Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

Homesteader. Wannabe. Five months ago we dumped the very nice house with a very nice, big, privacy fenced yard in a very nice neighborhood with fairly stable property values, cashed in the sadly meager 401K, quit the husband’s job, and moved into the middle of nowhere. We live on four forested acres in the mountains in a manufactured home that was foreclosed on by HUD and left fallow with deer running through it and — well, you don’t want to know — for a long time before we found it. We are going commando — pay as we go, no debt, no mortgage. No jobs. . . . .we are so broke. But, I want chickens. And a cow. And to be able to keep food on the table and insulin in the pump for my kids. The little things. Pray for us? Will ya? - blogger at "Two Ways of Renouncing the Devil"

If the choice to kill my child in the womb is a matter between me and my doctor, why isn't the choice to undergo a tonsillectomy a matter between me and my doctor?" - Peony of "Pansy and Peony"

My mom was reading the crawl on Channel 5, which said that Kennedy's Mass will be held at the Mission Church, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, "the cavernous basilica in Roxbury." My mom confused "cavernous" with "carnivorous"! "What does the Mission Church have to do with eating meat?" - Dylan of "dark speech upon the harp"

I have struggled with perfectionism for as long as I can remember, and I have learned that it is essential for me to keep my eyes on Christ's choice to accept the limits of a human frame. If I look only to the exalted Lord, crucified, risen, ascended into Heaven, it is easy for me to get stuck in perfectionist hell -- which is unpleasant as well as unproductive. - commenter Jamie on "Darwin Catholic"

If we have unrealistic expectations of others, our spouse, our kids, we probably have unrealistic expectations of prayer. If we are nitpicky fault-finders, we think that is how God will be with us. Who wants to go to prayer to be nitpicked? If we appreciate others and enjoy their presence, their good and bad, we will know that prayer is not always a perfect scenario, but is good and necessary. - paraphrase of talk given by priest, via Betty Duffy

The other point that hit me...– as it did in Dorothy Day’s letters, as it does in any unvarnished reading we are able to do of holy people – is how hard it is. I don’t know where this notion that once you give yourself to Christ, everything will be “fine” on every level comes from. I really don’t. Michael used to say, “The only thing Jesus promised his apostles was that they would suffer.” Actually, I think he was quoting Groeschel when he said that. And when you read the saints with a clear eye, that’s so true. And not just “suffer” in the sense that we tend to define it today – suffering from you know, self-doubt, lack of self-confidence and low self-worth – but really suffer from persecution, even from within the Church, suffer failure and disappointment, suffer from the consequences of their own mistakes and misreadings and wrong turns, suffer from doubt, and suffer because…I really could be doing something else more pleasant. I could just walk away. Why don’t I? - Amy Welborn

Obligatory Cute Nephew Pic

Take me out to the ballgame...

Ponderances

I'd planned, like Brendan, to be silent on the matter of Edward Kennedy's death, but two things fascinate me.

One is the seeming redemptive powers of a woman, a particular woman. I'm speaking of his second wife Victoria. It's a very, very rare thing for one spouse to change another, and Kennedy seemed the least likely candidate. He seemed to go from acting like Bill Clinton to an upstanding Harry Truman, at least in terms of his boozing & womanizing.

The other thing that interests me is his letter to the Pope, which Patrick Madrid blogged about here. Curious indeed. Humble and self-justifying at the same time (which is not to imply any of us are above that).

She Looks Like Us

The Queen of Heaven
came down to Mexico
disguised as a mestizo
meaning?
She would make herself look like you
or me
to win us to her Son.

Balthasar & Koontz Quotes

From novelist-turned-non-fiction writer Dean Koontz:

This world's beauty is a gift to sustain the heart, and infer the reality of mercy...This may be the primary purpose of dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, to make us consider that we should trust our intuition as they trust theirs, and to help us realize that a thing known intuitively can be as real as anything known by material experience.

And from Balthasar's The Christian and Anxiety:

Does not the Christian who takes sin and salvation seriously get lost in a dialectic with no exit, in which each increase in grace brings forth an increase in unworthiness, even guilt, so that in this tangled thicket religion becomes the real inferno? And does not all this furnish the most merciless psychoanalysis with an easy target?

It cannot be denied that something like vertigo can come over a man, even a believer, in this transitional state between fear and hope; after all, it is a routine fact. But Christianity cannot be blamed for this loss of footing; it has to be laid at the door of the man who does not want to take Christianity seriously. Christianity offers man, not a bottomless pit, but solid ground- grounding in God, of course, and not in self. To place oneself on this solid ground involves relinquishing one's own ground...Living, efficacious faith means to walk, to be under way. Everyone who walks has ground under his feet. Faith, love, hope, unceasingly offered to man, are the ground that is constantly being pushed under his feet...Whoever believes, whoever reaches out for faith, takes a real step, and while he steps he cannot simultaneously philosophize about the possibility of stepping, cannot reflect introspectively upon the passage from himself to God and have it in his grasp....The job of mastering this passage, from the Christian point of view, is no longer in man's hands. When man is really walking, God has already provided for the possibility of walking and solved the problem of continuity, and so all the paradoxes of the mind, about Achilles and the tortoise, are passe.

The uneasy conscience that many Christians have, and the anxiety based on it, do not come about because they are sinners and backsliders but because they have stopped believing in the truth and efficacy of their beliefs; they measure the power of faith by their own weakness, they project God's world into their own psychological makeup instead of letting God measure them. They do something that Christians are forbidden to do: they observe faith from the outside; they doubt the power of hope; they deprive themselves the power of love...faith is described in the New Testament as something tangibly sure, giving resat and security - certainly not as a flickering dialectic between sin-anxiety and assurance of salvation, trembling before the devil one minute and triumphing over him the next....

I've tended to be sympathetic to Martin Luther because he was scrupulous and had problems with depression but Balthasar doesn't seem to cut too much slack:

Luther...abided too closely by the Old Testament understanding of promise and eschatology and because he was unwilling to accept either a real deliverance from the anxiety of sin or a real participation in the anguish of the Lord's Cross.

From the Journal: a Vacation Day Last Week

Oh to be home! Under a rare uncompromising sun and adrift in my own thoughts or lack thereof, sitting under the sun, doing nothing at all, just stopping time though occasionally fending off the unsolvable thoughts: how to survive work again after you've seen paradise. (Dean Koontz offered that, post-Eden, work is a sort of repentance and that makes sense.)

Picked up Bob Evans' omelets and ate them on the still cool patio; then sat as the sun blossomed and became so steadfast. So richly textured through the fronds and leaves and I read long from Dean Koontz new memoir and the wonder-invoking Our Lady of Guadalupe book. Noon travelled to two which traveled to three, the hours falling like tokens in a slot machine, until we got Max & Erma's hamburgers. A nice vacation day.

Next morn went to St. Brendan's for 8:45 mass but it made me keenly miss dear old St. Patrick's and the comforting saintly images and stately rosary-sayers. "May the Divine Assistance remain with us always," goes the deep bass voice of the now familiar old man at St. Pat's. Feel a bit too dependent not only on daily Mass but on Mass at a certain place. St. John of the Cross said to get rid of your attachments - what if my attachment is to Mass at St. P's? What happens in the future when there are no priests? Don't borrow trouble, I'm told, today has enough of its own.

Links

The Columbus Dispatch just wrapped up a series that followed seminarian Robert Bolding through his final year of study at The Pontifical College Josephinum, which I avidly followed and enjoyed.
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George Weigel's latest column is an eye-catcher:

Sometimes, the veil slips.

It certainly did in a recent New York Times Magazine interview with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. There, in the course of relating her surprise at the Court’s 1980 decision upholding the Hyde Amendment (which banned federal funding for abortion), Justice Ginsburg had the following to say about legal history, social policy, and political surprises: 'Frankly, I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding of abortion.'”

Various & Sundry: the Last Refuge of Those Who Can't Think of a Post Title

Watched ex-Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters on C-Span's In Depth display his marvelous library - tall, broad shelves of medium-colored oak, all with the old beauty-spines of yesteryear. He loves the smell of books. The holding of them (and other things, he confesses, as all men's minds go to the female form). He goes on to praise all earthly things like wine, nature, etc...

He held an ornate book of the gospels and read a bit from the King James, which he says has the most beautiful language. He seems an epicurean with respect to religious texts & beyond, unabashed in his delight in the sensual, saying he could give it all up but since he doesn't have to he may as well enjoy it. Indeed. He seems a very happy individual. I report, you decide.

Spent a wondrous evening out on the back porch as dusk turned to dark and we turned on our solar-powered grill lights (i.e. reading lights) as I read Acedia & Me and my wife read There Is Eternal Life for Animals. Then Bill O'Reilly before bed. He's our Johnny Carson.
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One of the "interesting" lessons of late has been to keep a daily journal and to write down any fragrancies from God, so as not to take the latter for granted and for the improved mood corresponding to the former. Turns out I wasn't keeping a journal too frequently (i.e. once a week) but not frequently enough. A writer has to write. There's a reason Amy Welborn dominated dozens of notebooks after Michael died. I had begun devaluing the journal because it was becoming a complaint session rather than a session in wonder, but it turns out a complaint session is better than nothing.

From recent ameliorative Daily Office readings:

"He chose to become one of us, and brother in all things."

Which is an interesting analogy. Cain and Abel were brothers, as were Isaac and Ishmael. And the late Bob Novak described his relationship with Roland Evans - often rancorous and involving fights - as being "more like brothers than friends". We may fight with our brother but we love him. We may struggle with Christ, as did Jacob with the angel, but we love Him, or should.

Of course Christ is to us not only brother but friend, mother, father. In Psalm 35, the psalmist seemingly puts words into the mouth of Christ about us:

"When they were sick, I went into mourning, afflicted with fasting. My prayer was ever on my lips, as for a brother, a friend. I went as though mourning a mother, bowed with grief."

Emmanuel: God with us:

"For the Lord has chosen Zion,
he has desired it for his dwelling,
'This is my resting place for ever,
here have I chosen to live.'"

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It feels funny that ten years ago I was able to put in the back patio and go to St. Louis over a single vacation week, while this year it's enough just to exercise and read. In fact, vacations are becoming mostly exercise and reading, the exercise setting up the reading.

Well I did assign myself a task: de-weeding the garden. It was not a "must-do" because our harvest of tomatoes is simply astonishing. I feel like we could supply a farmer's market. But other parts of the garden, i.e. the onion & peppers are all way past due. In the swelter-sun I atavistically culled the earth and witnessed, with my own eyes, it transformed where once mainly tall weeds swung in the air. With only a shovel the dark soil was turned over in patches here and there until my shirt became soaked in honest sweat.

Then went to the local park and changed the dynamic of the usual routine by going off-trail and walking along the shore-line - up and down, up & down - in the late sun while looking into the translucent waters which made me long for my wife's dream of a Hawaiian trip after all, the endless plane ride & expense notwithstanding. (Hawaii is one destination I've never had any desire to visit; a beach is a beach is a beach.) Also thinking a very small 2-night trip to NYC solo. Visit Fr. George Rutler's parish and the art museums. And walk about the city bigtime. Central Park jog. All the things I didn't see last time. Old churches. Heck, just to be in that same hotel room as last year and look at the window - I could do that for hours with the aid of a beer or two.

Splurged for a massage today since I'm on vacation and feel the entitlement mentality. I decided not to drop trough completely. The massuese avoided my upper thighs so it was relaxing and not erotic. TMI I know.

Meanwhile, Betty Duffy says the only thing worth saying, which is why all is quiet on this blog lately since I have nothing worthy of comparison (below the emphasis is mine if you're scoring at home):

If we have unrealistic expectations of others, our spouse, our kids, we probably have unrealistic expectations of prayer. If we are nitpicky fault-finders, we think that is how God will be with us. Who wants to go to prayer to be nitpicked? If we appreciate others and enjoy their presence, their good and bad, we will know that prayer is not always a perfect scenario, but is good and necessary.

Somewhere along the way I thankfully learned that prayer does not win me anything in a spiritual competition with my husband...“In talking about religious life, men can focus more on the priesthood rather than their consecration, but women can sometimes focus more on the practices of the religious life rather than the consecration to God. Consecration is what matters—assiduous union with God in prayer.”

All the events of the past few weeks point to this idea of consecration in my married life—making my prayer a reciprocation of the love I first received from God, and making sacred all the irritable little aspects of my day.

Numero Siete

I'm shocked an orthodox Catholic book not written by the Pope has landed on the New York Times best-seller list.

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

There is the matter of being thrilled and excited in general. I wrote about this a bit in relationship to this summer’s travels. 6.5 months in, those emotions are not part of my vocabulary again yet. I even feel guilty contemplating a time in which they might return. It doesn’t seem right. (I am not saying this is right. Just being honest. Faith and loss fight a battle every day. Faith is winning. Slowly.)...

But the Lord is waiting to be gracious to you,
to rise and take pity on you,
for the Lord is a just God;
happy are all who hope in him

(Ps. 54. Office of Readings today) - Amy Welborn on her blog

I called my sister to complain that my life was not a Jane Austen novel. She had recently completed another military move, and was struggling to get her footing in a new location with her six children. “Don’t you think that’s a universal feeling?” she said, “I’d just been envying you, being able to put down roots with your little house by Mom and Dad.” And of course it’s a universal feeling: everyone else is having a good time while I’m not. It’s the chronic existential loneliness that rears its head when I am cut off from the vine. I’ve felt the looming darkness coming on for a long time—I could postpone it by continuing to do enjoyable things, like renting romantic movies. But the movies end, and then I have to deal with the fact that this summer has been a spiritual train wreck for me. - Betty Duffy

Mary’s confusion at the Annunciation reflects her spiritual poverty. We always experience confusion and perplexity when God descends into our lives. These purifications are passive—God is causing the growth by bringing about some crisis in our lives, in the Church, etc. We use these experiences as a trampoline to bounce off of and land in the arms of Jesus.” “Sanctity is not moral perfection, or success (a heresy of Americanism, he said), or psychic maturity, all of which are focused on the self. Instead, it is the meeting of our weakness with God, who loves us.” - Fr. Giertych via Betty Duffy

One of the things I immediately have grown to love about living in a religious community is the fact that I have a chapel right in my residence, in this case a very large and beautiful chapel. It was so nice on Sunday night after getting all ready for bed just walking down the stairs and entering the chapel, praying the Rosary in front of the Blessed Sacrament, and then going upstairs straight to bed. It was a beautiful and peaceful end to a very exciting first day. I got up early the next morning, around 5:30 or so. I was the only one up so I made coffee and prayed the Divine Office. I then went into the chapel and prayed the Rosary and just sat there a while in blessed silence. - from a seminarian at "Psalm 46:11 - a Journey to Truth"

[About not being able to stave off crisis with good behavior. I've heard that the most saintly among us even ask for affliction rather than trying to avoid it, so that they can feel more deeply the suffering of Jesus. Not something I've ever played around with, but I hear that people do. I would think that rootedness in prayer gives one an anchor and rudder when crises do arise--or maybe not. I'm remembering a quote by someone that abandonment to the will of God is like being a cork floating on the waves. So maybe the "meeting of our weakness with God, who loves us" is about all I'm capable of understanding at the moment. - Betty Duffy

Current Read

Been reading Dallas Willard's Hearing God and it goes to the necessity of having an continual personal conversation with God. Willard quotes Brother Lawrence as saying how sweet this constant communication with God is but - BUT! - you can't do it for that motivation. (And, Brother Lawrence reports there was agony in getting to that point of constant communication - a cross before a resurrection.) Lawrence says it has to be because it is what God wants:

"There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful than that of a continual conversation with God. Those only can comprehend it who practice and experience it,; yet I do not advise you to do it from that motive. It is not pleasure which we ought to seek in this exercise; but let us do it from a principle of love, and because God would have us...

Later he writes:

"Immediately make a holy and firm resolution never more to forget Him. Resolve to spend the rest of your days in His sacred presence, deprived of all consolations for the love of Him if He thinks fit...Be not discouraged by the repugnance which you may find in it from nature. You must sacrifice yourself. At first, one often thinks it is a waste of time. But you must go on and resolve to persevere in it until death, notwithstanding all the difficulties that may occur."

My motivation is often askew and I feel frustration in trying to change it. But then I can give that frustration and sense of powerlessness to God. I can admit my weakness and ever-poor motivations to Him. When I read spiritual books, this is the discouragement I feel whenever I'm told something like "you can't do this for the wrong motivation". Because invariably I think: "but how do I change my motivation?" The answer is not dissimilar to how you forgive someone you can't forgive. You ask God for help and let him do it through you.

Willard writes:

"Second, we may have the wrong motives for seeking to hear from God. We all in some measure share in the general human anxiety about the future. By nature we live in the future, constantly hurled into it whether we like it or not. Knowing what we will meet there is a condition of our being prepared to deal with it - or so it would seem from the human point of view. Francis Bacon's saying that knowledge is power is never more vividly realized than in our concern about our own future. So we ceaselessly inquire about events to come. The great businesses and the halls of government are filled today with experts and technocrats, our modern-day magicians and soothsayers. A new discipline of 'futurology' has recently emerged within universities. The age-old trades of palm reading and fortune telling flourish."

He then mentions how within the Christian community teaching on the will of God and how to know it continues to be one of the most popular subjects. He comments:

"But is not a self-defeating motive at work here - one that causes people to take these classes and workshops over and over without coming to peace about their place in the will of God? I fear that many people seek to hear God solely as a device for securing their own safety, comfort and righteousness. For those who busy themselves to know the will of God, however, it is still true that 'those who want to save their life will lose it' (Mt 16:25). My extreme preoccupation with knowing God's will for me may only indicate, contrary to what is often thought, that I am overconcerned with myself, not a Christlike interest in the well-being of others or in the glory of God."

He goes on to say that another problem is that we often fall into the trap of wanting to become robotic when God desires a relationship: "the sort of relationship suited to friends who are mature personalities in a shared enterprise, no matter how different they may be in other respects." God's not looking for Stepford children. "In close personal relationships conformity to another's wishes is not desirable, be it ever so perfect, if it is mindless or purchased at the expense of freedom and the destruction of personality."

Read His Poetry First?

As always, I turn my heart towards the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose Immaculate Heart draws me into her maternal love, and uniting me with her, she will truly and perfectly unite me to her Son. There are many layers of not-God to peel away before I may reach the Center of my being, the indwelling of God, and it is through the Virgin Mary that I am assured of the most direct route to this center. May I imitate her always in having a heart that is always intent on the will of God and directed towards His merciful love. -- Psalm 46:11 - A Journey to Truth

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I happened aross a video link (scroll down) of a couple of priests visiting the grave of St. John of the Cross (via Ellyn, who has another post up that well describes my own exisistential unease at the self-checkout lane at the supermarket).

I was surprised - shocked even - that the first works recommended by one of the priestly experts on St. J of the Cross was not Dark Night of the Soul or other instructional writings but his poetry. It seems somehow emblematic in how we find our way to God not strictly through reason but through love, a sort of unreason.

Perhaps it's merely that the priest thought that to see St. John first in love (in his poetry) will facilitate the harsher medicine of his message of detachment. (Not having read St. John's poetry suggests how weak that 'perhaps' is.) Why John of the "Cross"? the priest was asked. "Because it was in the imitation of the totality of the Christ's offering to the Father that you truly become holy."


WHAT IS GRACE

“What is grace” I asked God.

And He said,

“All that happens.”

Then He added, when I looked perplexed,

“Could not lovers
say that every moment in their Beloved’s arms
was grace?

Existence is my arms,
though I well understand how one can turn
away from
me

until the heart has
wisdom.”

- St. John of the Cross

Men are from Mars, Women from Venus...

Link here:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Of the seven deadly sins, men are more prone to be tempted by lust, while women more often succumb to the sin of pride, the papal theologian said.

In comments on a new book dedicated to St. Thomas Aquinas' teachings on the seven capital vices, Dominican Father Wojciech Giertych said men and women experience sin differently. His commentary was published Feb.16 by the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.

Father Giertych, who is theologian of the papal household, said he agreed with the findings of St. Thomas Aquinas -- a 13th-century Dominican theologian and philosopher -- that men were more inclined than women to pursue pleasure.

"Often the most difficult (sin) men face is lust, and then comes gluttony, sloth, wrath, pride, envy, and greed," wrote Father Giertych.

"For women, the most dangerous is pride, followed by envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and lastly, sloth," he said.

Found Poll

This is pretty close (scroll down, left side panel) to what I would've expected from a Catholic blogosphere bible poll -- with the exception of how popular the NAB is. Most of us have read enough about that version on the 'net to want to eschew it:

Found Poetry

Found here:

Last Night, as I Was Sleeping.

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night, as I slept,
I dreamt — marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

From the same blog:

In both the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, John the Baptist says that the one who will come after him (Jesus) will not be baptizing with water, but with fire. When I look at myself, as well as at most of us, I think we would rather settle for a baptism of water. We shy away from the fire, and end up in it when thrust there.
I am reminded of the words of the song, “Live This Mystery,” by Michael Card. It goes:

As the river seeks to be
forgotten in the sea
so my soul is so thirsty
it longs for Thee.
Like a moth around the flame
drawn to the light
and to the pain.
Since my life is hid in Thee
I must live this mystery.

It is, indeed, a mystery, that that which can draw us, can also repel us. Paradox and mystery. Our lives are filled with them. We long for passion – for fire. And yet we try to stay away from danger; we do not want to be burned.

Thank God for the poets who find ways to express what we do not. And that their words can open us to mystery.