Mom ♥s Archbishop Dolan

The blogger at Dawn Breaks on Marblehead breaks her silence to note the appearance of New York's archbishop on Sunday Night Live with Father Benedict Groeschel.

Shakespeare

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combinèd locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine

The ghost in Hamlet, from somewhere in Act One, scene five

Seamus Heaney on Dylan Thomas

For composition to be successful, Thomas had to be toiling in the element of language like a person in a mudbath: the strain of writing was palpably muscular, the sensation of hydraulic passage through the words paramount and indispensable.

S. Heaney, from "Dylan the Durable?" in The Redress of Poetry (Noonday, 1995), p. 131

Carlo Carretto (1910-88)

From his book Letters from the Desert (Orbis, 1972, paperback 1976); from chapter 3.


Faith alone triumphs, and faith is hard, dark, stark.

To place oneself before what seems to be bread and to say, 'Christ is there, living and true,' is pure faith.

But nothing is more nourishing than pure faith, and prayer in faith is real prayer.

"There's no pleasure in adoring the Eucharist," one novice used to say to me. But it is precisely this renunciation of all desire to satisfy the senses that makes prayer strong and real. One meets God beyond the senses, beyond the imagination, beyond nature.

This is crucial : as long as we pray only when and how we want to, our life of prayer is bound to be unreal. It will run in fits and starts. The slightest upset -- even a toothache -- will be enough to destroy the whole edifice of our prayer-life.

"You must strip your prayers," the novice-master told me. You must simplify, deintellectualise. Put yourself in front of Jesus as a poor man : not with any big ideas, but with living faith. Remain motionless in an act of love before the Father. Don't try to reach God with your understanding; that is impossible. Reach him in love; that is possible.

The struggle is not easy, because nature will try to get back her own, get her dose of enjoyment; but union with Christ Crucified is something quite different.

After some hours -- or some days -- of this exercise, the body relaxes. As the will refuses to let it have its own way it gives up the struggle. It becomes passive. The senses go to sleep. Or rather, as St John of the Cross says, the night of sense is beginning. Then prayer becomes serious, even if it is painful and dry. So serious that one can no longer do without it. The soul begins to share the redemptive work of Jesus.

Kneeling down on the sand before the simple monstrance which contained Jesus, I used to think of the evils of the world : hate, violence, depravity, impurity, egoism, betrayal, idolatry. Around me the cave had become as large as the world, and inwardly I contemplated, Jesus oppressed under the weight of so much wickedness.

Is not the Host in its own form like bread, crushed, pounded, baked? And does it not contain the Man of Sorrows, Christ the Victim, the Lamb slain for our sins?

dylan's 40th birthday

The occasion falls today. Hurrah, etc. Let joy be unconfined.

Dr Eric Mascall

A monumental Anglican of the last century. From The Christian Universe (Morehouse-Barlow, 1966, 174 pp.), 62-66.


And I want to stress that there is much in the world that suggests that it is a creation of a God of supreme loveliness and beauty. As I pointed out in the last lecture, life is not lived entirely in dust-bins, even symbolical ones, and chestnut-trees not only inspire feelings of disgust and resentment in French existentialists but manifest exquisite beauty to ordinary people.

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree,

wrote Joyce Kilmer; and went on to add :

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Even on the level of brute experience, the world is not merely squalid, widespread as squalor undoubtedly is. It is a world in which exquisite beauty is to be found, beauty in the things of nature, beauty in the artefacts of man, beauty in human behaviour and human relationships. But this beauty is uniformly imperfect, impermanent and, on its own level, inexplicable. It is only understandable in terms of Creation and the Fall. St Augustine has the reputation of having been a somewhat austere Christian, but to him the most heart-rending feature of the world was the fact that so much beauty was fragile and fugitive; and it could only be understood at all as reflecting the visage of a Creator who was supremely beautiful and changelessly eternal. "All this fabric most fair, of things that are truly good, will pass away when its course has been completed; they have their morning -- and their evening." And so he turned to God with the cry: "Late, how late have I loved thee, Beauty ever old and ever new." And St John of the Cross, as we have seen, is exuberant in his application of imagery derived from the natural world to the God for whom he yearns:

My love is as the hills,
The lonely valleys clad with forest-trees ...

Or, again:

Rare gifts he scatterèd
As through these woods and groves he pass'd apace
Turning, as on he sped,
And clothing every place
With loveliest reflection of his face. ...

The creatures, all around,
Speak of thy graces as I pass them by.
Each deals a deeper wound
And something in their cry
Leaves me so raptur'd that I fain would die.

Has ever such haunting expression been given to the sense that the beauty of the natural world is both an effect and a reflection of the uncreated beauty of its Maker?

Nevertheless, the fact must be emphasised that our awareness of God in this life is, at any rate for the most part (for moments of mystical intuition may be commoner than has sometimes been supposed), very partial and fragmentary, and its full enjoyment lies beyond the grave. "Here we see in a mirror, dimly; but then face to face." And we shall not discern him if we restrict our gaze to the surface of things and make no attempt to become sensitive to the deeper realities. "The things of the Spirit ... are spiritually discerned." If we look only for the dust-bins, we shall see only them; for they are certainly there. And if we see only them, the absurdity of the world will seem to be ultimate, for the world does not explain itself. But if we look for the world's explanation beyond itself and find in it a God who is infinite and self-existent love, bliss and splendour, then we can look back on the world and see it bathed in his beauty and reflecting it from its myriads of facets. But even as we look at him, we shall be dazzled by him, and his splendour itself may appear to us as darkness. With the Apostle we may say "I could not see for the glory of that light", and shall seek someone to lead us by the hand. And the more we come to know him, the more we shall recognise how much there is of him we do not know. With the Psalmist we may exclaim: "He made darkness his secret place, his pavilion round about him : darkness of waters, thick clouds of the skies." God is indeed mystery, but without him we have not mystery but absurdity. "The true alternative", it has been well said, "is not mystery or clarity, but mystery or absurdity." In Abbot Vonier's words: "It is an indispensable condition of all true and lasting admiration that its object should be greater than our knowledge of it; and the growth of knowledge, far from touching the limits of the marvellous, should convince us more and more of their inaccessibility."

God is infinite love, bliss and splendour; and, because he is infinite love, he wills that his bliss and splendour shall not be enjoyed by him in isolation but that there shall be other persons who shall share in it and enjoy it, if they will accept it as coming from him. The Christian God is not like the First Mover of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, totally absorbed in self-admiration and not even conscious that the world exists, as the world does its own poor, pathetic best, by its own feeble efforts, to imitate the perfection -- the cold and arid perfection -- which it beholds in him. The Christian God is a God who, while he is absolutely self-sufficient and perfect in his own life of love as Trinity, nevertheless pours out upon creatures the superabundance of that love. "Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands." "I have loved thee with an everlasting love."

This is the love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Cummings

If freckles were lovely, and day was night,
And measles were nice, and a lie warn't a lie,
Life would be delight, --
But things couldn't go right
For in such a sad plight
I wouldn't be I.

If earth was heaven, and now was hence,
And past was present, and false was true,
There might be some sense
But I'd be in suspense
For on such a pretense
You wouldn't be you.

If fear was plucky, and globes were square,
And dirt was cleanly, and tears were glee
Things would seem fair, --
Yet they'd all despair,
For if here was there
We wouldn't be we.

La Sainte Chappelle, Paris

(via Inside Catholic)

Sonnet to the Virgin

by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Mother! whose virgin bosom was uncrost
With the least shade of thought to sin allied;
Woman! above all women glorified,
Our tainted nature's solitary boast;
Purer than foam on central ocean tost;
Brighter than eastern skies at daylight strewn
With fancied roses, than the unblemished moon
Before her wane begins on heaven's blue coast;
Thy Image falls to earth. Yet some, I ween,
Not unforgiven the suppliant knee might bend,
As to a visible Power, in which did blend
All that was mixed and reconciled in Thee
Of mother's love with maiden purity,
Of high with low, celestial with terrene!

Cummings

except in your
honour,
my loveliest,
nothing
may move may rest
--you bring

(out of dark the
earth)a
procession of
wonders
huger than prove
our fears

were hopes:the moon
open
for you and close
will shy
wings of because;
each why

of star(afloat
on not
quite less than all
of time)
gives you skilful
his flame

so is your heart
alert,
of languages
there's none
but well she knows;
and can

perfectly speak
(snowflake
and rainbow mind
and soul
november and
april)

who younger than
begin
are,the worlds move
in your
(and rest,my love)
honour

Sonnet of Black Beauty

by Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648)

Black beauty, which above that common light,
Whose Power can no colours here renew
But those which darkness can again subdue,
Dost still remain unvary'd to the sight,
And like an object equal to the view,
Are neither chang'd with day, nor hid with night;
When all these colours which the world call bright,
And which old Poetry doth so persue,
Are with the night so perishèd and gone,
That of their being there remains no mark,
Thou still abidest so intirely one,
That we may know thy blackness is a spark
Of light inaccessible and alone
Our darkness which can make us think it dark.

The Call

by George Herbert (1593-1633)

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

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

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

Quotation

God does not give Himself to a chattering soul which, like a drone in a beehive, buzzes about but gathers no honey. A talkative soul is empty inside.

Saint Faustina Kowalska

dark speech on hiatus?

Maybe. I haven't decided yet. But am not happy with the directionlessness of this blog. Its happy miscellaneity can get a little silly and wearisome at times (perhaps not to the few loyal readers, but certainly to the author).

I would continue blogging at phos hilaron, my blog emphasizing the treasures of Eastern Christianity.

As for this blog, who knows? I might find something vital that captures my attention later today or tomorrow, and begin blogging again with vigor, and renounce all thoughts of suspending the effort. But there are times when it does seem wise to slow down a bit.

another YouTube

Five minutes of jazz with the Scola Tristano trio, featuring Fr Stan Fortuna CFR on (I think) bass guitar.

Go, meat!

from "H. Baptisme (I)"

You taught the book of life my name, that so,
    Whatever future sinnes should me miscall,
    Your first acquaintance might discredit all.

George Herbert (1593-1633)

Experimental

Discussing the knockout over a beer and a beer.

Walking toward the apothecary of sensations, synæsthesia at sunset.

Sleep during the day, brief winter's holiday's luxury.

For your soul's health's sake, contemplation and music.

Is everything hunky-dory with the ham radio?

Modern art, O triumphant banality! the iconography of cynical cool.

In wine you find wisdom, in beer strength, in water bacteria.

The sun's cold disk, composed of snow as yet unfallen.

During the night, we check the clock, and sleep, and check the clock.

Trivial music, auditory junk food, ephemeral masterpieces.

Everything will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.

Slant-rhymed reflections on the season's art, the alternating solstices.

The People's President Speaks

Thanks to the resolute measures
we took ten years ago,
we enjoy stability today.
We are free
from impure ideologies
and from dangerous doctrines
which undermine
the safety of the State.
Gone are the days
of archaic theocracies
and outdated value-systems.
We flourish
because we are united
in the task of building
a better land
for our posterity.
There are, however, a few
recalcitrant souls --
loners, reactionaries --
who focus on the supposed
sins of our Republic,
but we are intent on
educating the populace
to enhance appreciation
of all the positive actions
we have undertaken.
We have opened
an Enlightenment Center
in every major city,
and it is our sincere hope,
our firm expectation,
that these Enlightenment Centers
will benefit those
who might lack a proper sense
of our nation's great history.
It is the aim to remedy
any darkness of mind
that might have befallen
our citizens.

We remain
a peace-loving people,
resolute and optimistic.
But let no one doubt
our fortitude,
our clarity of purpose.
In that connection,
we beg your indulgence
as we conclude our remarks
with the words of our predecessor
(may he rest in peace):
the ones who are not with us
are against us;
the ones who do not
gather with us,
scatter.

1998

Zinging a cable through the ether

Où sont les moptop d'antan?

One wonders.

Poem of the Day

Dante to Beatrice.

A beautiful Pentecost prayer

posted at Enbrethiliel's.

And just in time for the semi-centennial ...

A Telegraph article about former Smiths frontman Morrissey : does he write poetry or lyrics? The writer argues that song lyrics aren't really poetry.

Via, oddly enough, poetryfoundation.org.

Watching the Scripps National Spelling Bee

I have to work the word "geusioleptic" into conversation sometime!

Oh, wow. Some lucky kid just got "avoirdupois." Considering they're throwing out words like "psittacosis," "ophelimity," "herniorrhaphy," and "Reykjavik," I'd have sighed with relief over "avoirdupois"!

The Hail Mary

in twelve languages.

I was not familiar with the French version, and was startled, a bit, by the word "entrailles," so much like the English "entrails"!

A poetry question answered!

Lord, defend us from the peroration;
Silence all that politicians say.
Those who plough us in to make a nation
Have not know the vision we obey.

Wits that learn from mother-wit are keenest,
Nor is there nobility of style
Till the proud man kneel to help the meanest:
Those who justify themselves are vile.

Vernon Watkins (1906-67)

Text of the poem provided by reader Tielo, to whom, a thousand thank-yous!