This Green Mountain Daybreak

desde la ventana de mi habitacion

---

Planet Earth is Blue, And There's Nothing Left to Do..

And this may simply be the greatest cover by anyone, of anyone, ever.  I here give you all my beloved public International Space Station Canadian Commander Chris Hadfield, covering Bowie's inverse epic Major Tom:


(If the video won't load click here.)

Incidentally, the shirt's 14$ at Target (that's pronounced "Tar-jeh-aye").



---

Oh, How We the Common Must Cry..

This is my song this week.  It's over the top hipster twee, forsure (with an Ira Glass & John Hodgman cameo!) but I cannot care anymore, I abjectly & simply love it.  Hope you enjoy it, too:

(It seems Blogger and YouTube are at odds these days, I can't get any embedded videos to play properly here - click on the YouTube icon in the bar at the bottom of the video window here to link to the video there, if it refuses to play.. Or else just click here.)

The Semi-Sensical Quasi-Prophetical Lyrics:

If it'd been my youth would it come to me,

Oh love won’t you bite my eye?
I miss the sweet God in men,
Baffle a skeleton dry.
All they wanted was a villain, a villain,
And all they had was me.
All they wanted was a villain, a villain,
So then they just took me.

Hold my county line, get down on my city floor.
I will suffer no humans, they've been my habit before.
Ah Oh, and how the earth did shake.
And tumble and tremble, for what the people do take.
And I want in, all over your mind.
Cause oh, how we, the common do cry!

Ooh, ooh ooha, wahooah, ooh, ooh ooha, wahooah, ooh, ooh ooha, wahooah, ooo waoohwaoooh..

Ooh waha, aha, aha, Ooh waha, aha, aha
Where do you go from me?
Ooh aha, aha
When I wait for you faithfully?
Oh aha, aha
And will they take my life in time?
Ooh aha, aha
I love my girl, will you remind her?
Ooh aha, aha
And oh how we, the common do cry!

Ooh, ooh ooha, wahooah, ooh, ooh ooha, wahooah, ooh, ooh ooha, wahooah, ooo waoohwaoooh..

We die, we die, we die until we try.
We die, we die, we die until we try.
Well I could be yours, you could be mine.
Well I could be yours, and you would be mine.

If it'd been my youth would have come to me?
Oh love won’t you bite my eye?
I miss the sweet God in men,
Baffle a skeleton dry.
All they wanted was a villain, a villain,
And all they had was me.
All they wanted was a villain, a villain,
So then they just took me.

Hold my county line, get down on my city floor.
I will suffer no humans, they've been my habit before.
Ah woah, how we, the common must cry!

Ooh, ooh ooha, wahooah, ooh, ooh ooha, wahooah, ooh, ooh ooha, wahooah, ooo waoohwaoooh..

And oh, how we, the common must cry!

Ooh, ooh ooha, wahooah, ooh, ooh ooha, wahooah, ooh, ooh ooha, wahooah, ooo waoohwaoooh oohwah..

---

On Being from Boston: A Meditation Upon Patriot's Day

WBZ CBS News is finally reporting that they got the second suspect - "that knucklehead" (as the main announcer keeps calling him) who committed that bombing at the Boston Marathon on Monday. 

I'm sitting here, welling with gladness. The tragedies of this week that those two fools perpetrated upon the people of my city have been the catalyst for a minor emotional restoration for me.  It's reawakened my dormant sense of passionate attachment to this place, New England, my home.  

I've been sitting here today thinking how Boston somehow oddly belongs to me, even though I've never lived there.  It's like this: when I am away from home, very few people know where Maine is.  Hardly anybody's heard of New England.  Foreigners tend not to know all that much about the States. I usually have a slight problem when people ask me, as they often do, what part of America I am from.  

My simple solution: I always tell them I am from Boston. Often that draws a blank, too.  At which point I just say that it's sorta like New York, only wicked awesome. That last part's impossible to translate into French or Spanish, so I'll interject the English then fudge translate (bien chouette, demasiado chido, algo y nada como esto..) No way they could possibly understand, it always makes me laugh. 

Sometimes I'll add another incomprehensible line about Boston being the hub around all known creation radiates (le centre autour qui orbite tout le reste de l'univers connu, el centro acerca todo el resto del universo orbita - just watch the linguistic ginsu master, how I roll).. I get on a slight comedic bend, and crack myself all up while the person who asked stares at me wondering what's wrong with the crazy damn gringo.

Anyway, I am somehow actually in fact from Boston. Because as anyone from Maine will tell you, going Down East is coming from Boston. That's how you go to get there from here, across the Gulf of Maine.  

What's more, we were once politically - until 1820 - part of Massachusetts. And to this day Boston's teams - the Sox, Patriots, Bruins, Celtics - are our teams. That's called belonging to something in your blood and guts. From the sea and soil. Blood, salt and dirt.. Family. Boston is our town. 


In my mind's eye I see the skyline of the city shimmering up from the inrushing tarmaced horizon of I 93 flowing toward us, the very first time my dad and mom took my brothers and me into the city back in 1980. We sat in the backseat of the stationwagon, I utterly entranced by the mystical majesty of those two clusters of towers thrusting high into the hazy summer sky.

Dad took us to Jacob Wurth's by Tufts, where he hung out in his graduate school days at B.U. The fat white shirted mustachioed German waiters kicking sawdust as they brought us our platonically delectable bratwurst and sauerkraut..

It was a love affair from the very beginning. All the graceful intimacy of the town, colonial class of Fennel Hall and the golden capitol dome, with the Aquarium & Old Ironsides hedging the Harbor throwing off briny mist, to Fenway and the Charles so storied, all democratically regal..

Which is merely to say the horror of the week has been unrolling across terrain I know. Places I often inhabit in my dreams.  Boyleston Street. Cambridge. Kenmore Square.  

I'm still riding this train, see, after all these years.. Florida could never keep me:

Tonight I again find myself patriotically emotional in ways I haven't been in years. The last decade has been very harsh on my patriotic feeling. I'm still ferociously patriotic. This country, this land, is my home. These are my people. My heart's not going anywhere, even if I happen to be physically abroad. But these past years my heart's become pretty well bruised and cynical. The love's intact, but the adolescent magic was gone. I've come to know too much, have been repeatedly disappointed.  

But now tonight, on Patriot's Day, the anniversary of the shot heard 'round the world, the old ferocious emotion floods back.  

They finally got that knucklehead.  

Not even news of Lindsay Grahm spouting the now all too trite quasi- fascist Republican idiocy assaulting our precious constitutional tradition of due process, once again whyping his nasty southern ass with the Bill of Rights, like those jack booted thugs have been compulsively for the past twelve years now can damp my happiness.  

How was it that I ever allied myself with those assholes, thinking that they were somehow pro-life?  Like they actually care about the unborn. Was I an idiot? Was there crack in our water supply back then? Why doesn't Lindsay and the rest of his gibbering cracker horde just succeed again, and leave us Yankees alone? Why was it we fought so damn hard to keep them last time?  I have no idea.

Whatever. My contempt for them knows no end. They call themselves patriots. Cretinous fuckers. Go fellate some more bankers. Put their plugs in your gobs like good little kept catamites. I have no more patience for your bullshit.

The people of Boston just put you all to shame. This week has been a minor epic, I felt like I was watching the boys form up on the green again, staring down Gage's thugs with calm defiance. 

No pathetic would-be terrorist is going to scare us. They only succeed if they terrorize us. They failed.  

Their flag to April's breeze unfurled..

The character of free men is defined in the conquest of fear, see.


Two hundred and thirty eight years ago today, on April 19th 1775, the people of New England faced down the forces of a foreign tyrant, and won our freedom.  

Tonight we triumphed once again.  God Bless Boston.  God Bless America.  



---

On the Criticism of Others

If we stop rejecting the criticism of others, be it justified or unjustified criticism, and see such criticism as profitable for our salvation, we will have gained a great spiritual treasure. When we gain the ability to see our own sinfulness, we see that even the good deeds we do are saturated with sin. When we have gained the humility that comes from embracing the criticism of others, we will see that we are unable to heal ourselves, but are entirely dependent upon God as our only source of healing.

When we take notice of our own sinfulness, we will stop judging others, seeing in them the same pitiful state, and realize they are our kinfolk, and we are all journeying together, towards God. They can no longer hurt or offend us with their criticism, for we pity them, just as we pity ourselves for our own sinfulness, and we see them as our friends in this common struggle for sanctification and holiness.

The famous Russian abbot of the 50's and 60's, Father Nikon, was said to have told a spiritual child that once he sees his own sin, he will stop exalting some and belittling others, seeing everyone as his brother or sister. He will begin to love everyone as his co-strugglers.

- Abbot Tryphon

---

Picture of the Day: Wiggly & Beany with Dad

I just got through sorting the pictures from the Easter weekend Kid's Passover Seder I was graced enough to be able to spend with my brother, his family & in-laws two weeks ago.

One of my favorite images from that weekend:

I have some thoughts about the assonances between the Passover seder and the mass that I'll put to pixels sometime soon.  One of the many essays I intend to eventually (someday) inflict on you my devoted audience of a dozen.  Belated Blessed Pasch, anyhow..



---

"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.



---

Pictures of the Day: Mercy Sunday, National Shrine of Divine Mercy

I drove a couple hours south yesterday, down to the National Shrine of Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.  That's right where Massachusetts meets New York, about 20 minutes from the Vermont border.

It was cool and blustery, but there were 15-20,000 other pilgrims there with me. The crowd was heavily Latino, Pilipino and (this was a bit of a surprise to me) there were many black folk there as well.  Most of them were Haitian or Caribbean, but some were Afro-American as well. A good third of the people there were probably speaking Spanish or Tagalog. I was quite amused and pleased by all of it.

There was a mass in the afternoon, but I arrived late because - after departing not giving myself quite enough time - I got briefly lost (a difficult feat with a GPS, but I still somehow managed it) trying to find a gas station with diesel along the way, and then took well over a half hour to find parking and walk a half mile up the hill to the shrine. I arrived just in time for the consecration, and decided to spend an hour and a half in line to confess while mass concluded. There were a few hundred of us in line, so they came and gave us all communion while we waited, granting us dispensation to receive before confessing if we needed one. We were singing the Chaplet of Mercy as we stood there. It was beautiful.

There were over a dozen priests hearing confessions in Spanish and English, and (I thought this was great) one of them was the local bishop. My confessor was a Franciscan of Primitive Observance from Boston, who wear grey habits and scraggly beards (like the Friars of the Renewal, Fr. Groeschel's group) but are probably even more hard core.

(No, edit that, they are more hard core. Follow the link there - they have little to no web presence beyond their wikipedia page, which states that the Franciscans of Primitive Observance live a strict observance of the Rule of St. Francis. They do not carry money, and rely on the donations of individuals to pay for their needs. In their houses they do not utilize modern appliances and seek food door-to-door in the neighborhoods in which they live. The FPOs live a mixed contemplative and active life, spending considerable time in prayer each day in the chapel, as well as time in the community. The FPOs do not wish that details of their penitential life be widely known, living by the Lord's admonition to "pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly" - Matthew 6:6.)

(Not mine, I stole this image from here.)

This fellow seemed very unimpressed by me at first, but I shot my mouth off in fine form, and he came around, stroking his beautiful beard, saying "hmm, I think that was a pretty good confession.." 

High flattery, that. I was pleased. I often wonder how it would be to confess to Christ himself, or one of the apostles, Augustine, Francis, Ignatius, Dominic or Padre Pio.. I got the next best thing, yesterday. That alone was worth the drive.

We were joking that with the wind and rain we were chalking time off purgatory whether we received the indulgence or not. One of the conditions of the indulgence is detachment from venial sin. I am not even sure what that means, precisely, and I've long since decided that I will be very happy if I am received into purgatory. I really do not understand why people used to be so obsessed with suffering there. I want that. To be there would be a great joy, because it means that you will see God. Right now, all this suspense and uncertainty is really terrible. To suffer for the sake of love is what we are meant for, and it is a beautiful thing.. I'm just too much of a sloth and coward to do it very well here. So, let me do it then. Please.

I never got to see the icon in the formal shrine, that charming gothic chapel that you can see in the image above here, because they had closed it by the time I'd confessed. You can see the line there filing into the chapel, there were thousands of people filing through after mass to venerate the icon.

I did spend a while in one of the tents they had set up for adoration, after they had removed the monstrance but had left an icon, though:

A truly great day. I'll be back there later this spring when there's less of a mob scene, to see the chapel.


Today, incidentally, is the Annunciation. A significant feast in my mythic universe. I've got a bit that I'll post tomorrow on that. It needs a bit of polish, and I'm not really up to finishing it off it tonight.. Until tomorrow, then.  



---

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.

---

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.

---

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..   

(YouTube has gone and changed their embedding protocol for Blogger, and it isn't working properly at all.  Annoying.  Click on the YouTube button on the embedded window there on the right if you want to hear the song and it won't play.  It'll open the clip in YouTube. )

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..



---

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.



---