Poet: Education for Joy

More Snow Falling

2010-12-12T15:32:00.000-08:00

More on the author Peter Kane Dufault can be read at Worple Press.

The Golden Statue

2010-11-28T23:58:00.000-08:00

by Gwen Adams (c. 2010)

(1st Sunday of Advent)
“The work of divine justice always presupposes the work of mercy; and is founded thereupon. . . . God out of abundance of His goodness bestows upon creatures what is due to them more bountifully than is proportionate to their deserts: since less would suffice for preserving the order of justice than what the divine goodness confers; because between creatures and God's goodness there can be no proportion.”
—Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica,1.21.4

King Midas loved gold too well and he wished that all he touched would turn to gold. When his wish came true, he was at first greatly pleased. But his joy soon became mourning. Midas had a daughter of surpassing beauty, with a vivacious and pleasing nature, but all her promise and splendor ended the day she came out to greet him and his hand touched hers. She was turned to a golden statue forever.

Midas spent many years seeking a cure, but finally gave up. He put the statue on a fine pedestal in the great hall, and was careful to touch nothing from then on, especially his infant daughter, sixteen years the junior to the eldest. His life was a continual misery and a reproach to him.

As the years passed, another grief plagued him: the inability of the youngest to find a suitable spouse. She was a plain woman, morose and sour, who found fault easily with people, especially her suitors. Her sour disposition was aggravated when people continually compared her to the once beloved eldest sister. The sight of the statue was bitter, so in the end the statue was put outside in an obscure courtyard in the garden. And people forgot about the eldest daughter.

But the years passed and still no one would wed the youngest. Midas decided to give a great ball for her and invite many possible suitors. To prepare, he hired many cooks, bakers, musicians, and all manner of workmen. There was a prince of a neighboring kingdom who had heard tales of the difficult princess that intrigued him and piqued his curiosity. He decided to see if she was worth winning and if so, to win her hand. He determined to come in disguise and hit upon the plan of applying as a workman for the ball.

So it came to pass that he worked at the palace and observed the princess unawares and found her to be as shrewish and disagreeable as the tales told. He would have left within a week if a singular event had not occurred. The palace was full of many royal personages enjoying themselves the long week before the ball. Now the disguised prince went to the garden to water the plants and clean the statues. Soon he came upon the obscure courtyard and the statue which had once been Midas’ eldest daughter. Time had covered creeper over her form; an old birds-nest lay in the crook of one arm. Nevertheless, a strange beauty and mysterious grace still hung about her. He pulled off the creeper and tossed away the nest. He looked at her for a long time. Her hand was still outstretched as it was the day she reached out to her father and was turned to gold. He polished her hand and then he kissed it. As he did so, a duke and duchess out for a stroll saw and recognized him as a prince.

When he came before the court to explain his presence and his disguise, he made a strange request. He asked that he might find a cure for the statue and then marry her. “I love this girl,” he said. “Grant me this gift.”

As he spoke, a barb lodged in the youngest daughter’s heart, and she saw this prince was very handsome, very good, and altogether worthy. Midas saw her face and demurred, “Prince, there is no cure for my eldest daughter. Take the hand of my youngest who is pleasing and fair of face.”

The Prince slept little that night for sorrow. He dreamed one dream: he saw a beautiful city of jewels and gold where the sun never set, and in the first gate of the city was a golden statue. The sun burned for seven years and the heat of its shining melted the gold of the statue. Its color faded as leaves will fade, and it became a clay pot. In this pot was clear, sweet water.

The next day, the prince went before the court and repeated his request. Again Midas looked at his youngest. She bit her lip and looked at the prince, and Midas denied him. “Sire,” said the prince. “I have had a true dream. I have worked as a laborer in this palace all week and I will work seven years more for you, if you will let me wed your eldest daughter. I know this labor will cure her; she will live again.”

But Midas’ heart was black and so he only pretended to agree. The prince worked as a laborer for seven years. He polished the statue in the courtyard so that the sun reflected on it and dazzled the eye. But the youngest watched him from her window, braided and re-braided her graying hair in the mirror, and pined. At last the time was ended, and the prince went before Midas. “I have labored for seven years,” he said. “And now I ask of you again that I might wed your eldest daughter.”

Said Midas, “It is not fit to take the dead over the living. You may wed my youngest daughter.” The prince said, “I have left my father, my kingdom, and my people these seven years to serve you and you deny me?”

“You may wed my youngest if you choose. We will hear your answer tomorrow,” said Midas. Looking at the youngest, the prince saw her face was streaked with happy tears. He made a courteous bow and left the hall.

All night he lay face down on the stones of the courtyard and would touch neither meat not drink. At dawn, the youngest plaited her graying hair and went out. All the grass was dewy, every spider’s web a net of dew in the grass. She would have gone into the courtyard but for the voice she heard. Her sour heart burned. She hid herself in the shadows and listened. The prince was speaking, “How can I ask her to plead for me? She desires to wed me, though I have labored these seven years for you. She has only to speak to her father who wrongs us so. How can I ask this of her? I cannot. I shall not wed you.” The youngest heard these words and the sound of his mourning rent her heart asunder. Then, for a moment, her plain face was radiant. She went to her father, and they summoned the prince.

When the prince stood before him, Midas began, “We are ready to discuss a dowry for my youngest daughter if you consent to wed her.”

“Sire,” began the prince wretchedly.

But the youngest interrupted, “Father, I find this prince unsuitable. My sister is his by right more than I. In justice you must carry out your original promise.” All were speechless, Midas most of all. “So be it,” he said.

The prince approached her, bowed, and kissed her hand. Her head was bowed, and he looked at her with wonder. “Dear princess,” he began but she stopped him. “There is no love without justice,” she whispered.

So justice was done to the statue and to the prince, and it was at the same time both due and gratuitous. The prince went to the courtyard and touched the hand of the statue which came instantly to life. They were soon wed and had many children. The youngest sister died shortly after the wedding; none were sure why. But when strange favors were granted, her tomb was opened and in her coffin they found dust and robes and two rent halves of a gold heart.

The Process of Conversion

2010-11-27T18:23:00.000-08:00

Reading Newman's Apologia, I was struck by how much Newman suffered between 1841-1843 as he tried to determine what to do--stay Anglican or become . . . Roman Catholic?

Here are his words. They give food for thought about how we Roman Catholics ought to interact with those like Newman, maybe considering the Faith.

"After Tract 90 the Protestant world would not let me alone; they pursued me in the public journals to Littlemore. Reports of all kinds were circulated about me. "Imprimis, why did I go up to Littlemore at all? For no good purpose certainly; I dared not tell why." Why, to be sure, it was hard that I should be obliged to say to the Editors of newspapers that I went up there to say my prayers; it was hard to have to tell the world in confidence, that I had a certain doubt about the Anglican system, and could not at that moment resolve it, or say what would come of it; it was hard to have to confess that I had thought of giving up my Living a year or two before, and that this was a first step to it. It was hard to have to plead, that, for what I knew, my doubts would vanish, if the newspapers would be so good as to give me time and let me alone. Who would ever dream of making the world his confidant? yet I was considered insidious, sly, dishonest, if I would not open my heart to the tender mercies of the world.

But they persisted: "What was I doing at Littlemore?" Doing there? have I not retreated from you? have I not given up my position and my place? am I alone, of Englishmen, not to have the privilege to go where I will, no questions asked? am I alone to be followed about by jealous prying eyes, who note down whether I go in at a back door or at the front, and who the men are who happen to call on me in the afternoon? Cowards! if I advanced one step, you would run away; it is not you that I fear: "Di me terrent, et Jupiter hostis." It is because the Bishops still go on charging against me, though I have quite given up: it is that secret misgiving of heart which tells me that they do well, for I have neither lot nor part with them: this it is which weighs me down. I cannot walk into or out of my house, but curious eyes are upon me. Why will you not let me die in peace? Wounded brutes creep into some hole to die in, and no one grudges it them. Let me alone, I shall not trouble you long. This was the keen [heavy] feeling which pierced me, and, I think, these are the very words that I used to myself."

(And later)
"The last letter, which I have inserted, is addressed to my dear friend, Dr. Russell, the present President of Maynooth. He had, perhaps, more to do with my conversion than any one else. He called upon me, in passing through Oxford in the summer of 1841, and I think I took him over some of the buildings of the University. He called again another summer, on his way from Dublin to London. I do not recollect that he said a word on the subject of religion on either occasion. He sent me at different times several letters; he was always gentle, mild, unobtrusive, uncontroversial. He let me alone. He also gave me one or two books. Veron's Rule of Faith and some Treatises of the Wallenburghs was one; a volume of St. Alfonso Liguori's Sermons was another."

Newman will go on here to relate what this reading did for him.

Castles in Spain

2010-11-26T17:47:00.000-08:00

by Jessica Hickey, (c. 2010)

Wednesday, 10 November 2010

"'My own garden is my own garden,' said the Giant; 'any one can understand that, and I will allow nobody to play in it but myself.'"
(Oscar Wilde, "The Selfish Giant")

"Beauty is one of mankind's greatest needs; it is the root from which the branches of our peace and the fruits of our hope come forth. Beauty also reveals God because, like him, a work of beauty is pure gratuity; it calls us to freedom and draws us away from selfishness."
(Pope Benedict XVI at the dedication of Sagrada Familia Cathedral, Nov 7, 2010)

"How, but in custom and in ceremony,
Are innocence and beauty born?"
(W.B. Yeats, "A Prayer for my Daughter")

This past Sunday, Pope Benedict presided at the dedication of the Cathedral of the Holy Family in Barcelona. Topped by towering spires a century in the making, this church was the creation by the architect Antoni Gaudi, who believed, "A church [is] the only thing worthy of representing the soul of a people, for religion is the most elevated reality in man". Not surprisingly, Gaudi is said to have been a very generous man, who lived in extreme austerity, but founded from his own savings a parish school for the poorest families whom he felt must always find welcome in the Church. This spirit comes through in the Cathedral he left for the church.

It is an expression of beauty, the gratuitousness of which always reminds man of the potential for generosity within himself, the latent charity and magnanimity in which he may, if he chooses, become a mirror of God Himself. It is, as the pontiff noted, something which urges imitation, plants the desire to give of oneself, to be drawn away from our habits of selfishness and meagerness of heart, to pour out oneself like a vessel over dry earth, to leave something precious for others. Pope Benedict in his homily at Sagrada Familia quotes St. Paul: "Do you not know that you are God's temple? … God's temple is holy, and you are that temple" (1 Cor 3:16-17). This leaves us to consider what we might build within, had we the passion and generosity of Gaudi, the firm disposition to turn from selfishness and to build our interior temple with the beauty inherent in holiness. Here I am reminded of a children's' story I have loved for years, Oscar Wilde's tale of The Selfish Giant:

The Selfish Giant
by Oscar Wilde, from The Happy Prince & Other Tales , 1881

"Every afternoon, as they were coming from school, the children used to go and play in the Giant's garden. It was a large lovely garden, with soft green grass. Here and there over the grass
stood beautiful flowers like stars, and there were twelve peach-trees that in the springtime broke out into delicate blossoms of pink and pearl, and in the autumn bore rich fruit. The birds sat on the trees and sang so sweetly that the children used to stop their games in order to listen to them. 'How happy we are here!' they cried to each other. One day the Giant came back. He had been to visit his friend the Cornish ogre, and had stayed with him for seven years. After the seven years were over he had said all that he had to say, for his conversation was limited, and he determined to return to his own castle. When he arrived he saw the children playing in the garden.

'What are you doing here?' he cried in a very gruff voice, and the children ran away.

'My own garden is my own garden,' said the Giant; 'any one can understand that, and I will allow nobody to play in it but myself.' So he built a high wall all round it, and put up a notice-board.

TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

He was a very selfish Giant.

The poor children had now nowhere to play. They tried to play on the road, but the road was very dusty and full of hard stones, and they did not like it. They used to wander round the high wall when their lessons were over, and talk about the beautiful garden inside.

'How happy we were there,' they said to each other.

Then the Spring came, and all over the country there were little blossoms and little birds. Only in the garden of the Selfish Giant it was still Winter. The birds did not care to sing in it as there were no children, and the trees forgot to blossom. Once a beautiful flower put its head out from the grass, but when it saw the notice-board it was so sorry for the children that it slipped back into the ground again, and went off to sleep. The only people who were pleased were the Snow and the Frost. 'Spring has forgotten this garden,' they cried, 'so we will live here all the year round.' The Snow covered up the grass with her great white cloak, and the Frost painted all the trees silver. Then they invited the North Wind to stay with them, and he came. He was wrapped in furs, and he roared all day about the garden, and blew the chimney-pots down. 'This is a delightful spot,' he said, 'we must ask the Hail on a visit.' So the Hail came. Every day for three hours he rattled on the roof of the castle till he broke most of the slates, and then he ran round and round the garden as fast as he could go. He was dressed in grey, and his breath was like ice.

'I cannot understand why the Spring is so late in coming,' said the Selfish Giant, as he sat at the window and looked out at his cold white garden; 'I hope there will be a change in the weather.'

But the Spring never came, nor the Summer. The Autumn gave golden fruit to every garden, but to the Giant's garden she gave none. 'He is too selfish,' she said. So it was always Winter there, and the North Wind, and the Hail, and the Frost, and the Snow danced about through the trees.

One morning the Giant was lying awake in bed when he heard some lovely music. It sounded so sweet to his ears that he thought it must be the King's musicians passing by. It was really only a little linnet singing outside his window, but it was so long since he had heard a bird sing in his garden that it seemed to him to be the most beautiful music in the world. Then the Hail stopped dancing over his head, and the North Wind ceased roaring, and a delicious perfume came to him through the open casement. 'I believe the Spring has come at last,' said the Giant; and he jumped out of bed and looked out.

What did he see?

He saw a most wonderful sight. Through a little hole in the wall the children had crept in, and they were sitting in the branches of the trees. In every tree that he could see there was a little child. And the trees were so glad to have the children back again that they had covered themselves with blossoms, and were waving their arms gently above the children's heads. The birds were flying about and twittering with delight, and the flowers were looking up through the green grass and laughing. It was a lovely scene, only in one corner it was still Winter. It was the farthest corner of the garden, and in it was standing a little boy. He was so small that he could not reach up to the branches of the tree, and he was wandering all round it, crying bitterly. The poor tree was still quite covered with frost and snow, and the North Wind was blowing and roaring above it.

'Climb up! little boy,' said the Tree, and it bent its branches down as low as it could; but the little boy was too tiny.

And the Giant's heart melted as he looked out. 'How selfish I have been!' he said; 'now I know why the Spring would not come here. I will put that poor little boy on the top of the tree, and then I will knock down the wall, and my garden shall be the children's playground for ever and ever.' He was really very sorry for what he had done. So he crept downstairs and opened the front door quite softly, and went out into the garden. But when the children saw him they were so frightened that they all ran away, and the garden became Winter again. Only the little boy did not run, for his eyes were so full of tears that he died not see the Giant coming. And the Giant stole up behind him and took him gently in his hand, and put him up into the tree. And the tree broke at once into blossom, and the birds came and sang on it, and the little boy stretched out his two arms and flung them round the Giant's neck, and kissed him. And the other children, when they saw that the Giant was not wicked any longer, came running back,
and with them came the Spring. 'It is your garden now, little children,' said the Giant, and he took a great axe and knocked down the wall. And when the people were gong to market at twelve o'clock they found the Giant playing with the children in the most beautiful garden they had ever seen.

All day long they played, and in the evening they came to the Giant to bid him good-bye.

'But where is your little companion?' he said: 'the boy I put into the tree.' The Giant loved him the best because he had kissed him.

'We don't know,' answered the children; 'he has gone away.'

'You must tell him to be sure and come here to-morrow,' said the Giant. But the children said that they did not know where he lived, and had never seen him before; and the Giant felt very sad.

Every afternoon, when school was over, the children came and played with the Giant. But the little boy whom the Giant loved was never seen again. The Giant was very kind to all the children, yet he longed for his first little friend, and often spoke of him. 'How I would like to see him!' he used to say.

Years went over, and the Giant grew very old and feeble. He could not play about any more, so he sat in a huge armchair, and watched the children at their games, and admired his garden. 'I have many beautiful flowers,' he said; 'but the children are the most beautiful flowers of all.'

One winter morning he looked out of his window as he was dressing. He did not hate the Winter now, for he knew that it was merely the Spring asleep, and that the flowers were resting.

Suddenly he rubbed his eyes in wonder, and looked and looked. It certainly was a marvellous sight. In the farthest corner of the garden was a tree quite covered with lovely white blossoms. Its branches were all golden, and silver fruit hung down from them, and underneath it stood the little boy he had loved.

Downstairs ran the Giant in great joy, and out into the garden. He hastened across the grass, and came near to the child. And when he came quite close his face grew red with anger, and he said, 'Who hath dared to wound thee?' For on the palms of the child's hands were the prints of two nails, and the prints of two nails were on the little feet.

'Who hath dared to wound thee?' cried the Giant; 'tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him.'

'Nay!' answered the child; 'but these are the wounds of Love.'

'Who art thou?' said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child.

And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, 'You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.'

And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms."

To me the story is particularly poignant because of the author himself. As a young man, Wilde visited Rome and fell in love with the Church in all its beauty. However, his elevated desires conflicted with the habits of his social circle, among whom he lived the life of a witty and popular aesthete, eventually falling into a life of grave sins and excesses. His later life saw him reduced to penury and humiliation after being imprisoned on charges of homosexual behavior. Estranged from his family, his once scintillating literary reputation in tatters, Wilde at length returned to the longings of his innocent days, appealed for pardon and reception into the Church. This wish was granted as he lay dying in France at the age of 47.

Though I do not think it would be fair to reduce Wilde's life to a mere cautionary tale, one cannot help but wonder, reading this story, what might have been, had he allowed his original love of goodness and beauty to lead him into the light. Wilde dreamt of "the wounds of love," the blood which had been shed for him, for love and for innocence. He dreamt of redemption, of breaking down the walls that shut Christ out. Did he think it was just a child's tale, too good to be true--"a castle in Spain" as the old expression has it? Yet looking upon Sagrada Familia, we know that such castles are real--with love, with generosity, they can be built.

What if he had permitted his soul to be, as it was destined to be, a temple for the Holy Spirit? What if he had been willing and strong for the task of setting the temple within in right order, opening the door and allowing, as in the story below, the Divine Child to enter? Might he have become, as Benedict said of Sagarada Familia, an icon of Divine beauty?

This is the question that lays open before each of us, whether, in the time that we are given on earth, we build well or poorly. "Let each man take care how he builds. For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ," wrote St. Paul (1 Cor 3:10-11). Pope Benedict adds: "The Lord Jesus is the stone which supports the weight of the world." It is for us to choose what we are willing to lay upon this foundation, whether all, or nothing, for God's temple.

This week, we appeal to Our Lord to enlarge our hearts and souls for His purpose. We ask particular graces for our candidate Hector, and all those who seek God in this place.

Rome Unvisited, by Oscar Wilde
I
The corn has turned from grey to red,
Since first my spirit wandered forth
From the drear cities of the north,
And to Italia's mountains fled.

And here I set my face towards home,
For all my pilgrimage is done,
Although, methinks, yon blood-red sun
Marshals the way to Holy Rome.

O Blessed Lady, who dost hold
Upon the seven hills thy reign!
O Mother without blot or stain,
Crowned with bright crowns of triple gold!

O Roma, Roma, at thy feet
I lay this barren gift of song!
For, ah! the way is steep and long
That leads unto thy sacred street.

II
And yet what joy it were for me
To turn my feet unto the south,
And journeying towards the Tiber mouth
To kneel again at Fiesole!

And wandering through the tangled pines
That break the gold of Arno's stream,
To see the purple mist and gleam
Of morning on the Apennines

By many a vineyard-hidden home,
Orchard and olive-garden grey,
Till from the drear Campagna's way
The seven hills bear up the dome!

III
A pilgrim from the northern seas -
What joy for me to seek alone
The wondrous temple and the throne
Of him who holds the awful keys!

When, bright with purple and with gold
Come priest and holy cardinal,
And borne above the heads of all
The gentle Shepherd of the Fold.

O joy to see before I die
The only God-anointed king,
And hear the silver trumpets ring
A triumph as he passes by!

Or at the brazen-pillared shrine
Holds high the mystic sacrifice,
And shows his God to human eyes
Beneath the veil of bread and wine.

IV
For lo, what changes time can bring!
The cycles of revolving years
May free my heart from all its fears,
And teach my lips a song to sing.

Before yon field of trembling gold
Is garnered into dusty sheaves,
Or ere the autumn's scarlet leaves
Flutter as birds adown the wold,

I may have run the glorious race,
And caught the torch while yet aflame,
And called upon the holy name
Of Him who now doth hide His face.

The Secret Garden

2010-11-10T18:35:00.001-08:00

One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws one's head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one's heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun—which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in some one's eyes.
--Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

This beautiful line is one of many in this fascinating book. Here is Karen Savage giving an amazing rendition at librivox.org. The idea of The Secret Garden always fascinated me. This little video gets it--the song from the 1993 film version and a few of the best scenes.

Spiritual Diary II

2010-11-08T15:10:00.000-08:00

The original Spiritual Diary post appeared here, and you can read more there about reasons to keep one and how to do it. I'm writing about it again because I just discovered a new use--as an invaluable record-keeper.

The other day I was praying and using the Spiritual Diary. I was fretting about a general lack of organization which kept resulting in failed resolutions and missed times of prayer. Idly turning the pages of the diary, I noticed that I'd begun this particular book on 24 September 2008. This diary is divided in three sections with different colored paper so it is easy to see how much time has passed between beginning the book and reaching the 1/3 mark and the 2/3 mark. I realized I could easily see if I was praying more or less in November of 2010 than I had been in November of 2008.

I went through every page and found that I was frequenting the sacraments just as often and just as regularly. But I found that it had taken me 6 months to use up the first 1/3 of my diary, 10 months to use up the second 1/3, and at the rate I was going, 12 months to finish the diary. That is, in November 2010 the time I invested in regular disciplined prayer was only 50% of what it was in Fall 2008. I had no idea that I had changed my habits so much. I had noticed the spiritual fruit that comes with cutting your prayer in half, but couldn't figure out the source. The spiritual diary had it all there in black and white records.

The upshot? My new daily resolution (duly noted in the diary) is to schedule the time of prayer. In addition, I've set a recurring alarm to go off on my cell phone to remind me to leave work and go pray.

Just another reason to keep the spiritual diary.

Blur

2010-11-07T14:52:00.000-08:00

pell—mell,
mean, and gaily murderous one moment
as I decapitated daises with a stick,
then overcome with summer's opium,
numb—slumberous. I thought I'd always be a boy,
each day its own millennium, each
one thousand years of daylight ending in
the night watch, summer's pervigilium,
which I could never keep because by sunset
I was an old man. I was Methuselah,
the oldest man in the holy book. I drowsed.
I nodded, slept—and without my watching, the world,
whose permanence I doubted, returned again,
bluebell and blue jay, speedwell and cardinal
still there when the light swept back,
and so was I, which I had also doubted.
I understood with horror then with joy,
dubious and luminous joy: it simply spins.
It doesn't need my feet to make it turn.
It doesn't even need my eyes to watch it,
and I, though a latecomer to its surface, I'd
be leaving early. It was my duty to stay awake
and sing if I could keep my mind on singing,
not extinction, as blurred green summer, lifted
to its apex, succumbed to gravity and fell
to autumn, Ilium, and ashes. In joy
we are our own uncomprehending mourners,
and more than joy I longed for understanding
and more than understanding I longed for joy.
--Andrew Hudgins

From www.poets.org quoting "Blur," from Ecstatic in the Poison by Andrew Hudgins. Copyright © 2003 by Andrew Hudgins. http://www.poets.org/ uses this by permission of Overlook Press (www.overlookpress.com).

Illumination

2010-10-28T20:16:00.000-07:00

by Jessica Hickey, (c.) 2010

Wednesday, 20 October 2010

"The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good, and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space that it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. The self does the same. . . 'To be' means 'to be in competition.'

Now the Enemy's philosophy is nothing more nor less than one continued attempt to evade this very obvious truth. He aims at a contradiction. Things are to be many, yet somehow also one. The good of self is to be the good of another. This impossibility He calls Love, and this same monotonous panacea can be detected under all He does and even all He is."
(C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Ch. XVIII.)

"No man has ever seen God; if we love another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us."
(I John 4:12)

In the year 635, the Irish monk St. Aidan was sent from Iona at the request of the Northumbrian king to found an abbey upon a little island. This island, just off the north coast of England, came to be known as Holy Isle, or Lindisfarne.

There, Aidan and his brothers worked and prayed, producing by a slow labor of love the illuminated Gospel manuscripts, some of which survive to the present day, and from this isle they put forth the roots of a Christian civilization, a civilization which was built on love, as our recent popes have reminded us.

The love of these monks intrigues me, for by some standards, their output was incredibly limited. A monk might live a lifetime of toil in the abbey's scriptorium without ever completing a single book.

This is partly explained by the delicacy, precision and intricate detail of the illumination. Each letter was inscribed with utmost care, some with elaborate ornamentation. Looking closely at one of these illuminated pages, patterns emerge, constructed of interlacing motifs: coiling knots and crosses, flowers and herbs twining together, birds, beasts, and fishes, angelic and saintly faces. The pages appear to be living, which in the theological sense, of course, they are. Designs involving thousands of miniscule dots, known as rubrication, were also used to adorn the initial capital letter of the sacred page. On one such page from the Lindisfarne Gospels, over10,600 dots were counted.

The scribe's work was small, his whole sphere of influence just the fly-leaf before him. Yet each brushstroke was carefully planned and executed to produce the utmost beauty of which his hand was capable. The words he copied were sacred, and he treated them as such, giving all that human effort and nature's resources could provide. The result was in the shining images of Revelation, the breath of God on calfskin, colored golden, lapis blue, emerald and roseate, such as may be seen in the Gospels of Lindisfarne, and the work of its sister house at Kells. Small, perfect, love made visible--like Christ Himself when he entered the world as a meek and tiny Child.

Some of the monks also took on the task of recording the events of their time, preserving the stories of their foundations and their saints. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is such a history, terse and brief, compiled by the English monks of this era, with just a few entries for each year. I remember the great sorrow I felt when, completing a translation exercise for a course in Old English, I worked out the following entry for the year 793:

In this year fierce, foreboding omens came over the land of Northumbria ... These signs were followed by great famine, and on January 8th, the ravaging of heathen men destroyed God's church at Lindisfarne.

Northern Europe had awoken: first the Vikings, and then later, the Danes. Descending upon the monastic settlements in search of treasure, they pillaged and burned these little works brought forth by love. And as with Lindisfarne, so too fell the abbeys of Kells and Iona. Under the torch and the sword of the Northmen, the monks were slaughtered or fled, leaving the bones of their founders behind them.

G. K. Chesterton captures the spirit of these times in his Ballad of the White Horse:

The Northmen came about our land
A Christless chivalry:
Who knew not of the arch or pen,
Great, beautiful half-witted men
From the sunrise and the sea.

Misshapen ships stood on the deep
Full of strange gold and fire,
And hairy men, as huge as sin
With horned heads, came wading in
Through the long, low sea-mire.

Our towns were shaken of tall kings
With scarlet beards like blood:
The world turned empty where they trod,
They took the kindly cross of God
And cut it up for wood.

Their souls were drifting as the sea,
And all good towns and lands
They only saw with heavy eyes,
And broke with heavy hands,

Their gods were sadder than the sea,
Gods of a wandering will,
Who cried for blood like beasts at night,
Sadly, from hill to hill.

They seemed as trees walking the earth,
As witless and as tall,
Yet they took hold upon the heavens
And no help came at all.

The invaders of this story stand in complete contrast to the monks of history. These latter were artists and creators, who with crushed berries and bits of feathers brought God's revelation before men's eyes. The Northmen, however, are mighty and blind; they destroy but they cannot build: "They only saw with heavy eyes, /And broke with heavy hands."

In this tale, Chesterton's King Alfred, grieving for the state of his realm, remembers an illuminated page shown him by his mother, and has a vision of the Mother of God:

And he saw in a little picture,
Tiny and far away,
His mother sitting in Egbert's hall,
And a book she showed him, very small,
Where a sapphire Mary sat in stall
With a golden Christ at play.

It was wrought in the monk's slow manner,
From silver and sanguine shell,
Where the scenes are little and terrible,
Keyholes of heaven and hell.
. . .
Fearfully plain the flowers grew,
Like the child's book to read,
Or like a friend's face seen in a glass;
He looked; and there Our Lady was,
She stood and stroked the tall live grass
As a man strokes his steed.

Her face was like an open word
When brave men speak and choose,
The very colours of her coat
Were better than good news.

Chesterton's Alfred, seeing perhaps what the artist saw, has a glimpse of the heavenly, and is in fact drawn into an encounter with heaven. Following this, he is able to take heart for the battles ahead, and ultimately to be victorious.

As for the monks of this time, the real men of Iona, Kells, and Lindisfarne, their desire to keep the light of faith in the world did not perish. The gilded and jeweled book-covers were added to the spoils of the Northmen, but by some great providence, some of the illuminations themselves survived. With their books, the brothers fled, regrouped, rebuilt--continued their work. The raids were repeated, sometimes driving the monks into hiding inland, but they preserved that which they loved and carried it into the future.

Now, it would be easy to draw parallels to our own dark times, to mourn our losses, to speak of great battles against a new pagan barbarism. Today, however, I'd like to think like a monk, that is, to think smaller, to think not of what has been lost but of what ought to be created: heaven's light manifested in the miniscule, love shown in perfect rows of tiny dots.

Cardinal Francis Xavier van Thuan, whose cause for canonization was recently opened, has said: "A straight line consists of millions of little points. Likewise a lifetime consists of millions of seconds and minutes joined together. If every single point along a line is rightly set, the line will be straight. If every moment of a life is good, that life will be holy."

Like the monks, Cardinal van Thuan is concerned not with the great tragedies or victories, but with taking each moment with care, making each moment a point of entry into the heavenly by doing it right. By rightness, I think perhaps I might better say, in perfect charity, for this is what is so often most lacking. After all, it was not a priggish desire for perfectionism which drove the monastic scribes, but a need to take the beauty and love of God and to translate into a small human art.

St John provided us with opening quotation of this meditation: "No man has ever seen God; if we love another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us." All that is Divine is manifested in us by our charity. Our very first Pope likewise adjured us: "Above all hold unfailing your love for one another, since love covers a multitude of sins." (I Peter 4:8)

One does not become holy, more perfected by Divine love in theory. It is when we awaken in the morning and begin the day, when things are lost are lost and broken, and people irritating, the weather disagreeable, the cupboard empty and the news bad, when there is a headache or hurt feelings or simply too much to do--this is when it is time to take up the quill and begin the rubrication, placing each point rightly, with colors celestial, giving the very best we have.

The mother of one my students told me once that she had had very little opportunity for formal religious education, but that her father had been a very pious man, and that he had taught each of his children: "Before your feet touch the floor in the morning, you must call upon the Holy Trinity." In doing so, he invited holiness upon himself, and began the first lines of that pattern that would be continued in his children and grandchildren.

God wishes to help us; He wishes to teach us the perfection of love, and to give us the ability to see that the good of others is our own good; the happiness of others is our own happiness. There is a gratuity and abundance of this desire, something that cannot help but express itself, something which is also captured in the burgeoning illuminations of Lindisfarne and Kells.

C.S. Lewis reminds us in The Four Loves:

"In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give. The doctrine that God was under no necessity to create is not a piece of dry scholastic speculation. It is essential. Without it we can hardly avoid the conception of what I can only call a 'managerial' God; a Being whose function or nature is to 'run' the universe, who stands to it as a head-master to a school or a hotelier to a hotel. But to be sovereign of the universe is no great matter to God. In Himself, at home in 'the land of the Trinity,' he is a Sovereign of a far greater realm. We must keep always before our eyes that vision of Lady Julian's in which God carried in His hand a little object like a nut and that nut was 'all that was made.

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe already foreseeing . . . the buzzing cloud of flies about he cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a host who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and 'take advantage of' Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves."

Possessing this diagram of gratuitous love can change us. We find that there is an intuitive rightness about charity that draws us. A child coloring instinctively chooses the color which is most beautiful for his purpose and is happy; it is its own reward. I believe the monks must have felt in their art this same rightness, that it belonged. Sketching out the tiny triads of fishes which revolve around the letters of Luke's Gospel, the artist must have felt: this ought to exist in that time and place.

In the same way, the beauty of charity deserves to exist in our temporal moments, the Gospel illuminated in human action. May we all learn all together the art of inscribing it there.

"I pray You, noble Jesu, that as You have graciously granted me
joyfully to imbibe the words of Your knowledge;
so You will also of Your bounty grant me to come at length to Yourself,
the Fount of all wisdom, and to dwell in Your presence for ever."
(St. Bede the Venerable, Abbot of Jarrow in Northumbria)

When We Were Very Young

2010-10-27T20:04:00.000-07:00

I just discovered Miranda Richardson's marvelous audio rendering of A. A. Milne's classic When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six. I had once dismissed the poems as drivel, but her rendition revealed the poems to be exactly what poetry should be. As Dennis Quinn put it in Iris Exiled: A Synoptic History of Wonder, "The poet really says very little: something like ‘Look at that!’ The looking involves seeing with our imagination and memory. Or the poet says, ‘It is like that!’ in which case we see the likeness. All the devices of poetry are efforts to get at the mystery of what things are.[1]

Milne is a true poet here, with poems not just for children. However, these are certainly an accessible introduction for children. The images are striking, the language beautiful, and the emotional range profound and varied. Here is longing, wit, curiousity, sorrow, relish, triumph, loyalty, tenderness, shock--all the emotions of wonder, if not of vice.

Here is one poem that especially caught my attention.

"The Wrong House"
I went into a house, and it wasn't a house,
It has big steps and a great big hall;
But it hasn't got a garden,
A garden,
A garden,
It isn't like a house at all.

I went into a house, and it wasn't a house,
It has a big garden and great high wall;
But it hasn't got a may-tree,
A may-tree,
A may-tree,
It isn't like a house at all.

I went into a house, and it wasn't a house -
Slow white petals from the may-tree fall;
But it hasn't got a blackbird,
A blackbird,
A blackbird,
It isn't like a house at all.

I went into a house, and I thought it was a house,
I could hear from the may-tree the blackbird call…
But nobody listened to it,
Nobody
Liked it,
Nobody wanted it at all.

The Cemetary

2010-10-06T12:15:00.000-07:00

by Gwen Adams (c. 2010)

(27th Sunday in Ordinary Time)

"Life may scatter us and keep us apart; it may prevent us from thinking very often of one another; but we know that our comrades are somewhere 'out there'—where, one can hardly say—silent, forgotten, but deeply faithful. And when our path crosses theirs, they greet us with such manifest joy, shake us so gaily by the shoulders! Indeed, we are accustomed to waiting. Bit by bit, nevertheless, it comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friends, that this one garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true mourning, which, though it may not be rending, is yet a little bitter. For nothing, in truth, can replace that companion. Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak. So life goes on. For years we plant the seed, or feel ourselves rich; and then come other years when time does its work and our plantation is made sparse and thin. One by one, our comrades slip away, deprive us of their shade."
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand, and Stars

“The cup of suffering, woe’s me, I ne’er must sip.”
—The Angel in C. S. Lewis’, The Pilgrim’s Regress

Drive out to the cemetery any day of the week and see the old graves, the new, and the waiting plots. I went last week to put flowers on the grave of Cecilia Goolous, a holy woman who died at the age of 102, the oldest woman in the parish. For years she lived just a block over from the church in an enormous Victorian house that her father bought with genuine gold bouillon more than a century ago. The house, when I saw it, was a shade of light green and had a large front porch that no one ever sat on. It had been divided up into rental units, but Cecilia said that one day her house would be used for God.

Cecilia Goolous never married and lived a life of silence and prayer. She used to sit in the back of the church by the radiators which made so much noise, and she would pray one rosary after the other. She had two great pictures of the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts that she kept with her in her nursing home room until she died. She was buried in her family plot with a plain flat stone, and I used to pray to and for her and take her pink roses on occasion.

Seeing people in every day life, it is easy to forget the underlying reality. But everyone has some relative or friend here, and you can learn a lot about people that you never knew by walking through on an autumn day. It is easy to forget—indeed easy not to know who lost a child in the accident or who had a baby still-born, buried him in a tiny grave under a weeping cherry. In the winter its stripped branches hang down, each with a soft white line of snow.

It is easy to forget that someone just became a widow or widower. You can see the grave with the two names and one set of dates. When I was a child, my grandmother used to take me to see grandfather’s grave. That cemetery was canopied by elms, with trunks and limbs stretching up in an almost stylized, art deco fashion, as they do in illustrations for Sleeping Beauty. We would water the plants, and I would look at her name and her birth date and the smooth gray blank where a man would chisel the date of her death, whenever that should be. I used to go to the cemetery by myself sometimes and look at that grave and that blank spot and wonder. Now if I went, if I wished I might put my finger on that spot and feel the angled engraving of each letter and line that marks how she died on Pentecost.

It is easy to forget what people have lost, what they lose. One sees them at the parish picnic and takes their loss for granted, simply because it is common.

All over the cemetery, one can cross into other lives. In the east section, all the sisters are buried without headstone, only one plain cross to mark the spot, as if they were fallen soldiers. And if you turned to the west you could look down the hill to the farms outside town and the red barns on the rolling hills with tree-lines like the Bavaria whence the first sisters came, at the young ages of twenty and twenty-four.

It is easy to forget, it is easy not to know that someone’s daughter died on a strange and foreign soil.

Here the priest buried his parents, here lie three generations of a family, here lies someone whose family must all be dead, since the Virginia Creeper has grown over his tombstone and no one ever brings a wreath. Who cares for these souls? Who cared for them when they lived, and who cares for their families, who looks after them, now that these ones have gone on?

And there are other graves here, too. Near the bench and the sundial or by the day-lilies are the friendships that never died but simply waned away. One discovered it suddenly, perhaps while washing a dish or cup, in some mundane activity, that one’s friend had suddenly ceased to be what he was, and had gone on somewhere you could not follow. There are graves lacking markers—for broken hearts, homes, and marriages, for children that ceased to love their parents, for all the uncountable deaths of daily life, all the things that we cannot hold on to, that we lose, each fleeting moment and season, the times we cease to remember something really beautiful, or the concern of someone we loved, or the truths that made us put crosses on our graves.

There are graves for all those things between the maintenance shed and the tiny chapel with the painted white steps and the broad green lanes cut in the grass. Every year they mow those same paths, as the plots fill, and everything draws closer to the end.

When I came to bring flowers in the summer, I would often see another grave dug and the tent set up for a burial on Monday. Once it was a child’s grave, once a young mother who had four children, once an old, old man who had lived and died in great pain. All that, and then this with the weeds and the creeper.

And yet on a summer’s day when the holly-hocks bloom in the odd corners of the cemetery, they bring hummingbirds, and one realizes in some dim way the glory of this reality. I wonder, when all is said and done, what will have been more glorious in the grand scheme of things, which moment of faith and love. The victorious part? Or the blind, dark moment? If He says, “Behold, I make all things new,” which is more glorious—when he says it to you or when he does it? In the end, the difference between those two moments itself passes away.

The Anchoress

2010-10-05T11:50:00.000-07:00

by Jessica Hickey, (c. 2010)

Wednesday, September 29, 2010
“Everything is a grace . . . Everything is the direct effect of our Father’s love--difficulties, contradictions, humiliations, all the soul’s miseries, her burdens, her needs--everything, because through them she learns humility, realizes her weakness. Everything is a grace because everything is God’s gift. Whatever be the character of life or its unexpected events--to the heart that loves, all is well.”
(St. Therese of Lisieux)

"Read assiduously and learn as much as you can. Let sleep find you holding your Bible, and when your head nods, let it be resting on the sacred page."
(St. Jerome, Epistle 22, to Eustochium)

"Such was his love for Holy Scripture that he ceased not from writing or dictating till his hand stiffened in death and his voice was silent forever. So it was that, sparing himself neither labor nor watching nor expense, he continued to extreme old age meditating day and night beside the Crib on the Law of the Lord; of greater profit to the Catholic cause by his life and example in his solitude than if he had passed his life at Rome, the capital of the world."
(Benedict XV, Spiritus Paraclitus ; regarding St. Jerome, 7)

I remember a warm afternoon late one summer, when I emerged from the library. I had loaded up with materials--light comic novels and books-on-tape, DVDs of murder mysteries and children's books--the typical fun 'fluff' entertainment of summertime. Very little was on my mind save squeezing the final dregs of the holiday lull, surrounded by these harmless enjoyments. It was then that I saw the woman who I have come to think of as the Anchoress. At first, I only saw a small car parked near mine, a very rusted and battered vehicle. It had mismatched doors, and was held together with lashings of plastic and duct tape. One of its back doors was propped open, and the grizzled head of a passenger, an old woman, leaned out. She was alone in the car, the rest of her family presumably visiting the library, while she remained behind. She was bent over oddly, very still. I wondered if she was sick in the oppressive heat of the day and needed a breath of air. On the hunched-over figure, I could see faded clothing, and around her the yellow foam of the seat cushions protruding from torn upholstery.

I went toward the car, thinking to offer help, but when I drew near, I saw that the woman was not bent over in illness after all. She was leaning intently over a book, her lips moving silently.

The slanting rays of sunlight falling upon the page disclosed the double-columns of typeface, instantly recognizable as the Scriptures. Deep in thought, she did not look away from her page at my approach.

I stopped where I was and did not disturb the Anchoress. My bag felt suddenly a little heavier in my hands. In a few moments, her family (a middle-aged couple and some teenaged boys) emerged boisterously from the library, their totebags bursting with movies and CDs. There seemed a vast gulf between the raucousness of the family and the silence of the little old woman. At a library, a world of books and entertainments, she was quietly apart. The family climbed into their dilapidated car and drove away. I didn't leave straightaway but sat thinking for a while.

Two, perhaps three years have passed since this event, and I have not seen the old Anchoress again, but I think of her sometimes. I gave her this nickname, because for me in that brief moment, she played the same role that was once played by those who tended to the bells and quiet work of the wayside monastery. She was a reminder of holiness, contemplation, prayerful immersion in the Scriptures. She was the human soul distilled to its most pure practice, that which Our Lord declared "the one thing needful."

In her poverty, one initially might be inclined to pity her. Yet anyone with eyes to see must have apprehended that she possessed something precious, a quality which few of us have managed to attain. Something in her face and her silent devotion spoke of Anthony of Egypt, who once contended with devils in the desert, of Jerome and of Francis, of St. Benedict prostrate before the altar at Monte Cassino: silence; ascesis; and finally, communion.

She managed to make of the sad little jalopy a contemplative's cell, wherein she held converse with the Four Evangelists. Before her were the Lion, the Ox, the Man, and the Eagle, each with his stylus in his hand, while the white flame of the Holy Spirit guided the words across the page.

I wondered how many times she had followed the Savior through the Holy Land in the quiet of her mind, guided by the Four. Did she feel like calling to others, as St. Jerome did to his correspondent Marcella?

"If only you will come, we shall go to see Nazareth, as its name denotes, the flower of Galilee. Not far off Cana will be visible, where the water was turned into wine. We shall make our way to Tabor, and see the tabernacles there which the Saviour shares, not, as Peter once wished, with Moses and Elijah, but with the Father and with the Holy Ghost. Thence we shall come to the Sea of Gennesaret, and when there we shall see the spots where the five thousand were filled with five loaves, and the four thousand with seven. The town of Nain will meet our eyes, at the gate of which the widow's son was raised to life. Hermon too will be visible, and the torrent of Endor, at which Sisera was vanquished. Our eyes will look also on Capernaum, the scene of so many of our Lord's signs— yes, and on all Galilee besides.

And when, accompanied by Christ, we shall have made our way back to our cave through Shiloh and Bethel, and those other places where churches are set up like standards to commemorate the Lord's victories, then we shall sing heartily, we shall weep copiously, we shall pray unceasingly. Wounded with the Saviour's shaft, we shall say one to another: I have found Him whom my soul loves; I will hold Him and will not let Him go." (St. Jerome, Epistle 46, to Marcella)

I thought then of all the classes I have been fortunate enough to take, which gave me a deeper understanding of the Scriptures and of theology. I thought of my work for the Church, which continuously provides opportunity to consider and speak about the mysteries of the Faith. I thought of the books I have read and the ever-expanding cache of websites I use for research.

Even that which I too often take for granted--to have simply been brought up in the true Church--was bourne in upon me.

I had a feeling that the old Anchoress has had none of this, but it seemed the lack was no true obstacle to the heart that loves. She, I think, may have bypassed it all, cutting straight to the heart of things, or as near to it as possible. Now, in the winter of her life, there she chooses to remain.

I wished for her the fullness of the Sacraments, the consoling knowledge of the saints as her brethren, and--in a better era--the cultural structures which reverence, support, and uphold those who like her desire a life of contemplation.

But for myself, I wished for the single-mindedness of her devotion, undistracted, uninterrupted: indeed, the better part.

I have asked myself whether I have over-romanticized the tale of the old Anchoress, for after all, I will never know whether her circumstances were different from those I inferred. In any event, this encounter was an instance of actual grace, and held a truth about the mystery of God's Word, a solution to life's noise so simple as to be habitually overlooked.

I have quoted before the words of Paul Claudel: "Face to face with our Maker . . .This is what we need above all; we need prayer more urgently than bread." Teresa of Avila too urged her readers in The Interior Castle: "Let us desire and be occupied in prayer, not for the sake of our enjoyment but so as to have the strength to serve."

It can be difficult to carry out these exhortations. Continuously, we may find the distractions of life beginning to eat away at this spirit of prayer and silence, multiplying like microscopic creatures in a dish, until they have a life of their own. We must often be busy with good and necessary things: the tasks of our vocations for example, or the works of charity which we offer to others. There is a constant challenge to keep fulfill such responsibilities while preserving and respecting the call to contemplation. Even our recreations, though they surely can be a means of living out the joy of Christian life, may sometimes grow too clamorous for our time and attentions.

These actions must be bound to prayerful study and meditation. Once this thread is cut, a danger arises in that our actions quickly become devoid of meaning. We come to a lack of strength for service, as Teresa warned; a furor of external busyness masking a hollowness within, a dull void where our treasure ought to be. It follows that even our external works will then become less perfect, less fruitful.

St. Jerome advised of the same peril, as Pope Benedict XV explained in his 1920 encyclical Spiritus Paraclitus:

"From the Bible's pages we learn spiritual perfection. Meditating as he did day and night on the Law of the Lord and on His Scriptures, Jerome himself found there the Bread that cometh down from heaven," the manna containing all delights. And we certainly cannot do without that bread. How can a cleric teach others the way of salvation if through neglect of meditation on God's word he fails to teach himself?

What confidence can he have that, when ministering to others, he is really "a leader of the blind, a light to them that are in darkness, an instructor of the foolish, having the form of knowledge and of truth in the law," if he is unwilling to study the said Law and thus shuts the door on any divine illumination on it? Alas! many of God's ministers, through never looking at their Bible, perish themselves and allow many others to perish also. "The children have asked for bread, and there was none to break it unto them" (Lam. 4:4); and "With desolation is all the land made desolate, for there is none than meditateth in the heart" (Jer. 12:11)." [#47]

Today I am grateful to the old Anchoress for rendering me the service of her example. In our work this week, let us ask Our Lord for a spirit of silence, ascesis, and communion, that we might meet Him in the Scriptures and from that font draw the strength to live in His service: ". . . Then we shall sing heartily, we shall weep copiously, we shall pray unceasingly. Wounded with the Saviour's shaft, we shall say one to another: I have found Him whom my soul loves; I will hold Him and will not let Him go."

Awaiting an appropriate poem

2010-09-20T13:38:00.000-07:00

I took this some time ago, waiting for the right poem, which does not come. Can you suggest one?

Carmelite Monks of Wyoming

2010-09-19T17:29:00.000-07:00

The Carmelite Monks of Wyoming are bringing the ancient rigor of Simon Stock, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Therese of Lisieux, and Edith Stein to the west. They are worth investigating (if you're a fellow and thinking about a religious vocation) and definitely worth contributing to. Now I can't remember if I first thought Bishop David Ricken (once of Wyoming but now in Green Bay, WI) was excellent because he had brought the monks to Wyoming or if the monks were awesome because they were just one more great thing going on in Ricken's diocese (like Wyoming Catholic College or the Catholic Culture institutes that preceded it.)

I was first introduced to these Carmelites through their coffee. They intended, like other monasteries, to do a manual labor that would help them live. Chocolate, jams, and jellies somehow seemed distasteful to these hardy monks building out in wild Wyoming. At least, that was how I heard the story. Anyway, these men of God looked at each other and said, "You know what? We are going to roast coffee."

And that's what they do. Buy it here and give a little extra if you can.

On My Own

2010-09-14T11:15:00.000-07:00

When I wake up in the morning, I sort of put my hand out—spiritually—and I reach for what you might call God. Sometimes I don’t feel God, and I feel lonely. I feel on my own, and wonder where God is. And then [pause]—again, I don’t want to be melodramatic about this—I ask God: “Where have You gone?” God usually replies in a way that is hard to describe: “I haven’t gone anywhere. [laughs] Where have you gone? I haven’t moved.” Then I have to check, and I realize that I have somewhere sold myself out.
--Bono, singer for U2, quoted in Michka Assayas, Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 321.

Son of God, isn’t that far-fetched?

2010-09-12T11:13:00.000-07:00

Here is a wonderful passage from a conversation between Bono, lead singer of U2 and his interviewer Michka Assayas. Assayas is a french journalist, biographer, and novelist. He holds a master's degree from the Sorbonne and in 2005 published Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas.

This will ignite a youth group discussion.

Bono: . . . And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that “As you reap, so will you sow” stuff. Graces defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequence of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff.

Assayas: I’d be interested to hear that.

Bono: That’s between me and God. But I’d be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. . . . It doesn’t excuse my mistakes, but I’m holding out for Grace. I’m holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don’t have to depend on my own religiosity.

Assayas: The son of God who takes away the sins of the world. I wish I could believe in that.

Bono: But I love the idea of the Sacrifical Lamb. I love the idea that God says: Look, you cretins, there are certain results to the way we are, to selfishness, and there’s morality as part of your very sinful nature, and, let’s face it, you’re not living a very good life, are you? There are consequences to actions. The point of the death of Christ is that Christ took on the sins of the world, so that what we put out did not come back to us, and that our sinful nature does not reap the obvious death. That’s the point. It should keep us humbled . . . It’s not our own good works that get us through the gates of Heaven.

Assayas: That’s a great idea, no denying it. Such great hope is wonderful, even though it’s close to lunacy, in my view. Christ has his rank among the world’s great thinkers. But Son of God, isn’t that far-fetched?

Bono: No, it’s not far-fetched to me. Look, the secular response to the Christ story always goes like this: He was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting guy, had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius. But actually Christ doesn’t allow you that. He doesn’t let you off that hook. Christ says, No. I’m not saying I’m a teacher, don’t call me teacher. I’m not saying I’m a prophet. I’m saying: “I’m the Messiah.” I’m saying: “I am God incarnate.” And people say: No, no, please, just be a prophet. A prophet we can take. You’re a bit eccentric. We’ve just had John the Baptist eating locusts and wild honey, we can handle that. But don’t mention the “M” word! Because, you know, we’re gonna have to crucify you. And he goes: No, no, I know you’re expecting me to come back with an army and set you free from these creeps, but actually I am the Messiah. At this point, everyone starts staring at their shoes, and says: Oh, my God, he’s gonna keep saying this. So what you’re left with is either Christ was who He said He was—the Messiah—or a complete nutcase. I mean, we’re talking nutcase on the level of Charles Manson. . . . I’m not joking here. The idea that the entire course of civilization for over half of the globe could have its fate changed and turned upside-down by a nutcase, for me that’s far-fetched.
--Michka Assayas, Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 204-205.

The last paragraph also featured in a book by Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New York: Dutton, 2008), 229-230.

Why I Am a Catholic

2010-08-18T07:02:00.000-07:00

Hans Urs Von Balthasar's very moving, very probing self-examination and confession of faith.

"And the saints are humble, that is to say, the mediocrity of the Church does not deter them from expressing once and for all their solidarity with her, knowing well that without her they could never find their way to God. To bypass Christ's Church with the idea of making their way to God on their own initiative would never occur to them. They do battle with the mediocrity of Christ's Church not by protesting but by enkindling and encouraging the better. The Church causes them pain, but they do not become embittered and stand aside to sulk. They form no dissident groups but cast their fire into the midst.

Your genuine saint never points to himself; he is no more than the reflection. It is the Master Flame that counts."

The Poets and the Saints

2010-08-17T07:02:00.000-07:00

From Walker Percy's Signposts in a Strange Land.

The Poets and the Saints: “It is such persons as these that shape a region, though first the region must have, by the grace of God, sufficient energy and unconscious purpose to create the poets and saints. They, as they come into being, offer a criticism of life. They create in art, and in life itself, the image of their world, of their time and their region, seen under the aspect of eternity. They substantiate, and they make substantial, the soul of their people. Looking at them and their works, their fellows see where they are trying to go, wherein they have succeeded and wherein they have failed. The poets and saints offer us a criticism of life, not just of life in the abstract but of our life now. The poets see our world; the saints—usually—live in it, in all its richness, complexity, and ambiguity, against a simplicity that lies at the heart both of the world and of themselves” (James McBride Dabbs, quoted in Walker Percy, “Life in the South,” in Signposts in a Strange Land, edited with an introduction by Patrick Samway, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991, 34-35)

William and the Magic Ring

2010-08-05T19:00:00.000-07:00

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston shop at Fanueil Hall introduced me to Laura Robinson's enchanting William and the Magic Ring: A Shadow-Casting Bedtime Story. It comes with a small penlight to illuminate the sturdy but beautiful chipboard cutout illustrations. It is a good story and the shadows cast make telling this story an amazing experience.

I think the story ends on a note too tame, so I usually add, "It was all a dream." Then I switch off the penlight and say, "Or was it?"

Robinson's illustrations are magnificent, but I bet you could invent some of your own illustrations and tell other stories in the dark. This is a great book; buy it and think about the possibilities.

I have to bring this to the attention of Margaret Perry who runs the blog Little Lamb Books. I'm always looking at her Ten Thousand Places for better blog ideas.

The Beautiful Changes

2010-08-04T13:25:00.000-07:00

On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of
you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that
says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things' selves for a second finding,
to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to
wonder.
--Richard Wilbur

White As Diamonds

2010-08-01T09:21:00.000-07:00

A beautiful and haunting production of Alela Diane's "White as Diamonds."

I've known mornings
white as diamonds
silent from a night so cold
such a stillness
calm as the owl glides
our lives are buried in snow

I was sifting through the piles
in my hand a tangled thread
each patient tug upon the snarl
is a glimpse of what has been

burdened bands gain strong hands
gaping holes where diamonds should be
must have been morning that stole them
a glint of white in the pocket of winter

and some hearts are ghosts settling down in dark waters
just as silt grows heavy and drowns with the stones

some hearts are ghosts settling down in dark waters
just as silt grows heavy and drowns with the stones

I've known mornings
white as diamonds
silent from a night so cold
such a stillness
calm as the owl glides
our lives are buried in snow
--Alela Diane

John Fisher (1469-1535) (11th Sunday in Ordinary Time)

2010-06-21T08:22:00.000-07:00

by Gwen Adams (c.) 2010

Today is the eve of Fisher's death. Happy Feast.

"Finally, it's a matter of love."
--Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons

He was Catherine of Aragon’s confessor, and almost from the beginning he discerned that the “king’s great matter” would end in time with his own doom. John Fisher was a thin, lean man, of great wisdom and prudence, ascetic and disciplined, a lover of wisdom. He used to rise in the dark hours before sunrise and study for four hours every day, so great was his love for truth.

He loved truth unto death. When Catherine of Aragon cast herself before Henry VIII and begged him not to put her away, her gentle voice broken with the young bruised love, her heart laid raw and naked before the court, Henry looked away. And Fisher knew that the comforting of the Queen, was the comforting of Christ, and that to speak the truth would be his last act.

When the last months came and Henry divorced Catherine, exiled her, took away their little daughter Mary, broke with the Church, it became clear to Fisher that his whole life had been a preparation for this trial. For Fisher, it was indeed “the king’s great matter,” but for more than one King. Everything had transpired to set him in a position and make him the kind of man not to wield power and sway events but to stand in this matter. He had been given the quiet, poor, unimportant Diocese of Rochester. Compare him to Wolsey who had the four richest and most powerful sees in Merrie England. Fisher was the wise man of his age, but never famous. Compare him to Erasmus who admired him and considered him the great mind of the age. Yet it was Erasmus whose name was known and celebrated everywhere, Erasmus who was sought after.

Belloc wrote that Thomas More died defending the papacy, died for the authority of Christ’s Church, her hierarchy, the authority of a celibate man to determine the validity of the bonds of matrimony. Thomas More was a layman, a husband, a father, who by his death, as it were, ratified the validity of the clergy, and of the Pope.

But Fisher was a man who died for a marriage. He saw himself called to walk in the footsteps of John the Baptist, who had been a friend of the Bridegroom, all his life growing lesser for an eternal wedding. Likewise, all his life, John Fisher was dying away, growing thinner, more obscure, more dispensable, as he prepared to defend a wedding. He said he could do no less than John the Baptist who died to defend the holy bonds of matrimony and “that at a time when it had not yet been sanctified by Christ’s blood.”

And so when they were arrested in the spring, Thomas More torn from his wife and family, Fisher, an old, sick man, both betrayed by the same contemptible coward, these two friends seemed as if standing on opposite ends of a bridge. On one shore, Fisher looked forth from his priesthood across the bridge to all the marriages and families of this world, and over there More was looking back at him and all the Christ-called clergy. And they spanned a bridge over the rushing water between the two worlds, pledging to defend each other’s lands, forging a treaty, ratifying an ancient promise to be one another’s rear guards, and fight back to back till the consummation of the world.

Catherine begged Fisher not to risk himself. But he must, and in June, a deceitful penitent duped the sick and exhausted bishop and got him to say something that would serve as a pretext for a trial. Fisher was tried, condemned and a few days later beheaded on the 22nd of June, just two days before the birthday of John the Baptist. The long, pale night before he died was Midsummer Night’s Eve.

They killed him in the morning and put his head on a pike over London Bridge to rot as a warning. They thought they had snuffed him out, but in truth, that was not how men like Fisher, More, and John the Baptist died. They became too great for this old shrunken world. The splendor of their souls, their rigor and life, in time burst forth from the confines of sin and death. They would spill their blood upon the soil; they could not hold it in.

When they put John Fisher’s head on a pike for the crows to peck, they thought they had snuffed him out. But Fisher was far away from them all.

It was a June morning, and all the meadow clover was bursting and dewy, as was the lavender by the gate. The morning sun pierced rods through the pearly mist and melted the mist away. John Fisher was climbing the country road to a church as all the bells were peeling. Everyone was going to a wedding, and out in the fields, people were setting up tents and tables and games. Fisher was wearing white vestments and he was no longer tired or weak. As the sun rose and the mist vanished, he found he could see a great distance to the poplar trees on the far horizon, and see each leaf on each branch. He knew he had come to a place where vows are not broken, where love remains true. And he remembered that he was going to hear someone’s marriage vows, he was going to preside over someone’s wedding, but he could not remember whose. As he came round the lilac hedge by the old cemetery, he saw all the graves were open and empty. The lilac blooms were gone, but a drop of dew hung on the tip of a heart-shaped lilac leaf, trembling like the last tear. Then he remembered it was the wedding of the Lamb.

All thou canst, do thou endeavor

2010-06-12T19:22:00.000-07:00

Someone said something this weekend which reminded me of a line from the sequence for last week's Feast of Corpus Christi: Thomas Aquinas' hymn Lauda Sion. Benedict XVI first drew this line to my attention in his Feast of Faith. It has long been a favorite line from one of his favorite hymns. It goes:

Quantum potes, tantum aude:
Quia major omni laude,
Nec laudáre súfficis.

Translated variously--

Bring him all the praise you know, He is more than you bestow, Never can you reach his due.
All thou canst, do thou endeavour: Yet thy praise can equal never such as merits thy great King.

Or as I first saw it in Feast of Faith: Dare to do as much as you can--for the glory of the great King nothing suffices.

Enjoy this beautiful rendition . . .

(Did you notice the Poet isn't writing about food? At least, not exactly. There's only one kind of food he wants . . . )

Love in the Abstract

2010-06-08T12:07:00.000-07:00

Love in the abstract will never have any force in the world if it does not sink its roots in the actual community built on fraternal love. Love’s polity is constructed only by starting out from a small fraternal community. It has to begin from the particular to arrive at the universal. To make openings for fraternity is today no less important than in the time of St. John, or of St. Benedict, who with the fraternity of monks was the true architect of Christian Europe, building models of the new city in a fraternity of faith.
--Benedict XVI, Journey Towards Easter, 95-96

This quotation is part of a three-part series of passages reflecting on David O'Hanley's post to "The Apartments."

The Beauty Attached to Every Human Soul

2010-06-08T12:04:00.000-07:00

We should never look at a person without there being present before our eyes the entire gravity and solemnity of the things that are the objective theme of very human soul. Against this background the defects of any person will appear not as so many trivial irritants or repellent traits, but in their character as sins or consequences of sin, possibly as something terrible or monstrous, but at any rate as something that betokens the wretchedness of human nature in its universality, and above all, something that causes us to think of both the justice and the mercy of God. Moreover, even against the background of sin the greatness of the spiritual person as an image of God, the fact of the Incarnation uniting and elevating—in the sublime beauty of a human soul in the state of grace, must remain present to our vision. Thus do we establish a decisive condition for charity and spontaneous kindliness to rise in our souls. How should love blossom in us, unless we penetrate the ultimate reality and grasp the beauty attached to every human soul?
--Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ, New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948, 197-198.

This quotation is part of a three-part series of passages reflecting on David O'Hanley's post to "The Apartments."

Hyla Brook

2010-06-08T11:45:00.000-07:00

By June our brook's run out of song and speed.

Sought for much after that, it will be found

Either to have gone groping underground

(And taken with it all the Hyla breed

That shouted in the mist a month ago,

Like ghost of sleigh bells in a ghost of snow)—

Or flourished and come up in jewelweed,

Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent,

Even against the way its waters went.

Its bed is left a faded paper sheet

Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat—

A brook to none but who remember long.

This as it will be seen is other far

Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.

We love the things we love for what they are.

--Robert Frost

This quotation is part of a three-part series of passages reflecting on David O'Hanley's post to "The Apartments."

Eat or Be Eaten

2010-06-06T11:39:00.000-07:00

Not by design, I just finished Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear Away in time for today's Feast of Corpus Christi. The Eucharistic imagery in "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" always moved me, but I found the same theme in this novel more demanding, more challenging--as if O'Connor could have titled it alternately: Eat or Be Eaten.

The boy sensed that this was the heart of his great-uncle's madness, this hunger, and what he was secretly afraid of was that it might be passed down, might be hidden in the blood and might strike some day in him and then he would be torn by hunger like the old man, the bottom split out of his stomach so that nothing would heal or fill it but the bread of life (135).

Resistent as he is to the hunger, it consumes him. Yet when he tries to reject this hunger, he gets swallowed up, Jonah-fashion, albeit in a far more gruesome way.

Riding in the cream-and-lavender car, Tarwater takes a swig of some drugged liquor and his last words to the leering young man are: "It's better than the Bread of Life!" Within two hours, the leering young man is creeping away, his skin "a faint pink tint as if he had refreshed himself on blood" (261).

So does God send the whale to Jonah? Does O'Connor mean us to think God sent that leering man Tarwater's way? No . . . it seems more like O'Connor was suggesting that the fate of the man who rejects the Bread of Life is not going to be merely starving. We are not going to be left to die in peace, in a fate of our own choosing. Rather, this food for the journey, this bread of angels is truly the staff of life, the support against a malevolence that would seek, vampire-like, to consume us.

Striking thoughts for the Feast of Corpus Christi. Happy Feast.
Quotations are from Three by Flannery O'Connor (New York: Signet Classic, 1983).

The Apartments (Trinity Sunday)

2010-05-24T17:02:00.000-07:00

by Gwen Adams, (c.) 2010

“Everyone has an absolute obligation to live—not merely to exist, not merely to pickle himself in piety like a gherkin in vinegar awaiting the Eternal feast. He must live, that is to say, he must recognize himself as part of a whole. He must realize that, as the world’s work and suffering are caused by our common debt to God, there is no one exempt from taking his share of the burden.”
—Caryll Houselander, Essential Writings

On Chestnut Street there was one those apartment buildings built in the 1930s with art deco touches, hardwood floors, and bare sinks jutting out from the wall with all the plumbing pipes exposed. If you walked in the front door between two potted evergreens, you would enter a landing with a choice to go up one flight of stairs to the 1st floor or down a flight to the basement. If you went up and then took one more flight, you’d arrive at the so-called “3rd floor.” The basement was technically the 1st floor.

There were ten apartments in the building, full of people who knew nothing whatsoever about one another but their idiosyncrasies. On the first floor were two couples, the Jones’, married with a new-born baby who cried a lot, and Greg and Grace who had been dating two years or so. They had no children. They did, however, have a cat that was forever getting out. Each couple found the other an endless source of irritation. It was often the main topic of dinner. Not that either couple ever spoke to the other.

Then on the basement level in an efficiency was an old woman, a widow whose apartment smelled so bad that everyone always hurried past on the way to the laundry room. No one ever went to see if she was being taken care of. She lived across from a young man called Mr. Crane who sold insurance. He used to live in an apartment building across the street. His favorite thing to do on a Sunday had been to take out his golf-clubs and practice his stroke on the lawn strip. One time he became aware he was being watched, so he was always self-conscious after that. There was a girl named Mary on the 3rd floor of the apartments who worked at the animal hospital down the street. She used to watch him secretly ever since she had seen him one afternoon swinging away on the narrow green strip of grass, a sight which she found strangely poignant. He began to watch her, too, and listen. She always cleaned her place Saturday night, and he could hear her singing to Frank Sinatra through the open kitchen windows and picture her on her hands and knees with yellow rubber gloves and strong shoulders. They liked to pretend they were not aware of being watched. But they knew. He kept his place clean, and made drinks, played music, and tried to look very handsome. He moved into her building mainly because it was cheaper, but partly to run into her. This did not happen, and of course, they did not speak to each other.

There were also on the top floor and first floor some young professionals and some university students who gave loud parties, and came back late at night needing to be put to bed by some obliging friend. They woke the Jones’ baby up at night and were the kind of people who left their wash in the laundry room washer for three days at a time and backed everybody up. Mr. Jones (who worked construction and had to rise early) could not stand the students above who broke his sleep or the baby’s (which amounted to the same thing). But once Mrs. Jones heard one of the girls come home drunk, crying and screaming about a boy, saying some terrible things. Mrs. Jones had lain there in the dark, wincing; she had been in a relationship like that before she met Jones. So she never said anything when Mr. Jones fumed to the mirror as he shaved. She just went and made coffee. They never called the landlord to complain, nor did they confront the students. They certainly made no overtures, brought no hot dish when any of them moved in. No one wanted trouble in that building.

That was why poor Mrs. Fletcher in the basement allowed her landlord to raise her rates so that she could afford little else with her social security checks. So her glasses were not replaced, and she became unable to keep her place or things or clothes clean. She was continually tormented by the 3rd floor students who thoughtlessly slammed the front door just by her apartment.

That was why Mr. Crane who saw the students do this morning, noon, and night, never said anything to them. He felt too awkward. He did not want any trouble, either.

That was why Grace and Greg never talked about marriage or children. They had been together almost two years, but every conversation on these subjects was ugly and ruined their time together, so it just became one of those things you do not discuss.

And so, for years, fifteen people or so lived in each other’s lives, hearing every tread of the foot, every time the sink ran or the shower, every time someone went in or out. They were fully aware of each other, almost constantly, but each technically lived his own private life, if only because they had arranged never to speak to one another or play a significant role in each other’s lives. Even those living together had managed to erase all source of conflict or tension or anything that might trouble the complacent peace of an otherwise solitary existence. That was until the fire, which changed everything.

It was an electrical fire, starting somewhere on the 1st floor and sweeping through that old 1930s building with its lovely original woodwork and its lovely original wiring. It began about five in the morning when only Mr. Jones had gone to work. He rushed back and found the streets were full of people and fire-trucks and police and ambulances, water running everywhere. The firemen were moving a great number of people out from behind the apartment building where all the cars were parked. It was clear the building would not be saved. Mr. Jones looked wild as he rushed through the crowd looking for his wife and baby. They were there. It had been very difficult for the firemen to ascertain if the building was quite empty, since no one person was responsible for all of the tenants, or even one responsible for another. Grace and Greg were there, too, and Grace was sobbing because the cat could not be found. Mr. Jones saw her, and he was suddenly moved with pity. It was all this girl had; he remembered he had nearly run over a cat on his way back. He told Grace he had seen her cat (he did not mention the part about almost running over it). This seemed to comfort her. But Greg, who was holding her, was quietly crying, too, with his face in her hair. He had seen Mr. Jones when he found his wife and baby in the darkness, the light of the flames casting strange shadows on his stricken face. Greg had suddenly seen himself by those same flames for what he was. He thought to himself, “Life is so short; why won’t I marry this girl?” And he felt ashamed to hold to hold her, this woman who so completely and so foolishly trusted him.

Mary from the 3rd floor had got out of the building. Turning to see if Mr. Crane had escaped, she recalled suddenly that there was an old woman who also lived in the basement. At that time, the firemen had not yet come, so with a moment’s hesitation, Mary rushed back in to Mrs. Fletcher’s efficiency where Mr. Crane was just forcing the door with his shoulder. The room was dark as they went in, and Mrs. Fletcher was crying and looking for something in the desk. Mr. Crane picked the old woman up like a baby, and Mary pulled out the entire top drawer of the desk and hurried after. She had a glimpse of the efficiency, the forms of dirty dishes, clothes, magazines, and dead plants, a thousand trinkets, old souvenirs, all the refuse of an old woman everyone had forgotten. When they were out, Mrs. Fletcher began to babble and grab at the things in the drawer, hoping against hope. When she found what she was looking for—letters from her dead husband and some from her mother—she started to cry again, and Mary sat down with her on the curb and rocked her. The firemen and paramedics were arriving, and Mr. Crane got a blanket to put around them. Then he sat down next to Mary.

To everyone’s consternation, it was found that one of the students was still up on the 3rd floor. Some of the other students realized this and went into hysterics—it could have been one of them. A very noble fireman got her just in time; she was suffocating from the smoke. She had been drunkenly asleep and was still in a dress and high-heels. Grace and Greg, the Jones, Mr. Crane, Mary, and everyone suddenly realized what a very little girl she was, all dressed up and run away from home with no one to take care of her. All were ashamed.

They did not save the building, and the tenants lost just about everything except their cars and each other. As the sun came up and the student was rushed to the hospital, the police got the tenants breakfast and coffee. The tenants ate donuts and drank their coffee sitting quietly in a meeting room with fluorescent lights. They all knew they had been given this moment to go their separate ways . . . or not.

They chose the latter. Mr. Jones’ parents made dinner for the group every night for a week, all these displaced persons, and they introduced themselves to one another, and talked about what they had lost, and what they would do. Five years later saw Greg and Grace were married with three little boys, and the Jones’ were god-parents for the third. Mr. and Mrs. Crane found a relative of Mrs. Fletcher’s and got the legal work done to get Mrs. Fletcher a little more care, and then they got a house with an addition so she could live by herself but still be looked after. The students were working and had pitched in together to get a house where they lived together and did each other’s laundry and washed the dishes in turns. Everyone lived. In the fullest sense of that word.

Oh, I Desire too much

2010-05-21T17:02:00.000-07:00

From C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955), 16-18.

The first is itself the memory of a memory. As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton’s ‘enormous bliss’ of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to ‘enormous’) comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss, nor even (though that came into it) for my own past. '`Ioulianpotho' ["Oh, I desire too much"] and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.

The second glimpse came through Squirrel Nutkin; through it only, though I loved all the Beatrix Potter books. But the rest of them were merely entertaining; it administered the shock, it was a trouble. It troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn. It sounds fantastic to say that one can be enamored of a season, but that is something like what happened; and, as before, the experience was one of intense desire. And one went back to the book, not to gratify the desire (that was impossible—how can one possess Autumn?) but to reawake it. And in this experience also there was the same surprise and the same sense of incalculable importance. It was something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something, as they would now say, ‘in another dimension.’

The third glimpse came through poetry. I had become fond of Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf: fond of it in a casual, shallow way for its story and its vigorous rhythms. But then, and quite different from such pleasure, and like a voice from far more distant regions, there came a moment when I idly turned the pages of the book and found the unrhymed translation of Tegner’s Drapa and read

I heard a voice that cried,
Balder the beautiful
Is dead, is dead—

I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.

The reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read this book no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else. For those who are still disposed to proceed I will only underline the quality common to the three experiences; it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.

The restlessness, the speed

2010-05-09T12:56:00.000-07:00

"We must maintain a 'collected' mode of life. . . . If, indeed, we conduct a bustling and fitful sort of life with one aim chasing the other, involving a breathless succession of disparate tensions--a sort of life which never gives us time to pause and to meditate, nor allows any possibility of a contemplative attention to God--we shall be exposed to incessant derangements of our peace. How could we, amidst the turmoil of such a life, develop the habit of confronting everything with God and of thus subjecting all our single preoccupations to an intrinsic order? How could we dwell in the depths of reality and the realm of eternal values; how find ourselves? On the contrary, pushed about and unduly possessed by our rapidly alternating tasks (all of which carry in them the impetus of urgency), we are at the mercy of the autonomous mechanism of each in turn. In our constant attention to present and fugitive actuality, even should the matter in hand be ever so profound and important in itself, we are hopelessly incapable of setting ourselves, in conspectu Dei, at a distance from all things, including our own ego. Yet, this distance, as has been shown, forms an indispensable prerequisite for the neutralization of any kind of depression and excitement. Even aside from this, a hyper-active and one-sidedly pragmatic rhythm of life--in which contemplation is doomed to wither--involves as such, in a general sense, a certain formal lack of peace. The restlessness, the speed, the nervous fatigue inherent in such a mode of life, the feverish rhythm of work and the bondage to the imperative of 'doing' that are inseparable from it, inevitably plunge man into a state of peacelessness. . . . True peace is inseparable from recollection."
--Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1948), 313.

George Herbert's "Love"

2010-04-30T20:28:00.000-07:00

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

If I lack'd anything.

"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";

Love said, "You shall be he."

"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,

I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"

"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame

Go where it doth deserve."

"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"

"My dear, then I will serve."

"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."

So I did sit and eat.

—George Herbert

Discernment of Spirits

2010-04-23T21:10:00.000-07:00

Ignatius of Loyola's Discernment of Spirits provided outstanding advice and insight this Lent. You can find an online text here of Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises 313-336. I also recommend the version I read: Discernment of Spirits: According to the Life and Teachings of St. Ignatius of Loyola by Piet Penning de Vries, translated by W. Dudok Van Heel (New York: Exposition Press, 1973).

For anyone trying to make difficult decisions, or even easy ones, or for people who find it all too easy to waffle, this book is invaluable. I would also recommend using this if mentoring young students.

Here are some highlights, helpful for discerning God's will in a decision:

When praying, note down the first thoughts and the final thoughts. If thoughts are bad/distracting, weaken/disturb/disquiet the soul, take away peace/tranquillity/quiet, then these are generally from a bad spirit and are to be dismissed and fought against. Never make decisions based on these impulses.
Examine conscience carefully and go to Confession regularly. If you are going from good to better, God's influence feels gentle, light, sweet; the bad spirit's influence feels sharp, noisy, disturbing. If you are going from bad to worse, the bad spirit's influence feels gentle, light, sweet; God's influence feels sharp, noisy, disturbing.
Given the above, when something makes us sad: this is right and just if you are then filled with peace and motivation to do good, but a temptation if you are disheartened and chilled. When something makes us happy, this is right and just if you are then filled with peace and motivation to do good, but a temptation if you are distracted and experience a sharp let-down and then sadness. Weigh your experience and judge accordingly. For example, it would not be good to base a course of action off the sadness that ends with chill or a joy that is distracting. Test the things that do this to you.
A good sign that something is God's will: when the preference of a period of consolation = the aversion of a period of desolation. I.E. When I was happy, I wanted X. Now I am miserable and want the opposite. This is a good sign, according to Ignatius, that God would want me to go for X, even if I find it distasteful right now. And stick to the course of action if such distaste arises in the future.
Make decisions with prayer, consider your own God-given desires, weighing the pros and cons. The revelation of God's will, His favor on a decision follows the decision: God gives peace to a right choice. But! Lest we grope about for a definition of peace, Ignatius suggests that any of the following would qualify as peace, hence, as a sign, that the right decision had been made and should be carried out: confidence, edification, some divine blessing, an experience of God, feeling of devotion, comfort, cheerfulness, contentment, tears/emotion, delight, joy, perseverence, a taste for divine things, ardor, tranquillity, vigor, generousity in difficulties, desire for perfection, sweetness, humility, repentence, resolution to do some good thing. Any and all of these come from God. If you are torn up inside about a decision, but you prayed, thought, asked advice, and chose, and now you feel sorrow for your sins--that's a sign from God! And it follows the decision, not precedes it.

Other great advice abounds. A must-read.

A Better Resurrection

2010-04-01T11:58:00.000-07:00

by Jessica Hickey, (c.) 2010

Wednesday, 31 March 2010

“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” (John 2:19)

"The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.“ (Romans 8:18)

“ . . . Face to face with our Maker . . .This is what we need above all; we need prayer more urgently than bread.” (Paul Claudel)
　
We now approach the final days of our Lenten observance, preparing to follow Christ into that dark night from which the true dawn was born.

It is always difficult, amid all our other obligations, to enter into this time. Palm Sunday, the solemn beginning of this week, sometimes arrives in the middle of a tempest--as it did this week, with lashings of rain, a too-full parking lot, fussy children, a head full of noise. Sometimes it is not just a step backwards, but a giant leap, that is needed, to open the pages of the missal and place oneself mentally upon those streets outside of Jerusalem where, mounted upon a colt foal, Jesus received those cries of Hosanna which faded into condemnation.

Yet, we must find a way back to that day; we must be allowed to accompany Christ in these last days that decided everything. It is almost a matter of finding a way into ourselves, feeling along a wall that is covered in ivy and bracken, until suddenly, we find the heart’s door. We are within, and none but Christ is with us.

I feel that only here can we know what self-abandonment is--ours and His. Here we know the poverty of our humanity, how little our powers, how faint the stirrings of life and hope which we can claim as our own. And yet it doesn’t seem to matter, for whatever our natural weakness and whatever wrongs we have done, Someone else is making a way for us, hewing a path to eternity from His mingled humanity and divinity. We are like a child, carried on the shoulder of a giant.

Christina Rossetti captures this realization in her poem, “A Better Resurrection”:

I HAVE no wit, no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Is numb'd too much for hopes or fears;
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
I lift mine eyes, but dimm'd with grief
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is in the falling leaf:
O Jesus, quicken me.

My life is like a faded leaf,
My harvest dwindled to a husk:
Truly my life is void and brief
And tedious in the barren dusk;
My life is like a frozen thing,
No bud nor greenness can I see:
Yet rise it shall--the sap of Spring;
O Jesus, rise in me.

My life is like a broken bowl,
A broken bowl that cannot hold
One drop of water for my soul
Or cordial in the searching cold;
Cast in the fire the perish'd thing;
Melt and remould it, till it be
A royal cup for Him, my King:
O Jesus, drink of me.

This prayer, one of true humility and abandonment, urges us to confront not just our smallness, our selves so like “a faded leaf,” unable to sustain of our own accord Faith, Hope and Charity. It also invites us to seize upon the truth that life and resurrection and purification will nonetheless take place in us-- if we ask for it, if we accept it. “My life is like a frozen thing . . . . / Yet rise it shall--the sap of Spring;/ O Jesus, rise in me.”

This confrontation, this face-to-face encounter with Christ toward which the Triduum draws us, is the purest and most distilled impetus to holiness that anyone could wish for. We have here not ideals nor historical reflections nor resolutions for a better life, but simply the eyes which have gazing upon us through the windows, peering through the lattice, as we read in the Song of Songs.

Who at this moment would cradle his sins to his heart, or content himself with stoking the fire of his own vanity? All the silly banalities, the distractions and petty indulgences of vice appear like objects too cheap and shoddy and embarrassing to be displayed. They do not belong in that house of the true self. We cannot meet His gaze with them in our pockets. Who, in the sight of these eyes, can say that any other thing matters more?

We must protect this moment, guarding it carefully. Like the Hebrews at Passover, we must sweep out the house of the soul, throwing all of the old bread upon the fire, awaiting the signal that the time has come. We stand with our traveling-cloaks on, not to follow Moses to the land of Canaan, but to follow Christ to a better resurrection.

St. Simeon the Younger, a hermit and mystic of the sixth century, wrote the following impassioned plea for such solitude with God:

“Leave me alone, sheltered in my cell. Leave me with God who alone is benign. Go away, remove yourself farther, leave me before God who created me. Nobody may knock at my door, nobody raise his voice. None of my acquaintances and friends may visit me, none shall draw my mind away from the contemplation of the Good and Beautiful Lord. Nobody hands me food, nobody brings me drink: I am satisfied to abide before the face of my God, my merciful God, my benign God, who came down on earth to call the sinners and bring them within Him into heavenly life . . . . Leave me in peace. Let me lock my cell and sit therein. And if I dig into the earth to hide myself within it, . . . and if I desire to die for love of Him, gazing at the eternal Creator and Lord--leave me do it!”

It is only in this silence that we can look upon the Crucified one and let His will be done. Paul Claudel writes that, upon seeing Him thus, man:

“ . . . though superficially shocked, is nevertheless glad at heart, or more accurately, enchanted. What if his deep-seated habits have been challenged? Without being able to identify the truth, he feels its sting, feels the home-thrust that can only be made under cover of dark. God does not enter by the door but by scaling the wall. He goes right to the heart. There are regions in man’s soul that he had believed to be inaccessible, and now, suddenly he feels stirring within him the truth which lies deeper than justice. He reels; he is torn; he is tormented; he becomes leavened dough; he has received one of those blows that compel one to respond.”

In this silence, all truth is delivered to our keeping. There is no other answer needed. Too well we know the despondency and destructiveness that plagues the human race; we have all been bitten by the serpent, and the effects of evil bear down upon us daily. Loud laments of themselves change nothing.

But if with quiet hearts we prepare, marking our doorposts with the blood of the Lamb, we can look upward and see the ransom which Love has paid, a price which He did not consider too high if, by paying it, He could have us.

“He was wounded for our transgressions,
he was bruised for our iniquities:
the chastisement of our peace was upon him;
and with his stripes we are healed.” (Is. 53:5)

Let us, in the days ahead, look upon the One who loves us to the end. Let us be like one of those friends who followed alongside Him, meeting His eyes with silent devotion.

Ecce Homo

2010-03-26T21:14:00.000-07:00

by Jessica Hickey, (c.) 2010

Wednesday, 24 March 2010

“God leads his chosen children on extraordinary paths.
This is an extraordinary path,
A noble road,
And a sacred way.
God himself trod it."
(St. Mechtild of Magdeburg)

"Pilate is correct when he says: 'Behold the man.' In him, in Jesus Christ, we can discern what the human being, God's project, is, and thereby also our own status. In the humiliated Jesus we can see how tragic, how little, how abased the human being can be. In him we can discern the whole history of human hate and sin. But in him and in his suffering love for us we can still more clearly discern God's response: Yes, that is the man who is loved by God to the very dust, who is so loved by God that he pursues him to the uttermost toils of death . . . . we can learn from him what it means to be a human being.”
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall)

"The key to human nature is Christ. He is the pattern in which man was originally made, and by becoming one with him, man can be restored to that pattern and become whole . . . . Christ is man's destiny."
(Caryll Houselander)

As we approach the end of the Lenten season and prepare to enter the Triduum, the image of Christ, the Suffering Servant, the "Man of Sorrows" comes to the foreground. In this mystery, the flame of light which fell upon humanity at the moment of the Incarnation burns with ultimate brightness, even in that darkest moment of history, for now this light will be reflected on the faces of all men. "God became man that man might become God," said St. Augustine.

This mystical identification is made explicit in the Sacraments, which pour into men the life of God, and which grant to them the qualities which are His: divine sonship and filial trust, the supernatural sight which is Faith and Hope, and supernatural love or Charity, proper only to God. We are immersed with Him, die with Him, rise with Him. We bear on our person His kingly and messianic anointings, and within us His Spirit dwells that we might be prophets as He is. Like the Bridegroom, we are wed, in our particular ways. On a hundred thousand altars we partake of His Passover; on a hundred thousand sick beds, we participate in His Passion.

God declared to Moses, "My presence shall go with thee." To be led and ruled by God, to know that His Pillar of Fire guarded them from evil--this made sense to humanity. Moses knew that he would stand upon the cleft of the rock while the Lord's glory passed over; he did not expect that he would ever see the Lord's face. Still less could he have imagined seeing God's eyes looking back at him in the mirror, his face Christed, his brow anointed and crowned with gold and with thorns. But this is in fact what the sacraments accomplish in a human being.

There is more, however, to this mystical union, for even among those who have not known Jesus and His sacraments, traces of Him still remain. Caryll Houselander speaks of the "unconscious Christs" we meet, those who are sharing, without knowing it, in His cross and resurrection. This is because all of human nature has undergone a permanent alteration. It has not been the same since that day when the angel Gabriel appeared in the home of the little Virgin in Nazareth. Our nature, says Paul Claudel, has been raided:

"When God took possession of the human form, when he appropriated it for his own use, when he placed himself within the hypostatic union, he committed an unpardonable offense against justice, good sense, and propriety. Until the end of time, intellectuals will respond with alternating indignation and amusement. There are certain things that are simply not done. Let us therefore plant the forked gibbet, in the sight of heaven, for the edification of all ages, this transgressor caught in the very act of stealing back a possession we had every reason to regard as exclusively ours.

"In procuring from us the means to die, he robbed us of that right to annihilation which, since the original sin, has constituted the most obvious part of our basic capital. He embezzled our funds for his own profit. In one stroke he reclaimed for his Father all that cultivated estate which we considered ours by tenants' rights, under the terms of a hard-won agreement. This is why he deserves the name of Thief that he himself officially assumed . . . Thanks to the complicity of the Virgin, there has been a stealthy raid on our nature. The damage is permanent; henceforth our walls are marred by a crack that for all our industry can never be mended again."

Ecce Homo: "Behold the Man!" He has become one of us; He is of our own kind. When we acknowledge the sacred humanity of Jesus, we are forced to re-evaluate what it means to be human, and we find that in fact that is nothing ordinary about it. God's presence with us as one of us has placed the final seal upon our nature, imposing an almost sacramental quality to the various aspects of our existence. Now, when we wake and stretch in the mornings, take a bite of food, clasp the hand of a friend, bend our back in labor, shed a tear in solitude, we know: "All of this Jesus Christ has done." He has gazed up at the constellations and at the same moon in its waxing and waning, not only from above as Creator, but from below as a man. God Himself has drunk from this cup.

Christ thus emerges in humanity. He is that pattern dimly seen in the background, the image which sometimes clarifies for moment until we can nearly recognize the Face that we have sensed there all along in the poor man who suffers silently, in the soldier laying down his life for the good of others, in the noble king dispossessed and shunned, in the solemn purity of the priest and in the fidelity of the devoted spouse, in the unborn child, even in the condemned man: Christ is there; He is all of these. Human life, like the wax of the Paschal Candle, has been imprinted with the mark of Christ---the Name, the nails, the crown. This makes it impossible for any human life to be useless, throwaway, ugly, or meaningless. All bear the image of Christ and remain sacred.

Writing as a Catholic in the southern Gothic tradition, the novelist Flannery O'Connor touches on some of these themes in her short story "Parker's Back."

The protagonist of her story is a young man leading a more or less shiftless life. After a short stint in the Navy, Parker ends up married to a difficult wife, a sharp, thin, plain young woman whose father was a "Straight Gospel" preacher and who never evinces much liking for Parker. Likewise, Parker cannot explain why he pursued and married her, or why he stays with her.

Parker has little sense of himself. The story tells us that he was ashamed to use his baptismal name, Obidiah (the name of a prophet, which translates "servant of God"). He works odd jobs without much purpose and appears to have no direction. Yet Parker is also slightly haunted. He dislikes wide vistas or open places, which depress him: "You began to feel as if someone were after you, the navy or the government or religion." He has a sense of pursuit which grows more acute with time: "Once or twice he found himself turning around abruptly as if someone were trailing him."

Parker's only point of illumination had occurred when, at the age of fourteen, he saw a carnival man who was covered entirely in tattoos, which appeared like a living garden of birds and beasts:

"Parker had never before felt the least motion of wonder in himself. Until he saw the man at the fair, it did not enter his head that there was anything out of the ordinary about the fact that he existed. Even then it did not enter his head but a peculiar unease settled in him. It was as if a blind boy had been turned so gently in a different direction that he did not know his destination had been changed."

This unease drove Parker to imitate the tattooed man, striving to achieve the Garden-of-Eden effect he had glimpsed. Some people were impressed with this; his wife disliked it and considered it vanity. And as time went on, the more tattoos he added & the less space he had left unmarked, the less satisfied he was with himself:

"The effect was not one of one an intricate arabesque of colors, but of something haphazard and botched. A huge dissatisfaction would come over him and he would go off and find another tattooist and have another space filled up. The front of Parker was almost completely covered but there were no tattoos on his back. He had no desire for one anywhere he could not readily see it himself . . . As the space on the front of him for tattoos decreased, his dissatisfaction grew and became general. . . . [It] became acute and raged in him. It was as if the panther and the lion and the eagles and the hawks had penetrated his skin and lived inside him, raging warfare."

At length, Parker felt compelled to fill up the one empty space left--his back--with an image of God. He fled to the city and chose from among the tattooist's designs "the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes."

The tattooist asks Parker:

"'You think she'll like it and lay off you for a while?'

'She can't hep herself,' Parker said. 'She can't say she don't like the looks of God.'"

By this one means Parker hoped to please his wife and to give over the one empty space he had preserved with the image of God, that Person whom he had felt behind him all the time. Now, "the eyes that were now forever on his back were eyes to be obeyed."

After doing this, he feels different: "His dissatisfaction was gone, but he felt not quite like himself . . . driving into a new country though everything he saw was familiar to him." He is able to use his own name, Obidiah Elihue, now.

However, Parker does not gain the reception he had hoped for when he reaches his own door:

"'Who's there?' an unfeeling voice said.
Parker turned his head as if he expected someone behind him to give him the answer. . .

'Another picture,' Sarah Ruth growled. 'I might have known you was off after putting some more trash on yourself.'
Parker's knees went hollow under him. He wheeled around and cried, 'Look at it! Don't just say that! Look at it!'
'I done looked,' she said.
'Don't you know who it is?" he said in anguish.
'No, who is it?' Sarah Ruth said. 'It ain't anybody I know.'
'It's him,' Parker said.
'Him who?'
'God!' Parker cried.
'God? God don't look like that!'"

The story ends with a scene of pathos, replete with biblical imagery: Obidiah, 'God's servant', driven from the house, sits weeping beneath a tree, while across his back the face of the Byzantine Christ is marked with welts left by Sarah Ruth's broomstick.

Parker, who bears the Face of Christ, has become a suffering servant. Symbolically, we can see here the prophet Hosea, who is maltreated and rejected by his wife, a symbol of Israel, and Moses, to whom God said "I will take away My hand, and thou shalt see My back, but My face shall not be seen," and to other prophets of the Old Testament.

But plainly O'Connor offers Parker as something of a Christ figure, capturing here the great sorrow involved in mankind's rejection of Him: "She can't say she don't like the looks of God," Parker thought. But when God is presented to her, she will not recognize Him: "It ain't anybody I know . . . God don't look like that!" She discerns neither God's image etched with ink, nor in the person of the husband, and raising her hands in anger, she desecrates both.

This was the feeling of the crowd gathered before Pilate that day, as he presented Jesus to his own people: "Behold the Man." They saw nothing: "God doesn't look like that!" And blindly they committed the greatest of all sacrileges. We should not be quick to relegate this lesson as one of the past, not so long as humanity remains on the earth, for so long as it endures, Christ's Face is still there to be seen among us.

Caryll Houselander writes:

"There is a startling paradox in this, that he who came as he said, to give life to men, to fill up the measure of their joy, to show them the way back to the wonder and peace of living in God, he who is known by names that are radiant with joy, light, life, love, is also known as the 'Man of Sorrows.' At first sight one would be tempted to say that he had fallen in love with our suffering. He made himself subject to our limitations--to discomfort, poverty, hunger, thirst and pain. He chose to experience fear, temptation, failure. He suffered loneliness, betrayal, injustice, the spurning of his love, mockery, brutality, separation, utter desolation of spirit, the sense of despair, and death.

"But it was not with our suffering that Christ fell in love; it was with us. He identified himself with our suffering because he identified himself with us, and he came not only to lead his own historical life on earth, but to live the life of every man who would receive him into his soul."

We pray that Christ, who longed to take all humanity to Himself, will be our vision, that we may come to recognize Him in ourselves and in one another.

"Christ shield me today from all wounds;
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right hand, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down,
Christ in the heart of all who think of me,
Christ in the mouth of all who speak of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me."

(From the Breastplate of St. Patrick)

An Annunciation Poem by Rainier Maria Rilke

2010-03-26T21:05:00.000-07:00

Not that an angel entered (mark this)
was she startled. Little as other start
when a ray of sun or the moon by night
busies itself about their room,
would she have been disturbed by the shape
in which an angel went;
she scarcely guessed that this sojourn
is irksome for angels.

O if we knew how pure she was.
Did not a hind, that recumbent once espied her in the wood
So lose itself in looking that in it
quite without pairing
The unicorn begot itself!
The creature of light
The pure creature.

Not that he entered, but that he,
the angel, so bent close to her
a youth’s face that his gaze and that
with which she looked up struck together,
as though outside it were suddenly all empty
and what millions saw, did, bore,
were crowded into them: just she and he;
seeing and what is seen, eye and
eye’s delight
nowhere else save at this spot--lo;
this is startling. And they were
startled both.
Then the angel sang his melody.

Field of God

2010-03-19T20:33:00.000-07:00

by Jessica Hickey (c.) 2010

Wednesday, 17 March 2010

“The LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed . . . . to work it and take care of it.”(Genesis 2: 8-15)

“Thinking he was the gardener, she said, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him." Jesus said to her, "Mary." She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, "Rabboni!" (which means Teacher).” (John 20)

“My vineyard, my very own, is before me . . . . O garden-dweller, my friends are listening for your voice, let me hear it! (Song of Songs 8:12-13)

“Then the LORD will guide you always and give you plenty even on the parched land. He will renew your strength, and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring whose water never fails. The ancient ruins shall be rebuilt for your sake, and the foundations from ages past you shall raise up; "Repairer of the breach," they shall call you, "Restorer of ruined homesteads." (Isaiah 58:11-12)

I am arriving now at the time when I must once again plot out and prepare my back garden. For five years, I have grappled with my little bit of earth, trying to understand the temperament of its soil, trying to reclaim it from years of neglect. I have hauled decrepit concrete slabs, the remnants of oddly placed sidewalks, by tying them to my long-suffering car and driving down the alley. I have dug up sad and sickly evergreens and had a crew of tree-cutters in to prune the ash and walnut trees of their dead wood. Between my vegetable and herb patches I have unearthed every imaginable thing: buried clothing, a ring with no gems left, a rusted axe-head, a tin Santa cookie cutter exactly like one my grandmother had, and over three hundred of the old clay Poston paving bricks.

It seems as if half of my plantings die or need moving about, and another quarter falls to the fauna. There is a long-standing war between me and the squirrels, those frivolous destroyers of cultivated things, and at this time last year, I was in consultation with a trapper who helped to relocate a sizeable resident woodchuck, the latter being a true connoisseur of organic produce.

It is going to be a long, long time before I see things put back to rights. But there are signs of hope. This week, I looked out the window and saw that the sorrel patch is already green and leafy again. Each year the air smells less of decaying plants and aging metal and car exhaust, and more of violets, tomatoes, mint. And every summer there is an increasing variety of birds like cardinals and hummingbirds, and the larger butterflies: monarchs, tiger swallowtails, and some I cannot name--signs of health of life.

This little garden, beleaguered though it be, drives me on, for it deserves to exist. In it stands a plum tree, which I like because it is gratuitous and because it is old. I didn’t know what it was when I first moved it, only that it had blossomed white and was the only thing of unadulterated natural beauty in the lot. Later, it began to bear fruit, the honey-like smell thick in the air about the first week of July.

It has become a thing of strange beauty, because its snowy blossoms and blue-blushing fruits overhang an alley full of trash bins and dumpsters, with ugly wires strung overhead and beer bottles underfoot. People smell the tree, however, and come by to gather plums. I see different people each year: a Mexican family with lots of children and a puppy; a pair of boys maybe ten or eleven years old who have an innocent enjoyment and enthusiasm which is good to see; a young man with a baseball cap who confesses he likes the sour ones best; even my meter-reader, who stopped me to ask what grew on that tree because it was the best fruit he ever tasted.

I didn’t do this; someone else planted here before me, and that is why this object of joy exists today. It is right that a gratuitous beauty be shared for Christ’s sake, and if I ever find a little Child perched in it, as did the Selfish Giant in the Oscar Wilde story, I will not be surprised.

What has all this to do with the spiritual life and the task of the Christian?

We know that often in the Scriptures we find the image of the garden, the vineyard. Jesus spoke frequently in parables of the seed and the harvest and the laborers, and was Himself mistaken as a gardener after the Resurrection. But perhaps it wasn‘t such a mistake: “The Church is a cultivated field, the tillage of God,” we read in Lumen Gentium. It is a living thing, with its roots deep in the first days of what we now call salvation history, and all of its branches, connected to the True Vine, are destined to bear fruit. But they must be cared for, tended.

However, cultivation is rarely an easy matter. Firstly, the seed does not always take root where it is sown; the weeds crowd the new growth, and it may come to any number of unfortunate ends. And also, the plot which needs tending seems to resist the gardener’s hand, so that, day to day, nothing seems to grow or improve. It is a work of years and lifetimes, rather than days or seasons.

Pope Benedict, speaking in 2005 to a gathering of parish priests from the Alpine Diocese of Aosta, remarked on the parable of the Sower and its historical context:

“The Lord's work had begun with great enthusiasm. The sick were visibly cured, everyone listened joyfully to the statement: "The Kingdom of God is at hand". It really seemed that the changing of the world and the coming of the Kingdom of God would be approaching; that at last, the sorrow of the People of God would be changed into joy. People were expecting a messenger of God whom they supposed would take the helm of history in his hand. But they then saw that the sick were indeed cured, devils were expelled, the Gospel was proclaimed, but the world stayed as it was. Nothing changed. The Romans still dominated it. Life was difficult every day, despite these signs, these beautiful words. Thus, their enthusiasm was extinguished, and in the end, as we know from the sixth chapter of John, disciples also abandoned this Preacher who was preaching but did not change the world.
"What is this message? What does this Prophet of God bring?", everyone finally wondered. The Lord talks of the sower who sowed in the field of the world and the seed seemed like his Word, like those healings, a really tiny thing in comparison with historical and political reality. Just as the seed is tiny and can be ignored, so can the Word.

Yet, he says, the future is present in the seed because the seed carries within it the bread of the future, the life of the future. The seed appears to be almost nothing, yet the seed is the presence of the future, it is a promise already present today. And so, with this parable, he is saying: "We are living in the period of the sowing, the Word of God seems but a word, almost nothing. But take heart, this Word carries life within it! And it bears fruit!"

“The seed carries within it the bread of the future.” The world will be fed from what is sown, though the sowers may not be there to see it. They are there to plant the promise, not necessarily to reap the harvest. And we also must recall what was said of the seed, which carries the future within it: that seed first must fall and die. Benedict continues:
“[Jesus] made people realize that he himself was the grain of wheat that fell into the earth and died. In the Crucifixion, everything seems to have failed, but precisely in this way, falling into the earth and dying, on the Way of the Cross, it bore fruit for each epoch, for every epoch. Here we have both the Christological interpretation, according to which Christ himself is the seed, he is the Kingdom present, and the Eucharistic dimension: this grain of wheat falls into the earth and thus the new Bread grows, the Bread of future life, the Blessed Eucharist that nourishes us and is open to the divine mysteries for new life.”
Spreading the Word, dying to self, partaking of His Sacrifice--these things are never wasted. Rather, in doing this work, we have made provision for the bread of future life, for ourselves and others. Just as with the unknown planter of the Plum Tree, the full flowering, the fruition comes later, an unexpected gift to many.

Yet what of the difficulty in proclaiming God’s Word and God’s Kingdom in a world which does not think it needs it, a world which resists tending? Benedict tells us:

“It seems to me that in the Church's history, these questions that truly torment us are constantly cropping up in various forms: what should we do? People seem to have no need of us, everything we do seems pointless. Yet we learn from the Word of the Lord that this seed alone transforms the earth ever anew and opens it to true life.
. . . . In the Western world, which is a world weary of its own culture, it is a world that has reached the time when there is no longer any evidence of the need for God, let alone Christ, and when it therefore seems that humans could build themselves on their own. In this atmosphere of a rationalism closing in on itself and that regards the model of the sciences as the only model of knowledge, everything else is subjective. Christian life too, of course, becomes a choice that is subjective, hence, arbitrary and no longer the path of life. It therefore naturally becomes difficult to believe, and if it is difficult to believe it is even more difficult to offer one's life to the Lord to be his servant.

This is certainly a form of suffering which, I would say, fits into our time in history, . . . . . I do not think that there is any system for making a rapid change. We must go on, we must go through this tunnel, this underpass, patiently, in the certainty that Christ is the answer and that in the end, his light will appear once more.”

“Christ is the answer.” Nothing can change this, even the world’s denial. But even if it resists the tending hand, the patient work of the saint will still teach the world, and will be the instrument by which people are brought closer to God, closer to the ultimate promise:

“Thus, the first answer is patience, in the certainty that the world cannot live without God, the God of Revelation . . .the God who showed us his Face in Jesus Christ. This Face of the One who suffered for us, this loving Face of the One who transforms the world in the manner of the grain of wheat that fell into the earth.

. . . . We are in need of patience, but also an active patience in the sense of making people understand: "You need this."

Even if they do not convert straightaway, at least they draw closer to the circle of those in the Church who possess this inner strength. . . . . I am thinking of the Lord's Parable of the Mustard Seed which was so small and then became a tree so great that the birds of the sky build their nests in it. And I should say that these birds could be the people who are not yet converted but who at least perch on the tree of the Church.”

Sometimes we hear of the ‘prophetic office’ of Christ in which we participate. Speaking the Word of God, being in this sense ‘a prophet,’ does not mean being a sooth-sayer, a teller of the future. It means rather embracing the personal experience of God, and delivering to others what we ourselves have been given. We may, like the prophet Moses, die on the mountain without seeing all the promises fulfilled. But the main thing is that we pick up the hoe and the trowel and plant the seeds.

“I am first and foremost a rustic,” wrote the doughty St. Patrick, whose feast we celebrate today, “but this much I know for sure . . . . He inspired me with fear, reverence and patience to be the one who would if possible serve the people faithfully to whom the love of Christ brought me. The love of Christ indeed gave them to me to serve them humbly and sincerely for my entire life if I am found worthy. . . . I must fearlessly and confidently spread the name of God everywhere in order to leave a legacy after my death.”

We have to fight for the Kingdom of God; it deserves to exist. It must be there to feed the future. We look with gratitude on that which was planted in the past by the labors of others. Let us pray also for the enthusiasm of the saints, the prophets, the evangelists, knowing that we inherit the fruits of their deeds and their continuous intercession:

“Today I put on a terrible strength,
Invoking the Trinity, confessing the Three,
with faith in the One
As I face my maker.
Today I put on the power of Christ’s birth and baptism,
Of his hanging and burial,
His resurrection, ascension,
and decent at the Judgement.
Today I put on the power of the order of Cherubim,
Angel’s obedience, archangel’s attendance, in hope of ascending to my reward;
Patriarchs’ prayers, prophets’ predictions, Apostles’ precepts,
Confessors’ testimony, holy virgins’ innocence,
And the deeds of true men.”
(From The Lorica, a prayer by St. Patrick)

Escape (5th Sunday of Lent)

2010-03-19T20:23:00.000-07:00

by Gwen Adams, (c.) 2010

“Only in charity do we climb out of the isolated self.”
—Thomas Shaeffer from “Up From Alienation”

John was an actor, as his parents had been before him. They were trained in Commedia dell’Arte as children and played all over the country, the father as Pantalone, the mother as Columbina. But when that kind of theater ceased to be in vogue, John’s parents shed this technique. This was long before John was even born. When John was older, his parents encouraged him to explore less constricting modes of theater. He tried a few theater companies and felt out of place or aimless, as did most of the actors he met. However, there was this difference: many of them liked being frustrated—it made them feel complex. In real life, John was not over-dramatic or emotionally demonstrative and to see people on and off stage acting “tortured,” first irked and then bored him. Indeed, he began to find all of theater life supremely boring. But, for lack of a better job and always hopeful that he might find the right place to act, he settled down with a new company in the Twin Cities where, like the previous companies, most of the actors were “trying to find themselves.” They were called the New Maneuvers Theater Company, and as far as John could tell, did not have a director. This was part of their technique. The actors used to meet weekly at a local coffee-shop in Dinkytown and discuss or vote on what to produce.

Roger was the first actor John met, and then there was Jane, and a host of others. Roger usually kept a finger to the wind to see what would please the critics. Jane, who had a talent for improvisation, rebelled at playing the same kind of role twice and always demanded to be cast as something new. At John’s first meeting, she had her hair pulled back in a very severe pony-tail and wore a pair of those narrow tortoise-framed glasses. She was playing an intellectual in one of their current productions and pretending to like iced black coffee. She held a pencil the whole meeting and waved it in circles when she was making a point, a habit which particularly annoyed John.

Roger crossed his legs. He was forever doing that these days since he was playing a sensitive man in a show uptown. He wore loafers without socks, played light jazz in his dressing room, and always asked Jane her opinion. “I suggest,” said Roger. “Sartre’s No Exit. It hasn’t been played here recently, and the critics say it will be well received. What do you think, Jane?”

Jane’s arms were folded, but she released one to wave her pencil. “It is very deep. I say yes.” The others agreed, and John who hadn’t read it before, agreed also.

John had to complain months later at the first coffee-shop meeting after No Exit closed. He was very irritable that day because he was playing two roles, one a high-powered financier with a local community theater and the other a vegan poet with New Maneuvers. He found it extremely challenging to role-play the conflicting parts. For example, before the meeting started he stood for a long time at the counter just trying to decide between black coffee and a soy latté.

“Are you a wealthy poet?” asked Jane sweetly. She was hanging on his arm, practicing for her emotionally dependent heroine role in another show with New Maneuvers. She was wearing a lavender twin-set and had ordered a coconut steamer. This irritated John.

He wanted to say “Stop hanging on my arm like that,” but he hated confrontation. Instead, he simply said, “I’m a poor poet.”

“A poor poet can’t afford a soy latté,” said Jane.

“So I should drink nothing?”

“Why don’t you order the cheapest black coffee as if you were a tight-wad financier but also a poor poet who wishes he could have a $4.50 soy latté?”

“But I am trying to be a financier who throws down big bills.”

“Then why,” asked Jane. “Are you wearing a black turtleneck? What?” she said following him. “What is it? Are you mad at me? Don’t be mad!” Her voice had a little quaver in it.

John said nothing to her and sat down sourly with the group. Roger was pretty pleased with himself. He was congratulating the group on another sensitive season when John interrupted. “I have to say,” said John gathering steam. “That I hated every minute of No Exit. And I dislike our new play, too.”

“But it asks the big questions,” said one of the actors who was playing a therapist.

“Nothing happens!” said John.

“That’s kind of the point,” said Roger. “Don’t you see the irony?” But they chose a different play, and John thought he might like it since each actor could give it direction. There were no sets, costumes, props, or lines, all improvisation. When John made his weekly call to mother, she was bothered by this and feared it might be a return to the old Commedia roles. “Trust me,” said John. “There are no roles in this play.”

This play was more difficult than they had first expected, and the actors were constantly bumping into each other or stepping on each other’s lines. There was an older man with glasses and a tweed sport-coat with patches on the elbows who used to come and sit in the back of the theater, night after night, possibly to come out of the cold. No one seemed to mind him, but John often wondered what he must think of their company, especially when their practices were particularly bad. Like the night John accidentally stepped on Jane’s speech for the hundredth time, and she lost her temper.

“I’m sorry,” said John. “I thought you were finished.”

“Lies! More lies!” cried Jane scornfully.

“Excuse me, Jane?” said John with confusion.

Jane groaned. “I’m not Jane, I’m Dr. Hanson—hello!? I’m trying to save the scene!” Jane looked around appealingly. “Did that sound bad? I said the first thing I could think of—how am I supposed to go on when he keeps interrupting me?”

They did three more plays like this, and John wondered what could possibly be more tedious when Roger suggested and New Maneuvers produced Six Characters in Search of an Author. “This,” said Roger sipping a chai. “Will be an autobiographical work for us.” Everyone looked very deep, but John laughed, a little hollowly.

He found the rehearsals pure tedium, and suddenly during a practice one day, blurted out, “Doesn’t anyone find this boring?” There was a slight pause, and all the actors exchanged a look. This irritated John because he realized they’d all had a conversation about him behind his back. “John,” said Roger. “I think it’s good to confront this issue. Your role is what you make it. And you seem to lack versatility, agility, plurality in your technique. All your roles are characterized by boredom—”

But John exclaimed “What roles? All we ever do is get up here and pretend we know what is going on!’”

Roger suggested he take a break. That year John began trying all sorts of roles in and outside the company, looking for a theater with a point. He played Regan in a contemporary play based on King Lear where all the characters are unrelated and unmarried—Goneril and Albany have an understanding and they both work as secretaries for Mr. Lear. Another time John juggled five different characters in one play and came on every scene as someone different, including a father who turns out to be evil, a villain who was just misunderstood, and a youth coming to grips with maturity. Once he played in a very avant-garde show about a man that falls in love with a turkey. This was the first thing to disturb John’s mother. “I don’t know,” she said over the phone. “You won’t do anything silly, will you? I don’t know how I can celebrate Thanksgiving the same way.” Jane and Roger loved the show. “It’s so creative!” said Roger (he was playing an intellectual these days). “No one has ever been honest enough to do this,” said Jane (she was playing an activist).

But John found this, too, was boring. “I mean,” he used to ask himself in the dressing-room mirror. “How do I woo a turkey? I mean, what do I say?”

“Let it come from your heart! Be authentic!” said the coach (he hated to be called director—“We’re all in this together,” he said.)

“My heart?” thought John. “I love you?” he said aloud to the turkey as the mist machine pumped a romantic haze all around.

“Too cliché! Too old-school!” cried the coach.

John inwardly fumed. He had become the last thing he wanted to be: a temperamental artist.

One night during practice at New Maneuvers, he walked off the set in a rage and stormed out the back door to the alley. He nearly collided with a man behind the theater. It was the man who always sat in the back. “Oh, excuse me,” said the man.

John was about to pass by but suddenly recognized him. “You’re the man at the back of the theater,” said John. “Can I ask you something? Why do you always sit there? Do you like these plays?”

“No,” said the man. He had an honest face. “I like the actors.” He extended a hand. “The name’s Edwards; I’m the director.”

John was so flummoxed he forgot to introduce himself. “What? Why don’t you direct? This group’s been messing around for ten years doing rotten plays.”

“The people like them,” said Edwards mildly.

“They think they do; what else is there?” said John. “Seriously, there’s must be something better than this! I go onstage every night and never know what to say or do. Other people tell me what to say—they vote on it, whether it makes sense or not—or I just say whatever pops into my head. This is good theater?”

“Some actors find that very liberating,” said Edwards.

“It’s paralyzing!” snorted John. “And weird. Have you seen some of the stuff I’ve played? Say, why don’t you direct?”

“Your company doesn’t want me. The board of directors fired me,” said Edwards. “Not that I wouldn’t if I could.”

“Well,” said John. “Do you direct anywhere else?”

“Yes, I do, but it’s pretty traditional if you like that sort of thing” said Edwards. It was beginning to rain, and he turned to leave. John stopped him.

“I would like to try. Are you holding auditions? Here, let’s get out of the rain. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee, and we can talk,” said John eagerly.

“I don’t drink coffee this late,” said Edwards. John’s face fell. Edwards smiled: “Oh, we can talk, but let me buy you a beer.” So they went to Sweeney’s and sat inside until the rain cleared away and they could go out by the big fire and look at the ivy and trees and lights overhead. And they drank two glasses of beer apiece and John agreed to come and read the following Friday. When Jane and Roger heard, they were aghast, but John didn’t care. His mother was worried, too: “John, be careful; next thing you know, you’ll sign some contract and get stuck playing Harlequin or something for a year.”

John laughed. “If I get good at such a role, it won’t matter. I intend to be like this great actress Mr. Edwards told me about. She played a lover, but was so good at it, and so delightful, she turned her role into a brand new character.”

When John came to the address Edwards had given him, he found a group of eleven self-conscious and uneasy actors trying to make conversation. They were all standing beside a stage for theater-in-the-round. Edwards came up to them and the very first thing he said (which made John laugh) was, “All of you, stop posing and get on stage!” They did as he said.

“Briefly,” said Edwards putting on his glasses and glancing at a paper he took from the pocket of his jacket. “You’re here to experiment with me. You’ve all been in theater before and so you’ve heard this is cliché. But I don’t think theater works well any other way, and I don’t think you can be great actors without succeeding at this.” He opened his briefcase and took out scripts for King Lear. “You can start looking these over.”

“Oh,” said John. “I’ve done this before, well, something like this.”

“Are you nervous?” asked a girl next to him. “I am. I’ve never played anything this structured.”

“A little,” said John. Actually, he was very nervous.

“Are you going to . . . cast us? If that’s the word I want,” asked one man.

“That’s the word,” said Mr. Edwards with a smile. “This is what I’ll do, and you may find this easier to take, especially with your background. I’ll give you your role, but you will create your identity. I have an idea of what identity would best suit you, but, in the end, it will be for you to decide who you’ll play. So, John, for example, will play a servant in Lear’s household. But whether he turns out to be a servant like Kent or a servant like Oswald will depend on him, how he acts, what he says.”

“But Oswald dies at the end,” said John. “Who would want to play him?”

“Now there,” said Edwards smacking his hand. “That’s a very Oswald kind of thing to say. A comment like that aligns you with him. Kent would be Kent whether he died at the end or not. If there’s someone you want to be, I’ll help you, but you’ve got to become that character to play him on the stage. Now, I have given you some restrictions. You, John, can’t play one of Lear’s daughters or secretaries,” he winked at John. “Is this a fair bargain for you, everyone?”

Everyone nodded.

Mr. Edwards smiled. “You’re always free to go back to the other theaters, after all; they’re almost all like that. You’ll find this theater has a different kind of creativity, it’s rather more practical, but then, rather more fruitful. We work five days a week, 7-3 with shows on the weekends, and dinner at my club, that is, Sweeney’s, of course. Drinks on me afterwards.”

So that was how John learned to like acting, which he’d been doing for years and hated. He ended up playing Oswald the first year they ran King Lear, but when they revived it a decade later, Mr. Edwards said he would make a fine Kent. And so he did.

Readings in Poetry--what is it? What's it worth?

2010-03-11T18:08:00.000-08:00

Here are some articles I've been meaning to read on poetry--some I have worked through, some I haven't. While I don't fully endorse everything in the ones I've read (such as D. H. Lawrence's “Introduction to Harry Crosby’s Chariot of the Sun”), they do give a lot of food for thought! There is, of course, no substitute for reading poetry itself, but sometimes it's good to re-examine its worth.

“If poetry is not a part of your life, no method in the classroom will create ex nihilo the love of poetry in your students. Recall the famous dictum of St. Augustine . . . the same maxim applies to what we call “English”: Love literature and do what you will.”—John Senior, “Be Ye Therefore Perfect.”

Arnold, Matthew. “The Study of Poetry.”
Auden, W. H. “Postscript: Christianity and Art,” in Selected Essays, (1956). Controversial! I don't agree at all but he makes a hard case.
Burke, Kenneth. “The Poetic Process.”
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “On Poesy or Art.”
Crane, R. S. “Toward a More Adequate Criticism of Poetic Structure.”
Croce, Benedetto. “Poetry, the Work of Truth: Literature, the Work of Civilization.”
Eliot, T. S. “Poetry and Drama.”
Houseman, A. E. “The Name and Nature of Poetry.”
Hunt, Leigh. “On the Realities of Imagination.”
Lawrence, D. H. “Introduction to Harry Crosby’s Chariot of the Sun” & “Introduction to New Poems.” Some parts I don't agree with but the umbrella image is outstanding.
Murray, Paul. “Poetry in a Time of Affliction.” Poignant; rings true.
Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Poetic Principle.”
Quinn, Dennis. Iris Exiled. A must-read.
Ransome, John Crowe. “Preface to The World’s Body.”
Senior, John. The Restoration of Christian Culture & The Death of Christian Culture, especially “Be Ye Therefore Perfect.” Wonderful.
Shelley, Percy. “A Defence of Poetry.”
Sidney, Philip. “In Defense of Poesy.”
Stevens, Wallace. “Three Academic Pieces.”
Swift, Jonathan. “Letter of Advice to a Young Poet.”
Tate, Allen. “Narcissus as Narcissus.” 3.23.10 This wasn't as good as "To Whom is the Poet Responsible?" and "What is a Traditional Society"? and "Tension in Poetry."
Thomas, Dylan. “Notes on the Art of Poetry.”
Von Hildebrand, Dietrich. “Beauty in the Light of the Redemption,” in The New Tower of Babel. Excellent.
Wilde, Oscar. “Preface to Dorian Gray.”
Winters, Yvor. “The Morality of Poetry.”
Yeats, W. B. “The Symbolism of Poetry.”

Ellen’s House (4th Sunday of Lent)

2010-03-11T11:47:00.000-08:00

by Gwen Adams, (c.) 2010

“It goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there.”
—Matthew 12:43-45

“Have I not wept your supreme anguish
and have I not sweated the sweat of your nights
Lamentable friend who seeks me where I am?”
—Paul Verlaine, “Mon Dieu m’a dit”

When Ellen was older and sick of her house, she shut it up and decided to go traveling. It was a beautiful home, brick with two wings, each with French windows opening onto a patio, and French windows in the back opening onto a porch. The back porch was lovely with indigo clematis growing on a lattice on the side. But Ellen shut the windows, covered all the chairs, locked the great front door, and went traveling all over the world. She believed herself happy for a few years.

She saw many great things, castles and tiny coffee-shops, exotic temples, the pyramids. She did all sorts of exciting and dangerous things, walked alone in big cities at night, jumped on a moving train, learned to shoot a gun, smoke a hookah, drink whiskey. But somewhere in her journeys, she began to hear the voice of a crying baby, very faint at first, but then increasingly louder. No one else ever seemed to hear it. But she did, and at the strangest of times: at a wine-tasting, a poker match, on safari. It woke her at night and she would pad over the cold tile floor of a hotel room in Spain and stand on the balcony, listening to the cars and the people wandering the streets below, with the smoke and smells and laughter rising up to her. And always behind it was the pathetic voice of a baby. This went on, and the cries grew more insistent the longer Ellen traveled, until one night, when she had a strange dream that she returned home.

She found she was walking up the long curved driveway lined with cedars and juniper and smelling their resin in the warm weather. Far away someone was cutting the grass. Everything looked just the same, and yet she felt as if she were a stranger there and visiting for the first time. Everything had a curious familiarity, yet a startling newness, like when one notices that a childhood friend has grown up into an altogether beautiful girl. Ellen went uncertainly up to the front door and found it locked just as she had left it, but there was noise coming from around the back of the house, from the back porch. So she went around and found seven people lounging in her wicker lawn furniture. There was also another in the hammock. They all looked at her without embarrassment, and Ellen had the strangest feeling she should know who they were. They were eating candy and had a great pile of chocolates on the table. “Would you like to join us?” said one of the visitors. Ellen suddenly heard the baby’s cries coming from somewhere in the house. She hesitated.

“Just for a little—” said another of the visitors. So Ellen sat with them and had some candy and found it amazingly delicious. It was all she could do to get up finally and enter the house to see if there really was a baby. When she went into one of the first rooms, the study, she felt as if she should recognize it—and she did in a way—but everything had a tangible jewel-like freshness. There was the desk and the banker’s lamp but she had never noted the sheen of the cherry wood before or the bright greenness of the glass lamp shade. There were all the books arranged in their bookcases, but as she touched them, it seemed to Ellen that she had never felt their sweet stiff covers and worn corners or seen their various colors and gilt-edged pages, never felt the rough cut pages of the older volumes. The windows were open on the east side, opposite the French doors to the back porch and the sun streamed in and the curtains blew all about, and each particle of dust caught in the slant of the sun seemed to sparkle. Then, at the same time, Ellen heard the cry of the baby and the nasty laughter of the visitors, and she suddenly remembered that she had invited the visitors a long time ago, that they had been there for ages, only she had never really been home to notice. Ellen went to the foot of the stairs, resting her hand on the base of the banister, looking at the beautiful pattern in the carpet up the stairs and the gleam of the brass rods between each step. She heard the baby and was about to go up, when one of the visitors called her.

“Ellen! Are you coming back? Come outside—we’re all here.” Ellen stood there torn for a second. Then she went back out on the porch and ate chocolate with the eight for a long, long time.

It was a great deal later that Ellen looked up rather sick and saw that all of the eight had horrible circles of chocolate around their mouths. Ellen stood up and then noticed on their faces the nastiest expressions she had ever seen. Every one of them looked sick, but also very, very cruel. She said, “I should go.”

“Go? Go where?” said one. “This is your home.”

Ellen heard the baby wail again. “Inside,” she said. “I hear someone crying.” And they all looked even nastier.

“Stay a little longer,” said another.

“Yes, just a little longer,” they all chorused. One of them had very casually risen and begun to walk toward the door behind Ellen. So quick as a snap, Ellen jumped back through the French doors and bolted them, just as the eight rushed at her with scratching nails. But they could not get past the door, and Ellen went and shut all the windows, and then followed the sound of the baby up the long flight of stairs to search through her home.

She wandered through the halls and the bedrooms touching the photographs of her family and the paperweights and toys, smelling the cedar in the closets, listening to the clock wind up and chime the hour. Finally, after she had checked every room and found no baby, she knew that the baby must be up in the nursery, in the old finished attic with the gables, that was so noisy when the rain drummed down. So Ellen crept up the last stairs, hearing both the cries of the baby and the rage of the eight outside, until she opened the nursery door and saw the blocks and dolls and stuffed animals, the stitched samplers on the wall, grandmother’s quilts folded in a pile, the cherries on the wall-paper, and lying in the old cradle a tiny infant crying his heart out. Ellen stood still for a second, and it seemed like that baby belonged there more than anything in the house, even herself. She felt quite like a stranger for a moment. But then she shook herself, and finding a bottle of milk on the table and a warm blue blanket, she picked up the infant, sat down in the rocking chair, and rocked him to sleep. She fell asleep shortly after with the child on her breast, both of them quite at home with each other.

EXAMINATION: Do I seek Christ? Do I seek Him everywhere but my own soul? Do I thrust out silence, contemplation, thought, examination, drown myself in a million distractions, never peer within the depths of my own soul, listen to the calling within my own soul?

Forty We Shall Be

2010-03-11T11:37:00.000-08:00

by Jessica Hickey, (c.) 2010

Wednesday, 10 March 2010

"Breast high in ice that froze their blood,
Against the midnight sky they stood
Those forty soldiers brave.
Shiv‘ring with cold but not with fear,
They looked without a moan or tear
Upon their awful grave.
. . . .The whole night long the martyrs prayed,
Their pains increased, but undismayed
Still rang their voices sweet:
‘Let us, O Lord, still forty be
When we shall stand in front of Thee
Before Thy judgment-seat.’”
(From “The Forty Martyrs of Sebaste,” in A Legend of St. Dismas and Other Poems, by A. H. Enid M. Dinnis, ed.)

Today, we mark the memorial of the Forty Holy Martyrs of Sebaste. These forty men were soldiers as well as Christians, and were condemned together in Armenia under the orders of Emperor Lycinius in 320. Accounts of their death attest to their courage and steadfastness, and to their will to remain united, even in death. Imprisoned, beaten about the mouth with stones, they were at length stripped to the skin and driven out upon a frozen lake one night, either to adjure their Christianity or perish by exposure. Steaming baths were maintained nearby to encourage them toward desertion.

The accounts tell us that they raised together one prayer: that God would permit them to enter Heaven as a corps of forty: “"Lord, forty of us have begun to run the race. Grant that all forty may receive the crown; do not let anyone be missing at the end.”

Before this trial was over, one of the company faltered, and unable to bear the cold any longer, left his companions and died in his flight to the baths. However, God did not permit the prayer of the company to go unanswered; the watchman whose task it was to see them to their end was moved by their example to embrace the faith, and, declaring himself a Christian, removed his clothes and took the place of the fortieth man on the ice.

Two points of reflection may arise from this story. The first concerns the Christian as witness, and the second deals with the salvation of others in God‘s Providence.

Blaise Pascal, in his desire to share the Faith with the skeptical and unbelieving men of his generation, made his famous argument, his “Wager,” in which he urged people to live as though they believed, for they had nothing to lose by so doing, and everything to gain:

“What harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others? I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognize that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.”

Perhaps Pascal’s proposal was a fair one for those seventeenth-century rationalists whose consciences and souls he wished to aid. And it may be that the effort of “living as if you believed” would indeed pave the way for genuine faith to develop in an unbeliever, rendering him more receptive to the movements of grace and ultimate justification.

I don’t wish to be too hard on Pascal, who, after all, rendered service to the Faith during a difficult era. Yet, I have always been slightly dissatisfied with this aspect of his attempt. Against the backdrop of the Incarnation and the supernatural character of the Church, with its undying passion, resilience and confidence, the Wager seems somewhat anemic. It feels like too great a concession to a skeptical world that the best we could say to it is, “Why not enjoy salvation? It’s free; please have some.” It reminds me a little too much of the sample vendors one sees at the grocery, who urge us to take a Dixie cup of this or that to see how good it is: “And it doesn’t cost you anything!”

Even our would--which the poet Claudel lamented as “so horribly heedless, so stupid, so appallingly deaf!”-- realizes that everything worth having does indeed cost us something in the end. This is why the appeal to simple self-interest, as reflected in the Wager, will never be as effective as the genuine witness of a Christian before the world.

The world may ask for proof of God, and the proof is there before them, not just in rational & historical evidence which the sincere man must not overlook, nor solely in God‘s revelation preserved in the Church, but also in the living testimony of the Christian--in our own lives. “This evil and faithless generation seeks a sign,” said Jesus, “but no sign will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.” The sign of Jonah, of course, is the Paschal Mystery, God’s ultimate proof by means of His suffering, death, and resurrection for love of men. We read in this sign the simple truth by which the saints and martyrs have lived and continue to live: Love risks something; love risks everything.

The term martyr is derived from the Greek word for witness, one who is able to testify from his own experience and knowledge. We often employ the title only when speaking of those who have accepted death for Christ, yet we are all, by virtue of the Sacrament of Confirmation and its attendant obligations and charisms, called to be witnesses. We must each have the heart of the martyr, the fulsome generosity of spirit that sees and gives and bears witness to truth as Christ did.

All this we see in the faces of the Forty who died on this date at Sebaste. To be good men, good citizens, good soldiers--this was a given. But in the end, the crown offered to them required much more. It required that there be within them a sanctuary where a flame of love burned without ceasing, even if that meant that the outer temple had to give way.

Love enables us to bear a great deal, and this is why the martyr, though he does not seek out persecution or punishment, can accept it if it comes, and be the better for it. “A man may well lose his head and yet come to no harm,” wrote Thomas More. There is an unbreakable connection between love and suffering, as Pope Benedict observed, and we find that suffering can make us more human and more capable of love:

“Today what people have in view is eliminating suffering from the world. For the individual, that means avoiding pain and suffering in whatever way. Yet we must also see that it is in this very way that the world becomes very hard and very cold. Pain is part of being human. Anyone who really wanted to get rid of suffering would have to get rid of love before anything else, because there can be no love without suffering, because it always demands an element of self-sacrifice, because, given temperamental differences and the drama of situations, it will always bring with it renunciation and pain.

When we know that the way of love–this exodus, this going out of oneself–is the true way by which man becomes human, then we also understand that suffering is the process through which we mature. Anyone who has inwardly accepted suffering becomes more mature and more understanding of others, becomes more human. Anyone who has consistently avoided suffering does not understand other people; he becomes hard and selfish.” (From an interview with Cardinal Ratzinger by Peter Seewald)

This is one of the reasons that, for the Christian, suffering has merit and value. God’s compassion--literally, His desire to ‘suffer with’ us--saves us. God showed us that there are things worth suffering for, worth the risk and the cost. People who bear their suffering in love are like Him in spirit, worthy to be called His friends. St. Teresa of Avila observed, “We always find that those who walked closest to Christ were those who had to bear the greatest trials.” Perhaps, knowing this will help us find the courage to bear the costs of whatever God asks of us in our particular situations.

Our second point of reflection centers on the Providence of God in the salvation of others. We learned in the story of the Forty Martyrs that one man was lost. Under the duress, he renounced his God and left his brethren. It seemed that their number would not be complete; there appeared an element of loss, of failure. Yet, by their witness of fidelity, another soul was gained that night, all unexpectedly. Forty were crowned in Paradise after all.

This seems to hold a lesson for those who evangelize or who work and pray for the salvation of others. We know that, in all essentials, the work of conversion is God’s own work within the soul, yet it is difficult to wait in hope, to wait to see if those we care about will come fully to Christ. We may carry this concern for members of our families who have strayed or for those we know who are searching, still trying to find their way.

God wishes to save all. This is what He has told us, quite simply and bluntly and of His own accord. The French poet Charles Péguy describes this revelation from the Scriptures:

“What an opening up, what a shock of hope. What a crushing.
The words are there.
There's nothing to analyze, what an entry into the thoughts of God.
Into the will of God.
Into the intentions, (the ultimate intentions), of God.
Abyss of hope, what an opening, what lightning, what thunder,
what a passageway.
What an entrance.
Irrevocable words, what an entry into the very Hope of God.
God deigned to hope in us. Hope for us.
Revelation, what an incredible revelation. Sic non est, Thus it is not.
Incredible hope, unhoped-for hope Thus it is not
Voluntas ante Patrem vestrum, the will before your Father,
Qui in caelis est, Who is in heaven.
Ut unus. That a single one
Of these little ones. De pusillis istis.
Pereat. Should perish.”
(Excerpted from Charles Péguy, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, English translation of the 1986 critical edition.)

Our hope for the salvation of others--however great, however heart-rending--is dim and pale before God’s Hope for them. What a surprise it is, as Péguy declared, a shock, a thunderous opening up of God‘s desire, when we realize this. If our hope moves us to seek, to suffer, to bring the truth to others that they might be saved, what will God’s own Hope accomplish?

As His hope, so also His work, His watchfulness, His care. Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his poem “A Lantern Out of Doors,” offers a description of this:

“Sometimes a lantern moves along the night,
That interests our eyes. And who goes there?
I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?
Men go by me whom either beauty bright
In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.
Death or distance soon consumes them: wind
What most I may eye after, be in at the end
I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.
Christ minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow or amend
There, éyes them, heart wánts, care haúnts, foot fóllows kínd,
Their ránsom, théir rescue, ánd first, fást, last friénd.”
(Gerard Manley Hopkins, “A Lantern Out of Doors“)

We walk with others often for a short time, until “death or distance buys them quite.” People pass out of our lives or our sphere of influence; they move away, we lose touch; perhaps they pass away. We may feel we cannot see them or help them along their way any longer. We find we cannot even keep them in our mind’s eye as much as we might like. We wonder what will become of them.
Hopkins reminds us that, however much we might care, they have yet a better Friend:

“Christ minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow or amend
There, éyes them, heart wánts, care haúnts, foot fóllows kínd,
Their ránsom, théir rescue, ánd first, fást, last friénd.”

The work of salvation is God’s. He gives us a place, working beside Him, to teach, to witness, to suffer and to love. This we must do faithfully, carrying others by our deeds and our prayer as long as our life and strength lasts.

But when our limitations begin, the story does not end. He follows on foot, His care “haunts” that soul. No one who desires Him will be denied. He, that first, fast, best Friend, will find a way: “Forty we will be.”

Trident

2010-03-04T11:39:00.000-08:00

by Jessica Hickey (c.) 2010

Wednesday, 2 March 2010

“You live in an age when you must show your desires by your works. Look around you: Where is the Divine Majesty honored, where is his greatness venerated, where is his most holy will obeyed? . . . . What need there is to prepare yourselves for all manner of work and struggle to make yourselves efficient instruments of Divine Grace for such a work! Especially when there are so few loyal workers ‘who do not seek their own advantage, but that of Jesus Christ’ (Phil. 2:21).”
(Ignatius of Loyola, in a letter to the Jesuit students at Coimbra, May 7, 1547)
　
“I felt that I would have laid down a thousand lives to save a single one of the souls being lost. And seeing that I was a woman and a sinner , and incapable of doing all that I should like in the Lord’s service, and as my whole yearning was and still is that, as He has so many enemies and so few friends, these last should be trusty ones, I determined to do the little that was in me.”
(Teresa of Avila, to her nuns, in The Way of Perfection)

“Labor as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” (2 Timothy 2:3)
　
Typically, the idea of a “work ethic” has been associated more with Protestant thinking than with Catholic. It is true, particularly in the stream of thought which originated with Calvin, that a person’s external busyness with good works and virtuous behaviors was important because it provided the proof of his righteousness, the proof that he was among the “saved.” In its early centuries, the Church dealt with a separate error, but one which nonetheless overlapped with Calvin’s in practical ways, in the heresy of Pelagianism, which argued, essentially, that we win heaven by our own efforts--in other words, we work our way in.

We know of course, that both these ways of thinking are false. We can bring to mind the image of Jesus in the home of Mary, Martha, & Lazarus. Mary, kneeling at the feet of the Lord in contemplation, chose the better part over Martha, who busied herself with the work of the home. Work, strictly speaking, is neither the cause nor the guarantor of salvation. Some individuals are called to a life spent primarily in contemplation. And all, including those who are not meant to pass into that sanctuary beyond the cloister’s wall, are called to give pride of place to the interior life, to remain united to the True Vine from which our life and purpose flow. We have all heard Pope John Paul’s declaration that, even for the Pope, the first duty is prayer.

What, then, becomes of work? It is not the highest calling, and it does not save us. Would it not be better to spend our time creating for ourselves and our friends places of peace and comfort, enjoying nature, a variety of games, hobbies, books, arts and leisure activities which will enrich our lives, making us more well-rounded, better socialized and cultured and in short, more fun? Should not the enjoyment of good things trump our “works”?

I suggest the above as a sort of subtle temptation we may face. I do not think I need argue seriously with any good Catholic about the value of all the abovementioned things, or the fact that we will--and in fact in many instances, ought to--do them. My question is “What else ought we to be doing?” Lent is a good time to consider this, since one of the fruits of self-denial is a better sense of moderation and also a better sense of justice--the virtue of allotting each thing its due--which comes more fully into play in the proper ordering of our time and energies once we have weeded out some of our temporal attachments.

I propose that work--and in this instance I refer specifically to work in the service of Christ and the Church--is essential to every Christian life. Each vocation in the Church is an expression of this, and that is why our works may truly be called labors of love. Yet such work is not embraced as it should be. There are plenty of Christians, but “so few loyal workers,” as the saints quoted above observed. Many enjoy the benefits of the Faith, but fewer bear the costs.

It is easy, speaking for myself, to remember that we are in the Church of Chesterton & Belloc, those hearty souls who represent to us piety, fun and enjoyment. Sometimes I may just want to stop my imaginings there, in that cozy scene with the cracking fire, the bread and cheese and beer, and the songs and laughter. But, while I would not give up the spirit of Chesterton and Belloc for worlds, I know that we cannot forget the others.

Beside those good men also stand the stalwart Paul, ragged and crusted with salt spray from his sea voyages; the zealous Francis Xavier practicing diligently the languages of the Asians and Indians by lamplight; the passionate and practical Teresa of Avila who went briskly from the kitchen, to her desk, to her kneeler; Damien of Molo’kai, with his books and bandages and a hat to shield him from the tropical sun; Teresa of Calcutta with her compassionate face and work-worn hands; the frail John Paul, boarding and de-planing over and over but always with the same smile and hands extended to the children of God. With one voice, they tell us with fervor and a sense of urgency that God is not known and loved as He deserves, that souls are being lost, that we must resolve to do our part. Labor for Christ, Paul adjured us, for this work, like prayer, is holy.

Some of you may be familiar with Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Masque of the Red Death.” In it, the wealthy Prince Prospero gathers about him all his good friends and retires with them to his palace for months, planning fanciful celebrations. He devises gorgeous rooms throughout his palace, each glowing in a different jewel-colored light. It was a scene of laughter, flowers, music & dancing:

“Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. . . . . The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within.”

Yet the setting is also a macabre one, for the reader knows that outside the locked doors of the amply-provisioned palace, a plague is raging, and the afflicted, weak and starving, are left to fend for themselves. In the end, however, by a higher justice, Prospero and his companions are held accountable, and they too perish by the same fate.

We know that once there was a princess--a historical person this time, not a fictional one like Prospero--who had a life of beauty, and many pastimes and comforts to enjoy. We know that sometimes, she gathered up what she had into an apron, against the wishes of some of her family, and went outside to share it with those who had not. Elizabeth’s labors demonstrate the Christian way, the way of the apostle and the saint. Love does not remain bottled up in enjoyments, but spills over into the rest of life. It finds the starving and feeds them. It manifests itself in deeds, and often, in sacrifices. It does not, as was said of Emperor Nero, concentrate on its own sweet music while the city burns.

“What good is it, my brothers,” wrote St. James, “ if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” (James 2: 14-17)

If we are to be called apostles, then we must be committed to the tasks proper to an apostle, to apostolic work. The forms of service are many, corresponding to our various gifts and abilities, and task set for us should be discerned and then firmly pursued without fear of the risk, as Venerable Cardinal Newman teaches:

“If then faith be the essence of a Christian life . . . it follows that our duty lies in risking upon Christ's word what we have, for what we have not; and doing so in a noble, generous way, not indeed rashly or lightly, still without knowing accurately what we are doing, not knowing either what we give up, nor again what we shall gain; uncertain about our reward, uncertain about our extent of sacrifice, in all respects leaning, waiting upon Him, trusting in Him to fulfil[sic] His promise, trusting in Him to enable us to fulfil our own vows, and so in all respects proceeding without carefulness or anxiety about the future. . . . . Now I dare say that what I have said as yet seems plain and unexceptionable to most of those who hear me; yet surely, when I proceed to draw the practical inference which immediately follows, there are those who in their secret hearts, if not in open avowal, will draw back. Men allow us Ministers of Christ to proceed in our preaching, while we confine ourselves to general truths, until they see that they themselves are implicated in them, and have to act upon them; and then they suddenly come to a stand; they collect themselves and draw back, and . . . . are sure to say we carry things too far, when we carry them home to themselves. . . . Alas! that we, my brethren, have not more of this high and unearthly spirit [of the Apostles]! How is it that we are so contented with things as they are,—that we are so willing to be let alone, and to enjoy this life,—that we make such excuses, if any one presses on us the necessity of something higher, the duty of bearing the Cross, if we would earn the Crown, of the Lord Jesus Christ?” (From Plain & Parochial Sermons 4, Sermon 20: “The Ventures of Faith”)

Newman echoes the questions of Ignatius and Teresa: Why so few? Why so half-hearted? What will you risk? Like Teresa, we must each resolve, “I will do the little that is in me.” The effects of Teresa’s “little” effort are still felt today, spanning centuries and continents. The students of Ignatius, prepared for all kinds of work and to be “efficient instruments of divine grace,” were the central missionaries of the counter-reformation and the age of discovery. Some of them have perished on our own soil, sanctifying it and planting the seeds for a future Church.

No, our work does not save us, but the One Who saved us wills that it be done. It is necessary because it is the means of carrying that salvation to others, and to safeguarding the common good. Who can meditate on the Way of the Cross without seeing in each footstep of Christ a labor of love? Our loyalty to Him demands that we share His work, each of us according to our capacities; our charity for others requires that we serve them: “Such as My love has been for you, so must your love be for each other. This is how all will know you for My disciples: by your love for one another." (John 13)

Thus, it seems to me that to prevail in the Christian life, we require a three-pronged weapon, like the powerful tridents of the ancients. If each prong is made rightly, with attentiveness and care, as a response to the grace we have been given, we will possess something formidable.

In the first instance, we must be willing to enter the ascent of prayer and practice devotion as fully as we might. This central prong, which directs the others, is greater and reaches further. Secondly, we should see and embrace all that is good, true and beautiful, living a life of genuine joy, which ultimately means a life without sin. And finally, we must work, laboring humbly and sacrificially in God’s vineyard, that the harvest might be as great as He desires.
　
“Dearest Lord, teach me to be generous.
Teach me to serve you as you deserve;
to give and not to count the cost;
to fight and not to heed the wounds;
to toil and not to seek for rest;
to labor and not to seek reward,
save that of knowing that I do your will. “
(St. Ignatius Loyola)

The Battle (2nd Sunday of Lent)

2010-02-26T21:51:00.000-08:00

(from Love or What You Will by Gwen Adams, (c.) 2010)

"We are the brave deeds we do before the age of twenty.” —Bishop Tadeuz in James Michener’s Poland

You were fourteen when your parents made you get confirmed. “What if I don’t want to?” you said. “Isn’t it supposed to be your own decision?” Your parents sent you to class anyway. You wrote notes to your friends in a college-ruled notebook and looked up wearily when the teacher called on you. The teacher talked about Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac. You wondered vaguely how Isaac must have felt about the whole thing. You felt irritable and skipped the homework.

The teacher talked about Moses standing through the battle with his arms stretched out and supported by Aaron and Hur. When Moses dropped his arms, the battle went badly. So he stood all day until the battle was over—

“Not ‘over,’” said the teacher. “Won.”
“I wish this class was over,” muttered a student and everyone snickered. You looked out the window at the telephone wires and the alley and thought of a man named Hur who got stuck with the boring job of holding up someone’s arms all day.

“We are in a battle,” said the teacher. “A real battle.”
“What battle?” said the smart kid. He was supposed to be three grades ahead but his parents put him in late. “Is this one of those INVISIBLE battles or something?” The teacher was visibly deflated.
“It is a spiritual battle and a real battle,” said the teacher. “There are real casualties. Some people die and they die forever and some people live and they live forever. We are in this battle whether we like it or not. The only choice is to decide if we want to be conquerors or victims. The day you are confirmed, you become an adult—”
LET ANYTHING HAPPEN TO ME, you thought looking at the teacher’s turtleneck and glasses. A turtleneck! DON’T LET ME BE AN ADULT WHO WEARS TURTLENECKS AND TEACHES SUNDAY SCHOOL.
“How do we get out of the battle?” said the smart kid. The teacher was really shocked after that.

All that year you went to school, played soccer, rode the bus, saw the trees in the mall parking-lot lose their leaves. They were covered with red berries in the winter. The snow turned to slush, the slush to mud, the mud to grass, and May came. You were confirmed. And that was the last time you gave a thought to the Church. You were not interested in victims or conquerors. It was the same with your friends. You graduated from high-school, college, found jobs, watched the game on Saturdays, went shopping and golfing, took vacations, had hobbies, got married in or out of the Church.

And then somewhere down the line the baby came and everything changed.
Somewhere between the trip to the hospital and the first cries of your daughter, you heard the trumpet and the martial drums.

Driving to the hospital, you saw the watch-fires and the tents, the single priest by the kneeling soldier; the last letter and the trinkets packed up and handed to friends to mail home.

A hundred battles, a hundred armies, a hundred weapons and a shield. Real casualties; real deaths.

What music woke your heart, what war-cry, looking at your child and at your beloved, linking hands, looking at each other over the baby’s head and nodding “to the bitter end for this one.”
And you found that you were a leader of men and a trainer of soldiers. It was the same with your friends. And with them you found you were not fit to lead, could not march, had handled neither sword nor bayonet, reeled at the rifle’s rebound. Young soldiers saw you lag in the running, a hand to the stitch in your side.
No discipline or endurance. Your language, your drinking, your anger—you found yourself daily in trouble with your commanding officer.

You could not lead, but you had to. Lives depended on you.

Some days you despaired and the drummer-boy gave you cold comfort.

“How can I be sure,” you said, “That I will not train soldiers badly, that I will not lead us astray, that men will not die at my hands, that I myself will not be lost?”

“You cannot be sure of that,” said the boy. The drum lay on his knees. “That is not the thing to think of. It would have been better to train in your youth, but what’s done is done. You have been made a sentinel. You are not the general. This battle is the long defeat. You will not see it’s winning, but it will be won. You needn’t fear for the outcome. We will be more than conquerors.”

The campfires were put out as the day dawned and the line drew up.

EXAMINATION: Do I ever postpone God, holiness, trying? Do I despair when I find myself a victim of my own vices? Do I try again?

Related reading

Ps 95
Ezekiel 33.7-9
Romans 8.31-34, 37 and 13.8-10
Cycle C Readings: 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time—Exodus 17.8-13; Ps 121; 2 Timothy 3.14-4.2; Luke 18.1-8.

Illuminating the Manuscript (1st Sunday of Lent)

2010-02-19T18:07:00.000-08:00

(from Love or What You Will by Gwen Adams, (c.) 2010)

“Impassioned thoughts, high aspirations, sublime imaginings, have no strength in them. They can no more make a man obey consistently, than they can move mountains.”
—Ven. John Henry Cardinal Newman, “The Religious Use of Excited Feelings,” Plain & Parochial Sermons

Their hearts burned, these monks who called Christ the Bridegroom, and sought him with a love called impatient, countenancing no delay. For His sake they renounced power, wealth, fame, sympathy—all the comforts of life, all the salt that makes such comforts palatable.

For His sake the monks broke their sleep, rose early, and kept vigil, like travelers or soldiers.

It was always so cold. In the morning, the wash-water was frozen in the basin. One man had chilblains.

When they did have riches, it was not at times of their own choosing; when power came to them, it was not when they would have wanted it. It was like two roads diverging and meeting again in strange places, sometimes parting a lifetime. The monks walked on the right-hand side, and those years when the roads converged, we said they were just like us. But then the road would fork in its own time, and the right hand side turn down into the rocky gully with the naked tree branches bare against the sky. Then we knew—“Theirs is a different road.”

There was no forming of pet pleasures and attachments—
“I must have cream with my coffee”
“I don’t see salt on the table”
“Have dinner without me, I want to finish—”

No going for a bite to eat later that night. No going out.
No sleeping in. No skipping tasks. No freedom to do whatever you want, when you want to.
No spider’s threads to wrap a sleepy soul. They were too alive.

Not all succeeded in the ideal, of course, but many did.

When monasteries were common, many an unknown and obscure man threaded his prayers faithfully in and out of the day, like a long piece of ribbon marking the pages of a psalter. They serenaded the Christ with songs and canticles.

These were not men who bore a meager love.
These were not men who entertained a mild affection.
Such passion was different from what we now call by that name.

They gazed with the calm intensity of the surgeon and the watchmaker. The gaze never wavered. They were like the tight-rope walker, pole balanced hand to hand while the music drifted up from below.

What did they seem when the empire fell, and the roads sprang with weeds and the schools crumbled away and a man could not walk safely abroad? A high stone wall and a bell-tower, monks raking the hay, Latin and a room of manuscripts, and a guesthouse with a basin to wash the feet of the weary traveler. The secret garden.

What must they look now, with our empires, roads, and schools, when a man cannot walk safely abroad.
Theirs is a different road. “Monasteries remind us of what we are for.”

Their love was not emotional, or uncontrolled, not vapid or silly,
Yet it was not choleric or overzealous.
And it was not weak.
Their love was real—
Hence calm—like the healing cut of the surgeon’s knife;
Steady—like the watchmaker’s hand and face bent over his work; dependable and balanced.

This love copied the texts, black stroke on stroke, each letter formed to a pattern. All a man’s life poured into the ink and gold, every breath measured in a phrase, heart’s beat in a letter stained red with true love’s blood, in a picture of a holy virgin with child, wearing a red gown and a blue mantle and a gold halo of precious gold leaf, purchased by men who denied themselves in everything.

The mixing of pigments and making of pens, raising of sheep, preparing their skins for parchment to bear the words of the Bridegroom.

Attention and focus, calm deliberation, steady undying love made the manuscripts. They sit under glass now. What lover loves so truly, so well,
giving so little,
only his all,
asking so much,
nothing but Him?

There was no shouting of Hosanna! first and then Crucify Him!, but only the scratching of the pen as it copied out
Love is as strong as death

Many waters cannot quench love
If a man offered for love all the wealth of his house, he would be utterly scorned.

EXAMINATION: Is my love emotional, uncontrolled, vapid and silly, choleric, and over-zealous? Do I seek consolation, spiritual thrills? Do I love the sight of myself loving God, more than God Himself?

Related reading
Psalms 27, 33, 42
Rule of St. Benedict, Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict by Dom Delatte
Song of Songs
Jean LeClercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God

Bonfire

2010-02-19T14:12:00.000-08:00

by Jessica Hickey (c. 2010)

17 February 2010

“Care enough to be willing to die in order that evil may be over come. This is the law of the seed, Jesus pointed out, which bears no fruit except it fall into the ground and die. This is the Way of the Cross.”
(A. J. Muste)

“You do not enter into paradise tomorrow or the day after or in ten years; you enter it today when you are poor and crucified.”
(Leon Bloy)
　
Today, as the Church anoints us with ashes, she tells us: “Remember, Man, that you are dust; unto dust you shall return.” This reminder, so thrifty of words, is extravagant in its meaning. We could speak of the "sackloth and ashes" symbolism in the scriptures, or the recognition of our mortality and the need to use well the resources and time given us. Today, however, I was reminded of one of the Thomist philosophers who remarked, “Ontologically, man is a beggar.”

Ash Wednesday recalls to us our essential poverty, our dependence upon God, from we receive our being. But for mystery of God’s love shown through the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ, our life would have been an irony to end all others: incapable of causing our existence or of deciding its purpose, we nonetheless exist, and we discover that we alone among all creatures have a destiny which lays completely outside the reach of every natural capacity. Post-modern philosophers note this fact, go no further, and conclude that life is pointless—as when Jean-Paul Sartre declared, “It is absurd that we exist.” Sartre is said to have sat sad and scowling in cafés, evidently unable to see the good of all that existed about him, including the divine spark within himself.

Yet for us, who have been entrusted with God’s Revelation, the thing takes on a differct hue. We may not be able to claim existence as our right. But the fact is that we possess it nonetheless. Eternal life, certainly not within our purchase, has likewise been offered us, not as a right but as a gift, a token of love. Existentially we are beggars, but we are beggars before whom a King lays the table, prepares the place of rest, and stands adorned as a Bridegroom—a King whose footstool is the earth. Is this poverty such as to justify the resentment of Sartre and his like?

Thus, the ashes of Lent open our eyes to a paradox, that the poorest of creatures is in reality an heir, if he but accepts his inheritance. This is why I can say that I will begin Lent with a sense of gratitude.

We associate today's ashes also with mourning and penitence, of course. Yet, ashes exist only where a fire has been. They are the last remnant of that which was, that which has been consumed, that which has served as a fuel—perhaps leaving behind the silver, refined, lambent and clean.

The ashes are in that sense the symbol of “something gone right.” That which the fire reduces to ash has served its purpose well in being consumed. Is this not the only right usage of sloth, selfish attachment, bitterness, and the like? We cannot build with such wood, but it burns well.

There is a story told of St. Remigius, Bishop of Rheims, who upon seeing his episcopal palace in flames, burning to the ground, suddenly recognized his attachment to earthly goods. “A fire," he is said to have finally remarked, “is always a pleasant sight.”

When at length this work is complete, there will be no more ash, for the fire will be able to rest, emanating heat, light and purity, on that which its flames do not harm:
“Behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed.”

“And there appeared to them tongues as of fire distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them.”

Lent lets us near the bonfire—literally, the “good fire”—that illumines, purifies, tempers, and refines. Like all people who gather about the flames, we will feel the sparks snapping upon us, we will carry on us for days the whiff of smoke, and yes, visibly be smudged with the ash.

But a bonfire is a merry thing, and, I always think, is worth the effort every time.

Fringe of the Garment

2010-02-12T14:17:00.000-08:00

by Jessica Hickey (c. 2010)
10 February 2010

“You see, I want a lot.
Maybe I want it all:
The darkness of each endless fall,
The shimmering light of each ascent.

So many are alive who don’t seem to care.
Casual, easy, they move in the world
As though untouched.
But You take pleasure in the faces who know they thirst.”
(Rainer Maria Rilke, “Du siehst, ich will viel“)

"It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from."
(C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces)

“As he went, the crowds pressed in on him. Now there was a woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years; and though she had spent all she had on physicians, no one could cure her. She came up behind him and touched the fringe of his clothes, and immediately her haemorrhage stopped. Then Jesus asked, ‘Who touched me?’ When all denied it, Peter said, ‘Master, the crowds surround you and press in on you.’ But Jesus said, ‘Someone touched me; for I noticed that power had gone out from me.’ When the woman saw that she could not remain hidden, she came trembling; and falling down before him, she declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched him, and how she had been immediately healed. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.’” (Luke 8: 42-48)

“I noticed that power had gone out from Me." When I think on these words of Jesus from St. Luke’s Gospel, such a world of meaning seems to lie behind them. It seems to me one of the most revealing things the Savior ever said. Two points in particular stand out for me.

The first concerns what we might call the disposition of Jesus, His will in relation to us as it is demonstrated in the story. His desire to heal and to save by love must have emanated from Him at every moment, strong enough to preclude the necessity of any other particular act of the will. He exercised no restraint over His will to love. It flowed out where it would, wherever it could find a conduit. All that was needed to discharge this power was the presence of a soul who also knew desire, the desire to be healed and saved by love.

This leads to my second point of reflection, and that is, how did she know? We are told that the woman suffering a hemorrhage had for twelve years sought all the help that medicine could offer, until her resources were exhausted. It is not difficult to see why she would seek out Jesus, who had been known to open the eyes of the blind, cast out demons, and heal the paralytics and lepers. But in these instances, there was always an interchange, a conversation, a direct action or command: “Take up your mat and walk."

Here, however, there was to be no request, no words spoken. How did the woman know that just the proximity of Jesus, the tentative hand laid momentarily on the fringe of His garment, would be enough? How did she know that there was no need even to ask?

I do not really know the answer to this question. It is plain that the glory and divine power of Christ must have been cloaked before others; only Peter, James and John were granted the vision of His Transfiguration, when He allowed His true nature to become more visible to them upon Mount Tabor. Yet, it also seems that those who longed genuinely to know Christ and His will--such as this woman, for whom the fringe of His garment sufficed--were also given to see the truth.

Heart speaks to heart, said St. Francis de Sales. And Teresa of Avila assured her Carmelite sisters, “In the measure in which you desire Him, you will find Him.” The woman spoken of in this Gospel shows us that this phenomenon of human desire is not just a mechanism for searching. Our desire is itself a response to a greater desire; we may well say, an infinite desire. St. Augustine, whose symbol is the heart engulfed with flame, shows us clearly that the desire which we feel is the reciprocation, the reply to another heart, One Which is yet more aflame:

"You called and shouted, and burst my deafness.
You gleamed and shone upon me, and chased away my blindness.
You breathed fragrant airs on me, and I held back my breath,
But now I pant for you.
I tasted, and now I hunger and thirst for You.
You touched me, and now I yearn for your peace."

The poet Rilke, quoted earlier, remarks:

“So many are alive who don’t seem to care.
Casual, easy, they move in the world
As though untouched.”

I do not believe, however, that any are truly untouched. Desire--however often it be suppressed, abused, ignored, or diverted--is in the nature of every rational soul. C.S. Lewis devotes much of his famous work Surprised by Joy to expressing how, from our babyhood, unexpected things arouse in us a pang of wonder and longing which is the first hallmark of divine desire. For the child Lewis, it was a miniature garden which he made upon the lid of a biscuit-tin--a funny, homely, earthly thing, but a genuine experience of beauty which rooted in him a desire for its Source.

Everywhere, the human experience teaches us of this inexplicable desire. Reading to my daughter a few weeks ago, I came upon the following from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, an episode in which the Ingalls family witnesses the migration of the Osage Indians:

“More and more and more ponies passed, and more children, and more babies on their mothers’ backs, and more babies in baskets on the ponies’ sides. Then came a mother riding, with a baby in a basket on each side of her pony.

Laura looked straight into the bright eyes of the little baby nearer her. Only its small head showed above the basket’s rim. Its hair was as black as a crow and its eyes were black as a night when no stars shine.

Those black eyes looked deep into Laura’s eyes and she looked deep down into the blackness of the little baby’s eyes, and she wanted that one little baby.

‘Pa,’ she said, ‘get me that little Indian baby!’

‘Hush, Laura!’ Pa told her sternly.

The little baby was going by. Its head turned and its eyes kept looking into Laura’s eyes.

‘Oh, I want it! I want it!” Laura begged. The baby was going farther and father away, but it did not stop looking back at Laura. ‘It wants to stay with me,’ Laura begged. ‘Please, Pa, please!

‘Hush, Laura, Pa said. ‘The Indian woman wants to keep her baby.’

‘Oh, Pa!’ Laura pleaded, and then she began to cry. It was shameful, but she couldn’t help it. The little Indian baby was gone. She knew she would never see it any more.
Ma said she had never heard of such a thing . . . “Why on earth do you want an Indian baby, of all things?’ Ma asked her.
‘Its eyes are so black,’ Laura sobbed. She could not say what she meant.”

For all who long, who hunger & thirst, we may ask the grace which was bestowed long ago on that woman--a tired and weakened woman who unerringly laid her hand upon the hem of God's garment. Where are they to go, those who today wish to do the same?

Last Sunday, the first reading described a vision of Isaiah: "I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, with the train of his garment filling the temple."

Within the house of God, His garment is spread wide, and no barriers exist save those which we erect ourselves. Here there is no need even to ask for help, for heart speaks to heart. To be present with desire is enough.

Plain old walls or not?

2010-02-04T22:48:00.001-08:00

Some call Yael Naim's "New Soul" inane. Some think it fantastic. If you've seen a lot of music videos, or just a few, you may have remained umimpressed. Whatever you think of the Yael Naim's song, or music videos in general, just try this little portrait. I've never seen anything like it--the tired old medium for once has become a new fairy-tale. All the fairy-tale pieces are there--desire, beauty, pictures coming to life, unexpected and unmerited, and then at the end: music, dancing, and the company of the blessed. At least . . . why not judge for yourself?

On the War We Wage Against Satan, the World, and the Flesh

2010-02-03T18:03:00.000-08:00

Peace would make me happy: under the heavens though

We fight our life. He who commands the night

Wages cruel war; and vanities delight

In quickening our corruption with their show.

And there is more, O Lord, that you must know:

Our home, this body, greedy, fleeting, bright,

Heedlessly envious of the spirit’s might,

Continually covets endless woe.

Weak, careless and divided, what can I

Engaged in all this combat, gain alone?

O Universal King, O peace most high,

Your mercy is my hope, or I have none.

Let them come close, Lord, teach me what to do,

Then I shall fight them and, thus saved, win through.

--Mikołaj Sęp-szarzyņski (1550-1581)

The Darkling Thrush

2010-01-30T20:49:00.000-08:00

by Jessica Hickey, (c.) 2010

Wednesday, 27 January 2010

The Darkling Thrush
"I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

. . . . every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
(From "The Darkling Thrush," by Thomas Hardy)

“Grant, O God, that I make good use of the tongue of flame which you have placed in my mouth . . . Since you have provided oil in which is immersed a seven-ply wick, what now prevents me from being a lamp?”
(Paul Claudel)

Some of you may have read this week about Grant Desme, a 23-year-old outfielder for the Oakland A's, who announced his plans to retire from professional baseball in order to begin studies for the priesthood.

Desme's decision came as a surprise to many, since his career in baseball seemed promising. He explained: "I'm doing well in baseball. But I had to get down to the bottom of things, to what was good in my life, what I wanted to do with my life. Baseball is a good thing, but that felt selfish of me when I felt that God was calling me more. It took awhile to trust that and open up to it and aim full steam toward him ... I love the game, but I'm going to aspire to higher things."

Reading some of the public commentary on this story, I was struck by how many people were critical of Desme's decision, seemingly unaware of the significance of his step toward the priesthood of God. "He could have used his millions to save more lives then he could do as a priest," one comment ran. "The church would love that way more than his service." "Two hands working do more than two million clasped in prayer," said another. People remarked that Desme was stupid, naive, brainwashed, or abnormal, and that he would assuredly come to regret "throwing it all away."

The spiritual blindness of the world, which we run up against time and again, can be disheartening. We see what St. John meant when he wrote that Light came into the world, but the world preferred the darkness. It is difficult sometimes not to be saddened by the state of things. Jesus said, "In the world, you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer: I have overcome the world." Though we know that we are born to conquer, to share ultimately in the victory of Christ, we have to accept that sometimes, (as the Italian novelist Manzoni observed), suffering for the sake of justice is our way of conquering.

Every Christian must bear, in some sense, the wounds and weaknesses of his brothers in faith, but perhaps more so the weaknesses of his brothers who hold themselves apart from faith. These, who are "of the world," are incredulous of the Christian. Laying down one's life because God wills it is, in the eyes of the world, absurd. The restlessness of the unbeliever, his hostility, his desperation in clinging to material values, his blinded vision--all this the saint must carry for him, as Christ carried the cross for us; the saint sheds tears of contrition along with his brother, against the day when perhaps he may do so for himself.

This is true for each member of the Church. Paul Claudel wrote:

"Once I saw a young priest weeping all alone, weeping his heart out in his deserted church. But what of the vicar of Jesus Christ, Pastor of the universe: Must not he too sometimes weep, shed tears of blood, dash his forehead against the sacred steps of the ecumenical altar? The world is so wicked and, above all, so heedless, so appallingly deaf! The red lamp burning before the tabernacle is the pope--Jesus Christ in the pope, alone under the eye of God, watching, listening, looking, understanding, working, and praying."

Every Christian, each in his own way, must be a lamp burning, as the Holy Father is. We do so, not simply for the sake of men--as though our light is bound to convince and save them--but as lights burning on the altar of God, participating in the true Light, for this is what saves.

In the poem above, Thomas Hardy describes a dark, desolate day in mid-winter, when all seems bleak, and even human beings are "fervourless." Then, of a sudden,

". . . a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom."

And it seems to me that this is what it means to follow God's will, to be a saint in our times; that, in the midst of the coldness and misery and spiritual darkness, one chooses to "fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom," to sing like the thrush a song of "joy illimited." The poet concludes,

"So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware."

Like the voice of John the Baptist, which was heard crying out in the wilderness, the soul of the saint is noticed. It is noticed, if for nothing else, for its contrast to the world around it: "So little cause for carolings / . . . was written on terrestial things." The World, noticing this sign of contradiction, at least wonders why. The saint's life speaks of this "blessed Hope, whereof he knew," and of which the World is, as of yet, unaware.

I began this reflection with the story of one among us who, like the Darkling Thrush in the poem, is sign of hope and light. I would like to end with the story of another, one who has run her race fully.

To be a saint at the age of 18 is something seldom seen in our times. We often associate sainthood with the completion of great and illustrious tasks in the world, but this is not its essence. Chiara Luce Badano died in October of 1989, with, we might suppose, most of her life "unlived." During her lifetime, her sphere of influence in her provincial town in central Italy was small. She had no fame or notoriety or special accomplishments to set her apart from others, saving her goodness. Yet, she has already been declared venerable and compared to Therese of the Child Jesus. Last month, Pope Benedict approved the miracle necessary for her beatification.

Chiara was born to her parents, Ruggero and Maria Teresa, in 1971, after they had been childless for eleven years. Maria Teresa recounts, “Even though we were so immensely happy, we understood straightaway that this child wasn’t ours alone. She belonged to God first of all.” This became more and more evident as their daughter grew. A particular spirit of generosity was manifested in her various actions--as a daughter, a friend, a parishioner. Chiara had a particular fondness for the elderly and compassion for the sick, for whom she prayed from her earliest years. She tried to perform acts of mercy and self-denial, some of which are recorded in her spiritual diary: “My friend has scarlet fever and everyone is too scared to visit her. With my parents’ permission I decided to do my homework over at her place so that she wouldn’t feel lonely."

For her friends, Chiara was a jewel. She was a popular and friendly person, skilled at singing, dancing, tennis, swimming, even mountain-climbing. She was fun-loving, and enjoyed going out to coffee shops with friends. When she became involved with Focolare, a Catholic lay apostolate in Italy, she was able to find many like-minded souls.

She had to learn virtue and self-discipline as we all do. Once when her mother asked her to clear the table, she responded, “No, I don’t want to.” She got as far as her room, then turned back and said, “Mum, I’ve just remembered that story in the Gospel about the two workers who had to go and work in the vineyard; one said ‘yes’ but didn’t go; the other instead said ‘no.' Mum, give me that apron.” Chiara struggled in some areas, such as with her studies. Despite being a conscientious student, the work sometimes proved too much for her. She found in the disappointment of her academic failures another form of penance, but resolved to persevere.

It seemed that this friendly, normal girl had a full life ahead, with both the blessings and difficulties everyone faces. Then one day when playing tennis, she experienced a severe pain. Tests later revealed that she had osteogenic sarcoma, a dangerous and very painful cancer. In and out of the hospital with various treatments, Chiara laid aside her needs to take care of others; she was seen frequently walking the ward with a young woman suffering from drug-dependency and depression.

“At first we thought we’d visit her to keep her spirits up,” one of the boys from her youth group later recounted, “but very soon we understood that, in fact, we were the ones who needed her. Her life was like a magnet drawing us to her.”

When it became clear that her condition was terminal, Chiara began to discover her real calling. "Previously, I felt another world was awaiting me and the most I could do was to let go," she wrote to friends, "Instead now I feel enfolded in a marvelous plan of God which is slowly being unveiled to me.” As the illness progressed, she chose to forego the use of morphine: "It reduces my lucidity. There’s only one thing I can do now: to offer my suffering to Jesus because I want to share as much as possible in his suffering on the cross.” In her last days, she planned her funeral celebration with her mother, choosing the flowers, music, and clothing as one would do in planning a wedding. She asked for it to be a joyful occasion, and consoled her parents in anticipation of the days ahead: “When you’re getting me ready, Mum, you have to keep saying to yourself, ‘Chiara Luce is now seeing Jesus’.”

The effects of her life--her obedience, kindness, cheerfulness, & example--were felt deeply, and in the end, over 2,000 people attended her funeral.

A city on a hill cannot be hid, the Gospel tells us. A girl, born only eight years before I was, who seldom left her little town, who left no great writings, and no famous deeds, has conquered, has attained fully the Kingdom of Heaven, and may well draw thousands after her.

Her story helps us see that we should not underestimate the good that may be wrought in the world by one light burning at the altar of God. Let us walk this week, not blindly, cursing the darkness, but rather, as St. Paul urged, as children of the light, in which is found every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth.

Prayer from "Choruses from the Rock," by T. S. Eliot:
O Light Invisible, we praise Thee!
Too bright for mortal vision.

O Greater Light, we praise Thee for the less;
The eastern light our spires touch at morning,
The light that slants upon our western doors of evening,
The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight,
Moon light and star light, owl and moth light,
Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade.
O Light Invisible, we worship Thee!

We thank Thee for the lights that we have kindled,
The light of altar and of sanctuary;
Small lights of those who meditate at midnight
And lights directed through the coloured panes of windows
And lights reflected from the polished stone,
The gilded carven wood, the coloured fresco.
Our gaze is submarine, our eyes look upward
And see the light that fractures through unquiet water.
We see the light but see not whence it comes.
O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!

. . . . We thank Thee for our little light, that is dappled with shadow.
We thank Thee who hast moved us to building,
to finding, to forming at the ends of our fingers and beams of our eyes.

And when we have built an altar to the Invisible Light,
We may set thereon the little lights for which our bodily vision is made.
And we thank Thee that darkness reminds us of light.

Stravinsky's Pulcinella

2010-01-25T11:27:00.000-08:00

I just heard this wonderful ballet by Igor Stravinsky, based on some older music and the themes of Italian Commedia dell'Arte. Read more about that wonderfully colorful street theater here. Meanwhile--here is the music. You can see the characters as Stravinsky plays with the different instruments. Below are links to the complete score.

The Firebird followed--and that, that was magnificent.

Gardens for the Kids

2010-01-22T20:29:00.000-08:00

It is time to consider whether or not to have a garden this summer, and to consider whether the children can have a plot of their own. To Do:

Get John Seymour's The Self-Sufficient Gardener (1978) and The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It (2003). These are wonderful, illustrated, diagrammed guides to introduce you to gardening, composting, caring for tools, starting seeds, etc. Wonderful guides on herbs and vegetables, when to plant, and how to care for them are included.
Consider the size and space. Make realistic plans to grow a few things you like to eat and a few things you like to see.
Start composting all your compostable trash.
Pick up some garden tools at a garage sale or used goods store. Clean, oil, and stick the tools in a tub filled with a mixture of sand and oil. Check this with the Seymour book.
Buy and start appropriate seeds.
Let the ground dry out and the first weeds grow.
Rent a rototiller, then churn up the dirt, killing off the first weeds. Jumping the gun does not help your seedlings.

And read Louisa May Alcott! She paints rosy pictures--the four little women having their various plots.

Meg grew: roses and heliotrope, myrtle, and a little orange tree in it.
Jo's garden was "never alike two seasons, for she was always trying experiments. This year it was to be a plantation of sun flowers, the seeds of which cheerful land aspiring plant were to feed Aunt Cockle-top and her family of chicks."
Beth grew: old-fashioned fragrant flowers in her garden, sweet peas and mignonette, larkspur, pinks, pansies, and southernwood, with chickweed for the birds and catnip for the pussies.
Amy "had a bower in hers, rather small and earwiggy, but very pretty to look at, with honeysuckle and morning-glories hanging their colored horns and bells in graceful wreaths all over it, tall white lilies, delicate ferns, and as many brilliant, picturesque plants as would consent to blossom there."

And in Little Men, the kids grow everything from potatoes to parsnips, from herbs to melons and one HUGE pumpkin. From experience, it takes a lot of work and direction to help kids do a garden. But how exciting and rewarding for the kids! And what a pay-off as they learn year by year how to do it. This kind of work will make your more like the Psalmist than you can imagine.

(**This post is going under poet, because while Tradition approves and Wonder demands the engagement with reality that you find in a garden--it is winter. And the Poet needs something beautiful to put him in contact with God.)

Into the Deep

2010-01-22T19:57:00.000-08:00

by Jessica Hickey, (c.) 2010
Wednesday, 20 January 2010

"Three cravings of the self, three great expressions of man's restlessness, only mystic truth can fully satisfy. The first is the craving which makes him a pilgrim and a wanderer. It is the longing to go out from his normal world in search of a lost home, a 'better country;' an El Dorado, a Sarras, a Heavenly Sion. The next is the craving of heart for heart, which makes him, a lover. The third is the craving for inward purity and perfection, which makes him an ascetic, and in the last resort, a saint."
(Evelyn Underhill)

" . . . He said to Simon, "Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch." (Luke 5)

Greek mythology provides us with the famous legend of Apollo & Daphne. Apollo, god of the sun, was pierced through the heart with the golden arrow of Cupid, whom he had offended, causing him to fall in love with the nymph Daphne. Cupid made the punishment more keen by piercing Daphne with an arrow of lead, which filled her with abhorrence for Apollo, so that she rejected and fled from him. As Thomas Bullfinch tells it,

"The god grew impatient to find his wooings thrown away, and, sped by Cupid, gained upon her in the race. It was like a hound pursuing a hare, with open jaws ready to seize, while the feebler animal darts forward, slipping from the very grasp. So flew the god and the virgin—he on the wings of love, and she on those of fear. The pursuer is the more rapid, however, and gains upon her, and his panting breath blows upon her hair. Her strength begins to fail, and, ready to sink, she calls upon her father, the river god: "Help me, Peneus! open the earth to enclose me, or change my form, which has brought me into this danger!" Scarcely had she spoken, when a stiffness seized all her limbs; her bosom began to be enclosed in a tender bark; her hair became leaves; her arms became branches; her foot stuck fast in the ground, as a root; her face became a tree-top, retaining nothing of its former self but its beauty."

The tale ends with Apollo—in what I have always thought an impudent gesture—declaring, "Since you cannot be my wife, you shall assuredly be my tree" and taking her boughs to wear as a crown upon his head. The irony in the story of Daphne, of course, is that, in trying to preserve her Self from the god, she manages to destroy her Self, or at any rate, to effect a cure far worse than the affliction.

I bring up this tale because I sense in the human condition a sort of latent "Daphne syndrome," a terror of the embrace of God, or a feeling that in sanctity, we will lose what we are, and like Daphne, become something other than ourselves, something less, a thing insensate from which individual personhood has more or less departed. I don't mean to say that any such dread is clear and present before our eyes, but that it lies quietly in the background, and shows itself in that sleepy, subtle reluctance, the hesitation or "holding back" in the spiritual life.

If I asked a roomful of my teen students, "Who wishes to go to heaven?" all would raise their hands. But if I asked, "Who would like to be perfectly holy, right now?" there would be a moment of pause, hands would raise and then falter. I would see them thinking, "Wait—do I want that?" They would raise their hands in the end, maybe because they thought they ought to. This may happen to us adults as well. And the reluctance I am trying to describe here is not that which arises from attachment to vice, or our "pet sin," as when Augustine prayed, "Lord, make me chaste, but not yet!" Rather, it is this odd silent conflict, natural to all of us, in which the desire to preserve the self dances a slow circle around the desire for that Other for whom we were made. Somehow, we are chary of being fully caught, lest we not get free again.

C.S. Lewis, in his essay, "A Slip of the Tongue," captures this struggle:

"There is, so to speak, a voice inside me that urges caution. It tells me to be careful, to keep my head, not to go too far, not to burn my boats. I come into the presence of God with a great fear lest anything should happen to me within that presence which will prove too intolerably inconvenient when I have come out again into my 'ordinary' life. I don't want to be carried away into any resolution I shall afterwards regret. For I know I shall be feeling quite different after breakfast; I don't want anything to happen to me at the altar which will run up too big a bill to pay then . . . . . We are like very honest but reluctant taxpayers. We approve of the income tax in principle. We make our returns truthfully. But we dread a rise in the tax."

Lewis summarizes: "This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea (I think St. John of the Cross called God a sea), and there neither to dive, nor swim, nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding onto the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal."

Jesus has said that we must "Put out into the deep." We must step into that little ship which, in the words of the poet Bridges, "fearest nor sea rising, nor sky clouding." I think our baptism teaches us in a most concrete way, that we should not be afraid to go into that water, to be immersed. For in that depth, we do not become, like Daphne, a shadow of our former self; we become the real self.

In Charles Kingsley's fairy tale of the Water-Babies, the little maltreated chimney-sweep Tom tumbles into a pool on the heaths and is presumed dead, yet in reality, he has taken on a different sort of existence. Like Daphne, his form changes, but in becoming different, he finds he is something more that he was before. Once in the depths, he finds that he can truly breathe this atmosphere, and that his new self is more genuine & delightful than that which he left behind:

"Tom was quite alive; and cleaner, and merrier, than he ever had been. The fairies had washed him, you see, in the swift river, so thoroughly, that not only his dirt, but his whole husk and shell had been washed quite off him, and the pretty little real Tom was washed out of the inside of it, and swam away, as a caddis does when its case of stones and silk is bored through, and away it goes on its back, paddling to the shore, there to split its skin, and fly away as a caperer, on four fawn-coloured wings."

Perhaps our reluctance stems in part from the difficulty of comprehending those realities which are spiritual, eternal, of heaven. Seeing, as we do now, only their dim reflection in the things of earth (including that reflection which is our Self), it is hard to see how the loss of these things can show us something better. Again C.S. Lewis, in his essay "Transposition" offers a description: "The exclusion of the lower goods begins to seem the essential characteristic of the higher good. We feel, if we do not say, that the vision of God will come not to fulfill but to destroy our nature; this bleak fantasy often underlies our very use of such words as 'holy,' or 'pure' or 'spiritual."

There is a difficulty in seeing the genuine qualities of "holiness," "purity," and so on. Often we can only explain them negatively: "the absence of sin." We see what isn't meant to be there, but it's harder to see what is. This is why the idea of being spiritual is full of confusion; 'the spiritual' is represented by things such as the sand-and-rock gardens, empty of life, which are meticulously arranged and re-arranged by the Japanese Buddhists. The concept of the spiritual is associated with gauntness, with distance, with a vision colorless, anemic and perpetually at 71 degrees Fahrenheit. Emptiness: who could desire this as his eternal goal? A voice whispers that we should cling to what we have. Daphne turns and begins to run. But certainly, this vision is not accurate.

I once held a peacock on my lap. It was a present for my grandfather, who raised birds of all sorts, and my job was to keep it still while my mother drove to his house. The bird caused no trouble and was in fact entirely complacent throughout the whole, yet I remember my own disquiet being considerable. It was not that I feared injury, but I looked on the bird and was disturbed. I think it was because it was a thing of beauty such as one rarely may have at such close quarters. The eyes outlined in both white and black, the high crest or coronet, the intensity of its color and the elegant and careful profusion of its plumage--all of this seemed to say more than I could then explain.

My mother said the bird should be called Samson, because he was proud. But the truth was, he was not proud. He was incapable of taking pride in his beauty because he didn't—couldn't—know about it in the way I could. Evolutionary biologists can sometimes point to this or that feature of a living thing as an adaptation for survival, but I do not think the peacock would attract fewer mates or alarm fewer predators had he been made simply black and white, or startlingly ugly rather than startlingly beautiful. The extravagance of beauty spent upon this insignificant creature can be appreciated by man alone, because man sees both with the eyes of the body and the eyes of the soul. The glory that we alone may see reflected in the peacock's plume is a spiritual glory, the tiniest shard bleeding light from a higher world, the stronger meat that we will be prepared to taste after we put aside the thin milk of earth.

"We know not what we shall be," writes Lewis, "but we may be sure that we shall be more, not less than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like a drawing, like pencilled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from a real landscape; not as a candle flame that is put out, but as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun.

" . . . It is the present life which is the diminution, the symbol, the . . . 'vegetarian' substitute. If flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom, that is not because they are too solid, too gross, too distinct, too 'illustrious with being.' They are too flimsy, too transitory, too phantasmal."

Within the realm of the spiritual or the heavenly we do not find emptiness or negation or loss. Therein lies the origin of all the good we now see, the blue of the peacock, the scent of the lily, even the dearest and most courageous human love—these are just the foretaste. The more we reach out into the deep, the closer we are to that fullness of glory. Holiness is not a path of abstention, but one of greater and greater partaking. It is not the sand, but the Sea.

"Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding,
Leaning against the bosom of the urgent West,
That fearest nor sea rising nor sky clouding,
Whither away, fair rover, and what thy quest?"
(Robert Bridges)

Sweet Crystalline Cry

2010-01-18T10:01:00.000-08:00

By Jessica Hickey, (c.) 2010

"We love because He first loved us. If anyone says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar, for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen." (1 John 4:19)

"I invite everyone to look into the face of the other and to see that he has a soul, a story and a life: He is a person and God loves him as he loves me."
(Pope Benedict XVI, 10 January 2010)

This Sunday, the Church celebrated the feast of the Baptism of the Lord. In this event, Christ inaugurated the sacrament that makes us sons of God, that instills in us Faith, Hope & Charity, and that allows even the smallest infant to open his eyes and gaze upon the world a Christian.

To see the world as God sees it, to love others as God loves them--this is the work that the Holy Spirit begins in us from that moment of our baptism.

There can be no doubt of how necessary this is for each soul and for the world. Without the ability to love & to practice the virtue of charity, the soul knows no peace, being continuously entangled in petty vices that sap our strength, consume our time, & waste our energies--giving us nothing in return. In love, however, we find peace, and even the burdens of our duties become easier, as St. Teresa tells us: "Love turns work into rest."

As for the world, how many of its manifold problems would remain were people able to see, as God sees, the worth of each creature? In so many of the debates, controversies and conflicts that occur, people achieve a sense of victory and superiority by the denigration of others, by dismissing them as being less than human, worthless. Just yesterday I read the story of a juvenile delinquent being sentenced, probably justly, for his crimes. As in many news stories about people who do wrong, or are accused of doing wrong, the public commentary was not just critical, but spiteful--rejoicing in the harm that would come to this person, hoping fervently for his future misery, labeling him " a piece of trash," and so on. This type of reaction has become common & predictable in our culture, and sometimes it is only by an effort that we can avoid being drawn into it. Even when a person has experienced a misfortune, something for which they may carry little or no moral blame, there is often still a contemptuous outcry, a expression that somehow "they deserved it."

Why do we humans do this? Why do we cultivate so great an animosity that we can come to feel the most passionate hate for others, often those we do not even know? Pope Benedict has spoken of the fact that, when we do not acknowledge the existence of sin, yet are still confronted by the harsh reality of it, the psyche must find a way to "deal" with it and to destroy it:

"What is remarkable to me is the aggressiveness, always on the verge of pouncing, which we experience openly in our society—the lurking readiness to demean the other person, to hold others guilty whenever misfortune occurs to them, to accuse society, and to want to change the world by violence. It seems to me that all of this can be understood only as an expression of the suppressed reality of guilt, which people do not want to admit. But since it is still there, they have to attack it and destroy it."
(Ratzinger, In The Beginning)

Caryll Houselander has written of this phenonenon as well, in her work entitled Guilt:

"There are people who will not admit the existence of evil in themselves, they will not, and ultimately perhaps cannot, allow the dark side of their nature to invade their consciousness . . . . the fact remains that they are, like the rest of us, children of a fallen race: concupiscence has become a part of their nature . . . . all this they project onto other people. . . . There is hardly an evil force more terrible than this projected self -hatred. It is not for nothing that we are told to love our neighbor as ourself, we must tremble lest refusing to come to terms with all that is self, we hate our neighbor as ourself."

Wherever this drive toward hatred originates, its force is countermanded mightily by our baptism. Baptism forces us to acknowledge sin and evil, and to see it vanquished by one who loved to the point of death and beyond. And unfolding in us, deeper even than our biological genes, is the desire for charity, which, if we are true to our baptismal promises and our baptismal grace, will become the blueprint for our future life. This will enable us to see each other in the proper light, and to offer love, compassion, and forgiveness. "There is nothing annoying that is not easily suffered by those who love one another," wrote St. Teresa of Avila inThe Way of Perfection.

Even those we meet in passing or who we merely hear about deserve to be seen with this vision. One of my favorite poems by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats offers a picture of this:

" INDIGNANT at the fumbling wits, the obscure spite
Of our old paudeen in his shop, I stumbled blind
Among the stones and thorn-trees, under morning light;
Until a curlew cried and in the luminous wind
A curlew answered; and suddenly thereupon I thought
That on the lonely height where all are in God's eye,
There cannot be, confusion of our sound forgot,
A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry."

"Paudeen" was a sort of nickname or slur for a certain type of ignorant and provincial Irishman, andwas probably seen as someone who habitually causes offense and is difficult to like. We have probably all known the equivalent in our own culture. Here we are given a glimpse of how quickly we might react to a person who annoys us with their small-mindedness, spite, incompetence, or other unfortunate traits. We dismiss him, the thought of him makes us roll our eyes and scowl. But in this, we are not seeing truly. We are "stumbling blind," among the rocks and thorns.

It is not until he hears the curlew's cry in the darkness that the speaker can see that, in God's eyes, there is " no soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry." Each has its worth, each cries out, like the bird in the darkness, and their cry is sweet. And most importantly, there is meant to be a response to their call: "And in the luminous wind / A curlew answered." Someone is meant to hear that soul's cry and return it. God did not think it beneath Himself to do so. How can we fail to see beauty where God sees it, or to offer love where He offers it? The practice of charity means attuning oneself to hear that cry and to answer it.

Paul Claudel puts this into even more concrete terms:

"Loving our neighbor means something altogether different from courtesy, or a doubtful or meager forebearance. It springs from the awareness of this universal summons, this interrogation that will not tire of knocking until the door has been opened; somewhere, some debt is owed by us that we cannot remove until it has been discharged. The day has come when it is absolutely necessary that we learn to get along with this brother who is thrust forcibly, whether we want him or not, into our arms."

" . . . .Yes, this peasant with his leathery face, this cringing and surly alcoholic, the image of the concierge's fat dog, this storekeeper with her mean scowl, repainting her ancient lips: these are our brothers and sisters; Jesus Christ died for them. There is a star embedded in the heart of this tormented flesh."
(from L'Epee et le Miroir, & Un Poete regarde la Croix)

"When you love people," wrote Dorothy Day in her memoirs, "you see all the good in them, all the Christ in them. God sees Christ, His Son, in us and loves us. And so we should see Christ in others and nothing else, and love them. There can never be enough of it."

Today we may think back to a time, perhaps beyond our memory now, when with water and the Holy Spirit we were given the mandate to love. We were called by a new name, pronounced by the mouth of the Lord, and that name was His own. In baptism, we became Christian, "of Christ," and we owe to this moment a particular reverence and fidelity. Let us pray to be true to this gift and vocation.

The Little Match Girl

2010-01-15T19:42:00.001-08:00

A wonderful wordless short by Pixar which really captures the poignant original by Hans Christian Andersen. The beautiful score is by Alexander Borodin.

All in green my love went riding

2010-01-09T20:56:00.000-08:00

All in green went my love riding on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling

the merry deer ran before.

Fleeter be they than dappled dreams
the swift sweet deer

the red rare deer.

Horn at hip went my love riding

riding the echo down

into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the level meadows ran before.

Softer be they than slippered sleep
the lean lithe deer
the fleet flown deer.

Four fleet does at a gold valley
the famished arrows sang before.

Bow at belt went my love riding
riding the mountain down into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the sheer peaks ran before.

Paler be they than daunting death
the sleek slim deer
the tall tense deer.

Four tall stags at a green mountain

the lucky hunter sang before.

All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
my heart fell dead before.
--e.e. cummings

The Thread

2009-12-28T13:37:00.000-08:00

Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me-a thread
or net of threads
finer than cobweb and as
elastic. I haven't tried
the strength of it. No barbed hook
pierced and tore me. Was it
not long ago this thread
began to draw me? Or
way back? Was I
born with its knot about my
neck, a bridle? Not fear
but a stirring
of wonder makes me
catch my breath when I feel
the tug of it when I thought
it had loosened itself and gone.
--Denise Levertov

This poem reminded me of a line from Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited,

where Cordelia is quoting a line by G. K. Chesterton: “Father Brown said something like ‘I caught him’ [the thief] with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”

Is it all coincidence? Thread is the name of a novel I'm writing to follow Flame (another novel I'm writing). What happens if you've been naturally happy all your life, and now you're not. Ever wish you could choose for people, but you can't? What's magic? What's miracle? How will you discern? Grey grit to russet pear in the mellow dusk--worlds touching other worlds . . . Two people who agree about everything except what's important--should they marry? Who cares about the rules when you're about to die? But what if you don't die? Can people be portals to other worlds? Can you make it up with the one you've wounded before it's too late?

Waiting for Christ

2009-12-19T20:01:00.000-08:00

Do you know what it is to have friends in a distant country, to expect news from them, and to wonder from day to day what they are doing, and whether they are well? or do you know, on the other hand, what it is to be in a strange country yourself, with no one to talk to, no one who can sympathize with you, homesick,—downcast because no letter comes to you,—and perplexed how you are ever to get back again? or do you know what it is so to love and live upon a person who is present with you, that your eyes follow his, that you read his soul, that you see its changes in his countenance, that you anticipate his wants, that you are sad in his sadness, troubled when he is vexed, restless when you cannot understand him, relieved, comforted, when you have cleared up the mystery?

Thus John Henry Newman writes in his fantastic sermon "Waiting for Christ" from Sermons Preached on Various Occasions. Read more here at Newmanreader.org, an entire site dedicated to the indexed, searchable works of John Henry Newman. A Merry Christmas to you. The beautiful photograph from here.

Waiting for an Advent

2009-12-11T20:48:00.000-08:00

by Jessica R. Hickey, c. 2009

December 2, 2009

Advent is a time of mystery. In past years, I have just regarded it sort of as the “anteroom of Christmas,” with some overtones of the Second Coming. Lately, however, I’ve begun thinking about what an advent is, what it means to have one, and what implications then follow from it.

In the old medieval text of The Quest for the Holy Grail, King Arthur and his knights did not merely ride forth, seeking adventure. Adventure, which is derived from the same Latin word as Advent, was something that had to come to them. A mysterious visitor would enter their chamber, tell his or her story, and lay upon them a quest or undertaking. The advent or adventure thus arrived of its own accord. They could not control the day, the hour, or the nature of the event, but without it, they were powerless to use their skill for good.

The histories of the various nations, beginning with Abraham, have such advents as well, events which are foundational, events which are heavy with meaning, which give the people their common identity, & which remain a rallying cry generations later. The memory of such an advent unites people and is passed on with pride & gratitude. It reminds me of the spirit expressed in Shakespeare's famous lines from Henry V, alluding to the English muster before the Battle of Agincourt:

"This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day."

Now, the Battle of Agincourt, of course, does not represent a Divine intervention of the sort I'm thinking of (especially if you happen to be French!). The type of advent I have been considering is that which involves a supernatural gift or manifestation, a miracle, if you will. For Christian peoples, such advents were of immense importance: they enabled them to see their particular blessedness, their vocation in God’s plan. I always think of Spain, in its golden age called “The Sword of Christendom,” which from a history of oppression rose as defenders of Christianity and missionaries to the New World.

In the ninth century, a mysterious light was seen shining over a field in the Spanish province of Galicia . Investigation by Bishop Teodomiro yielded a burial site believed to be that of St. James, son of Zebedee, apostle of Christ. James had been executed in Palestine by Herod Agrippa, and was denied burial. His followers were thought to have taken the body to a safe location along the Roman sea route to the north-westernmost corner of Spain . The site became known as Santiago de Compostella, St. James of the Field of Stars, and James was declared the patron saint of Spain .

Later, in the midst of a critical battle with Muslim invaders from North Africa, the heavily-outnumbered Spanish forces were led by the Asturian King, Ramiro II, and also by a mysterious man clad all in white, who fought side-by-side with the King and led them to victory at Clavijo. He disappeared after the battle. The Spaniards believed that God’s help had been manifested to them, and that the mysterious warrior was their very own patron Santiago, whom Jesus had called “The Son of Thunder.”

This advent confirmed their faith and cemented their determination for generations. Six centuries later, Cervantes wrote of Saint James in his Don Quixote as: “One of the most valiant saints and knights the world ever had ... given by God to Spain for its patron and protection.” The intervention of God through St. James gave them the strength to be true to the calling which God laid upon their nation. Twentieth-century Spanish poet & historian Menéndez-Pelayo wrote of his country:

"Spain, cradle of St. Ignatius, hammer of the heretics; light of Trent; evangelizer of half the world--this has been our glory; we have no other."

The appearance of the Virgin Mary of Guadalupe must be considered another such advent for the people of the Americas, a foundational event allowing us to experience the maternal love of the Mother of God and the knowledge of God's particular favor. During a time when the Faith must have seemed new and strange, God permitted the indigenous people of this continent to know that it was meant for them, that they were not strangers or outsiders, but family. In the words of the Virgin upon Tepeyac, which echo to this day: "Listen, my dear son, and be sure that I will protect you . . . . Am I not your Mother? Am I not of your kind?" This advent, in which the Virgin's mantle of protection was laid over the people of the Americas, remains the pivotal event of their culture.

The question which I ponder is: Here in our parish community, what is our advent? Are we still waiting for an event to give us our identity and our vocation, some manifestation of God's favor and His will?

Pope Benedict said this past week:

"There are very different ways of waiting. If time is not filled by a present gifted with meaning, the waiting runs the risk of becoming unbearable; if something is expected, but at this moment there is nothing, namely, if the present is empty, every instant that passes seems exaggeratedly long, and the waiting is transformed into a weight that is too heavy because the future is totally uncertain. When, instead, time is gifted with meaning and we perceive in every instant something specific and valuable, then the joy of waiting makes the present more precious."

There may be some event of great moment yet to come for us specifically. After all, advent always carries a sense of expectation, a "forward-looking," an understanding that the fullness is not yet here. Yet Pope Benedict also tells us:

"With the word 'adventus' an attempt was made essentially to say: God is here, he has not withdrawn from the world, he has not left us alone. Although we cannot see or touch him, as is the case with tangible realities, he is here and comes to visit us in multiple ways. . . . The meaning of the expression 'advent' includes that of visitatio . . . a visit of God: He enters my life and wants to address me . . . . Advent invites and stimulates us to contemplate the Lord who is present. Should not the certainty of his presence help us to see the world with different eyes? Should it not help us to see our whole existence as a 'visit,' as a way in which he can come to us and be close to us in each situation?"

I began to see that all of us at St. Boniface have been given an advent, perhaps not the final one God has in store, but nonetheless, something of great ontological richness, imparting meaning into each thing we do, manifesting God's particular favor and care for us, setting us on the path of our calling. It is God with us in the Eucharist.

Some might say, "All Catholics have been given this; we are not singled out for blessing in this way." But it seems to me that along with the Gift of Himself in the Eucharist, God has also permitted all of us in this place, through various ways and means, to recognize Him there. In a world where skepticism reigns, where the light of faith sometimes goes un-nurtured, and where devotion grows cold even among the faithful, we here have not been permitted to forget. He has preserved our vision. And all of us here, whatever our stage of sanctity, knowledge, or fidelity, have been given that one same thing. This is what has come to all of us. It is our Crispin's Day, our Compostella, our advent.

Israel Watches for Daybreak

2009-12-10T20:49:00.000-08:00

by Jessica R. Hickey, c. 2009

December 9, 2009

" . . . Wait for the LORD, my soul does wait, and in His word do I hope.
My soul waits for the Lord more than the watchmen for the morning;
Indeed, more than the watchmen for the morning.
O Israel, hope in the LORD.”
Psalm 130: 5-7

Last week, we reflected on the special manifestations of God's favor which ground us in our faith and in our particular mission. I referred to such occurrences as 'advents' of God, sudden intrusions of grace into the human world. We also considered the theme of waiting, particularly waiting in hope, finding meaning in each moment even as we look forward with expectation to the future.

It seems a perfect time now to meditate on the Blessed Virgin, that little daughter of the smallest of nations, in whom, it may be said, lay all the hopes of mankind.

Mary understands what it is to wait in hope. Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper has described hope as the status viatoris, the state on being “on the way,” the “virtue of the not yet.” Mary’s life is a portrait of this. Commonly we see images of the child Mary ascending what seems like an insurmountable number of stairs when her parents presented her, at the age of three years, to service at the Temple. Even then, she was on her statis viatoris. Other images depict her at the moment of the Annunciation, entering into the greatest time of hope and anticipation before the birth of her child. Travelling with Joseph to Bethlehem, to Egypt, to Nazareth--again this reveals her on a pilgrim’s way.

The anticipation and waiting cannot have always been easy for her. The story of the child Jesus discovered in the Temple occurs against a backdrop of what must have been unimaginable dread for Joseph and Mary. So mindful was Mary of her Son’s ultimate destiny that at the time of his first miracle at Cana, he reminds her: “Woman, my time is not yet come.” When this hour does arrive, however, she—who has been there, ready for it all the time—is prepared for the cross, the death, the rising, the helping and strengthening of the little band of brothers that was the whole of the Church in A.D. 33.

We may see from this how much of Mary’s vocation was to wait in hope. Pope Benedict expresses it this way:

“The abstract outlines for the hope that God will turn toward his people receive, in the New Testament, a concrete personal name in the figure of Jesus Christ. At the same moment, the figure of the woman, until then seen only typologically in Israel, although provisionally personified by the great women of Israel, also emerges with a name: Mary. She emerges as the personal epitome of the feminine principle in such a way that the principle is only true in the person, but the person as an individual always points beyond herself to the all-embracing reality, which she bears and represents.” (Daughter Zion: Meditations on the Church’s Marian Belief, Ch. 1)

What is this other reality which Mary both personifies and reaches out toward? Benedict continues:

“She is in person the true Zion, toward whom hopes have yearned throughout all the devastations of history. She is the true Israel in whom the Old and New Covenant, Israel and Church, are indivisibly one. She is the ‘people of God’ bearing fruit through God’s gracious power.” (Ibid. Ch. 2)

French poet Paul Claudel provides this remarkable description of Mary as Israel, the Woman waiting:

“It is she; it is she! At the thought of her the whole Bible catches fire in my mind with a blaze of syllables, like a fabric sewn with brilliants!

“It is she; it is she! She is the drop of manna the Lord placed in the mouth of Eve to take away the taste of the forbidden fruit and to impart it to Adam. It is she who set all sacred history in motion.

“It is she who lured Abraham from the town of Ur of the Chaldees, away from those hydraulic complications and regulations and all that bakery of clay idols, and who summoned him out into the world to take command and leadership of his flock. It is she who led him to those plateaus where we meet Melchizedek, King of Salem, and who raised that pavilion where the guests are the three Persons of the Trinity.

“She is the image of Isaac in the heart of Rebekah; she is the treaty of Jacob through all those years of slavery. She was waiting, drum in hands, on the opposite bank of the Red Sea, to greet the terrified column of refugees. She beguiled David through the eyes of Bathsheba—and through the mouth of Solomon she gave caravans to the Queen of Sheba in exchange for the incense of the desert and the ivory of Ethiopia, a wondrous remuneration of riddles and enigmas.

“Down through the generations of kings and pontiffs, mortified believers and wailing women, through the transplantations of Babylon and Medea, she fed silently on the milk and honey of the prophesies. She whom ‘all generations call blessed’ is the central figure and the culmination of a whole race tormented by the word of God.”
(La Rose et la Rosaire)

I remember a few years ago, on the Third Sunday of Advent, I believe, Lafayette was blanketed in snow such that few people could even leave their houses. I saw some families walking to Mass through the snowdrifts with their children all bundled up in scarves and pom-pom hats. The 9:30 Mass was celebrated in a very quiet way for this little group. I remember, in the warm light of the Church and the muffled silence of that snowy morning, Father Gustavo saying in his homily: “Everything about Advent is Mary: in her womb, a new world grows.”

We are not merely waiting, like people stranded at a train station. Even Israel, of whom Mary is the culmination, was moving toward something--marching, as the poet said, with a drum in her hands. But Mary unites the old with the new. She is both the little girl beating the drum with expectancy, and the Madonna with the moon under her feet, interceding for all the children of men. And somehow, we have been born into that New World of which she was the gate. It is maybe the only truly new thing in our old and sometimes weary earth. But God said: “Behold, I am doing something new.” And it came to pass for those who hoped, those who watched for daybreak. I think of that on days like today when we can see the new-fallen snow. In silence, in chill, hidden—something is still happening, something for which God wants us.

A little girl once knew that, as she started up the Temple steps. I wonder if she realized how many others she carried with her that day.
______________________________________

“What surprises me, says God, is hope.
And I can’t get over it.
This little girl who seems like nothing at all.
This little girl hope.
Immortal.
. . . .
Faith is a loyal Wife.
Charity is a Mother.
An ardent Mother, noble-hearted.
Or an older sister, who is like a mother.
Hope is a little girl, nothing at all.
Who came into the world on Christmas day just this past year.
Who is still playing with her snowman.
With her German fir trees painted with frost.
And with her ox and ass made of German wood. Painted.
And with her manger stuffed with straw that the animals don’t eat.
Because they’re made of wood.
And yet it’s this little girl who will endure worlds.
This little girl, nothing at all.
She alone, carrying the others, who will cross worlds past.

As the star guided the three Kings from the deepest Orient
Toward the cradle of my son.
Like a trembling flame
She alone will guide the virtues and worlds.

One flame will pierce the eternal shadows. . . .

It’s she, the little one, who carries them all.
Because Faith sees only what is.
But she, she sees what will be.
Charity loves only what is.
But she, she loves what will be.”

(Excerpted from The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, by Charles Péguy.
Translated from the French by David Louis Schindler, Jr.)

(Picture is entitled Gypsy Girl with a Basque Drum, by by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, c 1867.)

Feast

2009-12-04T22:12:00.000-08:00

If I was a teacher or youth minister or parent, I'd find a way to hold a great feast for a truly important occasion. To affirm the true and good and beautiful , and then to involve youth in this--that's what we're here for. From set-up to feasting to clean-up, involve the youth. Here are photographs from the parish that really knows how to do the Feast of Christ the King.

100 Years of Illustration

2009-12-04T21:44:00.000-08:00

This site showcases biographies and beautiful illustrations of, like it says, One Hundred Years of Illustration. Here you will find astounding artwork. You might even use it to determine which versions of illustrated books you might prefer. If I was a teacher or youth minister, I'd browse around and find illustrations I thought might whet the desire for beauty. I'd find prints and frame them and hang them in my rooms. Or I'd work to have books with their illustrations used in a curriculum.

For buying children's books, I recommend again this site, colorful and informative.

No Choice Except to Suffer

2009-11-27T21:12:00.000-08:00

My state representative Betty McCollum sent me a letter today explaining why she voted for H. R. 3962 (or Affordable Health Care for America) and against the Stupak-Pitts Amendment. She included a statement from the state's "Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice" (I know, I know--scandalous.) I was particularly struck by her line: "Americans without access to health care too often have no choice except to suffer." We're talking about access to "reproductive health care" without which Americans have no choice but to suffer.

It's hard to explain to a person who says "suffering is the worst thing there is" that something is worse. Moral degradation is worse. I had a student who once put it this way: "People often pity the victim, but the one to be pitied is the perpetrator of a crime. He is the one who lacks love. It doesn't matter what you suffer; as long as you have love, you will be fine. The one to be pitied is the one without love." Flannery O'Connor wrote of suffering: "It's the only thing worth a damn that we have to offer God." And the angel in Lewis' The Pilgrim's Regress puts it mysteriously in the quotation above.

Contra McCollum and the Religious Coalition, love challenges us to hope all things, endure all things. I turned from McCollum to this podcast of Alice Von Hildebrand talking about the sufferings and beauties of marriage.

And then to the new podcast of Dr. Christopher Blum reading Pope Benedict's Spe Salvi.

135 Best Poems to Memorize

2009-11-13T19:36:00.000-08:00

The golden apples of the sun . . .

Here are ten more poems to add to the list: see that list here. These are nicely appropriate for age 11, which had a sparser list.

1. Browning, Robert. “My Star”
2. Cather, Willa. “Spanish Johnny”
3. Chipp, Elinor. “Wild Geese”
4. Dresbach, Glenn Ward. “The Last Corn Shock”
5. Kipling, Rudyard. “The way through the woods”
6. McLeod, Irene Rutherford. “Lone Day”
7. Robinson, Edwin Arlington. “The House on the Hill”
8. Sandburg, Carl. “Baby Toes”
9. Shakespeare, William. “The Violet Bank”
10. Teasdale, Sara. “Night”

LIST I: By age 7, know 6 of the following.

A dillar, a dollar.
As I was going to St. Ives.
Bah, bah, black sheep. Bobby Shaftoe.
Cock-a-doodle-do.
Cross-patch, draw the latch.
Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John.
Ding-dong-bell, pussy’s in the well.
Georgie Porgie.
Hickory, Dickory, Dock.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
It’s Raining, It’s Pouring
Jack and Jill went up the hill.
Jack Sprat could eat no fat.
Jack, be nimble; Jack, be quick.
Lady-bird, lady-bird.
Little Bo-peep has lost her sheep.
Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn.
Little Jack Horner.
Little Miss Muffet.
Little Nanny Etticoat.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary.
Old King Cole.
Old Mother Hubbard.
One misty, moisty morning.
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Oranges and Lemons.
Pat a cake, pat a cake, Baker's man.
Pease-porridge hot.
Peter, Peter Pumpkin-Eater.
Polly, put the kettle on.
Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been?
Ride a cock horse.
Ring Around the Rosie.
Rock-a-by Baby, on the tree top.
See-saw, Margery Daw.
Simple Simon met a pieman.
Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye.
The Frog Who Would a-Wooing Go.
The lion and the unicorn.
The man in the moon came down too soon.
The north wind doth blow.
The Queen of Hearts.
There was a crooked man.
There was an old woman lived in a shoe.
Thirty Days Hath September
This pig went to market.
Three wise men of Gotham.
To market, to market, to buy a fat pig.
Tom, Tom, the piper's son.
Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town.
When good King Arthur ruled his land.

LIST II: By age 9, know previous 6 poems plus 12 more from LIST I or II

Caldecott, Randolph. “The House That Jack Built.”
Millay, Edna St. Vincent. “Tavern.”
Millay, Edna St. Vincent. “First Fig.”
Rossetti, Christina. “Flint.”
Stevenson, Robert Louis. “Requiem.”
Stevenson, Robert Louis. “The Cow.”
Stevenson, Robert Louis. “I Love To Be Warm By the Red Fireside.”
Stevenson, Robert Louis. “Prelude.”

LIST III: By age 11, know previous 18 poems, plus 12 more from LIST II or III.

Browning, Robert. “My Star”
Cather, Willa. “Spanish Johnny”
Chipp, Elinor. “Wild Geese”
Dresbach, Glenn Ward. “The Last Corn Shock”
Frost, Robert. “A Dust of Snow.”
Graham, Kenneth. “The Toad Came Home.”
Hunt, Leigh. “Jenny Kiss’d Me.”
Kipling, Rudyard. “The way through the woods”
McLeod, Irene Rutherford. “Lone Day”
Millay, Edna St. Vincent. “Travel.”
Robinson, Edwin Arlington. “The House on the Hill”
Rossetti, Christina. “The Wind.”
Rossetti, Christina. “Who Has Seen the Wind?”
Sandburg, Carl. “Baby Toes” (forgive the name, it's better than it sounds.)
Shakespeare, William. “The Violet Bank”
Stevenson, Robert Louis. “Escape at Bedtime.”
Teasdale, Sara. “Night”
Tolkien, J. R. R. “The Road goes ever on.”

LIST IV: By age 13, know previous 30 poems, plus 12 more from LIST IV:

Anon., “Jesus-Christ, the Apple Tree.”
Belloc, Hilaire. “My Own Country.”
Blake, William. “Jerusalem.”
Byron, George Gordon. “The Destruction of Sennacherib.”
Donne, John. “Death Be Not Proud.”
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “Spring and Fall.”
Houseman, A. E. “Loveliest of trees, the cherry.”
Houseman, A. E. Houseman. “The street sounds to the soldiers' tread.”
Longfellow, Henry. “The Arrow and the Song.”
Lorca, Federico Garcia. “Song of the Rider.”
Magee, John Gillespie. “High Flight.”
McCrae, John. “In Flander’s Fields.”
Rossetti, Christina. “A Birthday.”
Southey, Robert. “Inchcape Rock.” (very long)
Tennyson, Alfred. “Crossing the Bar.”
Tennyson, Alfred. “The Splendor Falls.”
Tolkien, J. R. R. “All that is gold does not glitter.”
Tolkien, J. R. R. “In western lands beneath the sun.”
Yeats, William Butler. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”

LIST V: By age 16, know previous 42 plus 18 more from LIST IV or V.

Anon. “Casey Jones.”
Anon. Song of Roland, selections.
Arnold, Matthew. “Dover Beach.”
Belloc, Hilaire. “The South Country.”
Belloc, Hilaire. “To the Balliol Men Still in Africa.”
Byron, George Gordon. “We’ll Go No More A-Roving.”
D., H. “Stars Wheel in Purple.”
Donne, John. “Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God.”
Donne, John. “Song.”
Eliot, T. S. “Marina.”
Eliot, T. S. “The Song of the Magi.”
Frost, Robert. “A Line-storm Song.”
Frost, Robert. “Reluctance.”
Frost, Robert. “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Frost, Robert. “The Road Not Taken”
Heaney, Seamus. “A Kite for Michael and Christopher.”
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “Pied Beauty.”
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “God’s Grandeur.”
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “The Windhover.”
Houseman, A. E. “XIX: To An Athlete Dying Young.”
Masefield, John. “Sea-Fever.”
Merton, Thomas. “For My Brother Missing in Action, 1943.”
Millay, Edna St. Vincent. “Recuerdo.”
Noyes, Alfred. “The Highwayman.”
Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Raven.”
Scott, Sir Walter. “Native Land.”
Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet LXXIII.”
Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet XL.”
Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet XCIV.”
Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet CXVI.”
Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet CXXIX.”
Wordsworth, William. "The World is too Much with us; late and soon.”
Tennyson, Alfred. “The Lady of Shalott.”
Tennyson, Alfred. “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
Tennyson, Alfred “Ulysses.”
Thomas, Dylan. “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”
Whitman, Walt. “O Captain! My Captain!”
Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming.”

Suggestions and recommendations, critiques and comments most welcome.

Three Aids to Listening

2009-11-06T21:16:00.000-08:00

When your head is spinning around with all the things you did today and all the things you have to do, and all the worries you have, try these three exercises to switch your mind over to attentive listening. It will aid your prayer, perhaps.

Sound page. See here.

If I were to paint: turn your gaze to something in the room and ask yourself, "If I were to paint that, what colors would I need, provided I did not mix anything." Look carefully, and start to list them. If you were to paint this web-page--greeny-blue, white, dark green, light tan . . . you might be surprised by how still your thoughts become.

List your sorrows. Too sad to pray? Too stressed out? Write it all out, a long list of everything that bothers you. Put it in God's hands--and there in that space of silence when you've nothing left to write, God can reach in.

Lead, Kindly Light

2009-10-30T20:48:00.000-07:00

Lead, kindly Light, amid th’encircling gloom,
lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home;
lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou
shouldst lead me on;
I loved to choose and see my path;
but now lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will. Remember not past years!

So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still
will lead me on.
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent,
till the night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile, which I
Have loved long since, and lost awhile!
--John Henry Newman
A poem which always reminds me of the tabernacle lamp.

Ronald Knox

2009-10-24T09:10:00.000-07:00

One author to add to your list of spiritual reading is Msgr. Ronald Knox. I first came across him when reading Evelyn Waugh's marvelous biography (get it here.) Prolific writer of theological works and detective fiction, he was the son of the Anglican Bishop of Manchester and ordained an Anglican clergyman himself in 1912. He served as chaplain of Trinity College, Oxford, before converting to the Catholic Faith in 1917. He later served as Catholic Chaplain at Oxford. He taught on the highschool level for more than seven years and preached numerous retreats. He preached at the funeral for G. K. Chesterton. A brief biography of his life is here.

A brilliant classicist, he won numerous scholarships and became a fellow of Oxford as a young man, and as an older man translated the entire Vulgate Bible into English. Two things I find most admirable in him are his availability to his students and his sense of humor. This was one of his jokes: a scrapbook full of “Wimbornes”—“a picture cut from a newspaper with which was included from an adjoining column a particularly inappropriate caption. . . . taking its name from the photograph of a footballer which appeared in a newspaper over the title ‘Lady Wimborne, who has adopted the new windswept style of hairdressing.’”

I am now reading his Retreat for Beginners--he's got that C.S. Lewis manner of cloaking profoundly deep theological ideas in sturdy, tangible "plain talk." While this was directed at high-school boys, it is giving me food for thought.

Here's a passage:
Of course, you may say to me, ‘I don’t see much wrong with this external religion you talk about; it looks good enough for me. I am a Catholic, and I hope to live and die a Catholic but you mustn’t expect me to get excited about my religion, because I’m not that kind of a person; I’m quite satisfied to remain in class B, to run my religion on second gear all my life.’

If you take up that sort of attitude, I’ve no more to say to you. At least, I have a good deal more to say to you, and it will take me about fours hours to say it, but I don’t suppose it will interest you very much. I will only make three comments on your point of view. First, that that kind of religion is not the kind of religion Jesus Christ meant Christianity to be. Next, that that kind of religion is not worthy of a human being. And, thirdly, that it is not a safe kind of religion to practice nowadays, and in the country we live in; it is very easy to lose that kind of religion, and to lose your immortal soul while you are about it.

First, I say that it is not Christianity as Jesus Christ meant it to be. I remember a boy at the school I used to teach at who was asked, in an examination paper, to give the context of the verse, ‘Do no more than that which is appointed to you.’ In case you have forgotten it, perhaps I ought to explain that when the soldiers came to St. John the Baptist, and asked him how they ought to amend their ways, he said to them, ‘Do no more than that which is appointed to you.’ But this boy gave as his answer, ‘This is what our Lord told his disciples when they asked him how they should inherit eternal life.’ It would be hard, if you come to think of it, to get an answer more exactly wrong. What our Lord said was, ‘He that loveth his life shall lose it.’ What our Lord said was, ‘What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?’ What our Lord said was, ‘He that doth not forsake father and mother and take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.’ That was his religion—something which came first, something which mattered supremely, something which did make you get excited about it, sometimes even turned your whole life upside down. Nobody is going to realize that ideal, unless his religion is something personal, not something merely external to himself.

Next, I say that this external religion is not worthy of a human being. It is man’s privilege to live by his ideals. He can live without ideals, but his life is the poorer for it; he will never know the joy of living if he lives like that. It is natural for a man to have some kind of work in life, some kind of job which is his job; if that job is mere drudgery to him, if he does it only because he has to do it, without getting interested in it or losing himself in it in any way—well, he will make a livelihood, but he won’t really live. It is natural for a man to marry; it is quite possible to marry a woman you aren’t the least bit in love with, to live quite contentedly and to bring up a family without having ever known what it is to be in love—I say that is possible but it is not natural, it is not what marriage was meant for. And if it is a warped life, a stunted life, which finds no zest in God’s gift of work and no joy in God’s gift of marriage, what shall we say of the life that finds no joy and no zest in the greatest of all God’s gifts, the opportunity he gives us, here on earth, to know and to love and to worship himself?

In the third place I say that, even if you are a Catholic, to be satisfied with an external kind of religion is to run a risk, and a grave risk, of losing your religion altogether. If your religion isn’t rooted deep—our Lord himself has warned us about it in the Parable of the Sower—the chances are three to one against the seed of faith ever bearing any fruit in your life. A religion that is external to yourself may do all right as long as everything goes well with you, but it won’t stand a shock. You will come up against difficulties about the faith, and you will not be sufficiently interested to take those difficulties to a priest or to think them out for yourself—you will let your religion go. You will come up against some temptation which will sweep you off your feet, or the prospect of some worldly advantage will encourage you to be false to your religion, and it will go. It will go, because it is not part of you, because it is something at the circumference of your life instead of being at the center of your life. That is the danger.

A school can teach you your religion, but it depends on you what us going to become of it afterwards. While you are at school, the routine of your life makes religion easy for you; custom makes religion easy for you; human respect makes religion easy for you; but all that will be no use unless you make some effort, on your own part, to realize the meaning of the religion you are being taught here and to make it your own. That is why, in this retreat, I want you to take stock of your religion and to see where you stand. ‘Is my religion personal to me, or is it merely external to me?’ That is the question I want you to ask yourself, and to entreat the Almighty God to shew you where the true answer lies.” (Retreat for Beginners, New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960; 42-44).

It Will Flame Out

2009-10-16T23:29:00.000-07:00

A map of a place I know well, or thought I knew . . . does the thinnest veil shade our eyes from the underlying reality?

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
--Gerard Manley Hopkins

Francis de Sales' Yearly Examination of Soul

2009-10-09T20:49:00.000-07:00

Taken from Francis de Sales Introduction to the Devout Life, the following ponders our relationship with God and neighbor. Don't be put off by his old-fashioned manner--he has some perennial wisdom to offer. I find his questions very helpful, especially when they probe how it feels to follow God. De Sales is concerned not only with actions, but with our desires. It is good to do good, but it is better to want to do that good and do it with ease. Difficulty in virtue is not a good thing. I recommend answering these questions in a spiritual diary and dating them, to be reviewed in the same examination within a year’s time.

A. Examination of Our State of Soul in Relation to God
1. What is the aspect of your heart with respect to mortal sin?
• Are you firmly resolved never to commit it, come what may?
• And have you kept that resolution from the time you first made it? (**for those who have made this examination before.) Here lies the foundation of the spiritual life.
2. What is your position with respect to the Commandments of God?
• Are they acceptable, light and easy to you?
3. How do you stand as regards venial sins? No one can help committing some such occasionally; but are there any to which you have any special tendency, or worse still, any actual liking and clinging?
4. With respect to spiritual exercises--do you like and value them? or do they weary and vex you? Which of the following do you like the most and dislike the most?
• hearing or reading God's Word
• meditating upon it
• calling upon God / making shorts acts of love during the day
• Confession
• preparing for Communion and receiving Holy Communion?
• Refraining from sin, sacrificing your desires, etc.
• Why do you feel as you do? Examine the cause, especially where your dislike comes from.
5. With respect to God Himself--does your heart delight in thinking of God? "I remembered Thine everlasting judgments, O Lord, and received comfort," says David. 1
• Do you feel a certain readiness to love Him, and a definite inclination to enjoy His Love?
• Do you take pleasure in dwelling upon the Immensity, the Goodness, the Tenderness of God?
• When you are immersed in work and pastimes, does the thought of God come to you as a welcome thing?
• Do you accept it gladly, and yield yourself up to it, and your heart turn with a sort of yearning to Him? There are souls that do so. Or do you feel irritable about “dragging God in”?
6. If a wife has been long separated from her husband, so soon as she sees him returning, and hears his voice, however busy she may be, her heart knows no restraint, but turns at once to think upon him she loves. So it is with souls which really love God, however engrossed they may be; when the thought of Him is brought before them, they forget all else for joy at feeling His Dear Presence near, and this is a very good sign.
7. With respect to Jesus Christ as God and Man--how does your heart draw to Him?
8. With respect to Our Lady, the Saints, and your Guardian Angel--do you love them well?
• Do you rejoice in the sense of their guardianship?
• Do you take pleasure in their lives, their pictures, their memories?
9. As to your tongue--how do you speak of God?
• Do you take pleasure in speaking His Praise, and singing His Glory in psalms and hymns?
10. As to actions--have you God's visible glory at heart, and do you delight in doing whatever you can to honor Him? Those who love God will love to adorn and beautify His House.
• Are you conscious of having ever given up anything you liked, or of renouncing anything for God's Sake? for it is a good sign when we deprive ourselves of something we care for on behalf of those we love.
• What have you ever given up for the Love of God?

B. Examination of your Condition as regards yourself.
1. How do you love yourself? Are you eager for your soul to attain heaven or to attain worldly success? If the love you bear yourself has a heavenward tendency, you will long, or, at all events be ready to die whenever it may please our Lord.
2. Is your love of yourself well regulated? for nothing is more ruinous than an inordinate love of self. A well-regulated love implies greater care for the soul than for the body; more eagerness in seeking after holiness than anything else; a greater value for heavenly glory than for any mean earthly honor. A well regulated heart much oftener asks itself, "What will the angels say if I follow this or that line of conduct?" than what will men say.
3. What manner of love do you bear to your own desires, whims, and wants? Isn’t it true that you like to cater to your weaknesses?
4. What do you imagine yourself worth in God's Sight? Nothing, doubtless. There is no great humility in the fly which confesses it is nothing, as compared with a mountain; or a drop of water, which knows itself to be nothing compared with the sea; or a cornflower or spark, as compared with the sun. But humility consists in not loving ourselves above other men, and in not seeking to be loved and admired above others.
• How is it with you in this respect?
5. In speech--do you never boast in any way? Do you never indulge in self-flattery when speaking of yourself?
6. In deed--do you indulge in anything prejudicial to your health,--not caring for our bodies by staying up too late, gluttony, avoiding healthy food / eating too much bad food because of the taste?

C. Examination of the Soul's Condition as regards our Neighbor.
1. How do you love your neighbor?
• Do you love him cordially, and for God's Sake?
• In order to answer this fairly, you must call to mind all the disagreeable, annoying people. In such cases we really practice the Love of God with respect to our neighbors, and still more towards them that do us wrong, either by word or deed. Examine your thoughts, words, and deeds towards those others, especially enemies, and whether it costs you a great effort to love them.
• Are you quick to speak ill of your neighbors, especially those who do not love you?
• Do you act unkindly in any way, directly or indirectly, towards them? A very little honest examination will enable you to find this out.

D. A briefer outlined Examination of the Soul.
I have dwelt thus at length on these points, on a due examination of which all true knowledge of our spiritual progress rests; as to an examination of sins, that rather pertains to the confessions of those who are not eager to advance. But it is well to take ourselves to task soberly concerning these different matters, investigating how we have been going on since we made good resolutions concerning them, and what notable faults we have committed.

But the summary of all is to examine our passions; and if you are worried by so detailed an investigation as that already suggested, you may make a briefer inquiry as to what you have been, and how you have acted, in some such manner as this:--

EXAMINATION
A. In your love of God, your neighbor, and yourself.
B. In hatred for the sin which is in yourself, for the sin which you find in others, since you ought to desire the extirpation of both; in your desires concerning riches, pleasure, and honor.
C. In fear of the perils of sin, and of the loss of this world's goods; we fear the one too much and the other too little.
D. In hope, fixed overmuch it may be on things of this world and the creature; too little on God and things eternal.
E. In sadness, whether it be excessive concerning unimportant matters.
F. In gladness, whether it be excessive concerning unworthy objects.
G. In short, examine what attachments hinder your spiritual life, what passions engross it, and what chiefly attracts you. It is by testing the passions of the soul, one by one, that we ascertain our spiritual condition, just as one who plays the lute tries every string, touching those which are discordant, either raising or lowering them. Thus having tried our soul as to love, hate, desire, fear, hope, sadness and joy, if we find our strings out of tune for the melody we wish to raise, which is God's Glory, we must tune them afresh with the help of His Grace, and the counsel of our spiritual director.

E. After the Examination.
When you have quietly gone through each point of this examination, thank God for any improvement, however slight, as you may have found in yourself, confessing that it is the work of His Mercy Alone in you. (**for those who have made the examination before). Then, do the following:
1. Humble yourself deeply before God, confessing that if your progress has been but small, it is your own fault, for not having corresponded faithfully, bravely and continually to the inspirations and lights which He has given you in prayer or otherwise.
2. Promise to praise Him for ever for the graces He has granted to you, and because He has led you against your will to make even this small progress.
3. Ask forgiveness for the disloyalty and faithlessness with which you have answered Him.
4. Offer your whole heart to Him that He Alone may rule therein. Entreat Him to keep you faithful to Himself.
5. Ponder over the examples of the Saints, the Blessed Virgin, your guardian Angel and patron Saint, St. Joseph, etc.

Diary of a Country Priest

2009-10-03T21:19:00.000-07:00

I have been rereading Georges Bernanos' classic The Diary of a Country Priest. Around October 1st's feast of Therese of Lisieux, I was reminded of how much Bernanos was inspired by her life, even borrowing her words "all is grace." The book's character marvels "Oh, miracle--thus to be able to give what we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands! Hope which was shrivelling in my heart flowered again in hers; the spirit of prayer which I thought lost in me for ever was given back to her by God" (157).

And isn't it mysterious that it can happen that way? How can Therese of Lisieux inspire such childlike confidence in God--when her own confidence was stretched to the limit--to believe there was something after death, to hang on through the suffocating agony of her tuberculosis? She begged her sisters not to keep lethal pain-killers within her reach--she freely admitted that, but for her faith, she would have killed herself.

How can Mother Teresa convince everyone around her that God loves us, when she herself felt completely abandoned? Yet there it is--God's power "made perfect in weakness." Mother Teresa, Therese of Lisieux, and the Cure of Bernanos' novel demonstrate the mysterious role of desire. Cut off completely from the experience of God, what did they have left but desire, even desire for the desire for God? While they burned in that, they lit the lives of others. Here's the book and here's the beautiful film.

Survivor

2009-09-25T13:44:00.000-07:00

Everyday,
I think about dying.
About disease, starvation,
violence, terrorism, war,
the end of the world.

It helps
keep my mind off things.

--Roger McGough

Grace and Truth

2009-09-18T20:17:00.000-07:00

Here is a grand read by Fr. Paul Murray called "The Word into Words: Grace and Truth in St. Bernard of Clairvaux." Fr. Murray is a Dominican Friar of the Irish Province and teaches at the Pontifical Faculty of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Angelicum, in Rome. He preached retreats for Mother Teresa and her sisters. He worked with death-row inmates in Africa and Ireland. He has written extensively on Jonah, T. S. Eliot, and Dominican spirituality. This paper deals with mercy and self-knowledge in a wonderfully lucid way. Here is the article and here is a recording of his lecture on the same talk.

I had Fr. Murray as a professor for three classes. He reads poetry like no other and his lectures are finely crafted syntheses of theology, philosophy, and literature. Listening to this will be well worth it.

Theology Needs Prayer

2009-09-11T20:36:00.000-07:00

The following quotation from a collection of meditations by Benedict XVI was also well-received by the Sailor. Theology needs prayer. Theology needs the experience of God. So you can't just teach theology . . . or doctrine . . . or religion . . . or scripture. You must afford youth the time and opportunity to pray. And you must give them the tools to pray as best you can.

"Where there is no relationship with God, there can be no understanding of him who, in his innermost self, is nothing but relationship with God, the Father—although one can doubtless establish plenty of details about him. Therefore a participation in the mind of Jesus, i.e. in his prayer, which (as we have seen) is an act of love, of self-giving and self-expropriation to men, is not some kind of pious supplement to reading the Gospels, adding nothing to knowledge of him or even being an obstacle to the rigorous purity of critical knowing. On the contrary, it is the basic precondition if real understanding, in the sense of modern hermeneutics, i.e. the entering-in to the same time and the same meaning—is to take place.

"The New Testament continually reveals this state of affairs and thus provides the foundation for a theological epistemology. Here is simply one example: when Ananias was sent to Paul to receive him into the Church, he was reluctant and suspicious of Paul; the reason given to him was this: go to him “for he is praying” (Acts 9:11). In prayer, Paul is moving toward the moment when he will be freed from blindness and will begin to see, not only exteriorly, but interiorly as well. The person who prays begins to see; praying and seeing go together because—as Richard of St. Victor says—“Love is the faculty of seeing.” Real advances in Christology, therefore, can never come merely as the result of the theology of the schools, and that includes the modern theology as we find it in critical exegesis, in the history of doctrine and in an anthropology oriented toward the human sciences, etc. All this is important, as important as schools are. But it is insufficient. It must be complemented by the theology of the saints, which is theology from experience. All real progress in theological understanding has its origin in the eye of love and in its faculty of beholding.
--Benedict XVI, Behold the Pierced One, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 26-27.

The Lemons ("I Limoni")

2009-09-04T17:08:00.000-07:00

But listen—those famous poets
everyone studied in school—they got stirred up
among plants we don’t know here: box privet or acanthus.
As for me, I love the roads that shrivel
into parched, weed-cluttered
ditches where boys
catch a skinny eel or two in a puddle;
the paths that follow the banks and sidle
down between clumps of cane
and put you down in the lemon groves, among the trees.

Better that the clamor of the birds
should exhaust itself, be swallowed
into the blue hole overhead;
then one can hear the private
whisper of branch to branch
while the air hardly moves,
and the meanings of that odor
which is just the earth and nothing else
as a mildness enters the heart in gusts like rain.
Here by a miracle the striving
of frustrate passions is stilled,
here even we, the poorest, find a fortune—
and it is the scent of the lemons.

Understand—in the silence in which each thing
puts off its guard and seems ready
to give itself away altogether,
one hopes to detect a lapse of Nature,
the blind spot of the world, the gap in the chain,
the tangled thread which, if followed, leads
into the innermost cell of a truth.
In the fragrance that blooms
as the day languishes further,
your eyes rummage the dark
and the mind searches combines distinguishes.
These are the silences in which one sees
in each retreating human shade
some surprised Divinity.

But the dream fails and time returns
us to the raucous towns where the sky
shows only in broken pieces pinched high
between the cornices of buildings.
Now rain tires the earth, winter dullness
heaps upon the houses,
the daylight grows grudging, the soul is grim.
When one day through a gate left open
there appears among the trees in a courtyard
the yellow light of lemons;
and the icy heart melts
as in the breast roar
their songs,
the gold trumpets of solarity.
--Eugenior Montale (translated by Millicent Bell)

Millicent Bell, Professor Emerita of English at Boston University, is a literary scholar and critic.

Eugenio Montale (1896–1991) won the Nobel Prize in 1975. Translator Jonathan Galassi published Montale’s Collected Poems 1920-1954 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998).

A contemplative way of seeing the things of creation

2009-08-21T20:23:00.000-07:00

Here is Josef Pieper on contemplation. Experience of the created world weds vision of the universe's heart. He perfectly captures how the desire for God is inseparable from engaging reality.

"Above all, there is a contemplative way of seeing the things of creation. I am speaking now of actual things, and of seeing with the eyes; I mean also hearing, smelling, tasting, every type of sense-perception, but primarily seeing.

A man drinks at last after being extremely thirsty, and, feeling refreshment permeating his body, thinks and says: what a glorious thing is fresh water! Such a man, whether he knows it or not, has already taken a step toward that ‘seeing if the beloved object’ which is contemplation. How splendid is water, a rose, a tree, an apple, a human face—such exclamations can scarcely be spoken without also giving tongue to an assent and affirmation which extends beyond the object praised and touches upon the origin of the universe. Who among us has not suddenly looked into his child’s face, in the midst of the toils and troubles of everyday life, and at that moment ‘seen’ that everything which is good, is loved and lovable, loved by God! Such certainties all mean, at bottom, one and the same thing: that the world is plumb and sound; that everything comes to its appointed goal; that in spite of appearances, underlying all things is—peace, salvation, Gloria; that nothing and no one is lost; that ‘God holds in his hand the beginning, middle, and end of all that is.’ Such nonrational, intuitive certainties of the divine base of all that is can be vouchsafed to our gaze even when it is turned toward the most insignificant looking things, if only it is a gaze inspired by love. That, in the precise sense, is contemplation. And we should have the courage to admit its identity. "
--J. Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), 84-85.