Concerning Denizens of the Indian Street (A Lenten Post)

I've been holding off on this post for a few days, thinking I would have something sage come to me to say, but I have nothing.  

As you probably are aware, there is profound poverty in India.  Half of the population, of over a billion, subsists on less than a dollar a day.  Two thirds of the larger world's population does the same. 

The Western (and Japanese, there are a few of them about here) tourist comes here with the power of the banks behind them, flush with cash.  Prices here are - for goods and services provided by and intended for these poor - extremely low.  As La La - a girl I met here who lives in the street - put it, "Indian girl cheap, American man expensive."  

There are other things I could say here concerning all this; about for example, say, Mother Theresa and the Western conscience, but I'm not in the frame of mind or heart to hold forth like that tonight. I'll just post some pictures I took of people I've known in Chennai this past month who live in the street - I'd say that they actually are not "homeless" in the Western sense, because their home is somehow the street. Whole extended families, who are not addicts, who engage in rudimentary commerce (selling rice, driving a tuk tuk), who have possessions arrayed about them, and who are in no way molested by anyone, not even the police, live up and down most sidewalks here. They tend even to dress well, and even wear expensive jewelry, so forth.. It is incredible, really.

Here, then, without further commentary, are some of the street people of Chennai, all of them members of the same extended family:

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Picture of the Day: Succinctly Summating Why I Shall Forever Prefer la Cuccina Italiana to la Cuisine Française..

As I've said somewhere once before, paté is for cats, and the Italians know it.

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Now, Some Good News..

For those of you who will understand. They put the repaired statue up again, in front of the newly consecrated (as of this fall) parish church the day before yesterday:

Pretty spiffy, eh? About time, finally..

 

 

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Upon the Recent Hubba- Ballooo Over All Pope Francis's "Scandalous" Comments About Erotic Sin, etc. [revised]

[Written in response to all the crap like this in the media, in reaction to interviews like this, these days.]

On the hierarchy of needs sexual pleasure falls well behind prayer, love, friendship, clean air, good food, clean water, sleep, good sanitation, shelter, medical care and education. The West's current obsession with it is merely a sign of its decadence and spiritual bankruptcy. The pope is talking to us like babies- yes, you can masturbate and we will still love you. God still loves you when you wack off into someone's mouth or anus. That this is taken as big news here is hilarious.

I mean, the operative question here is - now and forever shall be - not whether God and his Church loves each of us, it's whether or not we love God and his Church. It's whether or not we love the Truth (who is a person) and one another..

The pope is a Jesuit and a Catholic priest.  The things he has been saying about sodomy are not new. It's called moral casuistry, a.k.a. Catholic moral theology. See Molina, Escobar and Suarez; John the Baptist,  John Vianney and Padre Pio. See in the Bible where it says "judge not lest you be judged" and "take the beam out of your own eye before you condemn your brother for the speck in his" and then again "love your enemy" and then "he loved me while I was still in sin, I, the foremost of sinners."

Love the sinner, not the sin. Forgive, and you shall be forgiven. Justice (being merely the consummation of mercy) is mine, says the LORD.

The pope cannot and will not declare sodomy sex, because it is not sex. That's just biological fact. And it isn't just those with same sex attraction who commit it. He cannot tell us the earth is the center of the universe in any other sense than it happens to be the center of our universe. The Roman inquisition once got itself balled up on that point, hewing incorrectly to Aristotelean and Ptolemaic scientific consensus, and the world has never let us forget it, has it?

So, this pope is saying nothing new. He isn't going to endorse the sexual revolution by abandoning Catholic anthropology. And sin is still sin - love of money, hatred of the immigrant amongst us, denial the worker of his just wage, the murder of innocents and (yes) sodomy are still - and shall forever be - sins that cry to heaven for vengeance.  These are also sins that we, the people of the de-Christianizing West, commit with abandon.

The pope is waiting for us to confess, reminding many of us who call ourselves Christian that pride, perjury, wrath, envy, gluttony, sloth, avarice, murder, *as well as* hatred of the poor and sinful, are just as sinful as lust & sexual decadence is. If not more so..



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This Green Mountain Daybreak

desde la ventana de mi habitacion

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"Everything in the World Can & Will Be Made Better, the Only Question is by Whom & How.."

Side by Side, review. A- , 4/5 *,  95% Tomato Meter.

This documentary is an interesting exploration of the current revolution in film making away from celluloid (photo chemical exposure) toward digital exposure.  It treats the evolution of the technologies, their respective strengths and flaws, and includes interviews with many directors and other people involved in film making, discussing the trend.

"Filmaking" has always been a somewhat insubstantial exercise, the "projection" of light through a film of chemical gauze; casting light, color and shadow on a blank wall.  The one substantial aspect of the experience has until now been the film itself, the alchemaic artefact that gave film it's material reality, gave it its "there, there."

Now, the industry is abandoning film for algorithmic traces on a silicon chip, fleeting ever further into insubstantiality, into ephemeral abstraction. There is more freedom to create greater fantasy there, they say. This is what progress is, in its lack of essence: slipping material bonds, consummating consciousness in a triumphant manipulation of and victory over matter, ultimately ascending to the point that we finally escape the constraints of matter altogether. Intellect and imagination slip their material bonds, and achieve gnostic transcendence.

So it is somehow oddly appropriate that Keanu Reeves - the star of Bill & Ted's Excellent Time Traveling Adventure (for isn't time travel one of the most fundamental subversions of this material space time continuum in which we are enmeshed?) and the Matrix Trilogy (one of perhaps the purest gnostic fantasies that Hollywood has yet graced us with) - is the auteur of this interesting documentary.  Fantasy land is becoming even more fantastic, and even less substantial than ever before. And Ted is there to report back to us upon progress's inexorable march.

Until the 19th Century humanity kept its artistic and intellectual record on substantial matter such as paper, plaster, animal skin and canvas. Camera film is is different from these in that light is not reflected off it, but rather through it. It is also more delicate than most of these more ancient media, and it poses more difficult challenges to archivists who seek to preserve it. In 1902 there was an international congress of film makers, who in the spirit of the French Revolution and the positivist tradition, came together to set an international standard for film, guaranteeing that film making and projecting technology would be universal and standardized, ensuring that all film shot from then until now would all be accessible using the same tools, the same industrial paradigms. 35 mm film is always 35 mm film, and can be fed into any projector manufactured to that standard in the last century.

In the 1970's and 80's however, video tape and computer imaging was developed. In the rush of technological development there has been much that has been produced that no longer can be viewed, because in that short rush of evolutionary change we now no longer have the tools to access some of the things created only ten to thirty years ago. Imagine trying to access information stored on a floppy disc, an 8 track or VHS tape. Not so easy, these days. Such technology is all too quickly obsolete and the information recorded with it now inaccessible.

Because now rather than  using film, or electromagnetic tape, or even paper, most imagery and text is being recorded on silicon chips, hard drives. What is the nature of this new medium? What are its weaknesses, its strengths?  In this film Sad Keanu

has found his voice, and while he gives quite a bit of time to advocates of film and critics of the dawning digital age, it's ultimately pretty clear that Keanu is proselytizing for the new order. It's hard not to be impressed by the power of the new technology.. Still, nagging questions linger.

For while it is true that the rush of technological advance has given us in some ways greater freedom - we can now watch movies on four inch screens that we carry in out pockets - it may be also true that we could be simultaneously eradicating our relationship with the past. The great paper libraries, archives and museums that used to be the main way we accessed knowledge and art - which meant interacting with the past, the authors and artists who created that record - are now largely obsolete, in that the record has been impixelated, recorded in magnetic patterns of 1's and 0's on an electric grid. It is both more immediate and manipulatable, while verging utterly insubstantial.

Is this new network more resilient than thousands of paper libraries - which while they can be burnt, can also be turned into samzidat? Is this new modality easier to censor and track?  Is knowledge and art now simply more accessible, or is it also more easily repressed, tracked and eradicated?  Is this brave new world an electronic tyranny like that of Tron, or an anarchic paradise like that in Avatar? Or something else, utterly different or something in between?

I seems we are about to find out.

A few closing thoughts concerning Keanu: I remember when I used to dismiss guys like him (or Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, Leonardo DiCaprio, etc.) as being somehow unserious. Feminists complain about how women's voices and pov's tend to get discounted. Try being a very pretty boy. That seems to me an even harder row to hoe, in terms of being taken seriously, somehow.  Handsome man is not the same as pretty boy - most of them get discounted, sneered at.  If there's a Tiger Beat spread of you out there,

where you've been "lucky" enough to tap the collective libido of teenaged girls, you are finished. It's far, far worse than being a Playboy centerfold. No adult - male or female - is ever likely going to take you truly seriously again. Pity Justin Beeber and the Jonas Brothers, because when they hit their late twenties no one will ever pay attention to them again, and they won't know what to do about it. Expect to see them dishing to Dr. Drew on celebrity rehab in about a decade or so. That's how we treat our idols. Ours is a truly profane and irreligious society.

But wait.. Maybe not. Keanu is running counter the rule, here. Giving reviewers at venues such as the New York Times a reason to pay him respectful attention.. What is this?  Perhaps beauty, character and intelligence are not mutually exclusive. As much as we ugly people may find it hard to accept, beautiful people may occasionally be serious and smart, too.  Keanu has gone a proven it can be so, with this film.

Well done, Keanu. Bravo. Thanks for feeding my head. Now go do it again.



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Notes Upon the Feast of Saint Joseph

One of the things I've been doing lately is cultivating my relationship with Saint Joseph.

He brought the Messiah into Egypt, anointing balm into the land of sin & jahiliyah

I have a short litany of saints I invoke at the end of every rosary, of saints that have a particular meaning to me.  I have begun beginning it with him, then going to SS Joachim and Anne, then SS Anne and Simeon, then SS Elizabeth & Zacharias et S. Jean Baptiste, then SS Charles Borremeo, de Foucauld, of Austria and Wotyla, and so on, all the way through to Saint Philip Neri and Father Solanus Casey. I always end with those two, because I love them.

Anyway, in the course of this prayer, I have been thinking how great he is, Joseph:  a silent saint, whom we know relatively little about.  He may not even have been alive during Christ's public ministry. He is I suppose then of the Old Testament order, like John the Baptist.

He's mysterious, isn't he? Like so many things about the Faith, I like how his role seems best understood axiomatically.

You start with a recognition, a reality, a revelation "Blessed are you, Simon Bar Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you.." then the truth unfolds from it, by implication. The Incarnation is radical in this way. Faith in it is the greatest revolution then, in all human history. It is a transfiguring and radicalizing reality. If this is true, then..

So many other amazing things are, too. 

For example, Mary: her title, her role in salvation, is expressed by way of a simple syllogism. Her son is God. Therefore, she is the Mother of God.  So then is it likewise true that Joseph is the husband of Mary. The patriarch of her family. He is therefore the patriarch of the mother of God. Likewise, he is thus the patriarch of her son. Quod erat demonstrandum.

He becomes what he is through her, and she through her son.

سلام عليك  يا مريم الرب معك

It is interesting, because she in herself is nothing. A mere frail reed, an insignificant vessel. But through her faith and humility, she becomes the means by which our history is redeemed.  The eternal cycle of meaninglessness in its great grinding nihilism is caught and brought to a cataclysmic halt by the assent of a young woman to the will of God. God, who is always independent and transcendent and sufficient to all things unto himself, chooses this thin reed to span all the works of hell, and smash them. The empty eternal void is filled by the grace over- welling this tiny vessel. Her gentle acceptance of this will, that incredible prophetic burden, is an act of this grace.

It is the same with her betrothed, Joseph. He is asked to accept the putatively impossible, the incredible. And he does.     

It's also interesting how the protestants usually ignore him, and her. They talk and talk, babble on for hours in those talkathons they call church about any other person in the Bible - finding the oddest characters (like, say, Jabez) to fixate on. The only time I seem to hear Joseph brought up in that quarter is when they are stridently denying the Blessed Virgin's perpetual virginity. That terrifying chastity.. It's too much for them, the poor buggers. I understand them.

Because it is rough. Rough, just like the grain of the cross. But when Joseph realizes that he has been betrothed to the Spouse of the Holy Spirit, he has to imitate her: offer himself in total surrender to that same Spirit. He has to gird his loins like a man, and offer his life in complete surrender, just as she has already done.

In this way, he is her first devotee. Every one of us who has since been entrusted to her, and had her entrusted to us (cf. John 19:26-27) is therefore following after him, except that his relation to her is not one of discipleship, but is rather one of husbandship, of authority.

He takes her, then offers her intimately to God, our Father. And then he is entrusted with her son, the Only Son of the Father, and receives him intimately into his own hearth. His home becomes the hearth of God himself (le Foyer de Dieu lui meme) in the most literal ways.

"Lord, I am not worthy to receive you under my roof.. "

Think of how Paul says that the family, marriage, images the relation of Christ to the Church (cf. Ephesians 5) and therefore somehow images the inner life of the Trinity itself. In the Holy Family this mystery is  manifested in the most primordial manner. 

It's again interesting how so much about the early history of the Faith is hidden.  We do not know much about the intimate life of the Holy Family. It's similar to how the Acts of the Apostles just ends in mid-story. There are so many things you think they would have told us. Why are there no canonical records of the apostles' martyrdoms? The life of John and the Blessed Virgin at Patmos and Ephesus? Her ascension or dormition? What about Christ's childhood and adolescence, then his young adulthood prior to his baptism and Cana? We have the odd tale of his being lost then found at the Temple, and nothing more.

Why do we not a have a few more books of the infinite library (cf. John 21:25) that we would need to recount all the stories of his life and the life of his Church?  John 20:30 tells us there were *many* other things that Christ did that are not recorded in the Bible.  Not just a few.  Many.  What is this about?  Why must we be left so tantalized, gazing through all this glass so darkly?  

I am certain that it is because the things that are cloaked are so good, too very good for us to understand. We have been told enough to draw us toward that revelation. What is obscure is hidden for our own good.

It speaks to the sacred nature of the life of Joseph's family, this cloistered quietude and anonymity. That great scriptural silence testifies to his humility. He is one of those great silent saints.  Most of the saints are hidden.  I believe most of the greatest saints are hidden. They are unnoticed by the world, and have no interest in drawing any attention to themselves. Joseph is exactly like this. Very likely the greatest saint apart from his bride, and just as humble as she is.  He retires in silence and is consumed by prayer.

The world gets all exercised over the question of whether they had sexual relations.  What they fail to see is that the Holy Family is eschatologically ordered, a prophetic intimation of what is coming, when there will be no male or female, no marrying nor giving in marriage (cf. Galatians 3:28, Matthew 22:30), when we will be like angels in transfigured bodies, and all of our relations will be characterized by utter charity.

I suspect the sexual pleasure we're so obsessed with now will be somehow obsolete then. Just a gut hunch, that.

So, Joseph.  The saint who was the patriarch of the Blessed Virgin, the patriarch of her son.  In the economy of grace and humility this is the meanest office.  How is it that our God is so humble as to accept the authority of a man in this fashion?  Because he did. As he still does, see Matthew 16:19 for that incredible gift of authority. "What you loosen is loosened, what you bind is bound.." Isn't that astounding?

Joseph's name, incidentally, means "God increases, adds" or "God does it again"- the idea is one of divine augmentation, intensification. Like with Joseph the son of Israel in the court of Pharaoh, God's grace is manifested in the life of this quiet man in ways exponential infinitely beyond our poor hope and understanding.

And as I say, that my friends is why we don't know much about him. Because that knowledge is far too great for us.

Passover Consummate: Israel's Universal - "Orthodox Ecumenical Catholic" - Triumph.

And that reality should make you very glad and create in you great hope. Rejoice, and be not afraid.

This my friends is why today is a great feast. The Feast of the Patriarch of Humility, Our Dear Saint Joseph. 

Happy St. Joseph's Day everyone.

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De-Crypting Jonas's Sign: Semaphore From the Belly Of Leviathan

As I say, I am head over heels for the new pope so far based on what little I have heard or seen. My gut is telling me that he's the bees knees.  I'm really very pleased.

But..

There have been a few discordant notes that I have marked.  The most important is a comment Cardinal Bergoglio made in what is an otherwise inspiring interview, that can be found here.

I'll excerpt it, because it is very interesting, and worth a read and meditation.  The interviewer's questions and interjections are bold face, he begins by asking Cardinal Bergoglio what he would have said to a recent consistory of Latin American bishops he has just missed if he had had the chance.  Cardinal Bergoglio had been called to Rome and then become sick while there, forcing him to miss the consistory where Benedict XVI had addressed the bishops. This is his response:

BERGOGLIO: I would have spoken about these three key points. 

Nothing else? 

BERGOGLIO: Nothing else… No, perhaps I would have mentioned two things of which there is need in this moment, there is more need: mercy, mercy and apostolic courage. 

What do they mean to you? 

BERGOGLIO: To me apostolic courage is disseminating. Disseminating the Word. Giving it to that man and to that woman for whom it was bestowed. Giving them the beauty of the Gospel, the amazement of the encounter with Jesus… and leaving it to the Holy Spirit to do the rest. It is the Lord, says the Gospel, who makes the seed spring and bear fruit. 

In short, it is the Holy Spirit who performs the mission. 

BERGOGLIO: The early theologians said: the soul is a kind of sailing boat, the Holy Spirit is the wind that blows in the sail, to send it on its way, the impulses and the force of the wind are the gifts of the Spirit. Without His drive, without His grace, we don’t go ahead. The Holy Spirit lets us enter the mystery of God and saves us from the danger of a gnostic Church and from the danger of a self-referential Church, leading us to the mission. 

That means also overthrowing all your functionalist solutions, your consolidated plans and pastoral systems …

BERGOGLIO: I didn’t say that pastoral systems are useless. On the contrary. In itself everything that leads by the paths of God is good. I have told my priests: «Do everything you should, you know your duties as ministers, take your responsibilities and then leave the door open». Our sociologists of religion tell us that the influence of a parish has a radius of six hundred meters. In Buenos Aires there are about two thousand meters between one parish and the next. So I then told the priests: «If you can, rent a garage and, if you find some willing layman, let him go there! Let him be with those people a bit, do a little catechesis and even give communion if they ask him». A parish priest said to me: «But Father, if we do this the people then won’t come to church». «But why?» I asked him: «Do they come to mass now?» «No», he answered. And so! Coming out of oneself is also coming out from the fenced garden of one’s own convictions, considered irremovable, if they risk becoming an obstacle, if they close the horizon that is also of God. 

This is valid also for lay people… 

BERGOGLIO: Their clericalization is a problem. The priests clericalize the laity and the laity beg us to be clericalized… It really is sinful abetment. And to think that baptism alone could suffice. I’m thinking of those Christian communities in Japan that remained without priests for more than two hundred years. When the missionaries returned they found them all baptized, all validly married for the Church and all their dead had had a Catholic funeral. The faith had remained intact through the gifts of grace that had gladdened the life of a laity who had received only baptism and had also lived their apostolic mission in virtue of baptism alone. One must not be afraid of depending only on His tenderness… Do you know the biblical episode of the prophet Jonah? 

I don’t remember it. Tell us. 

BERGOGLIO: Jonah had everything clear. He had clear ideas about God, very clear ideas about good and evil. On what God does and on what He wants, on who was faithful to the Covenant and who instead was outside the Covenant. He had the recipe for being a good prophet. God broke into his life like a torrent. He sent him to Nineveh. Nineveh was the symbol of all the separated, the lost, of all the peripheries of humanity. Of all those who are outside, forlorn. Jonah saw that the task set on him was only to tell all those people that the arms of God were still open, that the patience of God was there and waiting, to heal them with His forgiveness and nourish them with His tenderness. Only for that had God sent him. He sent him to Nineveh, but he instead ran off in the opposite direction, toward Tarsis. 

Running away from a difficult mission… 

BERGOGLIO: No. What he was fleeing was not so much Nineveh as the boundless love of God for those people. It was that that didn’t come into his plans. God had come once… “and I’ll see to the rest”: that’s what Jonah told himself. He wanted to do things his way, he wanted to steer it all. His stubbornness shut him in his own structures of evaluation, in his pre-ordained methods, in his righteous opinions. He had fenced his soul off with the barbed wire of those certainties that instead of giving freedom with God and opening horizons of greater service to others had finished by deafening his heart. How the isolated conscience hardens the heart! Jonah no longer knew that God leads His people with the heart of a Father. 

A great many of us can identify with Jonah. 

BERGOGLIO: Our certainties can become a wall, a jail that imprisons the Holy Spirit. Those who isolate their conscience from the path of the people of God don’t know the joy of the Holy Spirit that sustains hope. That is the risk run by the isolated conscience. Of those who from the closed world of their Tarsis complain about everything or, feeling their identity threatened, launch themselves into battles only in the end to be still more self-concerned and self-referential. 

What should one do? 

BERGOGLIO: Look at our people not for what it should be but for what it is and see what is necessary. Without preconceptions and recipes but with generous openness. For the wounds and the frailty God spoke. Allowing the Lord to speak… In a world that we can’t manage to interest with the words we say, only His presence that loves us, saves us, can be of interest. The apostolic fervor renews itself in order to testify to Him who has loved us from the beginning. 

For you, then, what is the worst thing that can happen in the Church? 

BERGOGLIO: It is what De Lubac calls «spiritual worldliness». It is the greatest danger for the Church, for us, who are in the Church. «It is worse», says De Lubac, «more disastrous than the infamous leprosy that disfigured the dearly beloved Bride at the time of the libertine popes». Spiritual worldliness is putting oneself at the center. It is what Jesus saw going on among the Pharisees: «… You who glorify yourselves. Who give glory to yourselves, the ones to the others». 


So,  on one hand this may perhaps be the best exegesis of the book of Jonah I have ever read.  I really  like the story, and have always thought it amusing that God's chosen prophet is an angry pill.  I've commented on this before, here on the blog.

Cardinal Bergoglio- our new pope -  helps us here to really inhabit Jonah's perspective, and explore his motivation:  Jonah is not slothful.  He's not afraid. I used to read the book superficially thinking that Jonah is like me, in that sloth and fear are most often my motivations for avoiding what I believe God wants me to do, and projecting my sins onto him.  I'd rather not inconvenience myself, I'm afraid of criticism and failure.

I don't often consciously find myself wanting to actively frustrate what I think God wants..

But that is precisely what Jonah wants to do.  He doesn't want to preach mercy to Ninevah, because he hates the Ninevites.  He doesn't want them to be saved.  (I always found that amusing, and odd.. ) I've always thought that "the sign of Jonas" was a sign meant for the sinners in Ninevah, ignoring the irony that what the story may be signifying is that the really great sinner here is Jonah himself.   He flees to frustrate God's desire to show mercy to those he hates.

(Aside: I do not want to imply that my sloth and fear are less sinful than Jonah's hatred - hatred, even if sinful, is at least not lukewarm, and in Jonah's case is rooted in Jonah's righteousness - I think he hates the Ninevites because they truly are evil; not merely because they are from Iraq, inscrutable proto-muslims, and different than him.. )

The sign of Jonas is therefore perhaps also a sign to Jonah himself, maybe in the essential sense.  It's a sign unto the pharisees,  of whom Jonah is the prophetic forerunner.

Cardinal Bergoglio says the scripture is warning us not to let our pride; our sense of propriety, orthodoxy, our need to control things, judge things, to sit in Moses' seat over others; keep us from loving our brothers, and so keep us from loving God.

That's spot on, I think, and beautiful.  Judge not least you be judged.  Forgive, and you shall be forgiven.  Love, and you shall be loved. For to love is to have God. We are meant therefore to love everyone, especially our enemies and those we are tempted to hate.. For God is love. That's the gospel in it's purity.


But, on the other hand..  Two things he says give me pause:

So I then told the priests: «If you can, rent a garage and, if you find some willing layman, let him go there! Let him be with those people a bit, do a little catechesis and even give communion if they ask him». A parish priest said to me: «But Father, if we do this the people then won’t come to church». «But why?» I asked him: «Do they come to mass now?» «No», he answered. And so! Coming out of oneself is also coming out from the fenced garden of one’s own convictions, considered irremovable, if they risk becoming an obstacle, if they close the horizon that is also of God. 

I've also read Cardinal Bergoglio calling priests who refuse to baptize babies born to unmarried mothers  pharisees, as well.  It's the same theoretical principle.

But the two things strike me to be in practice different.  Baptizing an illegitimate child seems to me to potentially have strong pastoral justifications; to be a legitimate ekonomia, an act of gratuitous mercy.  While giving the eucharist to a person who is not actively trying to live a life of normal Christian virtue - the baseline of which is going to mass on Sunday - seems a very different thing.  Paul warns that if you receive unworthily you receive unto your own destruction.  I think that means at least a modicum eucharistic discipline is called for?  People should be encouraged to examine their lives and aspire to holiness - meaning living a life of some discipline in prayer and virtue - before receiving?


Then, and even more puzzlingly, he says "and to think that baptism alone could suffice." implying I think that ministerial priesthood is unnecessary, and conducive in any case to sinful clericalism.

That is another apparent radical denigration of traditional eucharistic theology.  Moreover, the ministerial priesthood is what makes the Apostolic churches.  Renouncing it is the existential hallmark of protestantism.  This is hugely problematic to me.


What the Holy Father says about "spiritual worldliness" - which is turning religion into essentially a mere ideology, a means of social control, a spiritual fetish that one uses to primp the ego and marginalize others who fail to meet our standards - is I think true and wise.  Well worth praying over.

But here's the thing: dogma and liturgy and tradition are not incidental. They are critical.  While it is clearly true that without charity - love - it is all dross, and that many people I think have fixated on tradition and liturgy and dogma in distorted spiritually destructive ways - I was, and perhaps still am one of them - it remains that the normative way that truth is expressed is through dogma, and that tradition and liturgy are organic realities that must be respected and nurtured as the rich soil in which the culture of our faith is renewed.  These things with charity are salvific, and without these things charity is endangered.

To value, and to seek to protect and promote them is not pharisaical. It's essential to being Catholic.


Asking people to come to mass, and encouraging them to fully participate in the life of their parish - which means things like asking them to make an annual confession, and not to miss mass without a serious reason - should be the norm.

The idea that someone unwilling come regularly to mass, who is not homebound or in some other serious way  prevented from coming regularly to mass, should be allowed to receive communion anyway while in an objective state of serious sin..  Well, that's scandalous.  I don't know what to say.

Maybe I do not understand all that the Holy Father meant there.  Maybe.  But if he meant what it seems he meant, I have some serious questions and reservations.


Look, I watch him talk in a clip like this,

And my heart melts.  I love him.  I do.


But.  But.   He receives the unconditional endorsement of the likes of Fr. Leonard Boff and Roger Cardinal Mahoney, and then does odd little things like quote an unnamed "German poet"

("es ist ruhig, das alter, und fromm.." It is peaceful, old age, and religious.. See his March 15th audience, 2nd to last paragraph for the context - again, I love this old man)

In one of his addresses, who turns out to be Fredrich Holderin.. Well, this as I say is a quibble, but old Friedrich is an early 19th century romantic poet and political radical; a supporter of the French Revolution and Napoleon, the German peer of Byron, Keats, Shelley; who went nuts and died painfully after having a insane affair with his patron's wife.  He had strong influences on the likes of Nietzsche and Hegel, and then later thinkers like Foucault, Derrida and Heiddeger..

Not a big thing at all, in itself really, but it strikes me as slightly odd, that citation being made publicly by the pope..


It all still makes me perk up a little bit and wonder if I should be concerned.


The people over at Rorate Caeli are going a little jigga-boo over all of this sort of stuff, and while I think it's beyond premature to get really upset, I still get why they are worried.


Because there is a popular apocalyptic backdrop to this election.

There's the entire Peter Roman and St. Malachi prophecy of the popes thing, most famously..

Then there's the controversy over the supposed suppression of the entirety of the 3rd Secret of Fatima gig, where the speculation is that Tarcisio (anagram of "Iscariot") Cardinal Bertone is hiding the part of the secret that prophesies apostasy in the curia and hierarchy..

And then there are the many other Marian apparitions prophesizing imminent tribulation, the most important being the apparitions at Medjugorje and Garabandal.

Google all that at your own risk.


All of that is way too lurid for me to spend much time on.  I used to be much more absorbed by such things.. In fact, Lourdes and Fatima are really two profound childhood influences that really incited my interest and faith, back then..

But to lend all of that too much attention and energy now, would be a mistake I think.  I'm just mentioning it here because it's there, and I think it bears some consideration.

We'll know soon enough if there really is anything to be actually concerned about.  In the meantime, I'm praying for our dear Holy Father.  I hope he's truly the mensch he seems to be.

Otherwise, things are going to really suck.



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Picture of the Day: Existential Kitty

The Ninth Tail

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Location:14th Street,Santa Marta,Colombia

Listen to the Wicked Witch Cackle..

Now for a completely political post.

I've been thinking that one salient reason to vote Obama over Romney (who in virtually every other respect would probably govern more or less the same) is that I've thought that Obama is slightly less likely to attack Iran than the utterly neo con Romney.

I'll take the moderate neo con foreign policy of the Democrats over the insane jiggaboo neo con extremism thrown off by the Republicans in a heartbeat.

Abortion, bank and corporate servitude, health care reform, assaults on the Bill of Rights and human rights, ever burgeoning institutional militarism, all that, I think Romney and Obama will govern basically the same, because the president isn't really calling the shots anymore. The corporate elite are.

I've thought though that Obama is temperamentally less likely to do something totally idiotic in the Middle East and plunge us all off a cliff that could lead to WW III and the utter bankruptcy of our economy.

(Actually, as I think about it, Obama is probably preferable to Romney on taxes - he's less likely to cut them, more likely to raise them, if he could - and entitlement reform- I'm still naive enough to hope the Democrats really want to save and even extend to all Americans - read Gens X, Y & other future generations - Medicare and Social Security.. Both essential bastions of the Middle Class as we know it, economically.. But Obama's record has me wondering about that too, and while Romney talks libertarian smack, like most things he says I'm not at all sure he means it, and may in fact govern more moderately.  So who to trust when they're all lying and playing double games??  Obama seems moderately less oleaginous, a bit more sincere, than Romney, is all I can say..  But in the end that may mean very little, given the circumstances.)

Witness how he is blowing off Netanyahu, and refusing to meet with him.  That warms my heart.  It is exactly what Likud and the Israeli right deserve.  Exactly in keeping with our national interests.  And that is something that Romney would never do.

So I've been thinking that I might vote Obama for that reason, alone.  Because it is of utter importance that we never go gratuitously to war with Iran, in the absence of an egregious act of aggression by the Iranians.  

Then I see something like this:



This shows you just how corrupt and unified our governing class truly is.  How little the charade that is our political process matters.  The old man on the left is James Baker, former Secretary of State under George H.W. Bush.   The woman is of course Hilary R. Clinton, our current Secretary of State.

Listen to her laugh.  They're discussing a potential war that will make the Iraq boondoggle - which despite what everyone these days thinks, has come off exceptionally well, considering what could have, and yet still might happen there, precipitated by our meddling - look like tiddlywinks, the moderate act of colonial aggression it was.  

An unprovoked attack on Iran will not only discredit us utterly as a nation in the eyes of the world, shredding what moral authority we have left (and that really matters, because it makes people want to follow us, and imitate us) it could lead to global conflict, destabilizing the Gulf, Turkey, and Pakistan, possibly drawing in Russia.  It could not so hypothetically lead to WW III.

Even in a best case, it will cost trillions and kill hundreds of thousands.  More American troops will die in months than have in all the last ten years.  The impacts - political and economic - will be incalculable.

Jim and Hil of course know all this, and this type of talk is posturing to intimidate the Iranians.

Jim: "We oughta take them out."

Hil:  "Frankly, there are those who are saying the best thing that could happen to us is to be attacked by somebody.  It would unify us, it would legitimize the regime."

It would legitimize the regime?  The regime?  The US regime?  Or the Iranian? The editing here is unclear.  I think she means the latter.  I hope she means the latter.

The crazy thing is, it is no longer beyond thought that she could mean the former.

This is whichever way you cut it, utterly evil and irresponsible.  Loathsome.  And I'm just paranoid and cynical enough to believe them capable of "creating the conditions" necessary to provoke the Iranians and precipitate conflict.  I mean, it's not like they haven't done it before.  Jim and Hil are informed by a CIA/Rand Corp. Machiavellian calculus that only considers things in materialistic, economic terms.  It's all about the resources.  And Iran and the incipient Arab Shia revolt the Iranians are patrons of, sits on the jugular, threatening our Sunni Arab petrol client states. That's the real deal, the Israelis are secondary, but much more popular domestically, so they get all the propaganda airtime Stateside..

Enough.  I'm voting third party, is all I have to say.  Enough of this bullshit.  I hope everyone who reads this will consider following suit.

It's time for a change.

[h/t: Daniel @ Caelum et Terra]



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Martha, Mary, Magdelena..

I wrote a post last night that got partly swallowed by Blogsy, an ipad app I like, but that has its issues.  I gave up re-writing because it was past midnight and I was meant to be up at 7 this morning to dive.  When I got up this morning they told me that because I was the only one who'd booked diving, they were postponing 'til tomorrow.

I went out and walked about Santa Marta instead.  The hostel is at the city center, just off the beach.  There's a central square surrounded by a dozen banks, and a few casinos (and hardly anything else, scum collects) with a great equestrian statue of Simon Bolivar, the George Washington of South America, who died here at 47 in 1830.

The Liberator

There's a container port with one of those great hoist cranes to lift the containers off the boats on the waterfront, and a beach that verges into a breakwater.

Port lights at night

The water seems relatively clean, and there were urchins diving and swimming all along the waterfront, looking for coins and seafood.

I was propositioned by this very talkative and friendly woman who wanted to give me a massage.  Twenty five bucks, my choice of creams.  Much more subtle come on than usual from the prostitutes down here, who usually are quite aggressive.. She left me the pretension that we could have been talking about shiatsu, which we in fact could have been, but I'm pretty sure weren't.  I was grateful for this, because I can't stand aggressive whores.  I listened to her, as she told me about her life and all about the coast about the city.

I left my camera in the room, so this evening after eating a forth time at the superb Mexican place that is owned by the hostel, I decided to go out and walk about getting pictures, including the two prior.

This time, I ran into a whole clutch of whores.  Just as I was taking that picture of Bolivar, there.  Four or five of them, a couple I think were transvestites.  Now, to be honest, there's something venal about the Caribbean, that I dislike intensely.  One of the reasons La Cieba, Honduras got so much on my nerves, and was so depressing was that you couldn't walk the waterfront in the evening without being harassed by streetwalkers.  I've never noticed this type of aggressive pandering stateside.  Granted, I never go where you'd probably encounter it.  But the center of a city?  Right next to city hall?

This is why I detest libertarianism.  Like this crap is supposed to be legal?  Leave me the f**K alone, please. Where are the cops? If you think prostitution should be legal, think about having our public spaces invaded like this. This type of thing makes me appreciate what it must be like for girls to be hit on and leered at.  Not cool.

Still, there is in fact a certain nasty charm in being propositioned so blatantly.  They're actually kind of funny, the things that they say, like "¡Que rrrr-ico!" (how yummy!) "¡Ay, papi!" - other stuff like that.  Until they get down to groping (no respect for personal space, they try to feel you up) and flashing you (the girl - I think she's a girl - in the picture below actually has quite a nice ass, I know because she showed it to me several times) and asking to fellate you.  I flatter myself, I think a few of them would have done it for free..

They wanted me to take photos of them, I obliged:

Que rico.

Yeah.  So that's Santa Marta by night.

I then headed back to the hostel, which is quite happening.  There's a bar upstairs where they blare the tunes until two-ish every night.  Not so loud that it disturbs my sleep, so I don't mind.  As I mentioned, there's a really, really good Mexican place in the same building, and the downstairs has a groovy swimming pool in the center courtyard, with a movie room where they have probably a few hundred films tevo'd and on constant rotation.  The crowd is twenty-ish and international, but largely anglophone.

The hostel too, has an air of decadence about it.  This picture is on the wall in the stairway to the bar area.  It's pornographic and sacrilegious, so don't study this image too closely if you don't want to be offended:

That's just how we roll these days, eh.  Penis jokes never get old, especially when they're blasphemous, right?

Creepy.

There's also a ram's skull on the wall of the barroom, which reminds me of this.


All of which leaves me ambivalent, in that while this town and hostel are once beautiful, they are also charged with a souspeçon of corruption.  I've been of paranoid mind these past few years.. I've been getting over it lately, throwing myself more fully back into an emphatic life of prayer where I'm trying to avoid analyzing things and becoming judgmental (ergo prudentes sicut serpentes, et simplices sicut columbæ.. that in my case by grace alone, because I'm too much the fool to manage it by my own) and thereby jacking up my inner life with the idea that I understand anything or anyone, or that I am actually in control of anything or anyone beyond my own mind and heart, and even that is touch and go, most the time...

Anyhow, as I came back to catch some sleep before diving tommorow, I noticed that the hostel is right next door to this:

eis qui sine peccado..

Which made me smile.  We're also right around the corner from another Paroquia de San Francisco here, as well.  I took a couple crummy shots of the church, it's a humble little colonial structure, I like it quite a lot.  I hope I can assist at mass there sometime before I leave here these next couple days..

He's always popping up, wherever I happen to go..

Tonight is the eve of our little brother's feast.  Saint Francis, pray for us.  I pray tonight especially for my little whores, may they come to no harm in the resurrection..

Oracion Simple

Senor, haz de mi un instremento de tu paz, 

Que alla donde hay odio, yo pongo el amor. 

Que alla donde hay ofensa, yo pongo el perdon.

Que alla donde hay discordia, yo pongo la union.

Que alla donde hay error, yo pongo la verdad.

Que alla donde hay duda, yo pongo la Fe.

Que alla donde hay desperacion, yo pongo la esperenza.

Que alla donde hay tiniebas,  yo pongo luz.

Que alla donde hay tristessa, yo pongo alegria.

Oh Senor, que yo no busque tanto
Ser consolado, cuanto consolar.

Ser comprendido, cuanto comprendar.

Ser amado, cuanto amar.

Porque es dandose, como se recibe. 
Es olvidanose de si mismo, como uno se encuentra a si mismo.

Es perdonando, como se es perdonado.

Es muriendo, como se resucita a la vida eterna.

Amen + 

I think that's all I got for you guys tonight.  Blessings on your heads.  Sleep tight.



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Location:14th Street,Santa Marta,Colombia

La Virgencita Guatemalteca

 

"¿Quién es ésta que se asoma como el alba, hermosa como la luna llena, refulgente como el sol, imponente como escuadrones abanderados?"

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

Diva Girl, Maximon's House, Panajachel Guatemala, July 1st 2012

 

 

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 




 

Posted with Blogsy

You Are As Sheep Amongst Wolves, Go Therefore Be Wise As Serpents & Innocent As Doves

 

 

For out of the mouth of infants and of sucklings thou hast perfected praise, because of thy enemies, that thou mayst destroy the enemy and the avenger.


 

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The Apocalyptic Historian's Headstone: Catedral de San José, Antigua Guatemala, May 23, 2012

 

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 

 

Song of the Day: The Games People Play

Games we all play now..

I give you all, my beloved public, two versions of this classic here. First Joe's original, then Waylon's magnificent cover of the same:

 

 

Them Lyrics:

La-da da da da da da da,
La-da da da da da da..


Woe, the games people play now,
Every night and every day now,
Never meaning what they say now,
Never saying what they mean, y'all..

While they wile away the hours,
In their ivory towers,
Til' they're covered up with flowers,
In the back of a black limousine, woe ah..

Chorus:

La-da da da da da da da,
La-da da da da da dee,
Talking 'bout you and me, brother,
And the games people play..

Oh, we make one another cry,
Break a heart then we say goodbye,
Cross our hearts and we hope to die,
That the other was to blame, woe ah..

Neither one will give in,
So we gaze at an eight by ten,
Thinking 'bout the things that might have been,
It's a dirty rotten shame, woe ah..

Repeat Chorus.

Look here:

People walking up to you,
Singing glory hallelujah,
While they're tryin' to sock it to you,
In the Name of the Lord..

They're gonna teach you how to meditate,
Read your horoscope, cheat your faith (fate?)..
Come on to hell with hate,
Come on get on board..

Repeat Chorus.

Look around tell me what you see..
What's happening to you and me.
God grant me the serenity
To just remember who I am.

'Cause you've given up your sanity
For your pride and your vanity.
Turns you sad (turn your back) on humanity,
And you don't give a da da da da da..

Repeat Chorus..



+++

 

Song of the Day: 'Tit Galop Pour Mamou

Lyrics:

'Tit galop, 'tit galop pour Mamou!

J'ai vendu mon 'tit mulet pour quinze sous.
J'ai acheté du candi rouge pour les 'tits, du sucre et du café pour les vieux.

'Tit galop, 'tit galop pour Mamou!

J'ai vendu mon 'tit wagon pour quinze sous.
J'ai acheté du candi rouge pour les 'tits, une yard de ruban pour la vieille.

Canter, canter to Mamou!

I sold my little mule for fifteen cents.
I bought some red candy for the kids, some sugar and coffee for the old folks..

Canter, canter to Mamou!

I sold my little wagon for fifteen cents.
I bought some red candy for the kids, and a yard of ribbon for my wife.



(my sardonic lay lyrical exegegis: mamou = mammon.. whadya think of that reading? )




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La Cara Guatemalteca, Antigua Guatemala, the First Week of May, 2012

I couldn't choose between them. I like them too much not to post both. Maybe my two favorite of all the images I've taken here so far.

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Note the delicious parody here of the all seeing eye. Magazines, third girl. Absolutely love it.

Take her gaze to heart..

I'd like to also point out that the older girl on the left is the same as the one in the picture I posted below on April 13th. Note too that she is wearing the very same green dress in both images. These kids often come by selling candy when I'm at my school being tutored in Spanish in the afternoon. I find the idigenous people here - they're apparently mostly K'iche' - to be fascinating, and beautiful. Inexplicably moving, actually..

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 



 

Further Thoughts on Humility & Knowledge

 

But let the Spirit of all lies with works of dazzling magic blind you. Then absolutely mine, I'll have and bind you.

- The Devil, Goethe's Faust

 

Gnosticism is the predominate heresy of our age. Gnosticism is belief in salvation by knowledge, belief in the (eventual) supremacy of the intellect over all. Essentially, belief in salvation through power. "Knowledge is power."

Gnosis is derived from the Greek for knowledge, just as science is derived from the Latin for the same. The conciet of the gnostic is that the spiritual (as with everything else) can be reduced to a science, that by understanding one can control things spiritual. Just as one can control the material, the physical through knowledge, one can also control the metaphysical by way of knowledge. Astrology births astronomy, alchemy births chemistry, both birth physics. Technology is as magic. We can be become like gods through knowledge. This is the Fall.

Christianity, in contrast is in this sense a practical agnosticism. We know nothing that can save us. Reality is ultimately mysterious, infinite when we are finite. We can never completely control it, which is to say never control reality's Creator, he who is the source of all that is. He is utterly ineffable, beyond all human power to control or even ultimately understand. The universe gives a hint of his transcendence, enough to inspire awe.

Thus just as we did not and cannot create ourselves, we cannot sustain or save ourselves. It is embrace of this abject need for the Other that saves. Salvation is love of him, and therefore love is the only thing we ultimately need. Again, salvation is through love and the humility and trust (faith) that love engenders. It is in our dependence, weakness, and ignorance that we are saved. It is not in pride, but humility that we are gathered in. "For God is love." Thanks be God forever.

Therefore, it is not knowledge as power that saves, but realtionship in the Divine Trinity, whose energies are grace born of love. And while love is animated by certain knowledge, understanding, it is not of the intellect. Rather, it is of the heart.

So it is then that the smallest shattered, diseased retard with a heart consumed with love is infinitely greater than the futile pride of all hell unbound.

My friend Dale is far greater than satan.

I.H.S.V.

A.M.D.G.

 

 

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Next Year I'm Praying a Novena to Win..

"The Mexican people, after more than two centuries of experiments, have faith only in the Virgin of Guadalupe and the National Lottery.."  Octavio Paz, Mexican Nobel Laureate in Literature 


The week before last I was walking through one of the many exquisite plazas in Oaxaca, and passing a lottery ticket booth I noticed that they were selling tickets for what apparently was a special 25 million peso (1,800,000 dollar) drawing  that was held yesterday on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the ticket (as shown on the poster above) being emblazoned with the image of her icon.  


I was extremely amused, and immediately reminded of the quote above.  I thought of buying one, and trying my luck, but didn't.  Fifty pesos (three and a half bucks) ) is a bit too steep (that's the price of two beers or an ensalada mixta here) and while I was fascinated and sorely tempted to collect a ticket for a souvenir, the impulse struck me as mildly sacrilegious..


I am still far more sanctimonious and puritanical than Mexico, you see.. 


Being here I'm starting to lighten up.  


I'm hereby resolved: Next year I'm going to play.  Cross your fingers for me..


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