carmelitana

Assumption

2007-08-15T18:37:00.000+01:00

A poem on the Assumption by my confrere, Joachim Smet:

No painter ever caught the magic other going--
This was a matter of an inward growing,
Simple and imperceptible as thought.
It was no pageant wrought
Of sounding splendor,
Flurry of quick angels' winging,
Bursts of their laughter ringing
In wild bliss.
The simple fact is this:
Love conquered at long last.
Her eager soul fled fast
With a great gladness like a song
Unto to her Spouse above,
And her pure flesh would not be parted long
For sheer love.

How does the light get in?

2007-07-31T15:41:00.000+01:00

For Claire, who asked for a post, and was dubious about Leonard Cohen.

I like this Leonard Cohen lyric “Anthem”, sad and wise and a nice piece of theology, and especially the lines “Every heart / to love will come / but like a refugee” (Origen?). Admittedly, it works better as a song lyric than a poem. There are lots of Cohen performance videos on the web, but not for this song, so below is a amateur youtube version that someone has made with the soundtrack from The Future (1992), when the marvellous Jennifer Warnes and Perla Batalla were singing backup.

The birds they sang / at the break of day
Start again / I heard them say,
Don't dwell on what / has passed away
or what is yet to be.

The wars they will / be fought again
The holy dove / be caught again
bought and sold /and bought again;
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.

We asked for signs / the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed / the marriage spent;
Yeah the widowhood / of every government—
signs for all to see.

Can't run no more / with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places / say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned up / a thundercloud
They're going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring ...

You can add up the parts / but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march / there is no drum.
Every heart / to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

The man with half a face

2007-05-30T19:01:00.001+01:00

In the largest ward, the old one,
in the corner, behind a screen,
the ravaged part of him turned discreetly to the wall,
lay the man with half a face.
No eye, no ear, no nose, no teeth,
from cheekbone to broken chin
was left to him only
a great hole covered with a graft of pale skin
and bordered with a twist of lip.

He accepted company with grace,
and spoke little in a whisper,
mainly to give thanks:
for warm bed and cool drink,
for hot food (though it was not)
and blankets softer than his own,
for kind nurses and blue skies
(we had to look out the window),
for mystery gifts,
a rose from the florist,
unexpected healing.

An old recluse, they’d said,
who had no-one to visit him:
but there was always a patient
or nurse or doctor sitting quiet and
awestruck there
listening to the silent music of his
thank you, thank you, thank you.

I saw a sunbeam move across his bed
and, I swear to you,
every mote of dust was dancing.

Pentecost

2007-05-26T20:36:00.001+01:00

Send me no more messages
or messengers,
even if they come from heaven.
You come. Please.
I'm begging.
Come.

Help me not to feel so poor;
shed some light in my heart;
bring what no-one else can give,
dearest house-guest of my heart.
You are sweet refreshment,
rest from this toil,
cool in this heat,
relief for this pain.
Help me to believe again.

Make some glimmer in this deep.
Shine on wealth where I see naught.

Wash over all this grime;
water this dry parched earth;
heal these tired old wounds.
See me taut and bend me;
feel me cold and warm me;
find me lost and bring me back.

I can count your seven gifts,
make me know then that I need them.
Give me reward, too, for small dear efforts,
salvation at the end,
joy that lasts.

After Veni sancte spiritus, 13th cent.

Dylan and the Pope again

2007-05-17T20:53:00.001+01:00

Sean Curnyn, who is writing a book on political and moral themes in the work of Bob Dylan, has a thought-provoking post at First Things which takes up once more the reports of Benedict XVI's criticism of Dylan being invited to perform before John Paul II in Bologna in 1997. While Ratzinger worried "whether it was really right to allow this type of ‘prophet’ to appear," John Paul — perhaps spontaneously, or was it a speech writer? — riffed easily on Dylan's lyrics:

A representative of yours has just said on your behalf that the answer to the questions of your life “is blowing in the wind”. It is true! But not in the wind which blows everything away in empty whirls, but the wind which is the breath and voice of the Spirit, a voice that calls and says: “Come!” (cf. Jn 3:8; Rv 22:17).

You asked me: How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? I answer you: One! There is only one road for man and it is Christ, who said: “I am the way” (Jn 14:6). He is the road of truth, the way of life.

Curnyn is very polite in suggesting that Benedict XVI probably doesn't know much about Dylan. But his main point is that Dylan's greatness as an artist has not been any attempt to give ultimate answers, but that he keeps proposing, in the face of an often superficial culture, the pressing need to ask important questions:

Dylan’s songs, and in particular his greatest songs, have often derived a great deal of their power by posing questions that compel and fascinate the mind of the listener. While most of our popular culture (from TV commercials on down to the latest pop song) tells you what you should want, what you should need, whom you ought to envy, or whom you ought to blame, Bob Dylan’s songs tend to shift the spotlight in a quite different direction. Leaving aside his three albums of gospel-oriented compositions—which, by their nature are indisputably about providing an answer—Dylan has made a career of writing songs that bring the listener face to face with questions and mysteries as timeless as they are also, sooner or later, urgent.

Easter Sunday

2007-04-08T00:04:00.000+01:00

...Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, ' joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ' Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ' world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

Quote: Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.
Image: Eskimo Nebula. In 1787, astronomer William Herschel discovered the Eskimo Nebula, which from the ground resembles a person's head surrounded by a parka hood. In 2000, the Hubble Space Telescope imaged the nebula that displays gas clouds so complex they are not fully understood. The Eskimo Nebula is clearly a planetary nebula, and the gas seen above composed the outer layers of a sun-like star only 10,000 years ago. The inner filaments visible above are being ejected by strong wind of particles from the central star. The outer disk contains unusual light-year long orange filaments. Image credit: NASA/Andrew Fruchter (STScI)

Holy Saturday

2007-04-07T00:02:00.000+01:00

Faithful Cross! above all other,
One and only noble tree!
None in foliage, none in blossom,
None in fruit thy peers may be:
Sweetest wood, and sweetest iron!
Sweetest weight is hung on thee.

Bend thy boughs, O Tree of Glory!
Thy relaxing sinews bend;
For awhile the ancient rigour,
That thy birth bestowed, suspend;
And the King of Heavenly Beauty
On thy bosom gently tend!
Quote: Venantius Fortunatus (530-609), Pange lingua gloriosi, tr. E. Caswall.

Good Friday

2007-04-06T09:43:00.000+01:00

If you willingly bear the Cross, it will bear you, and will bring you to the end which you seek, even where there shall be the end of suffering; though it shall not be here. If you bear it unwillingly, you make a burden for yourself and greatly increase your load, and yet you must bear it. If you cast away one cross, without doubt you will find another and perchance a heavier.

Quote: Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ 2.12.5.

Holy Thursday

2007-04-05T00:29:00.000+01:00

And God held in his hand
a small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
as through water,
he saw
a scorched land of fierce
colour. The light burned
there; crusted buildings
cast their shadows; a bright
serpent, a river
uncoiled itself, radiant
with slime.
On a bare
hill a bare tree saddened
the sky. Many people
held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
for a vanished April
to return to its crossed
boughs. The son watched
them. Let me go there, he said.

Quote: R.S. Thomas, “The Coming”.

Thirty pieces of silver

2007-04-04T00:17:00.000+01:00

He prays, but he hears prayer. He weeps, but he causes tears to cease. He asks where Lazarus was laid, for he was man; but he raises Lazarus, for he was God. He is sold, and very cheap, for it is only for thirty pieces of silver; but he redeems the world, and that at a great price, for the price was his own blood. As a sheep he is led to the slaughter, but he is the shepherd of Israel, and now of the whole world also. As a lamb he is silent, yet he is the Word, and is proclaimed by the voice of one crying in the wilderness. He is bruised and wounded, but he heals every disease and every weakness. He is lifted up and nailed to the tree, but by the tree of life he restores us; yes, he saves even the robber crucified with him; yes, he wrapped the visible world in darkness. He is given vinegar to drink mingled with gall. Who? He who turned the water into wine? Who is the destroyer of the bitter taste, who is sweetness and altogether desire. He lays down his life, but he has power to take it again; and the veil is rent, for the mysterious doors of heaven are opened; the rocks are cleft, the dead arise. He dies, but he gives life, and by his death destroys death. He is buried, but he rises again; he goes down into hell, but he brings up the souls; he ascends to heaven, and shall come again to judge the living and the dead...

Quote: St Gregory Nazianzen (†390), Theological Sermons 3.20.

Endured many things in many people

2007-04-03T00:10:00.000+01:00

This one is the passover of our salvation. This is the one who patiently endured many things in many people: this is the one who was murdered in Abel, and bound as a sacrifice in Isaac, and exiled in Jacob, and sold in Joseph, and exposed in Moses, and sacrificed in the lamb, and hunted down in David, and dishonored in the prophets.

This is the one who became human in a virgin, who was hanged on the tree, who was buried in the earth, who was resurrected from among the dead, and who raised mankind up out of the grave below to the heights of heaven.

This is the lamb that was slain. This is the lamb that was silent. This is the one who was born of Mary, that beautiful ewe-lamb. This is the one who was taken from the flock, and was dragged to sacrifice, and was killed in the evening, and was buried at night; the one who was not broken while on the tree, who did not see dissolution while in the earth, who rose up from the dead, and who raised up mankind from the grave below.

Quote: Melito of Sardis (†180), Homily on the Pasch 69–71.

Outrage and the chocolate Jesus

2007-04-02T22:01:00.000+01:00

Someone, I'm sure, has developed an offendability scale from 1 to 10. If you rate 1 or 2 you can’t be offended: you’re insensitive or a numbskull or you just don’t care. If you rate 9 or 10 you must wake up in the morning just ready to take offence: you roll over, listen to the clock radio, and there it is, you’re offended before breakfast; offence energises you and a day would seem empty without it. I think I might rate 4 or 5: I don’t want to be offended, thanks, but I’m not super-sensitive either. I think everyone, including me, deserves a bit of respect, and if you don’t get it you’re entitled to insist, but politely, with respect, because respect, like offence, tends to be a mutual thing.

We level 5’s and under just don’t get the fuss over Cosimo Cavallaro’s Sweet Jesus, a life-size sculpture of the crucified Christ made of chocolate, which has caused such a commotion in New York. Cardinal Egan is reported as saying it is “scandalous”, a “sickening display”, “an offence to faith and sensitivities”. The Catholic League says it is “one of the worst assaults on Christian sensitivities ever”, though as it only takes a few seconds to think of a whole list of worse things this can hardly be true. The gallery director, on the other hand, says it is “a meditation on Holy Week”. The artist seems to have run for cover: at least no-one is reporting anything from him.

What gives offence exactly? That the figure is chocolate? Our local baker here in Rome had a bread Jesus (and Mary and Joseph) for Christmas and no-one was offended. Is it the title “Sweet Jesus”? Pie Jesu has been an invocation through the ages. Is it the suspicion of irony? More than suspicion is required for a hanging offence, and anyway there’s plenty of highly-respected religious art suspected of irony still hanging in museums and churches round the world. Is it the nudity? Christ almost surely hung naked on the cross — it’s humiliation and torture in any age which is really shocking, not its depiction — and anyway there’s nothing really new here: Michelangelo, one of the most genuinely devout Christian artists of the Renaissance, did a nude crucified Christ in 1492 and another in 1495 and another, tender and heart-breaking, at the end of his life, and more besides. Is it the timing, just before Holy Week? There’s no better time. Is it the quality? I’ve only seen a fuzzy picture or two (have the critics seen more?) and Cavarallo’s Christ seems pretty good to me, maybe a lot better than much of the second-rate art in our churches.

Some people are saying, They wouldn’t dare show a naked Muhammad, and I’m sure they wouldn’t, but he wasn’t crucified, was he? — offensively, unjustly, shockingly, cruelly crucified. So where, exactly, is the offence?

Perhaps the artist is dumb, or insensitive, or faithless, or post-Christian, or post-modern, or exploitative; perhaps he intended to give offence, or perhaps he’s as devout as Michelangelo. He seems to be saying nothing just now, so we can’t know and should be slow to judge. I’d like to reserve my offendedness and take any opportunity, even if it’s chocolate and six feet tall, for a Holy Week meditation. If there’s real offence, I think we should insist on respect, but do so respectfully and without rushing to impugn the motives of others; but if there’s doubt, conversation is more in order than condemnation.

I read a story about some guys who lost their faith: the high hopes they had were disappointed, the religious stuff people told them seemed meaningless, their sometime commitment seemed a waste, and, like so many people we all know, they just walked away. Even though they were heading entirely in the wrong direction Jesus went along with them anyway: first he listened to them, then he explained a thing or two in a way they could actually understand, then he had a bite to eat with them in Emmaus. Sweet Jesus.

Mass tourism

2007-04-02T21:32:00.000+01:00

Here is Umberto Eco's take on mass tourism: insufferably snobby, and perhaps disturbingly true.

The house was filled with fragrance

2007-04-02T00:17:00.000+01:00

I have already discussed two ointments with you: one of contrition that takes account of numerous sins — it is symbolized by the perfumed oil with which the sinful woman anointed the feet of Lord (“the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil”), the other of devotion that embodies numerous blessings… But there is another ointment, far excelling these two, to which I give the name loving-kindness, because the elements that go into its making are the needs of the poor, the anxieties of the oppressed, the worries of those who are sad, the sins of wrong-doers, and finally, the manifold misfortunes of all people who endure affliction, even if they are our enemies. These elements may seem rather depressing, but the ointment made from them is more fragrant than all other spices. It bears the power to heal, for “Blessed are the merciful, they will be shown mercy”.

Quote: St Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs 12.1.

The following of the Crucified

2007-04-01T00:50:00.000+01:00

Death... occurs in the whole of life and reaches its completion only at the end. Hence... it was legitimate for Christian piety in its entire history to seek to realize the following of the Crucified in Christian life, in the acceptance of everything that Christian usage even up to the present time describes as the “cross”: the experiences of human frailty, of sickness, of disappointments, of the nonfulfilment of our expectations, and so on. What occurs in all this is part of man’s dying, of the destruction of life’s tangible goods. In all these brief moments of dying in instalments we are faced with the question of how we are to cope with them: whether we merely protest, merely despair (even for brief moments), become cynical and cling all the more desperately and absolutely to what has not yet been taken from us — or whether we abandon with resignation what is taken from us, accept twilight as promise of an eternal Christmas full of light, regard slight breakdowns as events of grace. If in this second way... we take the cross on ourselves daily, we are accomplishing part of the following of the Crucified, we are practising faith and living hope in which death is accepted as the advent of eternal life, and the following of Jesus, the Crucified, reaches its completion.

Quote: Karl Rahner, “Following the Crucified”, Theological Investigations 18 (1984) 169–170.

From that day on they planned to kill him

2007-03-31T00:23:00.000+01:00

In the last resort what happens in death is the same for all: we are deprived of everything, even of ourselves; we all fall, each of us alone, into the dark abyss where there are no further ways. And this death... Jesus dies; he who came out of God's glory did not merely descend into our human life, but also fell into the abyss of our death, and his dying began when he began to live and came to an end on the cross when he bowed his head and died.

Jesus died as we die. When we say this... what we see is Jesus following in our way and not ourselves in his... If we believe also that our own human reality has been assumed by God, this is true also of our death. Since the eternal Logos of the Father suffered it as his own death, this death must be redeemed, sanctified, emptied of final despair and futility, filled with the eternal life of God himself.

Quote: Karl Rahner, “Following the Crucified”, Theological Investigations 18 (1984) 166.

Is it not written, I said, You are gods?

2007-03-30T00:02:00.000+01:00

Understand that you are another universe, a universe in miniature, that in you there are sun, and moon, and stars too. If it were not so, the Lord would not have said to his disciples, “You are the light of the world.” Do you still hesitate to believe that there are sun and moon in you when you are told that you are the light of the world?

Quote: Origen, Hom. 5 on Leviticus, 2.

A good prayer

2007-03-29T00:20:00.000+01:00

A good prayer is one in which God works the most, and in which our spirit is most dependent upon his grace.

Quote: Jean-Joseph Surin (1600–1665).

Thy will be done

2007-03-28T00:30:00.000+01:00

The will of God is what Christ both did and taught — humility as a way of life; steadfastness in faith; modesty in words; justice in deeds; mercifulness in works; discipline in morals; to be unable to do a wrong, and to be able to bear a wrong when done; to keep peace with one’s fellows; to love God with one’s whole heart; to love him as a Father, to fear him as God; to prefer nothing whatever to Christ, because he did not prefer anything to us; to adhere inseparably to His love; to stand by His cross bravely and faithfully; when there is any contest on behalf of his name and honour, to show in one’s word that constancy which we profess; under trial, that confidence with which we do battle; in death, that patience by which we are crowned — this is to desire to be a fellow-heir with Christ, this is to carry out the commandment of God, this is to fulfil the will of the Father.

St Cyprian, On the Lord’s Prayer, 15.

But what I prayed for was a puppy

2007-03-27T20:04:00.000+01:00

Edwina sent me this lovely collection of kids’ letters to God:

Dear God, Instead of letting people die and having to make new ones why don’t you just keep the ones you got now? Jane

Dear God, I went to this wedding and they kissed right in church. Is that OK? Neil

Dear God, I think the stapler is one of your greatest invention. Ruth M.

Dear God, In bible times did they really talk that fancy? Jennifer

Dear God, I think about you sometimes even when I’m not praying. Elliott

Dear God, I am Amearican. What are you? Robert

Dear God, Thank you for the baby brother but what I prayed for was a puppy. Joyce

Dear God, I bet it’s very hard for you to love all of everybody in the whole world. There are only 4 people in our family and I can never do it. Nan

Dear God, Please put a nother holiday between Christmas and Easter. There is nothing good in there now. Ginny

Dear God, If you watch in Church on Sunday I will show you my new Shoes. Mickey D.

Dear God, if we come back as something please don’t let me be Jennifer Horton because I hate her. Denise

God, I would like to live 900 years like the guy in the bible. Love, Chris

Dear God, If you give me a genie lamp like Alladin I will give you anything you want except my money or my chess set. Raphael

We read Thos. Edison made light. But in Sun. School they said you did it. So I bet he stoled your idea. Sincerly, Donna

Dear God, If you let the dinasor not exstinct we would not have a country. You did the right thing. Jonathon

Dear God, Please send Dennis Clark to a different camp this year. Peter

Dear God, Maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each so much if they had their own rooms. It works with my brother. Larry

Annunciation (2)

2007-03-26T07:09:00.001+01:00

Another quotation for today’s feast of the Annunciation. Sarah Boss has explored traditional Mariology from a feminist point of view, and asks if Mary’s humble assent to the angel is a form of acquiescence to domination. She concludes:

Is Mary’s fiat (“Let it be done to me according to your word”) the response of a slave who accedes to her master’s wishes regardless of her own preference? A case can be made for saying that the dominant tradition of interpretation of the Annunciation story gives little ground for such a reading. It seems more in keeping with the general tenor of Mary's cult through the ages (if not in the twentieth century) that Gabriel’s news of the Virgin’s impending motherhood should be viewed as a message which fulfils Mary’s deepest longings. That is to say, she does not have to “knuckle under” and do as she is told, because it is her own desire which is about to be realized. She is to be the bearer of her own Saviour, who is also the Redeemer of the world...

Mary’s will coincides with God’s will not because she has been coerced into accepting his lordship, but because the life and will of God are at the foundation of life and well-being of all God’s creatures, and Mary has recognized that...

The fecundity of God’s activity is thus not imposed on Mary, but springs up within and as a part of her, so that her desire, her conception, her gestation and childbearing are radically her own at the same time as being divine. Mary is, as it were, an icon of freedom from domination, who not only inspires in the devotee the hope for a world transformed, but already embodies that transformation in her own life.

Quote: Sarah Jane Boss, Empress and Handmaid: On Nature and Gender in the Cult of the Virgin Mary, London: Cassell, 2000, 217–219.
Ill.: Hari Santosa, The Annunciation, Asian Christian Art Association.

Annunciation

2007-03-26T00:06:00.000+01:00

The angel and the girl are met,
Earth was the only meeting place,
For the embodied never yet
Travelled beyond the shore of space.
The eternal spirits in freedom go.

See, they have come together, see,
While the destroying minutes flow,
Each reflects the other’s face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steady there. He’s come to her
From far beyond the farthest star,
Feathered through time. Immediacy
of strangest strangeness is the bliss
That from their limbs all movement takes.
Yet the increasing rapture brings
So great a wonder that it makes
Each feather tremble on his wings.

Outside the window footsteps fall
Into the ordinary day
And with the sun along the wall
Pursue their unreturning way
That was ordained in eternity.
Sound’s perpetual roundabout
Rolls its numbered octaves out
And hoarsely grinds its battered tune.

But through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.

Quote: Edwin Muir (1887–1959).
Ill.: He Qi, Annunciation (Asian Christian Art Association).

Jesus’ tomb and the appetite for sensation

2007-03-25T17:06:00.001+01:00

The recent media beat-up about the Talpiot ossuaries and the supposed tomb of Jesus seems to have died down quickly, but perhaps not before it left permanent misapprehensions in the public mind. I just came across an interesting 2005 article by Edward M. Cook from the Society of Biblical Literature Forum which raises some related issues.

Cook is critical of the role of the Biblical Archaeology Review in publicizing artefacts like the “James brother of Jesus” ossuary and other artefacts which were later revealed as forgeries. He’s concerned with the effect that the market for forged and stolen antiquities may have both on historical evidence itself and also on the historical conscience of archaeologists and historians. However, his comments also invite reflection on our media culture’s appetite for the sensational, the immediate and the transgressive, the way it puts pressure on scholars and publishers to abandon the checks and balances of the traditional scholarly process, and the virtual ineradicability of much of the misinformation so carelessly generated.

And they went away one by one

2007-03-25T00:20:00.000+01:00

Jesus bent down and wrote on the ground with his finger. The ground represents the human heart, which gives forth its fruit in good or bad actions; the finger, which is flexible because of the articulation of its parts, represents discretion. So the Lord is instructing us that when we see any faults in our neighbours we should not immediately and rashly condemn them, but when we have humbly searched our own hearts in the first place, we should examine the issues carefully with the finger of discretion.

Quote: Alcuin, quoted by Thomas Aquinas, Catena aurea on John 8, l. 1; trans. PAC.
Ill.: He Qi, The Woman Caught in Adultery (Asian Christian Art Association).

Carmelites in Mozambique evacuated because of bomb

2007-03-24T18:04:00.000+01:00

On 22 March, an army ammunition dump in Mozambique blew up. Several places in the surrounding area were hit by rockets and mortars. One bomb landed in the garden of the Carmelite residence but did not explode.

The Carmelites in Mozambique are a mission from the Brazilian Province of Pernambuco. According to Fr Francisco de Sales, prior provincial of Pernambuco, the embassy of Mozambique called him to let him know that the Carmelites are safe. At the moment they have been moved from the house so that the army can deactivate the bomb.

Source: CITOC 24/3/2007.

The glamour of evil

2007-03-24T10:41:00.000+01:00

Can there be a genuine aesthetic without ethics? asks Clive James in a characteristically thought-provoking NYT review of two new books on Hitler’s favourite film-maker. Or by separating “art” from reality and its consequences do we set foot on the same path as Leni I-never-knew-the-Nazis-were-doing-that Riefenstahl herself? Dana Stevens asks a similar question about the epically stupid Spartan comic-book movie 300, “a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war”, but which, in our post-ideological, post-moral infotainment culture, will mostly be discussed as a technical achievement.

Write in stone

2007-03-24T00:27:00.000+01:00

Lord, how I am all ague, when I seek
What I have treasur’d in my memorie!
Since, if my soul make even with the week,
Each seventh note by right is due to thee.
I finde there quarries of pil’d vanities,
But shreds of holinesse, that dare not venture
To shew their face, since crosse to thy decrees:
There the circumference earth is, heav’n the centre.
In so much dregs the quintessence is small:
The spirit and good extract of my heart
Comes to about the many hundredth part.
Yet, Lord, restore thine image, heare my call:
And though my hard heart scarce to thee can grone,
Remember that thou once didst write in stone.

Quote: George Herbert, “The Sinner”, from The Temple (1633).

Aristotle and the Boy Scouts

2007-03-23T18:42:00.000+01:00

As a long-ago Boy Scout I was intrigued by Michael Duffy’s article “Staying Prepared” on the Scouting movement in its centenary year. Anyone who remembers anything of the old scouting manuals or knows something about Baden-Powell will know that they are large targets for the easy amusement of another age. (“Don't be disgraced like the young Romans, who lost the empire of their forefathers by being wishy-washy slackers without any go or patriotism in them”, is a typical enough Baden-Powellism, and it’s difficult to read it now without hearing a John Cleese/Monty Python voice in your head).

Duffy, however, thoughtfully resists cheap shots. The old Boy Scout Handbook, he suggests, quoting Paul Fussell, was into the ’70s “among the very few remaining popular repositories of something like classical ethics, deriving from Aristotle and Cicero”. And he concludes optimistically:

The ethics of Scouting for Boys have not been lost; they have been adopted by such a large proportion of society that the scouts, at least in Western nations, no longer need to preach them. If we laugh at Baden-Powell now, we do so because we can afford to, thanks in part to his success in civilising males. All this is good. As is the fact our boys no longer need be prepared for the vast range of disasters that hung over the youth of 1908.

Listening to silence

2007-03-23T00:45:00.000+01:00

Contemplation is essentially a listening in silence, an expectancy. And yet in a certain sense, we must truly begin to hear God when we have ceased to listen. What is the explanation of this paradox? Perhaps only that there is a higher kind of listening, which is not an attentiveness to some special wave length, a receptivity to a certain kind of message, but a general emptiness that waits to realize the fullness of the message of God within its own apparent void. In other words, the true contemplative is not the one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect or anticipate the word that will transform his darkness into light. He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation. He does not demand light instead of darkness. He waits on the Word of God in silence, and when he is “answered”, it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence. It is by silence itself suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God.

Quote: Thomas Merton, The Climate of Monastic Prayer, Shannon: Irish University Press, 1969, 122-123.
Ill.: Duccio di Buoninsegna, Christ before Pilate (detail) (1308–1311).

Carmelite stational chuch

2007-03-22T15:32:00.001+01:00

Today's Lenten stational church is San Martino ai Monti, a Roman parish in the care of the Carmelites on Monte Oppio. It was founded as a house church (the titulus Equitii) probably at the end of the 3rd century, and so is one of the first parish churches in Rome. A local synod is recorded as meeting here in 324 in preparation for the Council of Nicaea. Much rebuilt, the present structure dates from the mid-9th century, incorporating some parts from the early 6th-century church of Pope Symmachus, and there was extensive renovation work in the 16th century (by St Charles Borromeo, the titular cardinal) and again in the mid-17th century. The Carmelites have been there since 1299, and San Martino is presently the headquarters and studentate for the Italian province. A description with photos is here.

Technorati Tags: carmelites

Taken by surprise

2007-03-22T00:05:00.000+01:00

There is no moment at which God does not present himself... All that occurs within us, around us and by our means covers and hides his divine action. His action is there, most really and certainly present, but in an invisible manner, the result of which is that we are always being taken by surprise and that we only recognise its action after it has passed. Could we pierce the veil, God would reveal himself continuously to us and we should rejoice in his action in everything that happens to us. At every occurrence we should say, Dominus est, It is the Lord, and in all circumstances we should find a gift from God...

Quote: Jean-Pierre de Caussade (†1751), Self-abandonment to Divine Providence, 2.1; trans. A. Thorold (1959).

San Paolo fuori le Mura: no vibe, man

2007-03-21T11:15:00.001+01:00

San Paolo fuori le Mura is the Lenten stational church for today. There is a fine description with beautiful photos here. San Paolo is the largest church in Rome after St Peter’s. It is vast, majestic, awe-inspiring, magnificent, but in some ways strikes you as rather cold and lifeless and merely grandiose. Painstakingly reconstructed after the disastrous fire of 1823, in a certain sense it’s true that it is “an excellent (perhaps the best) representation of an early Christian basilica because it is devoid of the natural accretions and decorations that collect over many centuries of use”. However, as well as lacking accretions it seems to lack the mysterious “soul” that also accrues with use. For me San Paolo, for all its meticulous beauty, is a sign that you can’t recapture the past just by reconstructing it. Sad to say.

The medieval cloister, however, which escaped the fire largely undamaged, is wonderful: light, airy, delicate, enchanting, an invitation to meditation, one of the jewels of Rome.

Excavations (2002–2006) under the high altar of the basilica recently resulted in the rediscovery of the tomb of St Paul, including a marble sarcophagus, which had been made inaccessible by the 19th-century reconstruction work. Information is still fairly sparse but a brief report in English is here and the official announcement (in Italian) here. There will now be works at the basilica to make the 4th-century tomb structure more visible to pilgrims and visitors, along with a visitors’ centre and (unfortunately but no doubt necessarily) security screening.

A kind of unsatisfactoriness

2007-03-21T00:57:00.000+01:00

The church has known many different moods in the course of her history. Sometimes she appears to be very confident of herself and of the value of her message, sometimes she seems rather to be a bit confused and unsure of herself; sometimes she boldly tells everyone what they ought to be doing, sometimes she gives the impression of groping in the darkness. And it is not necessarily in her “best” moments, when she is most confident and clear, that she is most true to herself. There is a kind of unsatisfactoriness written into her very constitution, because she is only a transitional organisation, keeping people and preparing them for a new creation, in which God will be all in all, and every tear will be wiped away. When she speaks too securely, she may obscure the fact that her essential business is with “what no eye has seen, no ear has heard, not has it entered the heart of man”. The blunt truth is, as St John says, that “we have not yet been shown what we shall be”.

Quote: Simon Tugwell, Ways of Imperfection, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1984, 1.

One man had been ill for thirty-eight years

2007-03-20T00:14:00.000+01:00

St Augustine has an interesting comment in his Tract 17 on John about today’s reading on the healing of the man at the pool of Bethzatha. If Jesus was so powerful, Augustine asks, why didn’t he heal all the sick people there? He answers that what could be seen (the physical healing) was only a sign of an inner change, which is the real moment of revelation. Picking up his bed and walking, says Augustine, is a symbol of this man’s taking up the responsibility of caring for others, and it leads him to see what he had not seen before. The true healing—a contemplative experience, if you like—took place not at the pool but later in the temple:

[Jesus] went in to a place where a great number of sick people were languishing, the blind, the lame, the withered. And since he was the healer of both soul and body, who had come to heal the souls of all those who would believe, he chose to heal one of those languishing there, in order to signify unity. If we consider his action with a commonplace mind, with a merely human understanding and mentality, as far as power goes he didn’t achieve anything out of the ordinary, and as far as goodness goes he did too little, for many were laying there and only one was cured, when he could have raised them all with a single word.

What must we understand then, if not this: that power and goodness were at work more in what souls might understand in his deeds for their eternal health, rather than what their bodies might obtain for their temporary health? For the real healing of bodies which is expected from the Lord will come at last in the resurrection of the dead: what lives then will not die, what is healed then will not sicken again, what is satisfied then will not know hunger or thirst, what is made new then will not grow old...

[11] Now the man who was healed did not know who it was who had spoken to him, for Jesus, when he had done this and given him this order [to pick up his bed and walk], slipped away from him in the crowd. Look how this is fulfilled: We carry our neighbour and we walk towards God; but we do not yet see him whom we are going towards, just as this man did not yet recognise Jesus. The mystery which is confided to us here is that we believe in him whom we don’t see yet, and so that he may not be seen, he slips away in the crowd. It’s difficult to see Christ in the crowd: there is a certain solitude which is needed by our mind. God is seen by a certain solitude of contemplation. A crowd is chaotic, and this vision requires intimacy. So take up your bed, and you, who were once carried, carry your neighbour; walk, that you may reach your goal...

Since that man did not give up on carrying his bed and walking, afterwards Jesus saw him in the temple. He didn’t see Jesus in the crowd, he saw him in the temple. The Lord Jesus, indeed, saw the man both in the crowd and in the temple; but the sick man didn’t recognise Jesus in the crowd, he saw him in a consecrated place, in a holy place. And what does the Lord say to him? See, you have been made well...

Quote: St Augustine, In Ioannis evangelia tractatus 17.1, 11; trans. PAC
Ill.: Carl Bloch, Christ healing by the Pool of Bethesda (detail) (1875).

Cloud of peace

2007-03-18T00:27:00.000+01:00

For the feast of St Joseph, here is another of the beautiful Odes of Solomon, a collection of ecstatic hymns probably from the early 2nd century:

The gentle showers of the Lord overshadowed me with serenity,
and they caused a cloud of peace to rise over my head
that it might guard me at all times,
and it became salvation to me.
Everyone was disturbed and afraid,
and there came from them smoke and judgment.
But I was tranquil in the Lord's legion;
more than shade was He to me, and more than foundation.
And I was carried like a child by its mother;
and He gave me milk, the dew of the Lord.
And I was enriched by His favor,
and rested in His perfection.
And I spread out my hands in the ascent of myself,
and I directed myself towards the Most High,
and I was redeemed towards Him.
Hallelujah.

Quote: Odes of Solomon, 35 (2nd cent.) ; trans James Charlesworth.

Prodigal son

2007-03-18T00:07:00.000+01:00

Of course the sinner must repent. But why? Simply because otherwise he would be unable to realise what he had done. The moment of repentance is the moment of initiation. More than that: it is the means by which one alters one’s past. The Greeks thought that impossible. They often say in their gnomic aphorisms, “Even the gods cannot alter the past.” Christ showed that the commonest sinner could do it, that it was the one thing he could do. Christ, had he been asked, would have said — I feel quite certain about it — that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and wept, he made his having wasted his substance with harlots, his swineherding and hungering for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy moments in his life. It is difficult for most people to grasp the idea. I dare say one has to go to prison to understand it. If so, it may be worth while going to prison.

Quote: Oscar Wilde, “De profundis” (1905).
Ill.: Rembrandt, The Return of the Prodigal Son (detail), ca. 1662.

In honour of St Patrick

2007-03-17T11:27:00.001+01:00

He did not expel snakes from Ireland: the snakelessness of Ireland had been noted by the Roman geographer Solinus in the third century. He did not compose that wonderful hymn known as “Saint Patrick’s Breastplate” : its language postdates him by about three centuries. He did not drive a chariot three times over his sister Lupait to punish her unchastity: the allegation that he did first appears in a life of Patrick which is a farrago of legend put together about 400 years after his death. He did not use the leaves of the shamrock to illustrate the persons of the Trinity for his converts: true, he might have done: but it is not until the seventeenth century that we are told that he did...

Patrick linked his vocation to the missionary imperatives of the Bible... Patrick’s originality was that no one within western Christendom had thought such thoughts as these before, had ever previously been possessed by such convictions. As far as our evidence goes, he was the first person in Christian history to take the scriptural injunctions literally; to grasp that teaching all nations meant teaching even barbarians who lived beyond the frontiers of the Roman empire. Patrick crossed that threshold upon which... we left Augustine and Prosper hesitating.

Quote: Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe, London: HarperCollins, 1997, 80, 86.

I lift my heart to you

2007-03-17T00:41:00.000+01:00

No knowing where to go, I go to you. Not knowing where to turn, I turn to you. Not knowing what to hold, I bind myself to you. Having lost my way, I make my way to you. Having soiled my heart, I lift my heart to you. Having wasted my days, I bring the heap to you...

Quote: Leonard Cohen, “Not Knowing Where to Go”, Book of Mercy (1984).

Pope against Bob Dylan, Jesuit for Tom Waits

2007-03-17T00:01:00.000+01:00

Theological music news from the London Times:

The latest issue of Civiltà Cattolica, a Jesuit journal whose contents are subject to Vatican approval, says that [Tom] Waits represents “the marginalised and misunderstood”.

Father Antonio Spadaro, 40, who normally writes about literature but is emerging as a Roman Catholic authority on pop music, said that Waits had lived a youthful life of “drugs, alcohol and sex” as an outcast on the streets of California.

He therefore understood “the lower depths” of society, and was able to convey the desperation of those on the margins. His past also enabled him to express their “capacity for hope and instinct for happiness” in “authentic songs devoid of vanity and false illusions”, Father Spadaro said.

Heart and soul and mind

2007-03-16T00:01:00.000+01:00

I learn to look on this other person not simply with my eyes and my feelings, but from the perspective of Jesus Christ... Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave. Here we see the necessary interplay between love of God and love of neighbour which the First Letter of John speaks of with such insistence. If I have no contact whatsoever with God in my life, then I cannot see in the other anything more than the other, and I am incapable of seeing in him the image of God. But if in my life I fail completely to heed others, solely out of a desire to be “devout” and to perform my “religious duties”, then my relationship with God will also grow arid. It becomes merely “proper”, but loveless. Only my readiness to encounter my neighbour and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well. Only if I serve my neighbour can my eyes be opened to what God does for me and how much he loves me... Love of God and love of neighbour are thus inseparable, they form a single commandment.

Quote: Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est, 18.
Ill.: Detail from a 17th-cent. Ethiopian manuscript.

Wondering

2007-03-15T11:04:00.000+01:00

Every day, every day I hear
enough to fill
a year of nights with wondering.

Quote: Denise Levertov, “Every Day”, in Breathing the Water (1987).

My grandmother’s Turkish neighbours

2007-03-15T07:52:00.000+01:00

For Waleed Aly

My grandmother was married in 1915, and she and my grandfather moved into the house in Arncliffe in Sydney where they lived for the rest of their lives. Most of the houses in the street were built at the same time, and my nanna’s life-long best friend moved in next door on the same day; I forget her name now. One summer afternoon in 1968 — I wanted to show off my just-bought first car — I called in on Nanna unexpectedly and discovered the two of them in the lounge room eating cake and sipping their way through a bottle of sweet sherry. It was a memorable revelation of neighbourliness and enduring friendship.

Nanna was the sweetest of grandmothers. She always gave us scones with jam and cream. She seemed to have a preternatural ability to whip up a batch of scones in no time, baking them up in her ancient Early Kooka stove with the beautiful enamelled kookaburra on the oven door, which she refused to trade for something more modern “because you get to know a stove”. It was only as I grew older that I realised she had a tough old coot side. She was not as indulgent to her children as she was to her grandchildren. There was iron in her from poverty and depression and war and widowhood.

I remember her grief when her next-door neighbour died. The two of them were the last of the old-timers in the street. But there was worse to come: the house next door was bought by foreigners and her new neighbours turned out to be Turkish. She was indignant. Her sweetness and indulgence evaporated in a litany of complaints of a bitterness we did not expect from her, mingled, I realise now, with grief and loss. There were too many of them. They wore too many clothes. They were not even Christians. They didn’t speak English. Smells came from their kitchen. They should go back to where they came from. This went on for years. The side fence through which friendship had flowed backwards and forwards for fifty years became a fortification between her and the enemy camp.

But there was still worse to come. The Turks had some family occasion and barbecued a lamb on a spit in the back yard, which would have been alright except that they brought the lamb live and slaughtered it in the street. Blood and flies were everywhere, Nanna said in cold fury. With the flies came the police and the council inspectors and other anti-lamb-slaughtering officials. Inspection revealed illegal chickens and other outrages. The whole street was up in arms. Hostilities deepened.

Nanna was around eighty by then and growing increasingly frail. She took in a boarder — such a lovely girl, she always said — who stayed for a time, and then she was on her own again. Then one day, suddenly, a whole contingent of Turkish women appeared on the verandah. A little girl translated for them. She was too old to be living on her own, the Turkish women declared, with no-one to look out for her. Every morning when she got up she must hang a towel out the window, and if it was not there by breakfast time they would come in to check on her. Nanna professed indignation, and said she put out the towel only to keep those people away.

Pots of food were now occasionally appearing on the verandah, exotic fragrant casseroles, I suppose, to be gingerly tasted before they were gratefully eaten. And I like to think there were plates of Turkish Delight thickly covered in icing sugar, but I’m not sure, I’ve made that up, but you’ll have to allow a little artistic licence. Soon we were being told with sweet authority over the scones and jam that you could have no better neighbours than Turkish people, who were the best neighbours in the world.

I like this little family story. I like it that persevering neighbourliness defeated the side fence. I like it that my nanna went from hostility to gratitude. It is a small window not only into the history of this country but also into its future, a story that has been played out countless times and in countless ways, and one that we cannot afford not to repeat.

I sometimes think about the little girl who stood on my grandmother’s verandah and translated from Turkish to English and back again. She is probably a neurosurgeon or something now, and soon enough will be operating on my head. It is not a light burden to negotiate between cultures, but many people have done it, and they have made our future. I wish I could thank her and everyone like her.

Originally published in A Little Yeast, newsletter of Yarra Theological Union, Melbourne.

He who is not with me is against me

2007-03-15T00:37:00.000+01:00

Among the most certain elements of the tradition... is the fact that Jesus displayed a provocative partiality for sinners and identified himself with people who had neither religion nor morals. With him the wasters and the outcasts had a future... Dubious characters, delinquents, are constantly turning up in the Gospels, types from which decent people would do better to dissociate themselves... He simply accepted them. He not only preached a love open to all men, he also practiced it. Certainly he did not ingratiate himself, he did not by any means share in the activities of the disreputable groups. He did not sink down to their level, but drew them up to himself. But he did not simply enter into discussion with these notoriously bad people, but — quite literally — sat down with them...

“He who is not with me is against me.” This saying is directed against those who fail to stand up resolutely for Jesus and his message and so scatter instead of gathering. But it is not directed against those who do not join the narrower circle of disciples. The truth may sound like a paradox. But there it is.

“He who is not against us is for us.” This is directed against his disciples’ claim to be an exclusive group.

Quote: Hans Küng, On Being a Christian, London: Collins, 1977, 272-273, 280.

Not to abolish but to fulfil

2007-03-14T00:53:00.000+01:00

Jesus apparently cannot be fitted in anywhere: neither with the rulers nor with the rebels, neither with the moralizers nor with the silent ascetics. He turns out to be provocative, both to right and to left. Backed by no party, challenging on all sides: “the man who fits no formula.” He is neither a philosopher nor a politician, neither a priest not a social reformer... He is on a different plane: apparently closer than the priests to God, freer than the ascetics in regard to the world, more moral than the moralists, more revolutionary than the revolutionaries. Thus he has depths and vastnesses lacking in others.

Quote: Hans Küng, On Being a Christian, London: Collins, 1977, 212.

Carmelite retreat in Florida

2007-03-13T18:17:00.000+01:00

Over at Flos Carmeli Steven Riddle is blogging about a retreat he just did with Fr Patrick McMahon, president of our Carmelite Institute here in Rome.

Urban prayer legends

2007-03-13T07:19:00.000+01:00

I had an inquiry recently from a nice lady named Edwina looking for the text of “A 17th-century Nun’s Prayer”. It’s easy enough to find on the internet (text below). It’s a charming prayer but clearly modern in style and not from the 17th century, in spite of a few faux-antique touches. The Nun’s Prayer, then, must join some other pieces of 20th-century wisdom falsely assigned to earlier times. The two most famous cases, still often circulating under their false attributions, are the Peace Prayer of St Francis and Desiderata.

The prayer attributed to St Francis of Assisi (“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace”) can only be traced back to a little before World War I. The earliest known appearance is as an anonymous text in French on the back of a holy card of St Francis, dating from around 1912–1914. It seems that it was an English version in 1936 which first upgraded the association with St Francis’ picture to an explicit attribution of the text to him. The prayer became famous when Sen. Thomas Connally read it before the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945. Francis would no doubt have liked it, but Franciscan scholars universally reject it as an authentic work of his.[1]

Desiderata (“Go placidly amid the noise and haste”) was very popular in the ’60s and ’70s, usually circulating, as it often still does, in a form that says it was “Found in Old St. Paul's Church, Baltimore, A.D. 1692”. It is, in fact, a poem written by Max Ehrmann (1872–1945), an Indiana lawyer, who copyrighted it in 1927. It was first published by his widow in a collection of his poems in 1948. The confusion arose because at the end of the 1950s the rector of St Paul’s Church in Baltimore, which was founded in 1692, circulated a copy of the poem on his church letterhead, and the information about the church became mistakenly attached to the poem. The true story, well-documented, is here and elsewhere.

Desiderata attracted a cynical parody Deteriorata from National Lampoon in 1972. Years later Mary Schmich riffed cleverly on the theme in an article “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young”, now generally known as “Wear sunscreen”, in the Chicago Tribune (1/6/1997). This, too, soon attracted its own urban legend, that it was a commencement address by Kurt Vonnegut at MIT.

Unfortunately, these sorts of legends are tenacious and seem beyond correction.

A Nun's Prayer (not from the 17th century)

Lord, Thou knowest better than I know myself that I am growing older and will some day be old. Keep me from the fatal habit of thinking I must say something on every subject and on every occasion. Release me from craving to straighten out everybody’s affairs. Make me thoughtful but not moody; helpful but not bossy. With my vast store of wisdom it seems a pity not to use it at all, but thou knowest Lord that I want a few friends at the end. Keep my mind free from the recital of endless details, give me wings to get to the point. Seal my lips on my aches and pains. They are increasing and love of rehearsing them is becoming sweeter as the years go by. I dare not ask for grace enough to enjoy the tales of others’ pains, but help me to endure them with patience. I dare not ask for improved memory but for a growing humility and a lessening cocksureness when my memory seems to clash with the memories of others. Teach me the glorious lesson that occasionally I may be mistaken. Keep me reasonably sweet, I do not want to be a saint — some of them are hard to live with — but a sour old person is one of the crowning works of the devil. Give me the ability to see good things in unexpected places and talents in unexpected people. And, give me, O Lord, the grace to tell them so. Amen.

[1] J. Poulenc, “L’inspiration moderne de la prière Seigneur, faite de moi un instrument de vôtre paix”, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 68 (1975): 450–453; Damien Vorreux, Appendix: “Note sur la prière per la paix attribuée à S. François”, in François d’Assise, Écrits, ed. Théophile Desbonnets et al. (Sources chrétiennes 285), Paris: Cerf, 1997.

Such a Way, as gives us breath

2007-03-13T00:06:00.000+01:00

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
Such a Way, as gives us breath:
Such a Truth, as ends all strife:
And such a Life, as killeth death.

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength:
Such a Light, as shows a feast:
Such a Feast, as mends in length:
Such a Strength, as makes his guest.

Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart:
Such a Joy, as none can move:
Such a Love, as none can part:
Such a Heart, as joyes in love.

Quote: George Herbert, “The Call”, from The Temple (1633).

Extravagant landscape of the world

2007-03-12T08:14:00.000+01:00

Annie Dillard asks, If you were God, and you wanted to create something, wouldn't you be happy with a nice molecule? If you wanted something to lock up solar energy and give off oxygen, wouldn't you put down a slab of chemicals rather than invent forests?

... creation carries on with an intricacy unfathomable and apparently uncalled for. The lone ping into being of the first hydrogen atom ex nihilo was so unthinkably, violently radical, that surely it ought to have been enough, more than enough. But look what happens... Evolution, of course, is the vehicle of intricacy...

Of all known forms of life, only about ten percent are still living today. All other forms — fantastic plants, ordinary plants, living animals with unimaginably various wings, tails, teeth, brains — are utterly and forever gone. That is a great many forms that have been created. Multiplying ten times the number of living forms today yields a profusion that is quite beyond what I consider thinkable. Why so many forms? Why not just that one hydrogen atom? The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font...

Quote: Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, New York: Harper & Row, 1985, 131, 136.
Ill.: Hallucigenia sparsa, from about 500 million years ago.

Keep on walking

2007-03-12T00:17:00.000+01:00

You ask, “What does walking mean?” I’ll tell you very briefly: it means forging ahead... Forge ahead, my friends, always examine yourselves without self-deception, without flattery, without pretending to yourself. There's nobody there inside you whom you have to be embarrassed to face, or whom you need to impress. There is someone there, but one who is impressed with humility: let him test you, and you, too, test yourself. Always be dissatisfied with what you are, if you want to arrive at what you are not yet. Because at the point you are pleased with yourself, there you are stuck. And if you say, “That’s enough,” then you’ve even perished. Always add some more, always keep on walking, always forge ahead. Don’t stop on the road, don’t turn round and go back, don’t wander. If you don’t forge ahead, you stop; if you turn back to what you have already left behind, you go backwards; if you apostatize, you leave the road. The lame person on the road goes better than the runner off the road.

Quote: St Augustine, Sermo 169.18; PL 38:926.

A Desert Father on prayer

2007-03-11T00:04:00.000+01:00

Whoever is in the habit of praying only at the hour when the knees are bent prays very little. But whoever is distracted by any sort of wandering of heart, even on bended knee, never prays. And therefore we have to be outside the hour of prayer what we want to be when we are praying. For the mind at the time of its prayer is necessarily formed by what went on previously, and when it is praying it is either raised to the heavens or brought low to the earth by the thoughts on which it was dwelling before it prayed.

Quote: John Cassian, Conferences 10.14.2 (Abba Isaac); trans. Boniface Ramsey (1997).
Ill.: St Antony (Mt Athos, Dionysiou Monastery, 17th c.)

Bring the finest robe

2007-03-10T00:05:00.000+01:00

The repentant son came to the pitying Father, never hoping for these things — the best robe, and the ring, and the shoes — or to taste the fatted calf, or to share in gladness, or enjoy music and dances; but he would have been contented with obtaining what in his own estimation he deemed himself worth... The son, then, knew not either what he was to obtain, or how to take or use or put on himself the things given him; since he did not take the robe himself, and put it on. But it is said, 'Put it on him'. He did not himself put the ring on his finger, but those who were bidden 'put a ring on his hand'. Nor did he put the shoes on himself, but it was they who heard, 'and shoes on his feet'. And these things were perhaps incredible to him and to others, and unexpected before they took place; but gladly received and praised were the gifts with which he was presented.

Quote: Pseudo-Clement of Alexandria, Fragment of the Prodigal Son, 4; from monachos.net.
Ill.: Guercino, Return of the Prodigal Son (1619).

Fasting: a patristic view

2007-03-09T00:34:00.000+01:00

Plenty of strangers wander the roads, and everywhere we see their outstretched hands begging for help. Their home is the open air; they shelter in porticos, streets, and deserted corners of the marketplace, lurking in nooks and crannies like owls, and clothed in tattered rags. Their food is whatever they may get from a passerby, and they drink from the fountains with animals, using the hollow of their hands as a cup. Their storeroom is their pockets if these are not too torn to hold anything. For a table they use their knees pressed together; their bed is the pavement, and to bathe they have simply a river or pool which God gives for the use of everyone. Such is the rough, wandering path they follow, not because their life was like that from the start, but because misfortune has driven them to it.

You can help them through your fasting. Be generous to your brothers and sisters who are in trouble, giving to the hungry what you deny yourself, and making a fair distribution in the fear of God.

Quote: St Gregory of Nyssa (†ca. 394), De pauperibus amandis, 1.

S. Maria in Trastevere

2007-03-08T14:52:00.000+01:00

A fine description of S. Maria in Trastevere, with its exquisite 12th-century mosaics one of Rome’s most beautiful churches and the stational church for today, is here at Argent by the Tiber.

The Pope and Bob Dylan

2007-03-08T09:32:00.000+01:00

There’s an Irish joke everybody’s heard in which someone asks how to get to Dublin and gets the answer: If it’s Dublin you’re going to, I wouldn’t start from here. Sometimes I think the church has got itself caught inside that joke. We tell people they ought to be on a spiritual journey, but that they can’t start from where they are.

A report in the Daily Telegraph claims that Pope Benedict, a Mozart fan known to have a strong dislike of popular music, was dismayed that Bob Dylan played before John Paul II in Bologna in 1997.

It’s clear enough that theological acumen, good taste and common sense have often been missing from the church's dalliance with modern music. I hope never to attend another funeral where they play John Lennon singing “Imagine there’s no heaven” (don’t they listen to the words?).

But how can the church be in conversation with the majority of people today if it has no sensitivity to the seeds and signals and glimpses of the transcendent present in contemporary cultures? How can the church claim to have spiritual sensitivity if it can’t see a fellow-traveller in one who sings “Some sweet day I'll stand beside my king” (Thunder on the Mountain)? Or can’t hear “We all wear the same thorny crown” as a lesson already learned (When the Deal Goes Down)? Or can’t recognise itself here: “It’s dark and it’s dreary / I’ve been pleading in vain / I’m wounded, I’m weary / My repentance is plain” (Beyond the Horizon); or here: “They say prayer has the power to heal / So pray for me, mother / In the human heart an evil spirit can dwell / I am a-tryin’ to love my neighbor and do good unto others / But oh, mother, things ain’t going well” (Ain’t Talkin’)? And that’s just Bob's latest album.

Dylan’s fractured biblical imagination and his prismatic, enigmatic lyrics are both symbols of our age, and part of the reason he’s important. Much of what Christianity has sought to teach, and the longing for transcendence it sought to put us in touch with, now lies scattered as so many fragments through our largely post-Christian culture, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle of a picture which can no longer be imagined. The church has the lid of the box, the key to connecting it all again, but it doesn’t want to come and play. Too often it’s saying, You can’t get there from here.

Maybe Dylan was talking to us when he said:

Feel like my soul is beginning to expand
Look into my heart and you will sort of understand
You brought me here, now you're trying to run me away
The writing on the wall, come read it, come see what it say
(Thunder on the Mountain)

More on science and religion

2007-03-08T08:19:00.000+01:00

"Is explaining religion the same thing as explaining it away? Are the nonbelievers right, and is religion at its core an empty undertaking, a misdirection, a vestigial artifact of a primitive mind? Or are the believers right, and does the fact that we have the mental capacities for discerning God suggest that it was God who put them there?"

A long article "Darwin's God" by Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times, bound to provoke much discussion.

And lying at his door was a poor man named Lazarus

2007-03-08T00:05:00.000+01:00

Alongside the ecology of nature, there exists what can be called a “human” ecology, which in turn demands a “social” ecology. All this means that humanity, if it truly desires peace, must be increasingly conscious of the links between natural ecology, or respect for nature, and human ecology. Experience shows that disregard for the environment always harms human coexistence, and vice versa...

These are questions that show how respect for nature is closely linked to the need to establish, between individuals and between nations, relationships that are attentive to the dignity of the person and capable of satisfying his or her authentic needs. The destruction of the environment, its improper or selfish use, and the violent hoarding of the earth's resources cause grievances, conflicts and wars, precisely because they are the consequences of an inhumane concept of development.

Quote: Benedict XVI, Message for World Day of Peace 2007; text here.
Ill: Codex aureus of Echternacht, ca. 1000.

The ten were indignant at the two brothers

2007-03-07T00:04:00.000+01:00

Humility is a beautiful quality to find in a person. It is a characteristic feature of those who have not forgotten their roots. The term "humility" is related to the word humus and points to a connectedness with the earth and, by extension, with all that inhabits the earthly sphere. The Book of Genesis reminds us that our race originated from the soil of earth: Adam from admah; humanity from humus. Humble people are down to earth, they are not alienated from their own nature. They accept their origins and are content to be what they are.

A first approach to understanding humility is to see it as that total self-acceptance typical of untarnished humanity. Those who are humble experience no shame. They do not need lies and evasions to inflate their importance in the eyes of their associates, or to buttress their self-esteem. They have overcome the tendency to regard others as competitors or rivals... The humble are equally content with both the gifts and the limitations that come from their nature or their personal history. Humility brings with it a fundamental happiness...

Quote: Michael Casey, Truthful Living (2001), 9.

Wikipedia fraud

2007-03-06T22:49:00.000+01:00

The internet is a gold mine, and in any gold mine nuggets of gold are found only by sifting tons of rubbish.

Wikipedia is a magnificently ambitious project for an ever-growing, ever-improving, self-verifying collaborative encyclopedia, whose innovative methodology has included turning its back on the traditional forms of quality control developed by encyclopedists and publishers over generations. Of course it keeps coming unstuck.

The latest disaster is the exposure of EssJay, a senior editor thought to be a tenured professor of religion at a private university with expertise in canon law, supposedly the author of 20,000 contributions to Wikipedia, who is in fact an unqualified 24 year-old from Kentucky.

Only a few years ago the principal challenge for a researcher was finding information. Now information is everywhere (11.7 million hits for Michelangelo, anyone?), and the challenge is evaluating information. Brave New World.

Atheism taking a beating

2007-03-06T21:44:00.000+01:00

Believers often enough find themselves bemused, perplexed, or exasperated by much that passes for critique of Christianity and of religion in general. We hear misrepresentations of Christian belief which would be funny if they did not so frustrate the possibility of serious conversation. We bear with more or less forbearance the attribution to us of stupidities not held by any instructed Christian. Even those most inclined to sympathise with the thoughtful questioning of fundamentals as itself a healthy part of theological reflection are likely to be antagonised by accusations made from the sheerest ignorance by those who ought to know better. So it's refreshing to read Terry Eagleton's now-famous review (entitled "Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching" in The London Review of Books, 19/10/2006) of Richard Dawkins' best-selling book The God Delusion.

Dawkins is the Oxford evolutionary biologist and well-known media figure who has been called "Darwin's rottweiler". Eagleton, professor of cultural theory at Manchester, is best known for his Marxist cultural and literary theory, though he was also involved in the past with left-wing Catholic groups such as Slant. His main criticisms of Dawkins, vigorously put in a style which matches Dawkins' characteristic aggressiveness, are that he knows next to nothing about the doctrines he professes to despise, and that his apparent inability to accept any corresponding critique of the limitations of science reveals him as something akin to a simple bigot.

Some quotations, including the pull-no-punches opening paragraph:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster...

Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his life, which is the life of freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and why science and Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible. The same is true of human beings: God is not an obstacle to our autonomy and enjoyment but, as Aquinas argues, the power that allows us to be ourselves. Like the unconscious, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is the source of our self-determination, not the erasure of it. To be dependent on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a matter of freedom and fulfilment. Indeed, friendship is the word Aquinas uses to characterise the relation between God and humanity.

Dawkins, who is as obsessed with the mechanics of Creation as his Creationist opponents, understands nothing of these traditional doctrines...

Now it may well be that all this is no more plausible than the tooth fairy. Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook. The mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism. Even moderate religious views, he insists, are to be ferociously contested, since they can always lead to fanaticism.

On the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare.

Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history – and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry.

Never look down

2007-03-06T07:45:00.000+01:00

Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find the right road.

Quote: Dag Hammarskjold (†1961).

R.I.P. Sodastream

2007-03-05T12:23:00.000+01:00

I think it was my nephew Tim who introduced me to the Melbourne indie duo Sodastream, which became one of my favourite Australian bands. It's sad to hear they've folded. Karl Smith's whispering fragile vocals and delicate guitar and keyboard playing were Nick Drake-ish, but the unusual combination with Pete Cohen's bowed and plucked double-bass gave them a sound that was their own: melancholy, unassuming, and bittersweet. Even at their saddest, there was an air of acceptance and compassion in their lyrics of yearning and loneliness that made their songs, for me anyway, uplifting and healing.

Here's their Chaplinesque video and the lyrics for "Heaven on the Ground" (from The Hill For Company). "Dr Karl's Comforting Hand" at the end is very affecting:

it seems my friends that all of my strength here
has gathered up and left me
all my heroes are hanging thin
they have burned
and turned forward to face me

all of these ends
seem to have little will little will to know thee
they have little skin to show
what they have earned
a chorus to awaken me

thought i’d seen heaven on the ground
and it seemed so far
it seemed so far below me
and it seemed so far
it seemed so far below me

old friend
i had so many things i wish i’d told you
so many brothers are calling in
what they had learned
before you went away from me
you went away from me

thought you’d seen heaven on the ground
and it seemed so far
it seemed so far below me
and it seemed so far
it seemed so far below me

Sit down, master, on this rude chair of praises

2007-03-05T00:15:00.000+01:00

Sit down, master, on this rude chair of praises, and rule my nervous heart with your great decrees of freedom. Out of time you have taken me to do my daily task. Out of mist and dust you have fashioned me to know the numberless words between the crown and the kingdom. In utter defeat I came to you and you received me with a sweetness I had not dared to remember. Tonight I come to you again, soiled by strategies and trapped in the loneliness of my tiny domain. Establish your law in this walled place. Let nine men come to lift me into their prayer so that I may whisper with them: Blessed be the name of the glory of the kingdom forever and forever.

Quote: Leonard Cohen, "Sit down, master", Book of Mercy (1984).

Pharisees and publicans

2007-03-04T09:55:00.000+01:00

Here is Simon Tugwell, OP, on the teaching of the 4th-century Syrian monk, Pseudo-Macarius:

The immediate result of grace is not that everything suddenly becomes easy for us; on the contrary, the immediate result is an increase in tension. The straightforward sinner or the completely perfect saint are both simple creatures, who act without effort; but once we have begun to be converted from sin without yet having attained perfection, there are two "personae" at work in us...

Macarius reckons that many people have far too superficial a view of the extent of our problem. They acquire a few external virtues and think that the job is done. But inner virtues are at least as important. We must not be misled by appearances: people whose outward behaviour is quite virtuous may in fact be in a much worse position than people who are entangled in various manifest sins, but are inwardly trusting, humble and courageous. These latter are much closer to healing than the former.

I think, by the way, that Tugwell's Ways of Imperfection: An Exploration of Christian Spirituality is among the finest and most insightful of the brief introductions to Christian spiritual and mystical writings, perhaps the finest of them all.

Quote: Ways of Imperfection (1984), 50-51.

Quiet inside

2007-03-03T00:52:00.000+01:00

Abba Poimen said, A man may seem to be silent, but if his heart is condemning others he is babbling ceaselessly.

Quote: Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Alphabetical Collection, Poimen 63; trans. B. Ward.

The stars the work of your hands

2007-03-02T14:57:00.000+01:00

I love the NASA image of the day, which you can get as a RSS feed, especially the magnificent deep space images from the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes.

The Trifid Nebula, aka M20, is easy to find with a small telescope and a well-known stop in the nebula rich constellation Sagittarius. But where visible light pictures show the nebula divided into three parts by dark, obscuring dust lanes, this penetrating infrared image reveals filaments of luminous gas and newborn stars.
This spectacular false-color view is courtesy of the Spitzer Space Telescope. Astronomers have used the Spitzer infrared image data to count newborn and embryonic stars that otherwise lie hidden in the natal dust and glowing clouds of this intriguing stellar nursery.

Image credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, J. Rho (SSC/Caltech)

Sayings of the Desert Fathers

2007-03-02T06:51:00.000+01:00

Over at his excellent blog biblicalia Kevin Edgecombe is posting a new translation of the Greek Alphabetical series of the Apophthegmata patrum, which he's making as a Lenten exercise (!). It begins here. There are also links to some of the more significant discussion on the tomb of Jesus shenanigans.

Before a sculptor

2007-03-02T00:08:00.000+01:00

Sometimes I think of myself as a piece of stone before a sculptor who desires to carve a statue: presenting myself in this way before God I ask him to fashion his perfect image in my soul, making me entirely like himself.

Quote: Lawrence of the Resurrection (†1691), Letter 2; in The Practice of the Presence of God, trans. S. Sciurba (1994), 54.

Rest beside the fountain of the Lord

2007-03-01T00:07:00.000+01:00

Here is another of the beautiful Odes of Solomon, among the earliest Christian poetic texts, dating probably from the late 1st or 2nd century:

Fill for yourselves water from the living fountain of the Lord
because it has been opened for you.
And come all you thirsty and take a drink
and rest beside the fountain of the Lord.
Because it is pleasing and sparkling
and perpetually refreshes the self.
For much sweeter is its water than honey
and the honeycomb of bees is not to be compared with it;
Because it flowed from the lips of the Lord
and is named from the heart of the Lord.
And it came boundless and invisible
and until it was set in the middle they knew it not.
Blessed are they who have drunk from it
and have refreshed themselves by it.
Hallelujah.

Quote: Odes of Solomon, 30; trans. James Charlesworth, more here.

Jesus' tomb again

2007-02-28T16:09:00.000+01:00

Ben Witherington has two good posts on the forthcoming documentary on the Talpiot ossuaries here and here.

Dave Brubeck's Mass

2007-02-28T15:31:00.000+01:00

For jazz-lovers here's an interesting article on Dave Brubeck's 1979 Mass setting, via Flos Carmeli.

Carmelite Third Order member to be canonised

2007-02-28T11:55:00.000+01:00

Fr George Preca (1880-1962), founder of the Society for Christian Doctrine in 1907 and a Carmelite tertiary, is to be canonised in Rome on 3 June. He will be Malta's first saint.

Dun Gorg, as he's known in Malta, was ahead of his time in his commitment to education of the poor and in his determination to create a lay evangelical movement.

Stational churches of Rome

2007-02-28T11:15:00.000+01:00

Every day in Lent has a “stational church” in Rome. By ancient practice, dating back basically to the 4th century and largely fixed by Gregory the Great in the 6th, on these days the pope, clergy and people of the city gathered for Mass at a designated church after a procession and litanies. Today's stational church is S. Maria Maggiore, the great 5th-century basilica on the Esquiline hill.

It’s sometimes reported that the practice was abandoned after the move of the popes to Avignon in 1305 and not revived till modern times, but this seems to be not entirely true. Margery Kempe, for example, records her participation in Lent of 1415, and the Augustinian friar John Capgrave mentions it in the early 1450s. At any rate, these days the practice seems to be growing in popularity, and there are various guides on the web to each day's church. Over at Argent by the Tiber is a series with excellent pictures. The Pontifical Academy Cultorum Martyrum, which is responsible for the organisation of the stational liturgies, has stuff on its website (in Italian and a bit dry). There are numerous other guides, including one at the website of the North American College.

It would be good, though, if these stories of the stational churches were more careful in distinguishing history and legend.

Wells and fountains and countless rivers

2007-02-28T00:38:00.000+01:00

Just as that one well which is the word of God becomes wells and fountains and countless rivers, so the soul of man which is made to the image of God is capable of containing and producing wells and fountains and rivers. However, in point of fact, the wells that are in our souls need someone to dig them out. They have to be cleansed and everything earthly taken away from them that those springs of spiritual sensibility which God has put there may produce pure and wholesome waters.

Quote: Origen (3rd cent.); q. Aelred Squire, Asking the Fathers (1973), 106.

Remains of Jesus found? Well, not really

2007-02-27T06:58:00.000+01:00

"To a layman's eye it seems pretty darn compelling," said executive producer and Titanic director James Cameron. "This is the biggest archaeological story of the century."

Except that it's not really. The old-hat report on a tomb discovered in Jerusalem's Talpiot neighbourhood in 1980 will be broadcast around the world on Sunday. A press conference in New York kicked off the usual promotional hype yesterday. Has Jesus' family tomb been found, with the ossuaries of Jesus, his mother Mary, his wife Mary Magdalene, his son Judah? "Now it's time for the debate to begin," said Cameron.

Except that there's no debate. Amos Kloner, the Israeli archaeologist who found the ossuaries 27 years ago, says in an interview in the Jerusalem Post that the story is "nonsense". "There is no likelihood that Jesus and his relatives had a family tomb [in Jerusalem]," Kloner said. "They were a Galilee family with no ties in Jerusalem. The Talpiot tomb belonged to a middle-class family from the 1st century CE." The names on the ossuaries were among the most common of the period, and their discovery together is of no special significance.

The same story circulated ten years ago, when the Sunday Times said it "challenges the very basis of Christianity." The fact that it's déja vu, has no scientific basis, and is derided by the experts will probably have no effect in our increasingly vapid and conscienceless infotainment culture.

Why do so many people want to believe these Dan Brown-effect stories? Searching for an answer to that question is a real challenge for the church. A longing for the esoteric and occult, a fascination with the adventurous dynamics of conspiracy theories, a far-reaching distrust of institutions, scientific skepticism about the miraculous, postmodern doubt about great narratives, all these are no doubt part of the reason. But there is also perhaps a yearning for a truly human Jesus, a yearning apparently no longer satisfied by the traditional formulations about one "like us in all things but sin", and we're left with the question of how to communicate an adequate Christology in terms that make sense in our time and culture.

See your eyes in him

2007-02-27T06:00:00.000+01:00

Today's Lenten quote is from the Odes of Solomon. Long thought largely lost, the Odes were only rediscovered in 1908, and scholars are still discussing the origin and nature of this joyous, ecstatic collection of mystical poems. Though some scholars have considered the odes of Jewish or Gnostic origin, the present consensus is that are originally from a Greek or Syriac Christian community of the late 1st or early 2nd century, and so are among the earliest surviving Christian songs and poetry.

Ode 13 is a brief and beautiful poem with a striking take on the idea that we are created in the image of God:

Behold, the Lord is our mirror.
Open your eyes and see them in Him,
and learn the manner of your face,
then declare praises to His Spirit,
and wipe the paint from your face,
and love His holiness and put it on:
then you will be unblemished at all times with Him.
Hallelujah.

Quote: Odes of Solomon, 13 (2nd cent.), trans. James Charlesworth; more here.

The heart is a rage of directions

2007-02-26T00:07:00.000+01:00

I lost my way. I forgot to call on your name. The raw heart beat against the world, and the tears were for my lost victory. But you are here. You have always been here. The world is all forgetting, and the heart is a rage of directions, but your name unifies the heart, and the world is lifted into its place. Blessed is the one who waits in the traveller's heart for his turning.

Quote: Leonard Cohen, "I Lost My Way", Book of Mercy (1984).

Never far from us

2007-02-25T00:22:00.000+01:00

Many people regard themselves as being far from God, whom they are not strong enough to follow. But no one should think this! We should in no way regard ourselves as being far from God, neither on account of our weakness or our failings or anything else. And if your great sins have ever driven you so far from him that you regard yourself as not being close to God, then you should still regard God as being close to you. It can be very destructive if we regard God as being distant from us since, whether we are far or near to him, he is never far from us and is always close at hand. If he cannot remain within, then he goes no further than the door.

Quote: Meister Eckhart, Talks of Instruction, 17; trans. Oliver Davies (1994).

If you want fish, learn to get wet

2007-02-24T12:55:00.000+01:00

Learn how to let go of God through God, the hidden God through the naked God. Be willing to lose a penny in order to find a guilder. Get rid of the water, so that you can make wine... If you want to learn to avoid things, learn to suffer; if you want to eat of the honey, you should not be put off by the bee's sting. If you want to catch fish, learn to get wet; if you want to see Jesus on the shore, learn to sink down into the sea first... Listen. Look. Suffer and be still. Release yourself into the light. See with intellect. Learn with discretion. Suffer with joy. Rejoice with longing. Have desire with forbearance. Complain to no one. My child, be patient and release yourself, because no one can dig God out from the ground of your heart.

Quote: "The Silent Outcry" (14th c.); trans. Bernard McGinn, Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism (2006).

Not enough books

2007-02-23T20:33:00.000+01:00

To buy more books than you can possibly read is to approach somewhat to the infinite.

Better than fasting

2007-02-23T00:23:00.000+01:00

Conquering the tongue is better than fasting on bread and water.

Quote: St John of the Cross, Sayings of Light and Love, 170.

The drawing of this Love

2007-02-23T00:15:00.000+01:00

Quotation is almost inevitably a form of manipulation. It can't be helped, but it's good to be aware of it. These famous and much-quoted lines are excerpted from T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding" in Four Quartets, towards the end, but they are almost always quoted without the first line. It makes a big difference, don't you think?

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Quote: T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"; taken from Four Quartets: an accurate online text here.

Inconceivable surprise of living

2007-02-22T15:23:00.000+01:00

In prayer we shift the centre of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender. To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery, that animates all things. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living; it is all we can offer in return for the mystery in which we live.

Quote: Abraham Joshua Heschel (†1972)

John of the Cross and renunciation

2007-02-22T12:17:00.000+01:00

My old teacher Fr Brian Pitman always told people to read John of the Cross backwards: see the point of arrival first in the Living Flame and Spiritual Canticle, then go back and work through the Ascent and Dark Night, which talk about the earlier stages of the spiritual journey. Only some sense of where you heading, he would say, will keep you going through all that stuff. I think it's good advice.

It's challenging enough to be told to give up bad things, but it makes easy sense. However, it's scary to read that "all of a person's attachments to creatures are pure darkness in God's sight...; first [you] must reject them" (Ascent 1.4.1). What kind of starting point is this?

But you have to read carefully. John is always comparing: he does not think we should despise the being and beauty, grace and elegance, goodness and wisdom that surround us — they are God's handiwork — but we must know that God transcends them all to an infinite degree. Infinity is a hard notion to grasp, but it is a key to understanding John of the Cross. To say that his spiritual teaching demands of us a new sense of proportion makes it sound wishy-washy, like a facilitator searching for compromise at a rowdy meeting, but that is what he wants: a sense of proportion conceived in the face of the infinite. In John the disproportion between finite and infinite is dramatic and radical and its consequence is an entirely new way of looking at the world, and a changed way of making choices:

If you are offered the satisfaction of hearing things that have no relation to the service and glory of God, do not desire this pleasure or the hearing of these things. When you have the opportunity for the gratification of looking upon objects that will not help you love God more, do not desire this gratification or sight... (Ascent 1.13.4)

Thomas Merton says that John and other mystical writers

must not be misinterpreted to mean that the normal culture of the senses, of artistic taste, of imagination, and of intelligence should be formally renounced by anyone interested in a life of meditation and prayer. On the contrary, such culture is presupposed. One cannot go beyond what one has not yet attained, and normally the realization that God is "beyond images, symbols and ideas" draws only one who has previously made a good use of all these things... (Climate of Monastic Prayer, 1969, 115).

Falling asleep in church

2007-02-21T23:01:00.000+01:00

Some elders came to see Abba Poimen and asked him, If we see some brothers falling asleep in church, do you want us to reprimand them and make them stay awake? And he said to them, Well, when I see a brother falling asleep, I lay his head on my lap and let him sleep.

Quote: Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Alphabetical Collection, Poimen 92.

Bob Dylan mood

2007-02-21T22:36:00.000+01:00

Over at Faith and Theology Benjamin Myers, who has a whole bunch of good Dylan posts, says there's a Bob Dylan album for every mood, and offers as evidence an interesting list. How's this for a Lent mood from Dylan's wonderful latest (other lyrics here):

In the still of the night, in the world's ancient light
Where wisdom grows up in strife
My bewildering brain, toils in vain
Through the darkness on the pathways of life
Each invisible prayer is like a cloud in the air
Tomorrow keeps turning around
We live and we die, we know not why
But I'll be with you when the deal goes down

We eat and we drink, we feel and we think
Far down the street we stray
I laugh and I cry and I'm haunted by
Things I never meant nor wished to say
The midnight rain follows the train
We all wear the same thorny crown
Soul to soul, our shadows roll
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down

Quote: Bob Dylan, "When the Deal Goes Down", Modern Times (2006).

Treasure is everywhere

2007-02-20T23:24:00.000+01:00

Let's not be deceived. Lent, like everything else in Christianity, must begin not with work but with grace:

Here is the coin of the Gospel parable, the treasure which we never find because we imagine it to be too far away... Do not ask the secret of finding this treasure. There is no secret. This treasure is everywhere. It is offered to us at every moment and in every place... We have only to open our mouths and they will be filled.

Divine activity floods the whole universe; it pervades all creatures; it flows over them. Wherever they are, it is there; it precedes, accompanies and follows them. We have but to allow ourselves to be carried forward on the crest of its waves.

Quote: Jean-Pierre de Caussade (†1751), Self-abandonment to Divine Providence, 1.3; trans. A. Thorold (1959).

Thoughts for Lent

2007-02-20T21:56:00.000+01:00

I'm going to put up a thought for each day in Lent, or a quote, or a meditation of some kind, anything that might be food for thought. I'll take some from the Carmelite spiritual tradition to which I belong, which draws also on the fathers of the church and various medieval spiritual and mystical writers, but other thoughts will come from here and there. I'll try if I can to avoid the standard things and to offer, at least some of the time, a thought that might seem to come from somewhere strange or to unfold something unexpected: not just to startle, but because the yearning for the transcendent is all around us, even when it is in disguise, and because we need to be in training to welcome the Messiah, who comes when least expected.

Ash Wednesday and John of the Cross

2007-02-20T12:01:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the penitential season which leads up to Easter, which traditionally has a threefold call to prayer, fasting and almsgiving: which in other words demands a re-assessment and re-orientation of our relations to God, our inner selves, and the world in which we live.

I've been impressed again with how tellingly Segundo Galilea re-expresses some of the insights of John of the Cross about the meaning of renunciation. John expresses himself in the most absolute terms, in his famous nadas: not this, not that, nothing, nothing, nothing, "even on the Mount nothing":

To come to enjoy what you have not
you must go by a way in which you enjoy not.
To come to the knowledge you have not
you must go by a way in which you know not.
To come to the possession of what you have not
you must go by a way in which you possess not.
To come to be what you are not
you must go by a way in which you are not. (Ascent 1.13.11)

Many readers are shocked by John's apparent contempt for "creatures", for the earth ("nothing"), and for our desires and affections ("less than nothing"). Does that mean he's targeting all those people and things that we usually think of as enriching our lives and making them joyous and meaningful? In fact, for John, "nothing" is never an absolute term, but a comparative one: the beauty of creatures becomes nothing only when compared to the infinite beauty of their Maker; our desires become less than nothing when they are destructive.

Renunciation, therefore, is not an absolute: it is ultimately a new sense of the proportion and purpose of all things: it is our false gods and alienated affections which must be cast out, the inauthenticities and incoherences of our lives, our enslavements and self-deceptions, our corruptions and compromises of the good. When John speaks — so bewilderingly to us modern readers — of the eradication of all "attachments", we need to hear him speaking of what we might call compulsions. His aim is not the diminishment of life, but its liberation.

Segundo Galilea compares John's apparent negativity about our inner selves with our generation's negativity about the contemporary world. We're all too conscious of how human beings oppress one another and the earth itself, of the manipulativeness of our ideologies, the destructiveness of our materialism, the superficiality of our infotainment, the capriciousness of our conscience about the poor, the abuse of limited resources destined for all and exploited by few. But our pessimism can be an abdication of responsibility, and in the age of global warming we all know that our liberation, perhaps our survival, can only come through a kind of asceticism:

It is not enough for us to be aware of the fact that consumerism, the materialism of our culture, or the gap between the rich and poor constitute an evil; rather we have to do something to avoid being seduced by them and to change this state of things... It is useless to criticize a consumerist society unless we ourselves consume less — and this entails austerity and voluntary poverty... Every form of human liberation must pass through the renunciations and death of selfishness which are involved in overcoming our own servitudes and those of others — modern versions of the nadas of St. John of the Cross.

We would be fooling ourselves if we thought we could change the world without changing ourselves, and stripping ourselves of our self-serving illusions. Lent and John of the Cross agree on that, and it is increasingly the cultural and political imperative of our times.

Quote: Segundo Galilea, The Future of our Past: The Spanish Mystics Speak to Contemporary Spirituality, Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1985, 54-55.

The fire between your will and ours, in which we are refined (Leonard Cohen)

2007-02-19T23:35:00.000+01:00

Holy is your name, holy is your work, holy are the days that return to you. Holy are the years that you uncover. Holy are the hands that are raised to you, and the weeping that is wept to you. Holy is the fire between your will and ours, in which we are refined. Holy is that which is unredeemed, covered with your patience. Holy are the souls lost in your unnaming. Holy, and shining with great light, is every living thing, established in this world and covered with time, until your name is praised forever.

Quote: Leonard Cohen, "Holy is Your Name", Book of Mercy (1984).

Nine choirs of angels

2007-02-19T20:55:00.000+01:00

One of my confrères revealed at lunch the other day that a professor of his, who should have known better, had repeated the hoary old myth, known to be false since 1890, that medieval theologians had debated how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. Much effort in identifying the source of the notion has managed to track it back only as far as 1638 and the Oxford theologian William Chillingworth’s Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation.

However, the conversation set me off searching the web about angels, and I came across a marvelous post on Siris about the doctrine of Pseudo-Dionysius' Celestial Hierarchy on the nine choirs of angels, which made it all clear to me in a way it never was before.

Pseudo-Dionysius was concerned not only to speculate about angels, but to explore the meaning of participation in God, and his choirs of angels are defined by the level of their participation in the divine glory. Since it is also human destiny to participate in the divine, and since for Dionysius something of the structure of the angelic hierarchies is contained in every human and angelic being, a reflection on angelic intelligences is really a reflection on the dynamic of transformation in God and an opening towards it.

Here are some extracts, but I found the whole post a penny-drop experience:

The Order of Angelic Choirs That Are Most Concerned with the Manifest and Mundane
Angel
Archangel
Principality

The Order of Intermediate Angelic Choirs
Virtue: Forceful Strength
Power: Mighty Order
Domininion: Sublime Authority

The Order of Angelic Choirs That Are Immersed in the Presence of God
Throne: Majestic Righteousness
Cherub: Overflowing Wisdom
Seraph: Ardent Love

... But simply stating the order simply doesn't do justice to the Dionysian discussion. The whole point, as we find in the first few chapters of the Celestial Hierarchy, is not to discuss angels but to discuss participation in the divine; the orders are levels of participation in divine glory by intelligences, and the reason for discussing it is that we may better understand what participation in the divine involves. For it is our destiny to participate in God's light and love. The alternatives are to talk about this participation in terms of human beings or in terms of God's supereminent possession of excellences. The value of thinking of it in terms of angels rather than humans is that angels are pure cases: we can talk about them without dragging all the finer complications that are involved in talking about human beings... So the point of discussing the matter at all is not to satisfy curiosity about angels, but to guide us in union with God:
By moulding itself after their likeness our own hierarchy will, as far as possible, be assimilated to it and will, in very deed, show forth, as in images, the angelic beauty; receiving its form from them, and being uplifted by them to the superessential Source of every Hierarchy.
Indeed, the Dionysian goes so far as to say that the hierarchies are recapitulated, or at least there is something analogous to them, to some degree in every angelic and human intelligence... To focus on the angels alone is to miss the point; as the old proverb says, when a finger points at the moon, only a dog looks at the finger.

Ill. Detail of an 18th-century Ethiopian manuscript.

Creation theology

2007-02-18T17:52:00.000+01:00

This stunning image of the Cat's Eye Nebula 3000 light years away is taken from NASA's stunning image of the day site, which often has astonishing pictures from the Hubble Space telescope (the RSS feed is here, and Hubble has its own site here).

In The Pale Blue Dot Carl Sagan wrote: "In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe." Can it be true that our theology of creation is so dramatically failing us and everybody else?

The picture made me think unexpectedly of this poem by E.E. Cummings, for whom wonder is never far away, and for whom all love is an opening onto the transcendent:

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

Contemplation, reading, and moving your lips

2007-02-13T22:41:00.000+01:00

A thought-provoking essay by James Carroll today in the International Herald Tribune reflects on the link between reading, interiority, contemplation, and politics. Carroll asks what might happen to our consciousness as traditional forms of reading are changed by new technologies, which invite us not so much to meditative self-awareness as to "simultaneous multiplicity of experience".

St Augustine was famously amazed to see St Ambrose reading without moving his lips and speaking the words. Says Carroll:

What Augustine saw in Ambrose was an instance of pure interiority, reading as entry into a contemplative world. Augustine here embraced the philosophical ideal that would define him from then on — inner life as absolute. His conversion followed.

Where before, Augustine had regarded the Bible as the word of God, now he understood that the text of Scripture does not become the word until it enters the believer's consciousness... Silent reading is thus both the sign of and a means to self-awareness, with the knower taking responsibility for what is known... With every person able to read in the mode of Ambrose, the genius of Ambrose could belong to all. But democracy assumes the protection of the values that contemplative reading makes possible — the self- awareness of citizens, their privacy, their capacity for willed interiority. Only because of such reading is each one a center of knowing, thinking, choosing, and acting. But what happens to consciousness when such values are put at risk?

That is the question today. Once again, as occurred when the scroll became the book, innovations in technology that change the primal experience of reading are causing a shift in consciousness.

Words on a subtly flickering screen come to the eye differently than from the page, and who knows yet what that difference does? The main note of interaction between readers and what is read electronically has become interruption, since the Internet, e-mail, instant messaging, talk radio, and even audio books all assume a simultaneous multiplicity of experience.

Mutations inevitably follow in the way humans relate to language. Privacy, meanwhile, is undercut by government intrusion, shrinking the meditative realm. The busyness of daily life wars against the tranquil mind. It may be too soon to know what all of this is doing to us, but before this era ends, don't be surprised to find your lips moving once again.

Ill.: Benozzo Gozzoli, St Augustine Reading the Epistle of St Paul, Sant'Agostino, San Gimignano, ca. 1465.

Sorrow, mysticism and Oscar Wilde

2007-01-12T23:37:00.000+01:00

A breathless article in The Times last week headed "Vatican comes out of the closet and embraces Oscar" has been picked up all over the web. The cause of all the astonishment (feigned? or do even religion writers know this little about religion?) is a recently-published book Provocazioni: Aforismi per un cristianesimo anticonformista (Provocations: Aphorisms for a Anti-Conformist Christianity). The author is Fr Leonardo Sapienza, a Rogationist Father, well-known spiritual author, and (gasp!) chief of protocol of the Pontifical Household.

The source of the fuss is the presence of aphorisms from Oscar Wilde. The Times claims that Wilde, "a dissolute and disgraced homosexual", has "long been regarded with distaste by the Vatican". A somewhat cooler-headed article ("The Vatican goes Wilde"--oh dear) by Paul Vallely in The Independent has a bit more insight.

Fr Sapienza thinks that Wilde "has left us some razor-sharp maxims with a moral". Indeed he did. But what makes his story interesting and appealing from a Christian point of view is that it is a story of conversion and of a profound spiritual journey, one which brought him "into harmony with the wounded, broken and great heart of the world". "Where there is sorrow", he says, "there is holy ground".

De profundis (an e-text is here), which he wrote towards the end of his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, is more than a source of smart aphorisms: at least in its central sections it really deserves to be thought of as a spiritual classic.

Wilde was conscious that, in a certain sense, he had represented his age, a position few can hold and in which fewer are recognised in their lifetime. Much of what he says about himself still remains descriptive of contemporary culture:

Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. Desire, at the end, was a malady... I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it.

Wilde says of his once charmed, privileged and brilliant life: "I used to live entirely for pleasure... It was always springtime once in my heart". But prison brought him wild despair, grief, rage, bitterness, scorn, "anguish that wept aloud, misery that could find no voice, sorrow that was dumb... Better than Wordsworth himself I know what Wordsworth meant when he said, 'Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark / And has the nature of infinity'." Sorrow hollowed him out and and left him at the end only with humility:

It is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived, the starting-point for fresh development... Of all things it is the strangest. One cannot acquire it, except by surrendering everything that one has. It is only when one has lost all things that one knows that one possesses it...

He had evidently had to endure the easy cliched comforts which we offer the sorrowing when we have not known real sorrow ourselves or when we think that any word will always be better than silence, and he recognised their painful superficiality:

Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. One discerns things one never discerned before... Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God... It was, of course, my soul in its essence that I had reached. In many ways I had been its enemy, but I found it waiting for me as a friend... It is tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die... Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation...

He did not turn at once to conventional religion. He was in the dark night where conventional religion and easy faith are purified, where God is elusive and out of reach precisely because he is God:

Religion does not help me... When I think about religion at all, I feel as though I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar on which no taper burned, a priest in whose heart peace had no dwelling might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine.

(It was in these very same months of 1897 that the dying Thérèse of Lisieux, deep in her own dark night, was writing: the veil of faith "is no longer a veil for me, it is a wall which goes right up to the heavens... When I sing of the happiness of heaven... I feel no joy in this, for I sing simply what I want to believe"; Ms C 7v.)

But every morning, after the compulsory scrubbing out of his cell, Oscar was reading a few pages of the Gospels in Greek. If De profundis is a spiritual classic for his insights into himself, it is even more so, I think, for the insights he drew into Christ from this Gospel reading, into sin and sorrow, and into the paradox of the sinner "as the nearest possible approach to the perfection of man".

(To be continued)

Epiphany

2007-01-06T20:21:00.000+01:00

With the star we have hurried to him, and with the Magi we have worshipped, and with the shepherds we too have been illuminated; with the angels we have glorified him, and with Simeon taken him up in our arms, and with Anna the aged and chaste we have responded with our confession.
And let us give thanks to him who came to his own in the guise of a stranger, because he has revealed the glory that is in the stranger.

Gregory Nazianzen, Sermon 16.14

Ill: Detail from 12th-cent. Epiphany fresco from the Iglesia de la Asunción, Navasa

Carmelite Liturgical Calendar

2007-01-06T09:55:00.000+01:00

For users of Google Calendar I've posted a Carmelite Liturgical Calendar. It includes the feasts and readings for each day according to the usual Roman Calendar, as well as the additional feasts proper to the Carmelites:

Pascal on saints then and now

2007-01-03T21:11:00.000+01:00

“...we usually regard St Athanasius, St Theresa and the rest as crowned with glory and years, judged almost divine before our time. Now that time has cleared things up, this is what it looks like, but at the time when he was being persecuted this great saint was just a man called Athanasius; and St Theresa was just a mad woman. Elias was a man, subject to like passions as we are, as St Peter says [i.e. James 5.17], to rid Christians of the false idea which makes us reject the example of the saints as bearing no relation to our state. “They were saints”, we say, “it is not the same for us”. What happened then in those days?”

Pascal, Pensées 598/868, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer

Blogging the Bible

2007-01-01T14:53:00.000+01:00

I am enjoying following David Plodz's "Blogging the Bible" in Slate. This is his project:

I decided I would, for the first time as an adult, read the Bible. And I would blog about it as I went along. For the millions of Jews and Christians who know the Bible intimately, this may seem obscene: Why should an ignoramus write about the stories and lessons that you know by heart and understand well? I don't intend any kind of insult. My goal is not to find contradictions, mock impossible events, or scoff at hypocrisy... My goal is pretty simple. I want to find out what happens when an ignorant person actually reads the book on which his religion is based. I think I'm in the same position as many other lazy but faithful people (Christians, Jews, Moslems, Hindus). I love Judaism; I love (most of) the lessons it has taught me about how to live in the world; and yet I realized I am fundamentally ignorant about its foundation, its essential document. So, what will happen if I approach my Bible empty, unmediated by teachers or rabbis or parents? What will delight and horrify me? How will the Bible relate to the religion I practice, and the lessons I thought I learned in synagogue and Hebrew School...

At the moment he's in Isaiah. His section titles (Does the Book of Isaiah Predict Christmas? Is the Book of Isaiah Supposed To Be Funny? How the Book of Isaiah Is Like Sports Talk Radio) give an idea of the tone, but it seems to me he's struck a way of inviting us all to read the Scriptures with a fresh eye. If there's not a whole lot of spiritual insight, maybe that's because it is the do-it-yourself part of the project.

In the Carmelite spiritual tradition, reading the Bible is not so much like reading a book as it is entering into a conversation, and no-one else can do that for you.

and history immeasurably is wealthier by a single sweet day's death

2007-01-01T10:05:00.000+01:00

Time's a strange fellow;
more he gives than takes
(and he takes all)nor any marvel finds
quite disappearance but some keener makes
losing, gaining
— love! if a world ends

more than all worlds begin to(see?)begin

e.e. cummings

photo: pac

Dialogue with God

2006-12-28T22:21:00.000+01:00

A few years ago Michael Plattig, Carmelite friar, and Elisabeth Hense, Lay Carmelite, edited an excellent anthology in German of spiritual texts, one for each day of the year: Dich suchen Tag und Nacht: Mystik in der Tradition des Karmel (To seek you day and night: mysticism in the tradition of Carmel), Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 2001). It includes extracts from 45 Carmelite authors, many of them little known today, arranged thematically. I'm preparing an English version, and will occasionally post some extracts, first from the introductions to each month. Here is February, on the theme Dialogue with God.

A characteristic of idols, according to the Psalmist, is among other things that they can't hear and can't speak: they are incapable of communication (Ps 115.4–7). In contrast, those who pray to Yahweh, the God of Israel, experience a living God, One who speaks to them, who works in and through history, who is in dialogue with them. The "aliveness" of God manifests itself especially in his profound capacity and willingness for self-communication.
That is also the experience of Carmel: whether expressed in the image of the Bride and Bridegroom, or in the terms of Teresa's definition of prayer as a "conversation with a friend", over and over again a living dialogue with God has been proposed as a fundamental element of Carmelite spirituality.
Therefore, it is essential that dialogue with God is practiced and nurtured with the same attention one would give to a friendship, as Teresa's image suggests. This means on our part an effort and a consciousness that our every step towards and with God is always a response to the Word of God already addressed to us. This Word of God is spoken in Scripture, in the tradition of the Church, in the experience of believers before us. It is happening now in worship, in the sacraments of the Church, in personal prayer. To enter into conversation with God means, therefore, to seek out these "places", to engage myself with his words, so that I can discover the Word he addresses to me, and to me only, and become able to answer it.

the holy innocents

2006-12-27T19:32:00.000+01:00

It was long traditional to remark, even to flaunt the fact, that the white of Christmas is soon followed by the red of martyrs, St Stephen and the Holy Innocents. We're a bit more squeamish today. Perhaps it's because our ancestors were more familiar with death: they killed their own meat, and we get it shrink-wrapped. Or perhaps we have become rightly suspicious of the kind of devotions which romanticise suffering when our lives are safe and comfortable. The Holy Innocents seem a rude intrusion on our post-Christmas surfeit.

In a very thought-provoking Urbi et orbi address at Christmas Benedict XVI struck a challenging call to a more international consciousness:

Is a Saviour needed by a humanity which has invented interactive communication, which navigates in the virtual ocean of the internet and, thanks to the most advanced modern communications technologies, has now made the Earth, our great common home, a global village? This humanity of the twenty-first century appears as a sure and self-sufficient master of its own destiny, the avid proponent of uncontested triumphs.
So it would seem, yet this is not the case. People continue to die of hunger and thirst, disease and poverty, in this age of plenty and of unbridled consumerism. Some people remain enslaved, exploited and stripped of their dignity; others are victims of racial and religious hatred, hampered by intolerance and discrimination, and by political interference and physical or moral coercion with regard to the free profession of their faith. Others see their own bodies and those of their dear ones, particularly their children, maimed by weaponry, by terrorism and by all sorts of violence, at a time when everyone invokes and acclaims progress, solidarity and peace for all. And what of those who, bereft of hope, are forced to leave their homes and countries in order to find humane living conditions elsewhere? How can we help those who are misled by facile prophets of happiness, those who struggle with relationships and are incapable of accepting responsibility for their present and future, those who are trapped in the tunnel of loneliness and who often end up enslaved to alcohol or drugs? What are we to think of those who choose death in the belief that they are celebrating life?

How can we not hear, from the very depths of this humanity, at once joyful and anguished, a heart-rending cry for help?