consoling when I was an unmarried and unknown writer but less potent now that I’m a married unknown writer. :-)

I’m moved by the smallest things; I could easily tear up at seeing Tim McGraw and Faith Hill still together, let alone Martina McBride or George Strait himself. I was also moved by the fealty and homage paid by the big stars. Even if it’s only an act it’s a sort of virtue paying homage to virtue. The constellation of different performers, male and female, have a precious uniqueness in each as if a sure reflection of God’s intent. Alan Jackson sings and I realize it’s that he’s never changed that makes him charismatic. “The smoke and mirrors were just that,” sang one artist of Strait (and could've of Jackson too).

I was skeptical when I learned Lee Ann Rimes would sing my favorite Strait song, “Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind”. But she pulled it off even though they seemed to have cut a verse off.

Of course there’s a sour moment. Garth Brooks was preceded by a one-minute infomercial. Like Jimmy Buffet, these guys know how to market themselves. Or do they? Don’t they know that overkill doesn’t play in the savvy marketed-to-death Gen X’rs? I can imagine GB saying: “I’ll come on if you give me a minute highlighting my incredible contributions to country music, including ‘his voice is the soundtrack of our lives’”(no lie, that was actually in the infomercial). I hope I’m wrong and his record company wouldn’t let him go on without that particular plug. But, Garth’s speech was humble. He said that he was “passing the torch to a man who carried the torch for the last thirty years,” a touching tribute that seemed to move even George Strait himself.

Strait seems to embody the secret to life: to remain hungry even when full. He has all the money, fame, adulation he ever would need but still he records the hits and hits the road...

Celebration as Euphemism for "Funeral"

Our neighbor died after a long, impressive ten-year fight with poor health. I was happy for him that he was able to avoid nursing homes and assisted living. The life squad was over there so often that it began to seem routine and not a cause for concern. It was a touch of class that they asked that in lieu of flowers we donate to that fire squad - it's rare to see gratitude for what can be viewed as an entitlement.

It never dawned on me in a million years that the script wouldn't look like this: that one time the ambulance would come and he would be dead. Instead he died at a local restaurant. Our imagination is poor with respect to death, or perhaps it's just that I didn't realize he ever left the house.

The service was called "A Celebration of Life" as they often are these days and it was held at the funeral, er, Celebration of Life home. (The phrase paradoxically makes me feel depressed. It sounds too forcedly upbeat, a bit too kitschy.) I recall warmly now my wife's aunt's funeral, a daily Mass-going Catholic, and how the rosary was said at the visitation. Due perhaps either to poor catechesis or the headwind of this relativistic age, the Catholic gene can appear to be recessive - from the mixed marriage of my wife's family came six children, all of whom were raised Catholic to varying degrees but none of whom remained Catholic.

The service started with a young woman coming to the stage with an acoustic guitar and singing a song. I felt embarrassed for her, it felt too intimate, just the voice and unamplified folk guitar in this small setting in front of all these strangers. It still seems jarring - to me at least - to have what seems so obviously a performance in the context of a quasi-religious service. But surely my concern for her was misplaced; evangelicals are bold and likely feel called to witness in this way.

Next came a series of talks. The first brought tears to everyone's eyes, a precocious grandchild expressing an unabashed love for her grandfather. I probably underestimate the impact of grandparents in the lives of children, and I found this especially inspiring since I'm on the cusp of grandparentage.

She was followed by a jocular grey-hair'd man who knew the deceased for years as part of the card club. I was really surprised by two things; one was that he said our neighbor was never confrontational. He would ask his opinion on something and just take it in but never try to argue with it. And I recall thinking how different my experience was, how the first and nearly only time I talked to him was when he introduced himself right after we moved in and somewhat presumptuously told me that he didn't want me putting up a fence. He was into the green movement before it was cool, and apparently didn't like fences. He was no shrinking violet and yet he let his card club friend opine on politics or what-not without rebutting.

Then the grey-hair'd man remarked several times how he always wondered how the deceased got his very unusual first name. He said he looked forward to finding out from the next speaker, the son with the same first name. And I wondered why it never occurred to this gent to ask, during all those card games you'd think the subject might come up. It seemed so mysterious.

In the memorial program there were beautiful verses from a good translation of 1st Corinthians 15:50-57 on eternal life. Testimonials continued as to how focussed he was on others. He cared about others. Prayed for them, did anonymous works of kindess. While the modern tendency is to canonize the recently deceased, there is something inspiring about hearing the testimonials in that it makes you want to be a better person yourself. "Just do the best you can," his son said his father had always told him, "it's all you can do."

Bad Cell Phone Art Ain't Kilt No One Yet

I've long said that "bad poetry ain't kilt no one yet" in order to justify my own offerings on this blog, and in that same vein I offer you more Cell Phone Art (trademark pending). All photos were taken last night with my phone using only available light, which was generally the landscaping lights or a new globe light that gives off different colors. (All lights are solar-powered for you greeniacs out there.)

Same As It Ever Was

So our pastor gave a good homily Sunday. He mentioned the impact of Christianity on the Roman Empire via forgiveness and mercy. He said the problem with a society based on justice or revenge is that invariably the person or group wronged will see the act as a greater wrong than had actually occurred, and the person or group perpetrating the wrong will see it as a lesser wrong than had occurred. That means that retaliations must always be greater and greater because of this natural amplification. Perpetual war.

A simple concept but a true one. We are not Spocks, emotionless judges of wrongs. And speaking of judges, we see a sample of it in the political discourse today. Whereas a generation ago someone like Sonia Sotomayor might have argued vigorously for equality for women and Hispanics in the legal profession, she overreaches now and says that she's more worthy. (Can you imagine a white man saying today, "I would hope that a wise old white man with the richness of his experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life."?) But there is always overreaching, it's built-in, even among judges who are supposed to be the wisest and most dispassionate among us.