Monday, July 13, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Hart Crane
The earth may glide diaphanous to death;
But if I lift my arms it is to bend
To you who turned away once, Helen, knowing
The press of troubled hands, too alternate
With steel and soil to hold you endlessly.
I meet you, therefore, in that eventual flame
You found in final chains, no captive then --
Beyond their million brittle, bloodshot eyes;
White, through white cities passed on to assume
That world which comes to each of us alone.
Accept a lone eye riveted to your plane,
Bent axle of devotion along companion ways
That beat, continuous, to hourless days --
One inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise.
from "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen"
But if I lift my arms it is to bend
To you who turned away once, Helen, knowing
The press of troubled hands, too alternate
With steel and soil to hold you endlessly.
I meet you, therefore, in that eventual flame
You found in final chains, no captive then --
Beyond their million brittle, bloodshot eyes;
White, through white cities passed on to assume
That world which comes to each of us alone.
Accept a lone eye riveted to your plane,
Bent axle of devotion along companion ways
That beat, continuous, to hourless days --
One inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise.
from "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen"
Countee Cullen
The meek are promised much in a book I know,
But one grows weary turning cheek to blow.
(I forget the name of the poem these lines come from; I do remember that it's a sonnet.)
But one grows weary turning cheek to blow.
(I forget the name of the poem these lines come from; I do remember that it's a sonnet.)
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Carretto
[...] for him who suffers, theology is not enough. Something more is necessary.
Carlo Carretto, Letters from the Desert, p. 117 in my copy
Carlo Carretto, Letters from the Desert, p. 117 in my copy
Thursday, July 09, 2009
I want to have a blurb on Sancta Sanctis!
Here's my best effort. To be sung to the tune of Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable":
Enbrethiliel,
in every way,
Enbrethiliel,
you make my day!
(I should do a whole song, but, alas! my creative faculties are on the wane.)
Enbrethiliel,
in every way,
Enbrethiliel,
you make my day!
(I should do a whole song, but, alas! my creative faculties are on the wane.)
Meditation from Magnificat
Jesus could have persuaded [his would-be followers] ... by a fiery speech, for example, or by irrefutable arguments, by extraordinary promises, or by the irresistible radiance of his personality. But had he resorted to such means he would not really have respected them. In that case he would have been putting pressure on them and so desecrated the sanctuary of their freedom. [...]
Only a gratuitous and completely disinterested love could so profoundly and swiftly persuade them. Only a completely free love could arouse a love which was equally free and spontaneous. Love can only unfold completely in a heart which is fully expectant and open, in the intimate and hidden place in every human being where freedom still slumbers unconsciously. Only love can engender love, a love which will never regret anything, whatever happens; a love, strong as death, which will never be quenched, either by a flood of temptations or by the storm of death. It is because Jesus wanted us that he chose us.
André Louf, OCSO (italics mine)
Only a gratuitous and completely disinterested love could so profoundly and swiftly persuade them. Only a completely free love could arouse a love which was equally free and spontaneous. Love can only unfold completely in a heart which is fully expectant and open, in the intimate and hidden place in every human being where freedom still slumbers unconsciously. Only love can engender love, a love which will never regret anything, whatever happens; a love, strong as death, which will never be quenched, either by a flood of temptations or by the storm of death. It is because Jesus wanted us that he chose us.
André Louf, OCSO (italics mine)
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Possibly upcoming
A brief exploration of the Augustinian formula ama et fac quod vis, and a modern distortion thereof.
Friday, July 03, 2009
Quotation from current reading
And the Antichrist, with an air of scholarly excellence, tells us that any exegesis that reads the Bible from the perspective of faith in the living God, in order to listen to what God has to say, is fundamentalism; he wants to convince us that only his kind of exegesis, the supposedly purely scientific kind, in which God says nothing and has nothing to say, is able to keep abreast of the times.
Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, p. 36
Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, p. 36
Commonweal and Our Lady of Victory
Bishops need to help heal the wounds of division, not deepen them.
Summary of a recent Commonweal editorial (from the website)
:: :: :: :: ::
Humble the enemies of our holy religion, and frustrate their evil purposes.
From a prayer to Our Lady of Victory, found in a prayer manual from 1948
Summary of a recent Commonweal editorial (from the website)
:: :: :: :: ::
Humble the enemies of our holy religion, and frustrate their evil purposes.
From a prayer to Our Lady of Victory, found in a prayer manual from 1948
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Monday, June 22, 2009
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.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
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
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
Saturday, June 20, 2009
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
S. Heaney, from "Dylan the Durable?" in The Redress of Poetry (Noonday, 1995), p. 131
Thursday, June 18, 2009
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?
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?
Sunday, June 14, 2009
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.
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.
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.
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