So tonight, I begin with a recent shot of Beanie feeding a kid goat. It's cute, and I like the composition. A proud uncle shot. Humor me.
---
Monday, March 18, 2013
Picture of the Day: Bean Feeding the Kid
This is from the archive, back from a few months ago. But I'm going to start going deep into those stacks as I start getting it all completely organized, collated and copied these next couple months. I've done enough organizing so that all my images and video is in basic order, now I just need to work through and cull and tag things. As I do, I'll share some, and tell relevant tales hoping they'll be of interest..
So tonight, I begin with a recent shot of Beanie feeding a kid goat. It's cute, and I like the composition. A proud uncle shot. Humor me.
---
So tonight, I begin with a recent shot of Beanie feeding a kid goat. It's cute, and I like the composition. A proud uncle shot. Humor me.
---
Song of the Day: Keep it Light Enough to Travel..
I've had this one in rotation off and on for years, but this week it keeps jumping out of my special ski mix that I shook up last week. It captures my mood these days.
What kind of people go to meet people where they can't be heard or seen? I've never been able to figure that one out..
Wound up drunk again on Robson St.
Strange, 'cause we always agreed
At the start of every evening
That's the last place I wanna be
Coffee drinkers dressed in black with no sugar
They don't give me no respect
They say: "Look, here comes another one,"
And I don't know what they mean yet
And I say keep it light enough to travel
Don't let it all unravel
Keep it light enough to travel
Promise me we won't go into the nightclub
I feel so fucked up when I'm in there
Can't tell the bouncers from the customers
And I don't know which ones I prefer
Promise me we won't go into the nightclub
I really think that it's obscene
What kind of people go to meet people
Someplace they can't be heard or seen?
Keep it light enough to travel
Don't let it all unravel
Keep it light enough to travel
I broke the windows of the logging company
Just to get a little release
I had to throw down my accordion
To get away from the police
And I say keep it light enough to travel..
---
Sunday, March 17, 2013
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.
---
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.
---
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Miserando Atque Eligendo: Lowly And Yet Chosen - A Few Brief Reflections On Our New Pope
Tonight, before bed, I proffer a few thoughts on our adorable new Holy Father. He keeps growing on me, the more I read and pray for and about him. Details, such as that his first act as pope the morning after the election was to visit Maria Maggiore, which is the great Roman shrine to our Lady, just sing to me. He arrived by stealth, with ten minutes notice, eschewing the usual papal motorcade. That is simply beautiful.
Note that the title of this post is his episcopal motto. Again, like almost everything I read about him, I think it is great.
He has chosen the name Francis, which means of France, or Frank. Many have commented that it's a homage to Francis of Assisi whose ministry reinvigorated the late medieval Church, and Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit who converted the East. It is of course both of these things.
Note that the title of this post is his episcopal motto. Again, like almost everything I read about him, I think it is great.
He reminds me of John Paul I - unassuming, exuding gentle kindness, but with a hint of toughness. Not at all radiating with the charismatic charm of John Paul II, not even the calmer, nebbish charisma of Benedict.. He seems often impassive, expressing little emotion. Subdued, humble in appearance. Not the type of fellow you'd tend to notice in a crowd, unlike his two recent predecessors.
But that common air is perfect. Very apt in a priest: "He had no majestic bearing to catch our eye, no beauty to draw us near him.." Exactly. Just so.
I think in practical terms his election is explained by two things. First, Rome is an Italian archdiocese. It should have an Italian pastor, or at least a pastor who knows them and their language. And too, the curia is dominated by Italians, and Italian ways. The curial voting block in the conclave, and those cardinals who would like to see them disciplined in light of the scandals that are festering there, would both want someone who would will relate well to all of that, immediately. Second, the Church is now no longer mostly European. We need leadership from the larger world. A universal pastor from Europe, or worse Italy, would be a parochial choice..
How to solve this paradox? In Francis we have the perfect resolution. An Italian, but from outside Italy. Better, one from Latin America, where the strength of the Church now resides.
He has chosen the name Francis, which means of France, or Frank. Many have commented that it's a homage to Francis of Assisi whose ministry reinvigorated the late medieval Church, and Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit who converted the East. It is of course both of these things.
But it is also interesting to think how the German Franks, the French, while the "first daughter of the Church" were also simultaneously the great antagonists of Papal supremacy throughout the Middle Ages.. In that great struggle between the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy over rule of Europe - Guelphs versus Ghibellines - dating back to the moment Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Emperor on Christmas 800, where the pope surprised the king by refusing to hand the crown to him for him to place it on his own head, the pope himself crowning the Emperor in a symbolic act of supremacy over the secular power.. Through to the moment that Napoleon seized the crown from the hands of Pius VII and crowned himself Emperor in 1804..
The term "emperor" of course signifies Emperor of Rome, which is shorthand for the civilized world. The fact that the Franks, the Germans, had the temerity to claim that title while the historical line of emperors descending from Constantine was still extant in Constantinople, was not exactly appreciated in Byzantium. Indeed, it is the single most important catalyst creating the Schism we still suffer from today between the Orthodoxy and Catholicism.
This is a major theme I want to continue to treat here on the blog, that I have yet to touch upon at all: the role of political power and ethnic divisions in creating the great schismatic blocks in the Church -Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant.. The struggle over the imperium, the legacy of Rome, is at the heart of that.
The term "emperor" of course signifies Emperor of Rome, which is shorthand for the civilized world. The fact that the Franks, the Germans, had the temerity to claim that title while the historical line of emperors descending from Constantine was still extant in Constantinople, was not exactly appreciated in Byzantium. Indeed, it is the single most important catalyst creating the Schism we still suffer from today between the Orthodoxy and Catholicism.
This is a major theme I want to continue to treat here on the blog, that I have yet to touch upon at all: the role of political power and ethnic divisions in creating the great schismatic blocks in the Church -Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant.. The struggle over the imperium, the legacy of Rome, is at the heart of that.
I think the name Francis may in a sense resonate somehow in terms of that struggle - Our new pope may in some way be signaling that that struggle is finally over. That the papal claim to secular imperium is finally utterly dead. Our Pope Francis reconciles that tension in himself and resolves it.
The pope is now asserting the plenitude of spiritual power. The reason the Church exists is because people respond to Christ. His humility. God comes to us as a child. Then he offers himself to us, up for us, on the cross.
This is what love is. This is the form that true power takes. This is our God.
When the Church is humble like this, she conquers the world. When we surrender all pretension to worldly power, and bear the cross with the suffering and poor, we triumph.
In Christ, like Francis and all the other saints. Francis of Assisi's example, however, is one of the most radical. Our new Holy Father Francis is calling us to that extremity of love and humility.
Pope Francis has only one lung. Odd fact, that. Pope John Paul II always used to use the metaphor of two lungs of the Church in discussing our Orthodox brothers. That we are one organism, breathing through two lobes.
Here, we have a pope who as Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires was also bishop of the Eastern Rite in Argentina. This is unusual, usually the Eastern Rites have their own separate bishop.
And he has got only one lung.. A single pnuema if you like. Like I say, odd.. Isn't it?
I'll end this rumination by quoting our Holy Father's first public homily as pope, given at mass on Wednesday, March 13th. I really thought it was good, so I'll share an excerpt. The extended homily is pithy - I read it aloud to myself and it took me 2.5 minutes - and profound. That's the essence of good preaching. Succinct and powerful.
I give you about half of it here, what I think the best part:
I give you about half of it here, what I think the best part:
So (utterly not mote) be it, indeed. I love this man. I think we have ourselves a wonderful new pastor. Thank God.
May God bless and keep our Holy Father.
Now it's midnight. Sleepytime. Goodnight, everyone.
---
Friday, March 15, 2013
On the Wealth & Autonomy of the Church, Part I.
I wrote the following in response to a bit by Matthew Yglesias over at Slate on the wealth of the Church. (Aside: his last name in the byline of this article is bracing mild irony, no?) It's buried in the comment thread there, along with another comment that I post below. See the head of the next post for more commentary on that.
Here I skewer the stupid vulgarity of people who spew criticism at the Church for being rich, especially attacks on priests and bishops (note that secular/diocesan only earn between 20 and 30k a year in the United States, being the richest Catholic church on the planet, and religious/monastics usually receive much less than that) and the criticism that the "Church should sell all its priceless art to feed the poor."
My mom says that I shouldn't use the word idiot here. She's right, but it felt good to throw some skat back, you know? My comment:
The art and culture that is the Church's patrimony doesn't "belong to" the Church. It belongs to, and is meant to succor all humanity. It is merely the Church's gift to humanity. It doesn't belong in some rich jerk's private collection. It belongs where it is: In the case of the really historically significant stuff in the few museums and archives maintained, like national archives or museums, to edify us all. In the more significant case of the iconography common to our churches, it is meant to do what *we generation upon generation* of faithful have created it for: to help us worship the God who made us, and made all such beauty possible.
This lame argument, "that the priceless treasures" should be sold to feed the poor is exactly the line that hypocrite Judas fed Christ when the repentant woman poured her expensive unction on Christ's feet. All the rich schmuks who salivate at the idea of using their filthy lucre to collect the beauty of the Church to their own vanity use Judas's same argument. As if the Sistine Chapel and Chartes were created, and exist, to enrich the pope or something, and would be better used as the private preserve of billionaires who have truly *earned* it. That's intellectually and spiritually idiotic.
That beauty exists because we believe. Because the faithful have created it to worship God, and it is almost without exception freely accessible to anyone who cares to go seek it out. Rich or poor. I've been to hundreds of Catholic churches, and the only one I ever paid to enter was the Sistine Chapel, and that is not normally used for worship, and is effectively a museum. You will never pay to enter a Catholic church where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved. That - the most important presence in the world, as sacred as we human beings ourselves - can be encountered for free everywhere.
Because the poor need beauty too, and we the Church give it to them.
As for the idea that the Church is merely a charity, it's not. But its charitable works are greater by far than any other organization in the world. We feed, teach, and heal the poor, and rich, everywhere they come to us.
There is corruption, but it is - in the context and scale of the work - small. The idea that the Congress should confiscate the wealth of the Church - which is mostly in real estate, most of that for charity or worship - is risible. The Congress is far more corrupt than the Church, financially. Anyone who thinks the rich buying our patrimony, or the government spending it for us is a good idea is simply an idiot.
---
Here I skewer the stupid vulgarity of people who spew criticism at the Church for being rich, especially attacks on priests and bishops (note that secular/diocesan only earn between 20 and 30k a year in the United States, being the richest Catholic church on the planet, and religious/monastics usually receive much less than that) and the criticism that the "Church should sell all its priceless art to feed the poor."
My mom says that I shouldn't use the word idiot here. She's right, but it felt good to throw some skat back, you know? My comment:
The art and culture that is the Church's patrimony doesn't "belong to" the Church. It belongs to, and is meant to succor all humanity. It is merely the Church's gift to humanity. It doesn't belong in some rich jerk's private collection. It belongs where it is: In the case of the really historically significant stuff in the few museums and archives maintained, like national archives or museums, to edify us all. In the more significant case of the iconography common to our churches, it is meant to do what *we generation upon generation* of faithful have created it for: to help us worship the God who made us, and made all such beauty possible.
This lame argument, "that the priceless treasures" should be sold to feed the poor is exactly the line that hypocrite Judas fed Christ when the repentant woman poured her expensive unction on Christ's feet. All the rich schmuks who salivate at the idea of using their filthy lucre to collect the beauty of the Church to their own vanity use Judas's same argument. As if the Sistine Chapel and Chartes were created, and exist, to enrich the pope or something, and would be better used as the private preserve of billionaires who have truly *earned* it. That's intellectually and spiritually idiotic.
That beauty exists because we believe. Because the faithful have created it to worship God, and it is almost without exception freely accessible to anyone who cares to go seek it out. Rich or poor. I've been to hundreds of Catholic churches, and the only one I ever paid to enter was the Sistine Chapel, and that is not normally used for worship, and is effectively a museum. You will never pay to enter a Catholic church where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved. That - the most important presence in the world, as sacred as we human beings ourselves - can be encountered for free everywhere.
Because the poor need beauty too, and we the Church give it to them.
As for the idea that the Church is merely a charity, it's not. But its charitable works are greater by far than any other organization in the world. We feed, teach, and heal the poor, and rich, everywhere they come to us.
There is corruption, but it is - in the context and scale of the work - small. The idea that the Congress should confiscate the wealth of the Church - which is mostly in real estate, most of that for charity or worship - is risible. The Congress is far more corrupt than the Church, financially. Anyone who thinks the rich buying our patrimony, or the government spending it for us is a good idea is simply an idiot.
---
On the Wealth & Autonomy of the Church, Part II.
I am well into my promised post on What Happened in Caracas. It's gotten unwieldily, and needs to be edited with a good re-write, and then split into two parts, one about Chavez and my inchoate take on the politics and such down there, and then one with the straight narrative of my trip. I've been too busy the last few days to get that accomplished, but will try to tonight and tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm going to post a couple things I wrote in a comments thread over at Slate under an interesting article by Matt Yglesias about the wealth of the Church. I spent too much time on them to have them get buried in a thread for no one to read.
One of the main problems I have in starting to write on the things I've been mulling and want to express, is that on the one hand I have quite a lot to say, while on the other the basic thrust boils down to essentially a half dozen "tricks" or themes that I am going to play over and over again a few dozen times with various inflections. I've been hesitating because of this, but there's really nothing for it but to just put on my show and hope that all the acrobatics don't get repetitive and boring. So here we go, my first flip:
Yglesias suggests in his article that the Church (a word that in my usage always refers to the apostolic Church, all the churches in union with Rome, and the Orthodox and other Eastern Churches that descend from the apostles - protestants are merely heretics who relate to the Church by virtue of their baptism and faith alone. Their organizations are not Churches in the sense that they are vested with any true authority like apostolic bishops have), should be subject to taxation and auditing by the State.
I disagree. This is why:
Another point: Mr. Yglesias and many commenters here seem to think that the State curtailing Church's freedom and power would be an unambiguous good. That is in effect what giving the State the power to tax and financially audit the Church (and divers churches and other religious groups) would do.
But he misses an important thing: the separation of Church and State is not merely an innovation of the American Constitution. It's deeply embedded in the Christian, which is to say European, hence Western, experience. ("Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, give unto God what is God's.") Unlike in Islam where the Ummah theoretically constitutes the government and there is therefore no public distinction between the sacred and secular spheres; or in the Orthodox annoiting of the imperium, which has stunted the political life of Russia and made the Church there essentially a department of the state, creating an incestuous relationship between political and religious power; the Catholic Church has effectively created a tension in Western society that creates a sphere for conscience and then even legally legitimate political action *supported by the churches* as institutions. The churches act as catalysts or spaces for political action that have often counterbalanced, even frequently opposed, the otherwise overwhelming power of the State. This is counter the Enlightenment narrative of Catholic obscurantism, of course; but I submit that the Catholic Faith - with its doctrine of freedom of individual conscience (human beings are ontologically free, our fate is not predetermined, our actions have meaning) which is concomitant with the doctrine of the sacredness of the human person; as well as the doctrine that political sovereigns are bound *legally* by the Church's law, which demands fair treatment of the poor and places critical limits on use of power such as just war doctrine (which essentially still constitutes the basis for modern international law and human rights doctrine) - is at the core of the Western cultural ascendency.
See Boniface VIII's (the sucessor of the last pope who resigned, Celistine V, whom Boniface imprisoned) 1302 bull Unam Sanctam. It articulates the principal of dual authority. I argue that dichotomy vitally reinforces the moral and spiritual authority and freedom that the churches have had in our society to agitate for everything from emancipation to suffragism, from economic justice for the poor to opposition to war, from prohibition to opposition to (and support for) abortion flows from the legacy of that dichotomy.
The universities are incidentally adjunct institutions that are utter creatures of the Church, and until now have provided a intellectual clerical caste (with authority in the sciences, medicine, law and humanities that is preeminent in our culture) that grew out of, and has now secularized the prior Christian clerical ascendancy. As we eradicate the influence of the Church, the authority of this class will - I predict - also be called into question and eroded. That our universities are now behaving like hedge funds; and tenure is being eroded, only to be replaced by teachers for hire; and universities are now being re-cast as businesses (U of Phoniex type abuse of the student loan system); is actually symptomatic of this. The dogma that human beings are iconic of God; are always ends, never mere means; is fading. Now, the market and cash, and homo economicus are all that is left.
Absent this lingering Catholic dichotomy where an institution like the UN apes the Church in moderating the power of states and arbitrating disputes peacefully between them; we are utterly in the world ruled by the logic of Stalin, Hitler, Hobbes and Machiavelli. Just because we bourgeois think we are just too darn nice to be baldly brutal like them, does not mean that we should glibly dispense with the Church - and the various Christian splinter churches and other religious authorities - merely because we see them as backward and irrelevant in light of progress, which means merely because we disagree or think them ridiculous.
Civilization is a thin skein, and it was woven by religion. Tear at it at our collective risk.
---
In the meantime, I'm going to post a couple things I wrote in a comments thread over at Slate under an interesting article by Matt Yglesias about the wealth of the Church. I spent too much time on them to have them get buried in a thread for no one to read.
One of the main problems I have in starting to write on the things I've been mulling and want to express, is that on the one hand I have quite a lot to say, while on the other the basic thrust boils down to essentially a half dozen "tricks" or themes that I am going to play over and over again a few dozen times with various inflections. I've been hesitating because of this, but there's really nothing for it but to just put on my show and hope that all the acrobatics don't get repetitive and boring. So here we go, my first flip:
Yglesias suggests in his article that the Church (a word that in my usage always refers to the apostolic Church, all the churches in union with Rome, and the Orthodox and other Eastern Churches that descend from the apostles - protestants are merely heretics who relate to the Church by virtue of their baptism and faith alone. Their organizations are not Churches in the sense that they are vested with any true authority like apostolic bishops have), should be subject to taxation and auditing by the State.
I disagree. This is why:
Another point: Mr. Yglesias and many commenters here seem to think that the State curtailing Church's freedom and power would be an unambiguous good. That is in effect what giving the State the power to tax and financially audit the Church (and divers churches and other religious groups) would do.
But he misses an important thing: the separation of Church and State is not merely an innovation of the American Constitution. It's deeply embedded in the Christian, which is to say European, hence Western, experience. ("Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, give unto God what is God's.") Unlike in Islam where the Ummah theoretically constitutes the government and there is therefore no public distinction between the sacred and secular spheres; or in the Orthodox annoiting of the imperium, which has stunted the political life of Russia and made the Church there essentially a department of the state, creating an incestuous relationship between political and religious power; the Catholic Church has effectively created a tension in Western society that creates a sphere for conscience and then even legally legitimate political action *supported by the churches* as institutions. The churches act as catalysts or spaces for political action that have often counterbalanced, even frequently opposed, the otherwise overwhelming power of the State. This is counter the Enlightenment narrative of Catholic obscurantism, of course; but I submit that the Catholic Faith - with its doctrine of freedom of individual conscience (human beings are ontologically free, our fate is not predetermined, our actions have meaning) which is concomitant with the doctrine of the sacredness of the human person; as well as the doctrine that political sovereigns are bound *legally* by the Church's law, which demands fair treatment of the poor and places critical limits on use of power such as just war doctrine (which essentially still constitutes the basis for modern international law and human rights doctrine) - is at the core of the Western cultural ascendency.
See Boniface VIII's (the sucessor of the last pope who resigned, Celistine V, whom Boniface imprisoned) 1302 bull Unam Sanctam. It articulates the principal of dual authority. I argue that dichotomy vitally reinforces the moral and spiritual authority and freedom that the churches have had in our society to agitate for everything from emancipation to suffragism, from economic justice for the poor to opposition to war, from prohibition to opposition to (and support for) abortion flows from the legacy of that dichotomy.
The universities are incidentally adjunct institutions that are utter creatures of the Church, and until now have provided a intellectual clerical caste (with authority in the sciences, medicine, law and humanities that is preeminent in our culture) that grew out of, and has now secularized the prior Christian clerical ascendancy. As we eradicate the influence of the Church, the authority of this class will - I predict - also be called into question and eroded. That our universities are now behaving like hedge funds; and tenure is being eroded, only to be replaced by teachers for hire; and universities are now being re-cast as businesses (U of Phoniex type abuse of the student loan system); is actually symptomatic of this. The dogma that human beings are iconic of God; are always ends, never mere means; is fading. Now, the market and cash, and homo economicus are all that is left.
Absent this lingering Catholic dichotomy where an institution like the UN apes the Church in moderating the power of states and arbitrating disputes peacefully between them; we are utterly in the world ruled by the logic of Stalin, Hitler, Hobbes and Machiavelli. Just because we bourgeois think we are just too darn nice to be baldly brutal like them, does not mean that we should glibly dispense with the Church - and the various Christian splinter churches and other religious authorities - merely because we see them as backward and irrelevant in light of progress, which means merely because we disagree or think them ridiculous.
Civilization is a thin skein, and it was woven by religion. Tear at it at our collective risk.
---
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Self Portrait: Aux Nuages Au Dessus La Piste, March 2013.
I've been meaning to write and post daily since the beginning of Lent, but have been a victim of demon sloth, as usual. My one fragile excuse is that I have been skiing, reading my magnificat, saying my rosary and going to mass daily, with the exception of a few days this past week, when I took a break from all that discipline. My ambition to write here, and elsewhere, has been too easily sloughed off as vanity, and needless self exhibition. But today, I re-embrace my croix doux..
(because even if it takes slight discipline, praying the hours and going to mass is actually almost a carnal pleasure for me these days.. I've even learnt how - or rather, have been granted and taught - to mediate on the rosary with pleasure - what used to be a chore to say even a decade, now I could easily say all the mysteries without pause or difficulty. The key is realizing that all prayer is a grace, and asking for it.. Bit slow on the uptake, here. But I have kind of gotten it, at last..)
And have decided that these coming few weeks I will finally post some of the things I've been gestating and threatening to inflict on you all, my slight public, ever since I began this blog.
Tomorrow, I'll recommence by finishing my tale of Venezuela, of how my foray into that place went awry. I didn't feel like writing about it all last fall when it happened, but now that Chavez passed this week, I thought I ought mark the occasion with the story of my misadventures in his country..
Alors, à demain.
---
Friday, November 30, 2012
Sunday, October 7, 2012
Maracaibo: Where I Arrive In Kenny's Old Truck
So I left Santa Marta today. I wanted to take a bus direct to Maracaibo, which is the first large city (population 2 million+) in Venezuela. But there were none, and the woman at the bus station said there would be none until Monday. Since I want to be at the Brazilian Embassy in Caracas at 9 am Monday to get my visa taken care of, I had no intention of waiting. I had to take a small bus to Maicao on the border, and then transfer to another bus to Maracaibo.
I got to Maicao in about four hours, a place my guidebook warned me was going to be gritty and possibly dangerous, while there I needed to"watch my back." Heartening, that.
When we arrived, the door of the bus was crowded with jammering men demonically leering, wanting to sell me services. I was mildly disoriented, and my Spanish, which usually is quite solid in everyday situations, fled me. I was understanding less than half of what they were saying. I was not happy, and felt mildly threatened. I was in no mood to trust anybody, but I needed directions. I got one of the guys to cart my bags into the terminal on his dolly. I always take advantage help with my luggage these days, because the 50 cents or so I tip saves me the stress of lugging my overpacked bag, which is well worth it. This time I got a little paranoid, thinking he might run off on me. I ran behind him as he sprinted off to the collectivo office. I wanted the counter of the main busline, but was in no condition to interject myself properly into the situation.
There, there were more men shouting at me, pricing the trip in three currencies, and wanting to change my money.. They kept telling me that the border was closing in an hour and a half, if I wanted to go today I needed to make my mind up right away.
Way too much to handle. I needed to clear my head. I tipped the luggage guy, grabbed my bags, and fled into the open air.
I asked a man where the main busline counter is. He pointed the way. One man from the collectivo office is following me. I try to ignore him. He taps me on the shoulder.
I turn, about to lose my temper, which is a very, very rare thing for me to do. But I'm on the edge.
He hands my wallet to me. I'd dropped it. I take it, stammer my thanks, and run to the busline office.
I ask if there's a bus. No. Tommorow? No. Monday? Again, no. Why the hell not?
The guy looks at me, and hands me a brochure with Hugo Chavez's face on it. Because of the elections tomorrow he says. Would I like to change my money? He starts spouting information about collectivos again.
I get defensive once again, and start to lose my mind. I need a pen and paper. Write everything down. Prices. Exchange rates.
I told him that the bankrate on the Venezualan Bolivar to the dollar is 4.25, because that is what the internet said. He said their rate was 9 to one.
First the thuggish looking collectivo dude gives me back my lost wallet, and now I'm getting quoted and exchange rate twice the official rate. Surreal. What is going on here?
At that point I just surrendered, and realized that paranoia was getting me nowhere. I decided to trust these people.
Next thing I know, I am hurtling toward the border bouncing around in the back this,
Crammed alongside a bunch of campesinos, with twice as many Bolivars as I'd initially thought I'd have in my pocket.
Hugo Chavez decreed in 2007 that Venezuela be a half hour - that's right a half hour - timezone ahead of Columbia, just to make arriving in his country just a little more annoying than it need be. That Hugo. Crazy guy. We'll see if he wins today..
Four hours in the back of Kenny's ramshackle old truck later, I'm now safely ensconced in a hotel in center Maracaibo, which the a major oil hub here.
The guy at the hotel desk keeps putting his finger to his eye everytime I walk by him, squinting and hissing "cuidado cabellero: indigentes!"
I ignored him, and went out looking for a bottle of water. I saw a bunch of gypsy ladies on the corner running what looked at first as I approached like a hotdog stand. I went up and asked if they had any drinks, but when they turned around the one closest me had this wicked orcish looking five inch blade in her hand, and I saw that the box they had wasn't of hotdogs, but was instead a pile of raw offal. Viscous entrails, that is. The woman was wearing a black dress and bandana, and looked as if capable of gutting me there on the spot. They all snarled and glared at me, and croaked "no" in unison, like they were the witches in MacBeth or the Fates or something.. I fled, beating a hasty retreat back to my room, where I am reduced to drinking tap water for the first time since I've been in Latin America, hoping it's safe..
The hotel is a cheap one, within a few blocks of the bus station and the cathedral, which is convenient, because I hope to catch mass in the morning, and then leave for Caracas tomorrow afternoon.
I'll keep you all posted as I get along. As always, keep watching this space..
---
I got to Maicao in about four hours, a place my guidebook warned me was going to be gritty and possibly dangerous, while there I needed to"watch my back." Heartening, that.
When we arrived, the door of the bus was crowded with jammering men demonically leering, wanting to sell me services. I was mildly disoriented, and my Spanish, which usually is quite solid in everyday situations, fled me. I was understanding less than half of what they were saying. I was not happy, and felt mildly threatened. I was in no mood to trust anybody, but I needed directions. I got one of the guys to cart my bags into the terminal on his dolly. I always take advantage help with my luggage these days, because the 50 cents or so I tip saves me the stress of lugging my overpacked bag, which is well worth it. This time I got a little paranoid, thinking he might run off on me. I ran behind him as he sprinted off to the collectivo office. I wanted the counter of the main busline, but was in no condition to interject myself properly into the situation.
There, there were more men shouting at me, pricing the trip in three currencies, and wanting to change my money.. They kept telling me that the border was closing in an hour and a half, if I wanted to go today I needed to make my mind up right away.
Way too much to handle. I needed to clear my head. I tipped the luggage guy, grabbed my bags, and fled into the open air.
I asked a man where the main busline counter is. He pointed the way. One man from the collectivo office is following me. I try to ignore him. He taps me on the shoulder.
I turn, about to lose my temper, which is a very, very rare thing for me to do. But I'm on the edge.
He hands my wallet to me. I'd dropped it. I take it, stammer my thanks, and run to the busline office.
I ask if there's a bus. No. Tommorow? No. Monday? Again, no. Why the hell not?
The guy looks at me, and hands me a brochure with Hugo Chavez's face on it. Because of the elections tomorrow he says. Would I like to change my money? He starts spouting information about collectivos again.
I get defensive once again, and start to lose my mind. I need a pen and paper. Write everything down. Prices. Exchange rates.
I told him that the bankrate on the Venezualan Bolivar to the dollar is 4.25, because that is what the internet said. He said their rate was 9 to one.
First the thuggish looking collectivo dude gives me back my lost wallet, and now I'm getting quoted and exchange rate twice the official rate. Surreal. What is going on here?
At that point I just surrendered, and realized that paranoia was getting me nowhere. I decided to trust these people.
Next thing I know, I am hurtling toward the border bouncing around in the back this,
 |
| I found Kenny's Old Truck in Venezuela. Who'da thunk? |
Crammed alongside a bunch of campesinos, with twice as many Bolivars as I'd initially thought I'd have in my pocket.
Hugo Chavez decreed in 2007 that Venezuela be a half hour - that's right a half hour - timezone ahead of Columbia, just to make arriving in his country just a little more annoying than it need be. That Hugo. Crazy guy. We'll see if he wins today..
Four hours in the back of Kenny's ramshackle old truck later, I'm now safely ensconced in a hotel in center Maracaibo, which the a major oil hub here.
The guy at the hotel desk keeps putting his finger to his eye everytime I walk by him, squinting and hissing "cuidado cabellero: indigentes!"
I ignored him, and went out looking for a bottle of water. I saw a bunch of gypsy ladies on the corner running what looked at first as I approached like a hotdog stand. I went up and asked if they had any drinks, but when they turned around the one closest me had this wicked orcish looking five inch blade in her hand, and I saw that the box they had wasn't of hotdogs, but was instead a pile of raw offal. Viscous entrails, that is. The woman was wearing a black dress and bandana, and looked as if capable of gutting me there on the spot. They all snarled and glared at me, and croaked "no" in unison, like they were the witches in MacBeth or the Fates or something.. I fled, beating a hasty retreat back to my room, where I am reduced to drinking tap water for the first time since I've been in Latin America, hoping it's safe..
The hotel is a cheap one, within a few blocks of the bus station and the cathedral, which is convenient, because I hope to catch mass in the morning, and then leave for Caracas tomorrow afternoon.
I'll keep you all posted as I get along. As always, keep watching this space..
---
Friday, October 5, 2012
Thursday, October 4, 2012
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]
---
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]
---
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.
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.
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:
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?
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...
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 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..
I think that's all I got for you guys tonight. Blessings on your heads. Sleep tight.
---
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 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 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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