scatter

broken open

2011-11-14T07:46:00.000-06:00

Four times a day—on rising, at noon, late afternoon, and before going to bed—Agnes and Father Damien became that one person who addressed the unknown. The priest stopped what he was doing, cast himself down, made himself transparent, broke himself open. That is, prayed.

Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. Harper Collins, 2001. 182.

to live in a broken world

2011-11-14T07:37:00.000-06:00

People say they do not want to give way on important moral issues, but far too often they don't want to give way on the ego's need to be right, superior, and in control. This mimics that "original sin," described as a "desire to be like God" and daring to eat the apple of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It's the human unwillingness to live in a broken world. In the illusion of an unbroken world, we do not have to rely upon grace, mercy and forgiveness, we do not need to be "saved."

Richard Rohr, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety. Cincinnati, St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2001. 35.

self-selecting outsiders

2010-08-27T09:53:00.000-05:00

Part of the attraction of fundamentalist discourse, and this fundamentalism can be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Marxist, or secularist, is the way it allows partially self-selecting 'outsiders' from mainstream culture (and we are all such partially self-selecting 'outsiders' now) to see themselves as secret 'insiders' with a direct line in to What's Really Going On.

James Alison. Broken Hearts and New Creations. New York: Continuum, 2010. 38.

being forgiven

2010-08-18T21:24:00.000-05:00

Imagine what it is like to be approached by your forgiving victim. It is actually very difficult indeed to spend time thinking about our being approached by our forgiving victim! What is it like to actually undergo being forgiven? We tend to try to resolve this by saying, 'Oh, it's not being forgiven that matters. It's forgiving: I must forgive!' So we work ourselves up into a moral stupor, straining ourselves to 'forgive the bastard!' This then becomes very, very complicated. But in fact the Christian understanding is quite the reverse: it's because we are undergoing being forgiven that we can forgive; and we need to forgive in order to continue undergoing being forgiven. But remember: it's because we are approached by our victim, that we start to be undone. Or in Paul's language: 'even though you were dead in your sins he has made you alive together in Christ.' Someone was approaching you even when you didn't realize there was a problem, so that you begin to discover, 'Oh! So that's what I've been involved in.'

James Alison. Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-in. New York: Continuum, 2006. 64-65.

peripheral existence

2010-01-23T07:14:00.000-06:00

Sacred centres produce margins, and the margin is a dangerous place to be, and much effort must be expended not to be among the losers, whether in terms of finance, health, reputation or whatever. However, the extraordinarily powerful, benevolent, non-sacred, non-centre, which is Christ building the new Temple, is able to make it a pleasure to dwell with spaciousness among the weak and those of little account, because there is, after all, 'world enough and time'. So peripheral existence enables liking being among those who do not have anywhere to go, because they are neither competition, nor sign of scarcity, not threat of love, nor object of compassion, but sign of gift and shared story. There is all the spaciousness of eternal life with which to begin to build a story of the sort that has no end.

James Alison. On Being Liked. New York: Herder & Herder, 2003. 74.

conscious, consenting, responsible

2009-10-26T13:43:00.004-05:00

When Jesus speaks of having life more abundantly, this, I think, is the life He means: a life that is not reducible by division, category, or degree, but is one thing, heavenly and earthly, spiritual and material, divided only insofar as it is embodied in distinct creatures. He is talking about a finite world that is infinitely holy, a world of time that is filled with life that is eternal. His offer of more abundant life, then, is not an invitation to declare ourselves as certified "Christians," but rather to become conscious, consenting, and responsible participants in the one great life, a fulfillment hardly institutional at all.

Wendell Berry, "The Burden of the Gospels" in Blessed Are the Peacemakers; Christ's Teachings about Love, Compassion & Forgiveness. Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005. 66-67

gifts keep giving

2009-09-12T09:11:00.004-05:00

A commodity is truly "used up" when it is sold because nothing about the exchange assures its return. The visiting sea captain may pay handsomely for a Kula necklace, but because the sale removes it from the circle, it wastes it, no matter the price. Gifts that remain gifts can support an affluence of satisfaction, even without numerical abundance. The mythology of the rich in the overproducing nations that the poor are in on some secret about satisfaction—black "soul," gypsy duende, the noble savage, the simple farmer, the virile gamekeeper—obscures the harshness of modern capitalist poverty, but it does have a basis, for people who live in voluntary poverty or who are not capital-intensive do have more ready access to erotic forms of exchange that are neither exhausting nor exhaustible and whose use assures their plenty.

Lewis Hyde. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. New York: Vintage, 2007. 29

given not taken

2009-08-31T15:23:00.005-05:00

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: New Directions, 1961. 229.

the victim's logos

2009-08-20T10:14:00.004-05:00

The Johannine Jesus said that once he was raised up on the Cross he would draw all humanity to himself, that gradually the sight of this innocent man on the gallows would become more compelling than all of conventional culture's techniques for making sanctioned violence morally respectable. by the time the biblical scholars finally succeed in disproving the "authenticity" of this saying and demonstrating beyond all scholarly doubt that it was never spoken by the historical Jesus, it will have been fulfilled in ways that the average ten-year-old will be able to recognize.

Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. New York: Crossroad, 1995. 227-228.

a puzzling God

2009-08-15T08:14:00.002-05:00

The God whom Moses came to know in the wilderness was a God whose name is an emphatic form of the verb "to be." This was a God heedless of worldly power, who chose as agents in history the social underclass. The greatness and the tragedy of Moses consist, I feel, in the fact that he strove to put the elusive God who empathized with losers at the center of a culture that would have to win in order to survive. He gave the Hebrew people a God with an empathy for the lowly and the downtrodden, a God whose most defining feature was a refusal to be defined, a God openly hostile to the kind of cult idolatry that was synonymous with the conventional religious life of the age. Moses' God was a God wary of religion.

Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. New York: Crossroad, 1995. 146.

moral outrage

2009-08-09T16:04:00.002-05:00

The gospel's insistence on forgiveness is both profound and pragmatic, but we cannot fully appreciate either until we realize how routinely moral indignation leads to a replication of the behavior that aroused the indignation. Moral outrage is morally ambiguous. The more outraged it is, the less likely it is to contribute to real moral improvements. Righteous indignation is often the first symptom of the metastasis of the cancer of violence.

Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. New York: Crossroad, 1995. 89.

prophetic voice

2009-08-09T09:29:00.004-05:00

The Hebrew prophets were the first to speak in condemnation of the sacrificial system and in defense of its victims. They were largely ignored, but their words took on a life of their own, eventually becoming the moral ballast of the Hebrew Scriptures and the essential link in the Judeo-Christian revelation. The Gospels carry forward what the Hebrew prophets began, announcing from the supreme perspective of the Cross that those united by their common victim "know not what they do."

Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. New York: Crossroad, 1995. 74.

another transcendence

2009-08-09T08:52:00.004-05:00

In the final analysis, the only alternative to the simulated transcendence of social contagion and violence is another experience of religious transcendence, one at the center of which is a God who chooses to suffer violence rather than to sponsor it.

Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. New York: Crossroad, 1995. 66.

held

2009-06-07T14:16:00.005-05:00

Thrush song, stream song, holy love
That flows through earthly forms and folds,
The song of Heaven's Sabbath fleshed
In throat and ear, in stream and stone,
A grace living here as we live,
Move my mind now to that which holds
Things as they change.

Wendell Berry, from "Sabbath 1982, IV". A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997. New York: Counterpoint. 43.

a good conscience

2009-06-07T14:03:00.006-05:00

Someone of unbound conscience can dare to get it wrong, because they don't have to get it right. If you have to get it right, that means that you don't dare to get it wrong, which means that you are afraid of what will happen to you if you do get it wrong. But the Catholic and Christian understanding of conscience is that because we know that we are liked we can get it wrong, and it doesn't matter, because we are not frightened of punishment, but able to learn from our mistakes. In fact, if we can't dare to be wrong, then we can't truly get it right, because our being right will be a form of protection against what is other than us, what is unknown, exciting, big and causing us to be bigger-minded, magnanimous. A good conscience is not a feeling of self-satisfaction at having got it right; it is much more the underlying excitement of knowing yourself on the way somewhere, which is perfectly compatible with a deep sorrow of realisation at having got something wrong. This is the excitement of being a son or daughter who is on an adventure, not the contractual precision of a slave who has to get something right because he has no sense of being on the inside of the project of whoever is in charge, and merely senses the other as arbitrary and capricious, as someone who will glower at what is not perfect.

James Alison. On Being Liked. New York: Crossroad, 2003. 110 - 111.

to be possessed

2009-04-21T20:11:00.003-05:00

If the Gerasene demoniac [Mark 5] was able to come into his right mind, if, as I sense to be the case, we gay people are, despite all the odds, on the threshold of being able to talk among friends, at home, in our right minds, this is because the demoniac has indeed, and at last genuinely, been possessed. Possessed by the Spirit that was within the man who walked up the shore of Gerasa. What had been outside the demoniac as one who talked to him is now within him as the heart of the Creator who longs with a passionate and visceral longing for us to be free, and rejoices in nothing so much as our quiet, gentle contamination of each other with the first hints of that longing, translated into the first stutters of a right mind.

James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay, New York: Crossroad, 2001. 143

war & prayer

2009-04-21T13:01:00.006-05:00

In times of war, our leaders always speak of their prayers. They wish us to know that they say prayers because they wish us to believe that they are deeply worried and that they take their responsibilities seriously. Perhaps they believe or hope that prayer will help. But within the circumstances of war, prayer becomes a word as befuddled in meaning as liberate or order or victory or peace. These prayers are usually understood to be Christian prayers. But Christian prayers are made to or in the name of Jesus, who loved, prayed for, and forgave his enemies and who instructed his followers to do likewise. A Christian supplicant, therefore, who has resolved to kill those whom he is enjoined to love, to bless, to do good to, to pray for, and to forgive as he hopes to be forgiven is not conceivably in a situation in which he can be at peace with himself. Anyone who has tried to apply this doctrine to a merely personal enmity will be aware of the enormous anguish that it could cause a national leader in wartime. No wonder that national leaders have ignored it for nearly two thousand years.

Wendell Berry. Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, "Peaceableness Toward Enemies," 84-85. (text rediscovered via Thinking About It All ... thanks!)

enabled

2009-03-15T13:22:00.003-05:00

And it is only if our love of Christ and our following of him is part of our discovery not of being 'right', or being successful, or being relevant, or able to attract funds, or votes, or bring about democracy, or liberal values, but of being loved into being with all the others whom we might be tempted to think of as our inferiors, being assured that we are liked as we let go of the things we think make us likeable, being assured of a peace which enables us to let go of our addiction to the power of this world and the relevance to which we must cling, it is only these which will enable us, over time, to bear witness to Christ as God. Not the token messenger of a 'he' which shores us up, but the quiet depth of the 'I Am' who shakes us into life.

James Alison, Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-in. New York: Continuum, 2006. 32.

learning to pray

2009-03-14T16:32:00.005-05:00

Our learning to pray means our being taught how to receive long-lasting, up-building desires, over time, in imitation of the desire of someone who likes us, not the short-term, malleable desires of someone for whom we are a means to an end. It is because we don't know what we desire, and don't have strong enough desire, that we are ordered to pray without ceasing, so that we can have our desire strengthened and made simple rather than contradictory and belittling. In other words, we are being given the sort of desire that will enable us not to be moved by the social other but instead empower us as creators of a quite different social other.

James Alison, Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-in. New York: Continuum, 2006. 38.

bacon and change

2009-03-10T21:49:00.007-05:00

"The magus wasn't teaching us about action as in work, it was action as in change. That's why we learned Confucius first—everything having to do with the order of our fathers, the law, manners. Confucius is like the Torah, rules to follow. And Lao-tzu is even more conservative, saying that if you do nothing you won't break any rules. You have to let tradition fall sometime, you have to take action, you have to eat bacon. That's what Balthasar was trying to teach me."

"I've said it before, Josh—and you know how I love bacon-but I don't think bacon is enough for the Messiah to bring."

"Change," Joshua said. "A Messiah has to bring change. Change comes through action. Balthasar once said to me, 'there's no such thing as a conservative hero.' He was wise, that old man."

Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. Harper, 2002. 202.

becoming a pacifist

2009-02-24T19:46:00.005-06:00

“But wait!” cries out the inevitable voice of rational dissent. “What about war that is necessary to prevent greater evil? What about the need to stop Hitler sixty years ago, and wasn’t it good for NATO to intervene to stop the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims at the hands of Christian Serbia? Shouldn’t someone have sent troops to stand between the Hutus and the Tutsis and between innocent Sudanese civilians and the Janjaweed?”

It is a good and reasonable question, and my embrace of pacifism is not naive. Sometimes war seems unavoidable. I know this, but it doesn’t mean I have to like the violence of war or to proclaim allegiance to a system of thought that is anything but profoundly opposed to war. Historically, it seems that starvation is just as inevitable as warfare. That doesn’t mean I should be “pro-famine” or try to work out a theologically-and philosophically-sound “just-hunger” theory.

When human disagreements deteriorate into bloodshed, it is a failure of human imagination to find peaceable solutions to conflict. It is a demonstration of our inability, as a species, to set aside greed and prejudice, anger and bloodlust. I want no part of that inability. I think we can do better. As a Christian I believe we are created in the image of a God who at times is known as the Prince of Peace, a God who had called us blessed who work for peace. The time has come for me to serve that God as a pacifist.

Ben Daniel, "Why I Am a Pacifist." http://bendaniel.org/?p=222

the city

2009-02-22T12:50:00.003-06:00

So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence—not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be—its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of the injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.

Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath, folk would've expected to see any city, if it survived, all newly reborn, purified by flame, taken clear beyond greed, real-estate speculating, local politics—instead of which, here was this weeping widow, some one-woman grievance committee in black, who would go on to save up and lovingly record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry, and over the years to come would make up for them all by developing into the meanest, cruelest bitch of a city, even among cities not notable for their kindness.

Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day. New York: Penguin, 2006. 153-154.

(sic)

2009-01-17T08:10:00.004-06:00

In marriage as in poetry, the given word implies the acceptance of a form that is never entirely of one's own making. When understood seriously enough, a form is a way of accepting and of living within the limits of creaturely life. We live only one life, and die only one death. A marriage cannot include everybody, because the reach of responsibility is short. A poem cannot be about everything, for the reach of attention and insight is short.

There are two aspects to these forms. The first is the way of making or acting or doing, which is to some extent technical. That is to say that definitions—settings of limits—are involved. The names poetry and marriage are given only to certain things, not to anything or to everything. Poetry is made of words; it is expected to keep a certain fidelity to everyday speech and a certain fidelity to music; if it is unspeakable or unmusical, it is not poetry. Marriage is the mutual promise of a man and a woman to live together, to love and help each other, in mutual fidelity, until death. It is understood that these definitions cannot be altered to suit convenience or circumstance, any more than we can call a rabbit a squirrel because we preferred to see a squirrel. Poetry of the traditional formed sort, for instance, does not propose that its difficulties should be solved by skipping or forcing a rhyme or by mutilating syntax or by writing prose. Marriage does not invite one to solve one's quarrel with one's wife by marrying a more compliant woman. Certain limits, in short, are prescribed—imposed before the beginning.

Wendell Berry, "Poetry and Marriage" in Standing by Words. North Point, 1983. 201.

bio-mist

2009-01-15T21:38:00.002-06:00

today too, today too
living in mist...
little house

Issa. Translation by David G. Lanou

and so

2008-12-16T21:58:00.004-06:00

There are more songs in our souls than the tongue is able to utter. When detached from its original insights, the discursive mind becomes a miser, and when we discover that concepts bring no relief to our outraged conscience and thirst for integrity, we turn to the origin of thought, to the endless shore that lies across the logical.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1951. 17

lovely disengagement

2008-12-16T10:26:00.006-06:00

If one of the goals of a sabbatical is to work on one's big project, another is salutary disengagement from one's main pursuits. The success of James's year off can be gauged by the fact that among the slender sheaf of his writings for the year is a letter to a newspaper, in French, protesting the miserable, tomb-like conditions of French pigs, and a spirited letter to the editor attacking the new practice of binding periodicals with steel staples instead of the traditional stitching. He was not working on a book, and he turned out roughly a review a month, most of them quite short.

Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. New York: Houghton Miflin, 2006. 331

toward carmel

2008-12-03T13:19:00.005-06:00

We do not know the names of these first Carmelites. But we do know their hearts. From the beginning this tradition rooted itself in the deep hungers of the human heart. These men could only have located themselves on this mountain and begun a life together in response to such hungers, such "deep caverns of feeling," later captured in the poetry of John of The Cross. Why else live where they lived?

We can assume they had tried to feed these hungers with the normal food which nourishes life: relationships, possessions, plans, titles, reputations. They probably found that their efforts and their control brought little peace to their lives. They had not found food sufficient to feed their hunger.

And so they laid their lives down and began again. Perhaps they were escaping more than simply restlessness. Perhaps lives had come apart in deep disappointment; perhaps they experienced unbearable losses; perhaps they were chased from other places, or even were escaping the law.

But it was more than escape that brought them to Mount Carmel. They assembled there because of a call. I would think they were people who were haunted in some ways and who found one another on a mountain which evoked their desires. People today come to this tradition because they, too, experience themselves as pilgrims on this earth, having deep hungers, and haunted by a call.

John Welch, The Carmelite Way: An Ancient Path for Today's Pilgrim. New York: Paulist, 1996. 8-9

consider this

2008-11-30T14:47:00.005-06:00

: Dung literature appears with the life of
officials, with the advent of the officious, when
it is impossible to argue or to be kind in a
straightforward way. If one cannot anymore be
overtly kind, the expression of kindness
must become a guerilla affair. The official life,
the life of this empire, the life of rules, is a life
that does not readily allow the choice to be
kind: insurance companies find such choice
risky, and corporations find such choice costly.
Officiousness is not a thing, but the very action
that removes kindness. The purpose of
lampoon is, then, to show us that the
correct thing is often the improper thing. The
purpose of decent dung literature is, in part, to
show that the decorous action is often the
dangerous action. In
fact in such an age, in an age of militarism and
canned heroism, tragedy is the mere
commodification of suffering and the glue of
nationalism. A nation does not laugh, it grieves.
Yet it is a false grieving; the grief of nationalism
is merely a scrim to hide the buttocks of
revenge. America

does not know how to suffer because it does
not know how to endure. And it does not
know how to endure because it cannot laugh.
We need dung therefore. Like laughter, the
anus is innately disruptive. Dung is laughter.
The landbridge of laughter is a preposterous
isthmus leading to a seldom visited region of
purposeful metaphor, a region where cultural
and aesthetic politics matter. And, too, the idea
that the comic may be at once oppositional in
its uses and concordant in its pleasures is
something one may touch upon nicely here.

Gabriel Gudding, Rhode Island Notebook. Champaign: Dalkey, 2007. 106-107

what we want

2008-11-14T09:32:00.004-06:00

According to [Silvan S.] Tomkins, natural selection has favored distinct classes of affect for the preservation of life and for people. Tomkins argues that the "human being is equipped with innate affective responses which bias him to want to remain alive and to resist death, to want sexual experiences, to want to experience novelty and to resist boredom, to want to communicate, to be close to and in contact with others of his species and to resist the experience of head and face lowered in shame."

Kaufman and Raphael, Coming Out of Shame: Transforming Gay and Lesbian Lives, 1996. 26

crack

2008-11-09T12:51:00.006-06:00

"Anthem"
by Leonard Cohen

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government --
signs for all to see.

I can't run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring ...

You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen, The Future (1992)

practically true

2008-11-04T11:19:00.002-06:00

Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.

Frank O'Hara, "Personism: A Manifesto"

transrational certitude: the only kind?

2008-10-25T15:38:00.002-05:00

Contemplation is life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source. It knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes beyond reason and beyond simple faith... It is a more profound depth of faith, a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images, in words, or even in clear concepts.

Contemplation is also the response to a call: a call from Him Who has no voice, and yet Who speaks in everything that is, and Who, most of all, speaks in the depths of our own being; for we ourselves are words of His. But we are words that are meant to respond to Him, to answer to Him, to echo Him, and even in some way to contain Him and signify Him. Contemplation is this echo. It is a deep resonance in the inmost center of our spirit in which our very life loses its separate voice and re-sounds with the majesty and the mercy of the Hidden and Living One...

Thomas Merton. New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: New Directions Press, 1962: 1-3.

god's no christian

2008-10-24T08:39:00.004-05:00

There is no end to the being and fullness of God, who creates heaven and earth and is continuously present and active throughout the world, in all ages and all cultures. Throughout history this gracious mystery approaches us with little theophanies, signs and revelations and events that invite us into relationship. As Jeannine Hill Fletcher suggests, this is the starting point for Christian response to religious diversity. At the outset it opens the possibility that others might have distinct encounters with the divine that can be new resources for Christian exploration into the overabundance of God. To put it simply, the living God is not a Christian. Rather, the incalculable mystery, which the Christian scripture dares to call love (I John 4:8 and 16) is not constrained in loving but freely pours out affection to all and each one.

Elizabeth A. Johnson, Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God, 2007. 161-62

god of fiesta

2008-10-22T12:11:00.006-05:00

The Amerindian ancients looked to beauty as a reflection of the presence of the divine. Their intuition survives in the Spanish phrase 'flor y canto,' flower and song, a translation of the pre-Columbian Náhuatl metaphor for the truth of the spiritual world. Not only did beauty signify the blessing of divine presence, but indigenous ancestors historically used flower and song to communicate back with the Sacred. This approach reveals an aesthetic conception of the universe that approaches philosophy through poetry, conflating truth with beauty. Rather than arriving at truth through universal, abstract concepts governed by linear logic, the mind grasps truth intuitively through the imagination of the heart: "to know the truth was to understand the hidden meaning of things through 'flower and song,' a power emanating from the deified heart" (Léon-Portilla).

Elizabeth A. Johnson, Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God, 2007. 146-47

winter

2008-10-22T09:36:00.003-05:00

In this wintry season, church statements about God are ordinarily too naive and too superficial to help believers, let alone convince unbelievers. In a sense the onslaught of atheism might perform a service, prodding faith to purify notions of God that, while they may be traditional, are woefully deficient to the point of being idolatrous. Is God dead? If we mean the God imagined as a part of the cosmos, one existence among others though infinitely bigger, the great individual who defines himself over against others and functions as a competitor with human beings, then yes, the God of modern theism is dead. But as Rahner appreciated, atheism sets a condition for faith that in response must reach far deeper for its truth: "the struggle against atheism is foremost and of necessity a struggle against the inadequacy of our own theism."

Elizabeth A. Johnson, Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God, 2007. 30

a third way

2008-10-17T10:29:00.003-05:00

...as we learn to hold tension in ways that open our hearts, we begin to see how abnormal violence is. Now -- as openheartedness looses what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature" -- we experience our innate capacity to honor, not violate, the identity and integrity of others. We witness the remarkable things that can happen within us, between us, and beyond us when we relate to one another in a nonviolent way. We learn a "third way" to respond to the violence that is always around us and within us, so called because it offers an alternative to the "fight or flight" response.

To fight is to meet violence with violence, generating more of the same. To flee is to yield to violence, putting private sanctuary ahead of the common good. The third way is nonviolence, by which I mean a commitment to act in every situation in ways that honor the soul. Defined in this way, nonviolence is not a path of high heroism reserved for the likes of Gandhi and King. It is a path that can, and must, be walked by mortals like you and me.

Parker Palmer, from The Politics of the Brokenhearted

the purposeful beauty of 2-D

2008-09-06T10:56:00.010-05:00

from Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963)

when do we get here?

2008-09-05T09:38:00.009-05:00

Having left Europe far behind. they had not yet in any meaningful sense arrived in America, not yet having devoted themselves to any part of it in a way that would produce the intricate knowledge of it necessary to live in it without destroying it. Because they belonged to no place, it was almost inevitable that they should behave violently toward the places they came to. We still have not, in any meaningful way, arrived in America. And in spite of our great reservoir of facts and methods, in comparison to the deep earthly wisdom of established peoples we still know but little.

Wendell Berry, "A Native Hill" from The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Norman Wirzba, editor. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2002. 11

so ... gaps are great

2008-08-26T12:51:00.002-05:00

The job of interpretation—what in fact we're doing when we interpret—is to supply what the poem has appeared to omit, and our continuing interest in a poem turns on its resistance to our efforts.

James Longenbach. The Resistance to Poetry. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 2004. 85.

or not

2008-08-26T09:51:00.002-05:00

"Or" is the sign of a mind more interested in displaying a multiplicity of possible interpretations than in discerning something we could comfortably call the facts. At the same time, this mind is more palpably conscious of the pressure to call something a fact—to weigh one alternative against another before adding it to the available stockpile of information. Rather than feeling that all of history is contemporaneous, such a mind is possessed by a visceral awareness of the contemporary moment slipping away forever. Second by second, the incremental passage of time alters the sense of every preceding second, leaving this mind with a menu of more-or-less useful accounts. In addition, this mind is itself in motion, aware that one moment's version of events will not necessarily satisfy as time moves forward. Most important, this mind is not frustrated but nurtured by a constantly shifting sense of alternatives. "We remembered, we anticipated a peacock," says Proust of the continual process of surprise that constitutes our coming to know another human being, "and we find a peony."

James Longenbach. The Resistance to Poetry. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 2004. 76-77.

only almost? even almost?

2008-08-25T14:02:00.005-05:00

Poetry sets us on the broad sea, and we're pulled forward by incantation, drawn back to what resists our intelligence almost successfully.

James Longenbach. The Resistance to Poetry. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 2004. 49.

all for the best wrapped in the loving arms of mystery?

2008-08-22T10:10:00.008-05:00

Jesus' basic conviction was not only that God is close to us, but also that God loves us. As we have seen, God's unconditional love was the foundation of Jesus' spirituality. But it God is the all-encompassing mystery, how are we to make sense of this love? What would it mean to say that we are loved by the awe-inspiring mystery that is intimately close to us? Can I be loved by a mystery or by the mystery?

I can begin by recognizing that the mystery in which I live and movee and have my being is not hostile to me and cannot be. I am part of the mystery. The mystery gave birth to me.The mystery must then be more concerned about me thatn I am about myself. If the mystery of God is closer to me than I am to myself and if we are in some profound sense one, then I have nothing to fear. I will be cared for at all times and in all circumstances. Nothing can really harm me and whatever happens will be for the best. I am loved beyond measure because I am one with the whole mystery of life.

As I gradually become aware of the closeness of the mystery we call God, so do I become aware of the impossibility of being hated and rejected. If the mystery of it all were to hate and reject me, it would be hating and rejecting itself. Just as I am challenged to love my neighbor as myself, so also can I come to recognize that God loves me as God's own self. We are in some mysterious sense one self.

Albert Nolan. Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom. New York: Orbis, 2006. 145.

is this ever preached?

2008-08-20T11:18:00.004-05:00

Where other teachers might have had long lists of "do-nots" or prohibitions, Jesus' principal concern seems to have been that people not be paralyzed by fear.

Albert Nolan. Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom. New York: Orbis, 2006. 122.

he said and sparkled

2008-08-03T10:56:00.003-05:00

"Ah ... boys aren't pretty."
Farley Granger to Cathy O'Donnell in Side Street (1949).

always worked for me

2008-08-03T10:13:00.004-05:00

This vagueness is of course quite sufficient for education, for education is an art. A good teacher feels his way, looking for response.

Paul Goodman. Growing Up Absurd. 1960. 6.

sure, van

2008-07-26T16:19:00.011-05:00

"Nothing's the matter!"

Van Heflin and Janet Leigh. Act of Violence. 1948.

an unfortunate sentence

2008-07-26T09:25:00.009-05:00

What are the central prongs within a Christian spirituality of sexuality?

Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality. New York: Doubleday, 1999.

compassionmutteringtruth

2008-07-24T09:38:00.003-05:00

Leave us with a recipe for poetry.

With compassion, and while remaining truthful to yourself and life, write what actually goes actually goes through your mind. Mutter musically. Don’t impress.

Nick Piombino at men of the web wide poetry world

postmodern pastoral

2008-07-23T23:47:00.005-05:00

I'm drawn to pastoral as one of the oldest literary modes of mapping, which is simultaneously a troubling of the territory: where does nature end and culture begin? And as I immerse myself more deeply in ecocriticism I recognize its attempts to think space, place, and history in a fresh way. Struck by the mutual hostility and incomprehension of mainstream ecocritics and postmodernists, and by the similarity of their projects: deep ecology, which seems to be the most influential ecocritical impulse (versus the shallowness of "environmentalism" as just another attempt to manage nature), takes a post- or anti-humanist stance that Foucault might recognize in its decentering of the human subject. The difference is that Foucault, et al, would say that there is only discourse (il n'y a pas hors de texte) and the power relations that generate and situate subjects, whereas the deep ecologists privilege the nonhuman and in their more enthusiastic moments claim the nonhuman as a kind of ur-discourse (mystical, scientific, or both) through which we can access reality directly. I'm too far gone in postmodernism to go there: I think all our claims about nature are saturated in ideology, even and especially when they're made in scientific language. The virtue of pastoral is the transparency of its relation to ideology, and a properly postmodern pastoral will deconstruct its own claims about nature while its powerful affect remains intact.

Joshua Corey, "Poetry as Navigation"

truth content?

2008-07-21T10:23:00.006-05:00

Modernity is ancient history by now, modernism only slightly less agèd, yet we have come up with nothing to replace or succeed either one, just variants of the "post." We are still struggling toward a poetic language of the city as neither exotic wonderland nor demonic nightmare, a language that embraces those real conditions and relations, those profane cityscapes stripped of what Benjamin calls aura. The challenge is to find a vocabulary and a syntax for the city that isn't simply a reiteration or ventriloquization of the language of prose, but a specifically poetic language that can encompass, embody, and enact the chiming and clashing textures of the city. The city's resistance to our reified, ossified poetic dialects also provides some resistance to the rhetorical "cheating" that often goes on when people write about "nature." As Baudelaire wrote almost a hundred and fifty years ago, modern life demands a new language. And more recently, Theodor Adorno has pointed out that "Nature poetry is passé not only because it is losing its subject matter, but also because its truth content is vanishing."

Reginald Shepherd, "Toward an Urban Pastoral". Orpheus in the Bronx, 2007.

Loyalties

2008-07-20T12:55:00.009-05:00

To belong to a church is to be loyal to many things, not just to one thing. A healthy member of a church community does not pick, in an either/or fashion, between having boundaries or emphasizing freedom, between believing in defined doctrines or emphasizing individual conscience, between the gift of legitimate institutionalized authority or the importance of individual charisma, between the needs of the local community and the needs of the larger universal church, between what the gifted artist brings to the community and what the poorest of the poor brings, between liberal and conservative, between old and new, or even between what is being said by those church members who are alive and those others who have died but with whom we are still in vital communion. To be a member of a church is not to choose among these. It is to choose them all. Like our God in heaven, we too need a heart with many rooms. The true mark of church is wide loyalties.

Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality. New York: Doubleday, 1999.

A Path

2008-07-20T12:45:00.004-05:00

The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.

Wendell Berry, "A Native Hill" from The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Norman Wirzba, editor. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2002.