This & That Thursday

A fine couple tidbits from Eve Tushnet:

* This is third-hand, so bear with me, but one reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan is that when the story is finished and Jesus asks, "Who was his neighbor?" and the Pharisee says, "The one who showed him mercy"... the Pharisee is placed in the role of the wounded man. The one who thought of himself in the powerful role, the role of the man extending his hand in charity, instead sees himself as the wounded man in need of mercy. And Jesus not only acknowledges his wounds and dirtiness and pledges to cleanse, heal, and forgive him, but also gives him the task of going and doing likewise--now from a position of gratitude and humility, rather than a never-sullied position of privilege and power.

* We were asked to think of three concrete ways God has shown us mercy. I had a few in mind, but after hearing from several of the other participants I realized that I had only identified places where I have been lucky. Privilege, basic health, good work, and financial security are things I'm immensely grateful for, but God's mercy is a fiercer thing.

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Heard about St. Christina the Astonishing today. She could smell sin, and it wasn't pleasant. She went about hiding in closets trying to avoid the stench. Yikes! She rose from her own coffin and set up camp in the rafters to avoid the smell of the congregation. I reckon I wouldn't smell too good my own self. It seems so hard to believe, that of Christ's unconditional love, such that I'm faced with the truth that my sins do not define the compass of Christ's love, smell or no smell.

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Our pastor Sunday talked about the upcoming changes and mentioned the "for many" versus "for all" controversy and said that the reason for "many" is that we all know that some reject Christ and thus even though Christ died for all that some reject Him.

But this seems a bit iffy in the face of the assertion that Hell could be empty. How can we say "many" when we don't know the eternal fate of a single soul?

As one friend said, it seems to elevate human choice. On the other hand, if we take the long view we see that the Church has almost always elevated human choice since the word has been "many" for a long, long time before the New Mass came in. So I can't get too excited over it given the history. The Church has survived worse.

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It felt bracing and "empowering" (as the corporate-types so want us to feel) to blow off one of those egregious "Lunch 'n Learns" (meetings held in lieu of lunch that I alone appear to view as optional) despite it being politically inadvisable. It's amazing how you have to please so many more people now. Directors, AVPs, VPs...I get so much face time with higher-ups now and that's just not in my favor.

Feel uncomfortable with authority figures, primarily priests and assistant vice presidents. Hence I have difficulty with the semi-yearly sit-down chats. I would love to know the genesis of the fad to personally meet everybody on the planet. Blessed obscurity, where art thou? Flying beneath the pretty radar, how canst I?

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Am reading "The Compass of Pleasure" and the author promises to go into the heart of the subject: why does every human, and many animal, culture seek out ways to alter their brains via substances like alcohol or caffeine or hallucinagens? Have to wade through a lot of science & dancing dendrites along the way though.

Why's My Bookbag (or e-reader equivalent) so Heavy?

Excerpts from Eugenides' "The Marriage Plot":

In Madeleine’s face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.

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In Plato’s Phaedrus, the speeches of Lysias the Sophist and of the early Socrates (before the latter makes his recantation) rest on this principle: that the lover is intolerable (by his heaviness) to the beloved.

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“The flip side of self-loathing is grandiosity,” Leonard observed. “Right,” Henry said. “So if you’re going to crack up, you want to crack up like Robert Lowell.”

Bookroom pictures:

Poet Mark Doty excerpts...Unfortunately I lost all the formatting of Mark Doty poems when getting via web so...

Tiny girl in line at the café—seven, eight?—holding her book open, pointing to the words and saying them half-aloud while her mother attends to ordering breakfast; she’s reading POMPEII…Buried Alive! with evident delight. Pleasure with a little shiver inside it. And that evening, I thought I was no longer afraid of the death’s head beneath the face of the man beneath me.

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that spiraling like climbing the steep winding of the cathedral in Barcelona, the Sagrada Familia, stone steps built to the mathematics of a narrow seashell, feet obscured in darkness, a built night, and then in a while, many whorls up, the terrifying small balconies perched at the back of spires of conch or chestnut burr or what ever spiked and tiled intensity the architect pronged from his melting fantasia,

*

Almost audible: weft of continuous color, blocks of mint, green-yellow glaze, olive floating above a violet underpainting, contentious against the citron and yellow-flung, seamless texture, like the hare of the cicadas, ceaseless music through which outbreaks of blue assert themselves.

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In the flashpoint summer of 2002 it was possible to feel where we were headed, sun screwing its titanium compress down on human foreheads in the parking lots, thin tamarisks on the margin shimmering a little as if seen through fumes of gasoline, and I was in the absolute darkness of Fresno, past the middle of my life. As if I’d been colonized by the long swathes of car lots, flapping pennants stunned under the mercury lamps,

Quotable

"...anyone with even the most superficial acquaintance with embryology must have been struck by the marvelous way in which complexes of cells group themselves to form an eye that as yet has nothing to see, hands that have nothing to handle, feet that have nowhere to go, and so on. Everything, while contributing to the life of the embryo, seems subordinated to a life of a quite different and higher order yet to come. The embryo has an integrity dictated to it as it were by the future. The meaning of each organ is read back into it by the function it achieves after birth."

- from Goddard's "The Meaning of Shakespeare"

Funny Stuff

See reviews for this shirt. A parody of the consumer search for the salvific amid the mundane.

King & Duffy, Not a Law Firm

I'm becoming somewhat of a pacifist concerning argumentation, in emails or on the web.  Not from anything loftier than a bare utilitarian impulse, since it seems I have an equal and opposite effect from that which is intended.  There's a reason reverse psychology is a term familiar: we are most resistant to ideas that are exactly what we most need to hear, self most definitely included.  I'm more convinced than ever of the truth of Archbishop Sheen's line "win an argument, lose a soul." 

The context for this is that that which I hold dear is mercy (if not on my interlocutors, ha.)  And Heather King's works are rife with it and thus I hold them dear, especially the latest, "Shirt of Flame".  In it she says, with some delicacy, that she can even understand the sins of pedophiles or words to that effect.  Rut-row!  That set my friend's "liberal gieger-counter" off and he saw red. Never could he imagine feeling the least pity for the child molester. She lost a reader and I lost if not a friend, one who trusts my judgment.

I made a similar mistake with my father-in-law, another justice guy.  He was appalled when I told him of an ex-Nazi who confessed his sins to a priest before his death and thus was presumably in Purgatory instead of Hell.  The story I had cherished repelled my f-i-l.  I have this tendency, sometimes, to assume my mindset is the same as everyone else's. But people are different. 

Of course my love of mercy could be cheap and shallow. I have not been a victim of, nor do I know any victims of, sex crimes or Nazi genocidal maniacs.  I concede that I may not be able to identify closely enough with the victims.  More sinning than sinned upon is me. 

But still I can't help but think of St. Philip Neri's famous identification with Judas: "Oh Jesus, watch over me always, especially today, or I shall betray you like Judas."  Here was a saint who didn't hold himself above the worst sinner in history, the man who Christ Himself said it would be better than "he'd never been born." 


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"They know not what they have," was my envious thought upon reading Betty Duffy mention she's in charge of a religious education class. That may not be true, of course, some may know and appreciate her. Others may think that she's just a "handsome woman" as Lino Rulli might say. The only reason I realize she's of such depth is from reading her blog. I have that advantage. But then I got to thinking: how many other extraordinary people are walking around that I completely miss as being extraordinary? And then I realized how flawed that whole mindset itself is, since isn't everybody extraordinary given that we are all made in the image and likeness of God and will end up either as angels or devils, metaphorically speaking?

Her latest column in Pathoes - ironically enough given the subject matter - was like crack cocaine to me. Reading about one's affliction has a sort of ameliorating effect, or at least gives you momentarily sufficient distance to understand what's happening. It certainly "fits" for me, this pleasure-till-you-drop mentality, the serial affections.. I have to gear up for suffering as seriously as I gear up for pleasure. I need to take that time and say the Rosary in lieu of listening to Lino on the ride home from work or music on the way in. Even better I need to "be still and know that He is God". Prayer is like oxygen. Effects not long-lasting, but neither is optional.

Veterans Day

A fine tribute found over at American Catholic:

War is a curious part of the human condition. It is a summary of the worst that Man is capable of: violence on a massive scale, cruelty, greed, hatred, and the magnification of every human vice. Few of us are more “anti-war” than those who have had the misfortune to fight in one and witnessed all the folly, loss and endless pain produced by the inability of men to frequently resolve their differences without resort to the sword. Yet, in war we also see men rise to the heights of what we are capable of at our best: self-sacrifice, courage, love and the magnification of every human virtue. War as the direst of human institutions is to be bitterly regretted, but we must ever pay homage to those who find themselves in this terrible maelstrom and acquit themselves with honor.

And so on Veteran’s Day we honor all those who took time out from their regular lives to stand between the rest of us and danger. We especially remember those silent heroes who paid the ultimate price for us and who never came home. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. (John 15:13) Our gratitude, praise and thanks is small enough compensation, but it is the poor best we can give. We are creations of a loving God, and when we return love for love we demonstrate that.

Banned in O-hi-O

Seems Rich Leonardi of "Ten Reasons" has lost his radio show. Anyone knowing Rich from his blog, and the reputation of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, could figure that the two weren't a good fit and that it might come to this.

Oddie Biography of GKC

There's a quote from Chesterton's autobiography that refers to a William Henley poem which begins:

"OUT of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
for my unconquerable soul."

Contra that, the GK Chesterton writes:

"I had wandered to a position not very far from the phrase of my Puritan grandfather, when he said that he would thank God for his creation if he were a lost soul...I thanked whatever gods might be, not like Swinburne, because no life lived for ever, but because any life lived at all; not, like Henley, for my unconquerable soul...but for my own soul and my own body, even if they could be conquered."

What a profound sense of gratitude!

I was interested to read, in William Oddie's biography, Chesterton's view of Wilde and the decadents and I found, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, a strong moral streak that preceded his conversion. Even as a semi-pagan he recoiled, almost instinctively and without the defense of doctrine, from pleasure-seeking as the end all and be all:

"[Walter] Pater's root mistake, revealed in his most famous phrase [asking us] to 'burn with a hard, gemlike flame' is that you cannot handle flames. You cannot handle passions. His error is precisely that he wishes us to treat flames as one treats gems. He will burn his fingers."

And then of Pater's insistence of "enjoying the moment for the moment's sake" Chesterton wrote:

"You cannot have glorious moments and enjoy them 'simply for those moments' sake'. For suppose a man has a truly glorious moment, not something about a bit of enamel, I mean, but something violently and painfully happy. A moment of ecstasy in first love, for instance, or a moment of victory in battle. The lover enjoys the moment, but not for the moment's sake. He enjoys it for the woman's sake. The warrior enjoys the moment for the sake of the flag. The cause of the flag may be foolish. The love may be calf-love and last a week. But the patriotic soldier thinks the flag immortal; the lover thinks his love will never die. These moments are full of eternity: these moments are splendid because they do not seem momentary. Man cannot love mortal things; he can only love immortal things for an instant."

We're All the 1%?

If class envy is a problem, perhaps it would be helpful to look at the big picture. In the history of mankind, nearly all present-day Americans would have to be classified in the top 1%, wealth-wise. If there were time-travelers from a hundred years or more ago they might well be protesting when they went back, knowing what we have. The whole thing is so relative. And if there's anybody who should be occupying something, it's the poor in Africa and elsewhere, many of whom are poor even by historical standards.

The other thought I had concerned the ubiquitous anxious question, "Will our children be better off that we will?" as if that's the end all and be all. I cringe a bit when I hear it because it rather nakedly poses that material happiness is the criteria upon which we base our society. I'm not sure, for example, it's crucial that my grandchildren have 4,000 square foot homes, instead of 3,000 square foot ones. Mika B. on Morning Joe mentioned today how French adolescents were asked to make drawings that reflected what they thought of Americans and one girl drew a person eating money. (Of course the French should talk but...).

This is not to say that the middle class hasn't been getting squeezed over the past four decades. Incomes aren't rising all that much, so even staying even is problematical. The thing about capitalism is that it does seem like if you're not striving to have better lives materially, you'll lose even the current standard of living. Which is what seems to be happening in Europe.

Takes Faith to Have Faith

Read an interesting web item on how massage therapy promotes the release of oxytocin which leads to feelings of trust. But, ironically, she says that it takes trust in order to be open to receive the gift of trust.  Sort of like faith?:

"This is the miracle of the modern world. It’s usually safe to wander back streets in other people’s countries, and engage in transactions with nothing but gestures and smiles. Modern trade requires a huge amount of trust, which took centuries to build. We should celebrate that trust instead of taking it for granted. Most people fill their heads with the calamities on the news and don’t notice how often things go right...

That’s the irony of massage. It stimulates the neurochemical “oxytocin,” the feeling we experience as trust, but you have to start with a lot of trust for it to work."

Of Books

Went down to the cafeteria for a civilized half-hour reading "Swamplandia", a novel set in the atmospheric swampy Everglades about a family who own a tacky tourist trap involving alligator wrestling. Tasty Florida kitsch. The author is coming to Columbus tonight, to the Thurber House. Wouldn't mind going if it were hassle-free, which it's not. In the end I'd rather be reading her novel than listening to her read it and doing whatever else happens at book events. (She can't sign my Kindle, so there's no book-signing possible.)

Later worked out and read the eminently readable "After America" by Mark Steyn. I don't know why, but these financial collapse books seem to unduly fascinate me. Am on my third book that describes the events of 2008 forward. Maybe it's just the authors - Mark Steyn and Michael Lewis are always great reads. Or it's just that the topic of collapse and decay appeal to the pessimistically inclined.

In Honor of National Novel Writing Month!

She was born in the summer of her 67th year, she often joked, making reference to a song that few shy of her age would recall. It was then that she found God and a mate, both belated suitors it might've seemed to her even though in fact both had been waiting for her all her life.

Born prickly, her younger siblings preceded her in death as if adhering to her natural order of things. She would have her way, and her way was not to leave the stage without taking the requisite bows. The wonder of it was how she managed a full social calendar despite her abrasive personality. People just got used to it, or maybe they feared her, figuring it was easier not to make a scene or an enemy. It seemed on the surface at least that she had more than a few friends. Like family, small town neighbors were those you had to get along with since you saw them so often.

She ran an unsuccessful business out of her home because she was the only one who would have her as an employee. Her gloss was that no employer would live up to her standards. Regardless, it was a rare point of agreement: she and potential employers agreed she was not suited to work for anybody but herself.

But all of this changed the summer she turned 67, much to the surprise of the local pastor who'd long ago written her off: "Focus on the young. The old are too set in their ways," he often said. Ironically it was he who was too set in his ways.

RSS R Us

Netted some good blogposts, such a blogger making the point that our worth is not tied up in our usefulness:

"Last month I listened to a radio program . . . that made me groan out loud . . . . about adoption . . . . Who knows what gifts and treasures an adoptee might bring to the world, if they're only given a chance ([the commentator] said). For proof, just take a look at what Steve Jobs accomplished! And the same has been used as a rationale against abortion: don't deny the unborn a chance to become the next greatest CEO!

"What rot. Children, refugees, women, men, the elderly, the disabled, the severely disabled, the unborn, are of extreme value because human life is valuable. Period. People are worthy of our service simply because they are people and as such have inestimable dignity.

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Eric Scheske said what I've often thought: that the sign of the end of civilization is upon us when adults stop giving out Halloween candy to children.

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On embracing the unknown, from a soul-baring would-be Augustinian monk.

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And Kevin Jones on American culture blindness in Iraq.

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Also listened to a bit of blogger Steve Gershom on Catholic Answers radio show yesterday. Didn't sound gay (he admitted on his blog before that he's pretty good at not setting off any gaydar). I didn't realize his was a pseudonym, but I can certainly understand why he uses one. Certainly makes one feel freer to share.

Saints & Sinners

It's funny how a single word can throw me. Thousands of times I've recited my favorite prayer after Communion, "Soul of Christ, sanctify me / Body of Christ save me....". But this time when I got to "Passion of Christ/ Strengthen me" I thought of passion not as the crucifixion as I normally do (while focusing on self, in terms of praying that some of His strength rub off on me), but His passion in the sense of love, as in his passion for us. Afterwards I thumbed through the Jerusalem Bible and came across an incident in Luke 7, an illustration of how Jesus, Master of the Universe, wants our love. Which is a strange and humbling thing on the face of it. The account was of a sinner and a Pharisee and how the sinner loved Christ because more was forgiven her. It's a telling reminder that Jesus doesn't want our rote acts of fealty but our love, our passion. And He linked that to forgiveness. What makes God most lovable? Not His power or even His perfection - what God has is forgiveness. That is the coin of the heavenly realm. Is it a chicken and egg kind of thing, in that he who has forgiven much, loves much, or is it he who loves much is forgiven much? The gospels express it both ways. And in the end Jesus says it was the woman's faith that saved her. Faith in His forgiveness, it would seem.

Still, I'm left with a paradox, the woman had sins, "many sins", and yet great love. Aren't the two mutually exclusive? How does purport to love God and yet be a big sinner? A lack of sin doesn't necessarily make you a great lover, but the contrary seems true: being a sinner means you aren't a great lover since to sin against someone is to say, in some way, you don't love them (or God). Perhaps it's as simple as seeing her sins in the past. She *was* a sinner who didn't love much, then she became, in that moment with Christ, a lover who didn't sin much.

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I've long been fascinated by the stories of saints whose bodies remain incorruptible after death. It's strange of me to think of this as a "reward", since it hardly matters whether someone's body is molding in the grave or is in great condition because in either case they are dead and their spirit is elsewhere, concerned with bigger things. But it seems to me a touching, an imprimatur from God, a little act the Creator bestows on the created, a little sign of love that may or may not ever be discovered by the masses. This incorruptibility seems like a tangible reward, an honor God bestows on the few, the pious, the Marines of the spiritual world. But even this is not a surefire way of identifying the saintly. Many saints did become corruptible and some incorruptibles may not be holy. Too often I also superstitiously note the lack of saints who died in accidents (have there been?) and think Thomas Merton may not be one due to his unnatural end. All of this can "misunderestimate" how passionately God loves us, whether or not our bodies corrupt or what sort of death we experience. We look for little droplets of kindness unaware we live in a sea of Love.

Excerpts from Goddard's "The Meaning of Shakespeare"

How well the first two paragraphs seem to correlate to Biblical criticism and not just Shakespearian:

To find out first what Shakespeare really wrote sounds eminently sensible. But it is not as objective an inquiry as it seems. Even in determining the text, love is as necessary as learning, for only he who recognizes Shakespeare’s voice and has penetrated into his spirit is fitted to make the delicate choice among possible readings or to catch the “inspired” emendation. And so it turns out that we must know Shakespeare before we know what he wrote precisely in order to be capable of finding out more nearly what he did write.

to read some of the historical critics you would think that only a learned student of Elizabethan society and the Elizabethan stage can pretend to understand Shakespeare.

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“The Lord at Delphi,” says Heraclitus, “neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign.” Dreams have the same Delphic characteristic. So does poetry. To our age anything Delphic is anathema. We want the definite. As certainly as ours is a time of the expert and the technician, we are living under a dynasty of the intellect, and the aim of the intellect is not to wonder and love and grow wise about life, but to control it.

We want the facts for the practical use we can make of them. We want the tree for its lumber, not, as Thoreau did, to make an appointment with it as with a friend.

*

Neither [Cadwal nor Belarius] is a mere passive receptacle for the narrative. Each participates in, contributes to it. But how differently! The elder acts it out, spirit and body combining to be the story and its hero. The younger re-creates it imaginatively, striking life into it by revealing his individual reaction to it...But translation is rarely creation, and there is a step beyond it. There is nothing that makes a story come to life like linking it with the experience of the moment.

But if it came to a choice, who can doubt where Shakespeare’s deeper sympathy would lie? And so I hear him adding: “But there is another way of taking my stories that I like even better. I like to have you strike life into my speech by lighting it up with your own experience, as Cadwal did the speech of Belarius. Yes, I love to have my stories taken as dramas, but I love still more to have them taken as poetry.” That at any rate is the way Shakespeare treated the stories of others.

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“‘Never be afraid of an author,’ he said, ‘an actor is a free artist. You ought to create an image different from the author’s. When the two images-the author’s and the actor’s-fuse into one-then a true artistic work is created.’

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How many masters of how many arts have expressed delight when they have found some Cadwal to strike life into their own creations: “I write to you,” says Chopin in one of his letters, “without knowing what my pen is scribbling, for Liszt is at this moment playing my Etudes and he transports me out of my proper senses. I should like to steal from him his way of playing my pieces.”

You and I and the next man are not entitled to read anything we take a fancy to into a symphony or a play. It is only in so far as each of us is an artist that his freedom to interpret a work of art will not degenerate into license. Fortunately, however deeply buried, there is an artist in every man.

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only the imagination can apprehend the imagination.

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The criticism of the first period (often called neoclassic), instead of striking life into Shakespeare’s works, sought to subject them to a set of rules and a conception of dramatic art inherited from the past, something that was not at all its “own conceiving.”

The critics of this age admitted that Shakespeare was a kind of rough genius but contended that he lacked art-which he did, in their sense. They served a purpose in pointing out some of Shakespeare’s excesses. But they showed how powerless reason is to grasp imagination.

The romantic period, which followed, was poetic rather than intellectual, and produced, at its best, as good criticism of Shakespeare as has ever been written. But it had the defects of its qualities; and in its lesser writers, in its greatest ones at their worst, and in their later imitators, Shakespearean criticism degenerated into extravagance and fancy-for alongside the man who finds his own soul, and so the soul of everyone, in a work of art, is the man who reads into it his own prejudices and opinions, makes it a point of departure for some sheer invention, or uses it to grind his own axe—all of them fatally different things. As Cicero remarks in Julius Caesar, men may construe things after their fashion, Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.

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“Let us get rid of all this subjective business,” cry all these critics in unison, “and get back to Shakespeare himself.” Shakespeare himself! As if Shakespeare himself were acquainted with any such person, had his own neat theory of Hamlet, or held the same conception of his characters a decade later as on the day they were created. “I must observe that I have often been mistaken,” says Chekhov in one of his letters, “and have not always thought what I think now.” All free minds say that.

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Shakespeare’s lifelong pity for “the fools of time” suggests what he might have thought of this way of approaching his works. A thoroughgoing historical critic is a man attempting to explain the flower by an exhaustive examination of the soil. It cannot be done. “If anything is humanly certain,” says William James, “it is that the great man’s society, properly so called, does not make him before he can remake it. Physiological forces, with which the social, political, geographical, and to a great extent anthropological conditions have just as much and just as little to do as the condition of the crater of Vesuvius has to do with the flickering of this gas by which I write, are what make him.”

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the objective business that is the object of their search is neither a whit better nor a whit worse than the subjective business that is the subject of their scorn. The two are extremes that meet. Suppose that in a drop of water an oxygen sect were to appear clamoring for the extinction of all this hydrogen business—or vice versa. It would be a parable of the factual critics. For what thev leave out is one of the two constituents of life itself. What they forget is the dual character of the imagination. Imagination is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two...

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The reader with a poem before him is like a youth with life before him. In spite of all that the guides and drivers say, he must be faithful to the text and to himself: two lions at the gate of his adventure to keep him from wandering off into the desert of custom or the jungle of fancy. This is the answer to those who hold that opening the doors on individual interpretation is opening them on anarchy. If it is, we are to blame. It need not be. We read a poem as we live—at our risk.