happy birthday estlin

pity this busy monster,manunkind,

not.  Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim(death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange;lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen until unwish
returns on its unself.
                                       A world of made
is not a world of born--pity poor flesh

and trees,poor stars and stones,but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence.  We doctors know

a hopeless case if--listen:there's a hell
of a good universe next door;let's go



~ E E Cummings
born 14 October 1894
died 3 September 1962

9th blog-o'-versary!

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

And here is the initial post of Dark Speech upon the Harp, which was called Tenebrae back in 2002 -- the post is of a poem by Theodore Roethke.  Enjoy!

Msgr Massimo Camisasca

Even the weight of your sins would lead you back to me, God says.  The whole of Christian wisdom is summed up in this sentence.  For in becoming man, God chose to communicate himself, not only in spite of fragility, but "through" it.  If we agree to this divine method without reservation, we can stop looking at our limitations as a reason for discouragement or frustration, and so as something to forget, to censor, and can start looking at them as stones to build with.  The whole of our lives, with all their lights and shadows, exists in order to manifest the glory of Christ (Jn 9:3).  If we refuse this logic, life will always be a burden that sooner or later we will find unbearable.

We are frequently tempted to censor difficulties, to hide them even from ourselves.  When we do that, we are diverging radically from the way that God acts with us:  every detail is a matter of importance for him.  This kind of censorship is a diabolical act, which is often born of a fear of another's judgment, of the fear of losing the positive image that others have of us.  But our stature before Christ has nothing to do with his image, nor can it be measured in terms of the mistakes that we may make or avoid making.  Rather, it is decided by Christ himself and by our belonging to him.  So to hide your own limits, your own problems, really doesn't make any sense.  You do not find freedom from your own miseries by censoring them, but by handing them over to Christ, which is to say, by letting him embrace them.  This embrace is like the one with which the mother enfolds her child in her arms, with which the lover takes the beloved into his.  Indeed, it is infinitely more affectionate than these other gestures.  Within this embrace, everything is taken up and directed to the one goal that makes life exciting: the glory of Christ on earth.

(via Magnificat, September 2011, meditation for the day, Sunday the 25th)