Quotation : Mary Oliver

If God exists he isn't just butter and good luck.

Mary Oliver, from "At the River Clarion," in Evidence (Beacon Press, 2009), p. 51

From The Cloud of Unknowing

Anyone who desires to regain the purity of heart lost through sin and to win that personal wholeness beyond all pain must patiently struggle in the contemplative work and endure its toil whether he has been a habitual sinner or not. Both sinners and innocents will suffer in this work although obviously sinners will feel the suffering more. And yet it often happens that some who have been hardened, habitual sinners arrive at the perfection of this work sooner than those who have never sinned grievously. God is truly wonderful in lavishing his grace on anyone he chooses; the world stands bewildered before love like this.

And I believe that Doomsday will actually be glorious, for the goodness of God will shine clearly in all his gifts of grace. Some who are now despised and held in contempt (and who are even perhaps inveterate sinners) shall on that day reign in splendor with his saints. And perhaps some of those who have never sinned grievously and who to all appearances are pious people, venerated as gods by other men, shall find themselves in misery among the damned.

My point is that in this life no man may judge another as good or evil simply on the evidence of his deeds. The deeds themselves are another matter. These we may judge as good or evil, but not the person.

via Magnificat, November 2009, pp. 332-3, meditation for Tuesday the 24th

Bizarre news story

Man sleeps with dead wife. For five years.

Another country heard from (times three)

Three of the four Massachusetts Democrats in contention for the US Senate seat vacated by the death of Senator Edward Kennedy sound off about the controversy involving Kennedy's son Patrick and his bishop.

Why don't they just shut up?

Quotation : Marianne Moore

Sympathizing with an experiment, we yet need not venerate the result.

The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (Penguin, 1987), p. 586

Eelworks

A poem by Seamus Heaney.

Via Steven Riddle's excellent blog A Momentary Taste of Being.

Dialogue on a bus

(By "girl" be it understood to mean "young college-age woman")

Girl #1: So what's your ethnicity?

Girl #2: I'm Brazilian.

Girl #1: Brazilian! I knew you were either Greek or Brazilian the first time I saw you. You're so pretty.

Girl #2: Thank you! And I knew you were Asian the first time I saw you!

The IHOP coffee incident, September 1997

You told a funny story
(Hilarious, not gory)
And it was mandatory
    To spew my coffee-quaff.
To Heather I say "Brava!"
Volcanoes belching lava
Can't beat my burst of java
    That time you made me lauff.

Quotation

A lot of people take the term free verse literally, with the result that there is more bad free verse written today than one can easily shake a stick at. Most of it hopes to recommend itself by deploying vaguely surrealistic images in unmetered colloquial idiom to urge acceptable opinions: that sex is a fine thing, that accurate perception is better than dull, that youth is probably a nicer condition than age, that there is more to things than their appearances; as well as that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were war criminals, that the C.I.A. is a menace, that corporations are corrupt, that contemporary history seems "entropic," and that women get a dirty deal. All very true and welcome. Yet what is lamentably missing is the art that makes poems re-readable once we have fathomed what they "say."

Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, revised edition (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 88

A nuisance

This is why it is important, from my point of view, to have discovered God. In a way I would say it is rather a danger, very often a nuisance. One could very well live with less trouble without a God than with a God because -- particularly with a God who has accepted solidarity to the point of death, love to the point of forgetting Himself and in addition to this, is vulnerable, helpless, despised, beaten -- God tells us coldbloodedly; this is the example which I give you -- follow it. Or he says, here are the beatitudes: you will be hungry, you will be thirsty, you will be beaten, you will be cast out, you will be persecuted -- and that is the best you can have. That kind of God is not always a discovery that brings ease in our lives. The point is not whether God will be useful, the point is whether it is true that He exists.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, God and Man (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2004), pp. 93 & 94

"Why hast thou forsaken me?"

The Orthodox bishop Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) on one of Christ's seven last words.

Big time computer problems

Don't know when regular posting will resume.