Nouwen and Houselander: Recent Reading

Your heart is broken, the heart that did not know hatred, revenge, resentment, jealousy or envy but only love, love so deep and so wide that it embraces your Father in heaven as well as all humanity in time and space. Your broken heart is the source of my salvation, the foundation of my hope, the cause of my love. It is the sacred place where all that was, is and ever shall be is held in unity. There all suffering has been suffered, all anguish lived, all loneliness endured, all abandonment felt and all agony cried out. There, human and divine love have kissed, and there God and all men and women of history are reconciled. All the tears of the human race have been cried there, all pain understood and all despair touched. Together with all people of all times, I look up to you whom they have pierced, and I gradually come to know what it means to be part of your body and your blood, what it means to be human.

Henri J M Nouwen, Heart Speaks to Heart: Three Gospel Meditations on Jesus (Ave Maria Press, 2007), pp 36-7

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The Christ Child in a nation is like the presence of the child in the house: everything centers upon his youth; and he fills everything with his life. If He goes away, the child's values go, too, such as the sense of wonder, mystery, beauty, and adventure: the poetry which, free from materialism, is the most complete realism.

Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God (Sheed and Ward, 1961), pp 103-4

Twitter meme: Proud to be a fan of ...

Here are 10 things of which I am "proud to be a fan."  There are others, but these were the first ten that came to mind.

Dylan Thomas
Theodore Roethke
E E Cummings
Shakespeare
monks
The Smiths
Tracy Chapman
Carolina Chocolate Drops
Boston's CatholicTV
Blessed John Paul II

Advent (In Mary-Darkness)

I live my Advent in the womb of Mary.

And on one night when a great star swings free

from its high mooring and walks down the sky

to be the dot above the Christus i,

I shall be born of her by blessed grace.

I wait in Mary-darkness, faith’s walled place,

with hope’s expectance of nativity.

I knew for long she carried me and fed me,

guarded and loved me, though I could not see.

But only now, with inward jubilee,

I come upon earth’s most amazing knowledge:

someone is hidden in this dark with me.

Jessica Powers, The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, p. 81

*

And here is Fr Philip Dabney, CSsR, of Boston's Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, incorporating lines from the poem above into a short homily (it's toward the end):

20 Things I Don't Like

Summer. Loud noise. Most hip-hop. Tequila. Peas.

Cottage cheese. Baked beans (but I like pinto beans). Pumpkin ravioli (but I love cheese or spinach ravioli). Tom Petty. Stevie Nicks.

Charles Bukowski. People who say the F-word too much. A doctor I had in 2003, uncompassionate and convinced of her own infallibility. A biology teacher I had in 1983, ditto. Talk radio.

Aggressive or reckless drivers. The New American Bible. "Dialogue" or "fellowship" used as verbs. A certain strain of overconfident, inflexibly convinced Protestantism. Brutality of any kind.

Forty miles west

The morning after Thanksgiving, at my aunt and uncle's.

A plentiful lack of elbow room

Golly, that Unitarian Harvest Moon Fair! It's a bigger mob scene than Town Day, forsooth! And all manner of awesome things are to be found at the Fair.

I gravitated toward the books and CDs, where I didn't succeed in finding any orthodox Dolanesque Catholics, but I did find a pair of social-justice Orbicular Catholics, and, as one book's title was stolen from Gerard Manley Hopkins (Send My Roots Rain by Megan McKenna), I bought it. Other books included Alan Watts's autobiography, Elizabeth Bishop's last book of poems, and an anthology edited by the light-verse-master X. J. Kennedy. Oh, and I bought Scott Brown's book for Maugham!


I went to the mammoth Blue Table, where everything is blue. I got for Maugham a pair of conical blue-tinted drinking glasses. The lady who sold them to me (Patience was her marvellous name!) suggested they'd be good for sherry. Maugham and I may put them to other uses!

Elbow room is not in ample supply at the Harvest Moon Fair. Humanity doth swarm around the tables. Some vending quilts, Christmas decorations, toasters, blenders, needlepoint hangings with Bible verses, scarves, gloves, mittens, coffee mugs, '70s board games (do any of you remember Probe? Sort of like Hangman without the gallows!), baked goods, et cetera, et cetera, ad bloody infinitum. There was even a table of computers with the punning sign CHIPS 'N' SALSA.

I met the genteel and charming lady minister! I started the conversation. She was wearing a name tag with her full name which I recognized from the church's billboard or signpost or whatchamacallit. So I said "You're the minister!" And she said yes indeedy she was. Nice lady, fiftyish. Short gray hair, and maybe glasses but I don't recollect. Slender and smiling.

As I revise the last paragraph but one, I think of what a marvellous radio broadcast Dylan Thomas would have made of the Harvest Moon Fair. He'd probably take ten paragraphs to catalogue all the cool stuff that was being sold, from plants to computers, from board-games to coffee-mugs, from scarves to framed Bible verses in needlepoint, from books to jewelry, from CDs to cupcakes. And then he'd describe the weather in terms that would make the angels sob "Selah!" And he'd describe the people, quirky, progressive, and unfailingly kind, with name-tags reading Patience and Holly and other lyrical names. And he'd probably describe the bawdy bongs of the post-modern bell-tower, chiming the hours with gusto. And he'd describe the three folksy guitarists in the cafeteria, crooning away in the bustle. He'd make a masterpiece that would rival A Child's Christmas in Wales!

Oh, and there was indeed a trio of women in casual autumn attire playing guitars and crooning folk songs in the cafeteria. (They called their little group Somebody's Mother.) The cafeteria (which opened for meals at 11.15, that is to say, after Maugham and I left) had a menu featuring all things Mexican -- and for kiddies, or for unadventurous bland American palates such as mine, hot dogs, or peanut butter sandwiches.

And did I convey what a sublime day Saturday was, weather-wise? Perfect November day, almost a mite too warm for me. Upper 40s, delicately brushing 50, and surpassing it as the day progressed, with brilliant sun that somehow seemed gentle for all its brilliance.

Oh, and the flyers and notices on the UU bulletin board! One notice advertised a lecture on the difference between Islam and Islamism. Another spoke of the rights of women in our hyper-sexualized culture. Some flyers advertised music lessons. And others, I think, English lessons.

There was a room at the UU fair called The Jewelry Box, which Maugham waited in line (perhaps sitting on her walker-seat) to get into. I didn't see this room, but Maugham was not all that favorably impressed. Which is surprising, because every other aspect of this bazaar or fair or flea market was overwhelmingly fun and good. And all those UUs, they're so friendly. Of course, I didn't (apart from buying the Scott Brown autobiography) advertise my Republicanism, which probably contributed immeasurably to the friendliness.

I almost went and talked to the ladies staffing the "Who We Are" table, providing info about Unitarianism. I would have said, "I went to a Unitarian church for three months in 1991! I've read Jack Mendelsohn's Being Liberal in an Illiberal Age!"

(I didn't just go to "a" Unitarian church. I went to the Arlington Street Church, adjacent to Boston's Public Gardens. A slight acquaintance of bygone days, the poet W--- L-------, was a member of the church. I thought, this seems to work for him, it just might work for me! It didn't. I soon discovered Thomas Merton, and the rest is history.)

But those UUs really are awesome. Kind. And that matters. Maybe I'll write a book about them called Being Kind in an Unkind Age.

The Ronald Knox Foxtrot

Some coffee and a doughnut,
Some toast and apple juice,
An egg-and-sausage sandwich,
A kick in the caboose.
At lunch, three pints of lager
And fish sticks from a box
As we rehearse the sacred verse
Englished by Ronald Knox.

Some like the modern versions
Of ageless Holy Writ,
But some are pert and slangy
And some flunk basic Lit.
King James produced a winner,
Which no one ever mocks --
But call me strange, I wouldn't change
The one by Ronald Knox.

The leaves fall in November,
And soon, the flakes of snow.
I read the book of Proverbs --
Outside it's ten below!
Let's keep the home fires burning
With Chivas on the rocks,
And turn the page to that old sage,
Monsignor Ronald Knox.

The reader at the pulpit
Proclaims the N.A.B.;
King David takes siestas?
Sounds rather odd to me.
The lectionary's awful!
Let's please turn back the clocks!
Give us a dose of sweet verbose
Monsignor Ronald Knox!