Seek: for identifying (via live camera or still photos) of insects, birds, spiders, reptiles, amphibians, plants, fungi, and anything else you might find in your yard or on a hike. The regular challenges are fun too. Every person I've introduced to this app has gone completely gonzo. Remember how much of a blast PokemonGo! was a few years ago? This is just like that, except with real things all around you.

Skyview: I paid a couple of bucks for the full version, and use this at night for ID'ing stars, planets, and satellites.

Merlin Bird ID: By the Cornell Ornithology folks, you answer a few questions about a bird you saw (size? colors? what was it doing?) and it makes a pretty good guess of what it was. The same lab publishes a beta app for Android that identifies specific bird calls via microphone. My brother showed me this and I nearly jumped from iOS.

Theodolite: Camera/ARG app for measuring angles, bearing, distance. I use this when I'm eyeballing distant thunderheads and matching them up with I can see on the weather radar websites.

BlitzortungLive: Blitzortung is a crowdsourced global lightning detector. Volunteers run the pi-based detector hardware and strikes are immediately triangulated and put on a map. The live app updates pretty quickly, but sometimes there's a few seconds of lag between a bolt you see and its appearance on the map.

Runner-up: Rockd, which tells you all about the geology you're standing on.

I have since finished Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome. They were great. Love in the Ruins is an interesting product of its time - an end-of-the-world novel written in 1971 that's set somewhere in the imagined 1980s. It holds up pretty well to be honest, with a sort of semi-dark hilarity that's definitely reminiscent of contemporary movies and TV shows - think M*A*S*H (the movie). The political predictions alone will make it worth revisiting. Maybe certain predictions didn't land as well as jokes because, lo, they've basically come to pass.

The Thanatos Syndrome is a sequel inasmuch as it features the same main character (and several others) but it stands on its own and you needn't have read the other book first to enjoy it. I remember reading it, probably in college, based on the title and general conspiracy-plot description. The Catholic elements completely escaped me at the time, so it was well-worth revisiting. Have re-tackled the adventures of Dr. Tom More, Louisiana psychiatrist and self-described terrible Catholic, I'm probably going to add The Moviegoer and Lost in the Cosmos to the bookshelf soon.

As it is, I'm done with my fiction break and diving back into spiritual reading: The Conferences of John Cassian. I bought a copy of it on Amazon only to find out afterward that it's a selection of nine conferences and not the complete set. The introductory material is terrific, though, so I'm reading it while waiting for a full edition to arrive. And it will arrive just in time - we're about to hit the road for a funeral in the Ozarks and some meaty reading will be an extremely welcome distraction.

I seem to keep gravitating to the mystics and monastics - Bernard of Clairvaux and before that, Catherine of Siena. The Rule of St. Benedict. The Daily Office. What has this quarantine been but a sort of monastic enclosure of circumstance, where we live in community, occasionally receive guests, pray, and go about our daily work? Where we meet God in the ordinary moments of the day, in those others before us, and reflected in created beauty? Where, if we are honest, we fail, and seek the grace to rise again, and hasten along the path? Where we listen?

So I migrated over from github’s pages, which meant I had all of my old markdown posts stored locally. I had asked the micro.blog support folks about migration awhile back and was directed to a nifty little import script which used nodejs. But lo, in the meanwhile, an import button had showed up!

I still needed to insert the date into the frontmatter. My old posts had the date pre-pended to the filename (ie, 2020-01-08-some-title-here.markdown), so after bashing (har) my head against the wall for awhile, I came up with this, which cuts the leading date fields off the file and jams it into place at line 3. Hooray for Unix.

for i in `ls *.markdown`     
do
    sed -i "3a\date: `ls $i | cut -d- -f1,2,3`" $i
done

So I went from this at the top of every post:

---
layout: post
title:  June Update 
---

to this, which was slurped in beautifully:

---
layout: post
title:  June Update 
date: 2020-07-02
---

Yes, there are other ways to do this. Go nuts. This worked for me. I zipped everything up afterward and had all my old posts moved over lickety-split.

Cicada

I just finished Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own, which traces the respective biographies of Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy into a beautiful and engaging story of a particular moment in American Catholicism. Merton and Day’s stories I already knew, having read The Seven Storey Mountain and The Long Loneliness some time ago. O’Connor I knew from studying Southern Lit in college and working my way through her complete short stories, collected letters (Habit of Being, published posthumously), and Wise Blood. Percy I knew only sort of obliquely. I read The Thanatos Symdrome in high school or maybe college, intrigued by the general plot but missing buy a country mile any sort of religious threads. I should probably
add it to the on-deck list along with Love In The Ruins.

As it is, I’ve got The Violent Bear It Away and the selected writings of St. Bernard of Clairvaux on the way. Also a guide on identifying wild edible plants, which has become sort of interest of mine recently. Off the top of my head, I can think of the following things growing in and around our yard which are said to be edible if not actually tasty: prickly pear cactus, red mulberry, blackberries, American persimmons (male trees which will not fruit), Passionflower vines, elderberries, and (if you can get them before every bird) black cherries. There’s plenty of wood sorrel and I’d wager purslane somewhere if I knew what it looked like.

I woke up with some terrible stomach cramps today. They seem to be on the way out, but it’s telling that in trying to figure out their cause, my wife looked at me archly and asked whether or not I had eaten anything I’d had found in the yard. The answer was no, if you were wondering.

So - we’ve had a fair amount of rain lately and the gardens are growing like crazy. The peppers look very promising and, mirabilis dictu, we’re keeping up with the zucchini production. I’ve been meaning to get some pumpkin hills planted so that we might have pumpkins by October. Maybe over the holiday weekend. As it is, we’ll be well-supplied with weird gourds. Several from last year were thrown into the compost heap and they’ve grown like Audrey III. I don’t think we can eat them or do anything but look at them, but they’re growing so well I don’t have the heart to pull them up.

RCIA-wise, I have taken over the neophyte year meetings, which we’ve been doing over Zoom. We do them monthly; the next session is coming up and I need to start preparing for a discussion on prayer.

I recently ‘attended’ an online symposium marking the fifth anniversary of Pope Francis' Laudato Si. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but I enjoyed the discussion and would definitely watch more of that sort of thing in the future. Zoom-fatigue notwithstanding, registration and attendance were basically frictionless. I watched it on the back porch. It doesn’t get a whole lot easier than that.

One of the speakers was author Paul Elie, and somehow his book The Life You Save May Be Your Own came up. I can’t recall if it was mentioned, or if I saw it while pulling up other links during the discussion. In any event, I was intrigued: here was a book featuring Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy. How on earth was it possible that I hadn’t heard of it? Straight to the one-click-order screen. I had intended to wait until finishing The Dialogue but the weather was so nice on Memorial Day that I simply couldn’t resist. So far it’s wonderful. Elie weaves the stories of these four together into a sort of larger story of pilgrimage, of Catholicism with a peculiarly American savor. Among other things, it’s made me want to read more of Percy’s work. I read The Thanatos Syndrome years and years ago, but only remember bits and pieces of it.

Public celebration of Mass has resumed here, and we were able to receive several of our RCIA students last Sunday, God be praised. A few more will be received this weekend. After that we’ll start semi-regular (online) meetings for their neophyte year. This will be my particular focus and I’ve been putting some thoughts together on topics for presentation and discussion. My hope and intent is for these sessions to be more about praxis - the active life animated by faith and belief - rather than a guided tour of neato Catholic tidbits or a collection of stuff we never got to during Lent. Things like the methods and reasons for prayer, the colossal treasury of devotions, where to find answers, realizing a vocation, the interior life and so on. “Further up and further in,” as they said in The Last Battle. It’s a lot to bite off, but then again there’s no lack of time and space. The timing is good for something like this.

It’s been awhile since I posted any sort of update, so here we are. After finishing Cardinal Sarah’s Silence, I started The Day is Now Far Spent. I got about 100 pages in and stopped. It’s not really my bag, and I’m not sure how much shelf-life it will have, as it seems (so far) very much a response to a particular time and place. I can take a few guesses as to who the intended audience of this book is, and I’m pretty sure it’s not me.

By way of a break from spiritual reading, I found myself re-reading Nostromo by Joseph Conrad and obsessing, in a minor way, about its imaginary setting. What would modern Sulaco be like? A second- or third-tier cruise ship destination? Super exclusive, with a few casinos and high-end clubs? I dreamed up vintage Pan Am posters advertising Clipper service to Costaguana and tried to find maps of the country to see if they squared with my mental reckoning of the place. Spoiler: I couldn’t find any, and it is believed that Conrad didn’t have one either, owing to certain inconsistencies in his descriptions of place and distance. This seems to be born out by some articles I found on JSTOR. Colombia seems to be the likeliest inspiration.

I don’t know why the invented country has grabbed me like it has. Maybe it’s almost real in a way that, say, Middle Earth isn’t. The verisimilitude is dinged a little bit for me with some of Conrad’s Spanish, which feels clumsy and inauthentic, like someone who’s writing about a place he’s only read about. But those Pan Am posters…I would 100% buy one if I could find it. I can see them in my head so clearly that maybe I’ll find a way to create them myself.

Then April ended, and with it we celebrated the Feast of Saint Catherine of Siena, mystic, Dominican tertiary, and Doctor of the Church. She holds a special place for us; my wife was received (and I was re-received) at a parish named for her (before winding up at a church named for yet another a Dominican tertiary). Even so, I hadn’t read any of her work and all the quotes showing up on Catholic twitter inspired me to pick up The Dialogue, which I’m working through very slowly. So far, so good.

In other news: the formation program for the diaconate is on pause for a year because of the pandemic. Public Mass may be starting up again soon, which is wonderful. The weather has gone all haywire. After one late frost which killed my vegetable seedlings and pummeled my fig, we’re due for another one tonight, which means I’ll be out covering everything up (again) and hoping for the best. This would be the latest freeze ever recorded here, breaking a 90-year old record.

Picked up Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, her narrative history of 14th century France (and England), framed around the life and times of Enguerrand de Coucy. You’d think a departure from plague-related material would be more in order, but no. It was hoped by some that the Black Death would occasion greater piety and a return to moral decency by some of the time. Alas, it was not necessarily to be. In between waves of the plague, the survivors basically went right back to what they were doing beforehand. The normal, writes Tuchman, has a powerful draw.

In any case, I’m also (re)reading Death on a Friday Afternoon, a series of meditations on the Seven Last Words of Jesus by Richard John Neuhaus. I’d nearly forgotten what a wonderful writer he was. I miss his columns and observations.

The Good Friday liturgy was streamed from our local parish, but there were audio issues. The cantor was loud and clear but we could barely hear the priests. Followed along the readings and caught the gist of Father’s homily. I hope they get it all sorted by tomorrow night.

The weather is still lovely, though a little on the cold side today. There’ll be frost tonight and bad weather in store for the next couple of days. Hopefully we’ve come to an end of the chilliness for good. It was positively summer-like a few days ago and we jumped the gun and did some planting, rather than waiting until Tax Day, which marks the traditional last-frost day for our area. I’ve covered a few things up and will hope for the best.

We were delighted to spot a screech owl hanging around the nesting box that we hung up a few years ago. Very much hoping it decides to hang around. Most of the other birdhouses have residents now, too: bluebirds for the most part, and one that always seems to attract sparrows. I’m sure there’s plenty going on in the trees and shrubs, too.

Next we were supposed to be hosting the vocations director here at our home so that he’d have a chance to meet everyone face to face. It’ll be a videoconference instead. All we can do is all we can do, right?

Ut in omnibus glorificetur Deus

I want to use this post to develop some thoughts I’ve had recently on what the monastic traditions - specifically The Rule of St. Benedict - have to teach us about living in community, and how they might help us a bit during this time of quarantine.

Saint Benedict wrote his Rule in the sixth century, intending to lay down something of a constitution for monks living in community under the authority of an abbot. In monasteries, bits of the Rule are read daily, and they cover in a firm-but-flexible way many of the major tasks of a monk: what to do, when to do it, and what happens if things go sideways. Some of the rule is quite firm; other parts leave a fair bit of space for human weakness, local conditions and seasons, and so forth. It’s been in use for fourteen centuries, so there’s got to be something to it. Much of the Rule devolves to the Beatitudes, and therefore to Christ Himself - the route and destination for a monk (and the rest of us besides). What can The Rule teach a layperson? And can any of it help make sense of the sudden enclosures we find ourselves in? I’m beginning to think that it can.

True, those who enter a monastery do so while (or after) long periods of discernment - they’re called by God to this particular place, for this particular reason. None of us discerned our way into a pandemic. Yet here we are, enclosed to various degrees and wondering how not to throttle each other.

One of the vows made by Benedictines is stability. He or she promises to remain within the monastery, leaving only with the permission of the Abbot. Thomas Merton wrote that he was entering into the “four walls of his freedom,” for far from becoming a monk to get away from humanity, what you find within those four walls is humanity writ large. It’s there that you will find Christ - in, with, and through the community. So it is for us. If we can’t find God in the everyday moments, we won’t find him anywhere. Stability means that we are precisely where we are supposed to be, and it is this present moment where time intersects with eternity. A kind word - or a cruel word deferred - in this particular moment might very well rock the very planets from their orbits. Stop. Pull away from the second-by-second waterfall of news. Recall, within yourself, the silence that you have all but forgotten. It is there that you will find Him, waiting. The first word of the Rule - literally, the very first word - is listen. Listening can be difficult in the best of circumstances; it’s nearly impossible in the daily cacophony we raise around us.

The other day, the daily reading was Chapter 45. Not quite ten lines on how it’s better to own a mistake immediately than to let it fester and come out some other way. This seems pretty obviously useful and relevant as the pressures of suddenly close quarters start to wear. We would do better to strive for a bit of humility, surrendering some pride, and acknowledging our mistakes immediately. The Rule says that a greater punishment awaits the one who “would not correct by humility what he did wrong through carelessness.” What greater punishment than to damage our relationships with the others around us, knowing that an immediate confession and apology could have headed the whole thing off? We teach our children as much, and then forget it ourselves in maturity - that the cover-up and lie is often worse than the actual mistake.

Much of my understanding of St. Benedict’s Rule as it applies to the laity is informed by Esther de Waal’s excellent Seeking God: The Way of Saint Benedict. To assist in my daily reflections on the Rule, I’m using Georg Holzherr’s The Rule of Benedict: An Invitation to Christian Life which I find wonderfully situates the readings in history, providing extensive context and copious footnotes.

For further reflection: obedience? Conversatio morum? Definitely lots to mull over.

The silence of God is elusive and inaccessible. But the person who prays knows that God hears him in the same way that he understood the last words of Christ on the Cross. Mankind speaks, and God responds by his silence.
— Cardinal Robert Sarah

I’ve finished The Power of Silence and it’s given me a lot to think about. Although few are called to the Carthusian silence which inspired the book, Cardinal Sarah nevertheless calls attention the need for some silence - especially interior - in order that we may better encounter Christ. Indeed, we have as much to learn from the examples of the Lord’s own silence as we do from His words - the long silence of of His hidden life in Nazareth, His solitude in the desert, His moments before His accusers. We want to be like Him, and so we must do like Him, and follow in the paths He trod before us. And how much of our interior noise is driven from the outside? From our own thoughts as we run from amusement to anxiety and back again? As we fill our eyes and ears with a constant drone, noise difficult to escape even when we try? Hell will be noisy for sure, and not the pleasant wholesome noises of field, forest, or hearth.

The search for silence is arguably more important than ever. As I write this, the urge to stay glued to the TV or social media is nearly overpowering. I’m caught in a tension between needing to stay informed and giving to the business of acedia, concerning myself with things I can neither control nor escape. We have not been affected at home nearly as much as others - we homeschool the kids, so they’re around all the time anyway. I’ve worked from home for over a decade, so we’re well equipped for that as well. Our extracurriculars have stopped. There are no public Masses. The weather has been rainy, so we really have been confined for large periods. We have each other, our respective (and largely overlapping) spaces, and moments of friction. Here within the four walls of our domestic cloister, perhaps the Carthusians and Trappists have something to teach us after all.

Am about halfway through Robert Cardinal Sarah’s The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise. The book is set in a sort of dialogue between Cardinal Sarah and Nicolas Diat, inspired by a visit the Cardinal made to Grande Chartreuse, the motherhouse of the Carthusian Order. This place, and the men who live there, can be seen in the wonderful documentary Into Great Silence. The filmmaker proposed the movie to the monks in 1984, and they asked for time to consider it. Sixteen years later, they responded in the affirmative. He used a single camera and no artificial light. As a feat of technical filmmaking, it’s wonderful. More precious still is the intimate look at this most austere of orders - a community of hermits.

Cardinal Sarah writes about silence - in prayer, worship, and secular life. It’s slow going - he’s a methodical, contemplative writer:

Christ’s public life is rooted in and supported by the silent prayer of his hidden life. The silence of Christ, God present in a human body, is hidden in the silence of God. His earthly speech is inhabited by the silence speech of God.
The whole life of Jesus is wrapped in silence and mystery. If man wants to imitate Christ, it is enough for him to observe his silences.
The silence of the crib, the silence of Nazareth, the silence of the Cross, and the silence of the sealed tomb are one. The silences of Jesus are silences of poverty, humility, self-sacrifice, and abasement; it is the bottomless abyss of his kenosis; his self-emptying (Phil 2:7).

And so we must seek the silence of the desert - within ourselves first of all. These means calling our relationship with noise by its name: a dictatorship under which we should (and do) chafe. We have forgotten, in large part, what true silence really is. I had forgotten, if indeed I ever knew it, until I sat in the empty chapel at Gethsemane several years ago. The silence was so profound as to feel positively physical. Time passes differently there, and you can return to yourself - to your senses - like the prodigal son.

In other news…with Lent underway, we have started our small group study. We meet on Monday evenings, here at our home. The first session went very well. Looking forward to next week. RCIA continues apace. The Elect have moved into the Purification and Enlightenment period. Looking ahead, I need to start preparing content for Mystagogy, which we’re sort of rebooting. In the background of all of this, the application process for diaconal formation is coming to a close. Lots of self-examination, meditation, and prayer going on.

I finished Nault’s The Noonday Devil last night. Really good stuff, and I’ll almost certainly be returning to it in the future, and the sections on the various remedies for acedia, in particular. When you see something described and then named, and then you look around and realize “oh so that’s what that is”, you feel struck first by surprise and then by, well, sheepishness. They knew what they were about fourteen centuries ago. There is nothing new under the sun.

One of my other Christmas books was a guide to gardening with native plants, a subject I’ve gotten more interested in as time has passed here. We live on a small bit of acreage and I’ve let several parts of it “go wild,” principally because the areas are rocky and difficult to maintain but partly because they also serve as a bit of privacy screening from the road and surrounding houses. Watching the local plants, shrubs, and trees take back over has been a lot of fun. I’m cutting less, to be sure, so I’ve got that going for me. Many local insects, birds, and other critters have moved back in. I’ve used a nifty iPhone app called Seek to ID the local plants and found quite a few of them in this gardening book. Using the native species honors the spirit of the place, and also makes concrete the dictum of “the right plant in the right spot.” I don’t want to have to coddle things or beg them to grow. I’d rather they sit right where they’re supposed to be. I already have some ideas about moving some passionflower vines, and there are enough elderflower bushes nearby for cuttings. If I left a few of the rocky areas revert back to something like the cedar glades that are common for this area, why, I’ll have even less grass to cut. Everybody wins.

I’ve also just started The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages, by François-Xavier Fauvelle. So far it’s fantastic. The chapters are short, beautifully written, and heavily documented. In the midst of an interminable grey and rainy winter, you could do a lot worse than peer through the stained-glass window that Fauvelle has carefully reconstructed and gape in wonder.

The retreat was good. As usual, I went expecting one thing and left with something different. The conferences were interesting, in no small part because priest who led them was something like six-foot-six, friendly, personable, and full of stories. There were numerous opportunities for prayer, Mass, Adoration, and the like. Plenty of silence, and the sisters who manage the retreat house do a wonderful job of keeping the retreatants fat and happy. It was also good to meet the others - some of whom I had met last year - and catch up on things. I found myself answering a fair number of questions about homeschooling, parenting teenagers through the college experience, and the like. Some of the men were considering things we did about ten years ago, so they were keen to hear how things had turned out, and what sorts of insights I had to offer. I’m not going to lie; it was a little weird.

I started The Noonday Devil while on retreat and am very much enjoying it. You wouldn’t think that a book about a capital sin would be all that, but it is. Acedia was known to the Desert Fathers and described in detail by Evagrius of Pontus, a fourth century theologian. Monks living a solitary existence would come into periods of dryness and weariness, rendering prayer difficult or impossible. In some cases this was accompanied by torpor, in others, a sort of frantic business. As time passed, acedia sort of fell off the radar in favor of sloth, which took its place in the lists but calls to mind general laziness and losing something of its depth. St. Thomas Aquinas briefly wrote about it, describing it as a sin against the love of charity, and points to an ingenious remedy: The Incarnation itself! Go read it to see how. Ultimately, William of Ockham may have been responsible for acedia’s place on the back-burner. By reducing events and actions to individual, separated occurrences, sundered from a larger pattern or totality, the need to describe a broad tendency (like acedia) is diminished.

Fortunately, acedia’s made something of comeback in the popular consciousness. Unfortunately, it never really left us. The Noonday Devil traces the notion of acedia through church history, starting with Evagrius and the others, through the middle ages, and into modernity. The Fathers were wise - the concept of acedia is no less relevant today than it was in a desert cell 1,600 years ago. Consider the mid-life crisis, or the pervasive nihilism, or the constant desire for novelty as its own end. I’m not quite finished, but can see that I’ll certainly be returning to it, especially the section I’m in now, which not only describes modern acedia, but goes on to describe the remedies.

Christmas is done, Epiphany is finished and here I am with a stack of new books: Doors in the Walls of the World by Peter Kreeft, The Golden Rhinoceros by François-Xavier Fauvelle, The Rule of Benedict by Georg Holzherr OSB, and a guide to gardening with local Tennessee plants. I’m still slowly working my way through Tanquerey’s Spiritual Life, which I’m liking very much. I used parts of it for a recent RCIA lesson on sin and temptation, in particular the explanations of the threefold concupiscence. I’ve just started the section on the capital sins - also very engaging stuff.

I like Kreeft’s books. This one feels like it could have been a transcript of a lecture - very conversational and approachable. There are moments where his enthusiasm is nearly too much, that maybe the printed word is just barely enough to hold him still. Reading him is like having a couple of beers with a friend who just happens to be on fire and can’t wait to ignite you as well. But in a good way of course.

I had another meeting with the director of vocations yesterday. The process continues, and I left with another book recommendation: The Noonday Devil by Dom Jean-Charles Nault, OSB. This is an exploration and study of acedia, more commonly known as sloth, one of the seven capital sins. From the dust-jacket blurb:

The word “sloth”, however, can be misleading for acedia is not laziness; in fact it can manifest itself as business or activism. Rather, acedia is a gloomy combination of weariness, sadness, and lack of purposefulness. It robs a person of his capacity for joy and leaves him feeling empty, or void of meaning.

The Noonday Devil will be going with me next week as I head to a weekend men’s retreat.

Is it, indeed, so difficult to love Him Who is infinitely lovable and infinitely loving? The love that He asks of us is nothing extraordinary; it is the devotedness of love — the gift of oneself — consisting chiefly in conformity to the divine will. To want to love is to love. To keep the commandments for God’s sake is to love. To pray is to love. To fulfill our duties of state in view of pleasing God, this is likewise to love. Nay more, to recreate ourselves, to take our meals with the like intention is to love. To serve our neighbor for God’s sake is to love. Nothing then is easier, God’s grace helping, than the constant exercise of divine love and through this, steady advance toward perfection.
— Chapter 3, No. 350

Because God is not wholly alien to human thought and freedom, therefore the freedom of Christ can find its authentic fulfillment, perfection, and beauty in being utterly relative to God, that is to say, in knowing and doing the will of the Father. Through the medium of his human reason illumined by grace, Christ as man has knowledge of his own divine will that he shares with the Father, and this in turn renders him humanly free to do the divine will. Were there an absolute ontological dissimilitude between the human nature of Christ and divine nature, there would simply be no possibility of a cooperation of the human will of Christ with the divine will, as the revelation of the will of the Father would remain wholly alien and unintelligible to Christ’s human nature, even in the presence of divine grace. In point of fact, however, Christ’s human knowledge of his own deity deepens his human freedom by augmenting his human potential to love and to choose what is authentically good with freedom. In this way it is the source of the unique freedom of Christ.
— Thomas Joseph White, OP, The Incarnate Lord

This book was a bit of slow going at first - the initial parts of it respond to to other works of theology that I only know by name, though it didn’t take look to suss out the main ideas by way of White’s sed contras. I haven’t had to read that carefully and slowly in a long time, and I can see returning to this frequently in the future.

Why study Christology? Well, if we believe that God became Man, it’s very much worthwhile thinking through that teaches us about Him, especially as regards His death and resurrection. White shows how to bring to bear the theology of Thomas Aquinas to bear on some of the modern lines of thought about Christ, resolving some of the issues that have clouded an already demanding topic. At best, this cloudiness results in confusion; at worst, thoughts which slowly edge in the direction of Nestorianism or even Gnosticism. For my part, the sections on Holy Saturday cleared away some confusion I’ve had since trying to tackle Balthasar’s Mysterium Paschale (which he engages directly). Strangely enough, the descent into hell is something we gloss right over in the creeds but gets called out frequently by adults in our RCIA classes. Wait, what does THAT mean? He descended into hell? They’ve never heard it before, which surprises me.

For many years, I have been contending with a call to the vocation of deacon, and stepped into a focused period of discernment about eighteen months ago. That process has continued, and I’ve entered into a sort of formal process for continued discernment, both on my part and the part of the church. Long conversations with the director of vocations, and the first of many extensive questionnaires. This have encouraged a great deal of meditation and continued prayer on my part. The formation period is extensive and rigorous: four years of study, with coursework completed in parallel for the completion of a masters degree in theology. This in addition to my existing responsibilities: husband, father, and employee. I trust that with the grace of God I will be be led through this process, or perhaps out of it completely. I have but to surrender, you see, confident that He will not take me anywhere that I can’t contend without His grace. Lead Thou me on indeed.

As for reading…well, when you ask the director of vocations for reading suggestions, you’re going to get recommendations on a whole new level. My reading for foreseeable future is going to consist of The Incarnate Christ: A Thomistic Study in Christology by Thomas Joseph White, OP and The Spiritual Life: A Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology by The Very Reverend Adolphe Tanquerey, S.S.D.D. The first author is described as “a stud” by Father, and the first few pages are certainly studly. He said that the Tanquerey book took him the better part of a year. Like I said: a whole other level. Luckily I have some business travel starting shortly, so there’ll be some flight time and hotel evenings to fill.

Update: after a four-hour late-night flight, I’m about 150 pages in. There is lots here to unpack. I’ve certainly read more about the hypostatic union than I have in my life to date.

I’ve also tossed Making Small Groups Work into my bag. There seems to be quite a bit of interest in small groups at our church (for a variety of interests, by a variety of groups).

Maturity comes only when confronting what has to be confronted within ourselves. This is where the vows relate, and illuminate each other. For stability means that I must not run away from where my battles are being fought, that I have to stand still where the real issues have to be faced. Obedience compels me to re-enact in my own life that submission of Christ himself, even though it may lead to suffering and to death. And conversatio, openness, means that I must be ready to pick myself up, and start all over again in a pattern of growth which will not end until the day of my final dying. And all the time the journey is based on that Gospel paradox of losing life and finding it. An anxious attitude with my personal and spiritual growth is disastrous. The goal of my changing life is not self-fulfilment, even though so much of the personal growth movement popular today seems to suggest that that is so. St Benedict is quite ruthless about the sort of self-fulfilment which is self-seeking. My goal is Christ.
– Esther de Waal, Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict

He must increase; I must decrease. You wish to serve - very well then. What if it is His will that you serve by waiting? By turning silence into a joyful communion of thanks and praise? Perhaps this is all there is, and all there will ever be. Or not. But here, now, in this moment, surrounded by these people - how will I conform myself to Him? Elsewhere, de Waal quotes Metropolitan Bloom, to the effect that if I cannot find Him here and now, I will not find Him anwhere, perhaps not even in the Temple. Am I growing in holiness? Or erecting roadblocks based on the way I think things ought to be?

Our technologies have specific ends to which they are ordered. What are they? Are there multiple ends? Those ends for which we use them, but a deeper (or higher?) level, their actual ends, as intended by their creators?

Technology doesn’t exist for its own sake. As there was a creator, there is also a telos.

In the sphere of unlimited, instantaneous global communication and attention, how have our views of ourselves (and by extension, others) been changed for the better or worse? How does the TOB inform this thinking? I’m thinking in particular of authentic, in-person communications and our relationships with enfleshed others.

What if Alison Parrish’s thoughts on a new hacker ethic were to obtain completely? What if they were reinforced by the thoughts in Weapons of Math Destruction, in particular, the growing recognition that humans are not nearly as good at algorithms as we think we are? And that this recognition may not be keeping pace with their widespread implementation? And that this widespread implementation has real, grave impacts? If fully internalized by technicians, how would the technology landscape be different?

If we count the cost, who pays the steepest prices? What does a preferential option for the poor look like in a globally connected world?

As the world prior to the Internet continues to recede, and the second generation to swim completely in it grows up, what new criticism will be levied? As a cohort, where will they stand fast?

When the thistle blooms and the chirping cicada
sits on trees and pours down shrill song
from frenziedly quivering wings in the toilsome summer
then goats are fatter than ever and wine is at its best
— Hesiod

We’re in that weird time of the year where the evenings are beautifully cool and the days are still in the mid-90s. The insects and plants are not fooled. Leaves are just starting to blush a little on some trees and the late summer insects are on the move. Do you have phases of insects? We do. In spring, the crane flies erupt from the grass in huge clouds and manage to find their way into the house, grossing everyone out. Early summer is time for the Japanese beetles. Midsummer, we get the June bugs: large buzzy emeralds that zoom around just above the grass, driving the chickens crazy. About this time the cicadas turn up - annuals every summer, periodic hordes on their own particular schedule.

In late summer, we get the scolidae wasps: dark, blue-winged wasps that zoom around over the grass looking for the larvae of the aforementioned Japanese beetles. The wasps are thereby my immediate friends. They’re nice looking, too: deep purple, almost black, with a cinnamon-tipped abdomen adorned by two distinct yellow dots. They’re non-aggressive and spend most of their time flying in large groups here and there over the grass, hunting the buried grubs that will feed their young.

Late summer is also the time for praying mantises at their largest, stickbugs, and butterflies all over the remaining zinnias and gomphrenas. The little butterfly bush near the porch has hosted monarch caterpillars in years past but I haven’t seen any this year. The pawpaw attracted tiger swallowtails to lay their eggs, but I pulled the larvae off to give the tree another season or two of growth before they make off with all the leaves.

Before much longer, the real heralds of fall will arrive: garden spiders and other large orb-weavers will appear in the remains of the tomato plants or in improbably big webs between trees. That’s when I know the party’s nearly over. Until then, we still get the soft daytime hum of the field crickets and a cicada or two. The hummingbirds are still fighting over the feeders and hopefully getting fat for their big flight south. And the sky has turned that cobalt blue once or twice. The afternoon light is a little redder, and the shadows are coming a little sooner.

Then the quietude. The insects will be gone until spring and I’ll miss their comings and goings, and especially their sounds. As for winter, I have plans for a 3-chambered bat house hanging above my desk. I hope to site it in the farthest part of our back yard, where it’s close enough to see but far enough away that nothing ought to disturb any bats who happen to move in. I saw a bat house in an urban garden recently end it was certainly full of bats. I figure if they can be happy there, perhaps they can be happy here too.

As far as books go, I just finished Ovid’s Metamorphoses and I’m re-perusing Joseph Pieper’s The Four Cardinal Virtues while I try to figure out what to read next.

TV-wise, we’re waiting for the return of The Expanse, Better Call Saul, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Crown. The trailer for HBO’s Watchmen caught my attention, too. Over a couple of nights this week, I watched the BBC/Amazon production of King Lear and I thought it was great. I’ll never read it again without seeing Anthony Hopkins, Jim Broadbent, and Emily Watson in my head.

We recently moved our oldest son into his university dorm, our first child to go out of state and far away. Bittersweet, to be sure, though we had all been quietly getting ready for it well in advance. The campus is small and intimate and he’ll be walking into a ready-made community by way of his teammates. It’s all very exciting.

I spent some time nosing around the campus bookstore and came upon Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which has been on my to-read list for years. So I grabbed it - the hardback definitive edition - and finished it in about 2 days.

Maus was every bit as good as I had expected. You’d think that a story as amazing as this would be tempered slightly by the format - comic book? With mice and cats? But no. If anything, it felt more focused to me. The drawing style is spare and there are panels that will be me for awhile. The story is amazing enough. Highly recommended, even if graphic novels aren’t usually your thing.

In the home-stretch of Daniélou’s From Shadows to Reality, a series of studies in the main threads of early patristic typology. I have to confess that the material is a bit drier than I expected (if you can believe that). Much of it is “so-and-so wrote this, so-and-so affirmed it, but so-and-so’s Homily on Foofooius draws from Philo…” and again I’m not really sure what I was expecting. The book is exactly as described on the cover: studies in the typology of the fathers. I read one of his other books on sacramental typology (The Bible and the Liturgy) and thought it was a bit more engaging. In any case, I can see coming back to this for consultation now and again. It’s a near-certainty to me that reliance on historical-critical exegesis leaves something of a void that a return to the fathers can fill. From the introduction:

Few things are more disconcerting for the modern man than the Scriptural commentaries of the Fathers of the Church. On the one hand there is a fullness, both theological and spiritual which gives them a richness unequalled elsewhere. But at the same time modern man feels a stranger to their outlook and they cut clean through his modes of thought. Hence the depreciation, so common, of Patristic exegesis, which in varying degrees is felt among so many of our contemporaries. We cannot help feeling that this suspicion is due to the fact that, in all the works of the Golden Age of the Fathers, we find side by side the most divergent interpretations, in which good an dbad are inextricably mixed. The problem is how to find one’s way in this new world. If Origen speaks of the “vast forest of the Scriptures,” how much more true is this of the luxuriant commentaries which have grown up around the Scriptures.

I just started the section on the Joshua cycle, and it looks a bit more interesting. We’ll see.

In other news, we just started Chernobyl. I believe I’d watch a miniseries of Jared Harris just working crossword puzzles and putzing around in his kitchen.

WINE comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift my glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
— Yeats, “A Drinking Song”

RCIA is ramping up again soon and I’ve been asked to take over/restart/reboot the neophyte year. There’s not a whole lot support offered to new Catholics in after the post-Pentacost mystagogy concludes and this needs to be rectified. I’m simultaneously excited and a little nervous, but we’re meeting as a team in a couple of weeks and I’ll hopefully get a bit of clarity. If not, well, Veni Creator Spiritus.

Closing in on the end of the long long trip through Yugoslavia with Rebecca West, her husband, and the odd couple, Constantin and Gerda. There’s nothing in the on-deck circle at the moment. I’m glad to have read it and have learned a fair bit about the Balkans, or at least West’s impressions, in the process.

It’s hot here. The hottest part of the year. The squash is done, the cucumbers nearly so, and both are about to be replaced by beans. Tomatoes have formed an impenetrable thicket. Only the peppers are standing tall. I have a few experimentally drying in the garage. We’ll see how that goes. This morning I skipped Lauds to get in an early morning run before the day got too hot. Then I got back and my work day commenced immediately. So I felt great from the run, but not great from laying aside prayer and meditation to do so. Not a mistake I intend to repeat.

I’ve kicked Twitter to the curb for the most part. I deactivated my main presence there and set up a new one which follows exactly 30 accounts in my local area which focus on severe weather, emergency response, or public information on the same. When bad weather rolls in (as it did last night and will again this weekend), I’ll turn it on to read (and contribute) weather spotting information as needed. The only other thing I was using it for was DM’ing my brother, and we’ve since moved to SMS. To the curb, then. Or halfway to the curb anyhow. The mobile app still has way too many sponsored posts. If I’m sitting at my desk, though, I can use oystyyer to keep an ad-free, 100% text experience.

As for the rest: I’m trying (with variable success) to limit my Reddit intake to the amateur radio-related sub(s). I switch between newsbeuter and liferea for RSS feed-reading. I use Firefox as my main browser, and have installed uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger. For many things, elinks still works fine. I also run a pi-hole on our local network.

Much of this – including renewing subscriptions to the two (!) local newspapers – has been part of a slowly growing focus on the local; that which is still arguably within our ken. I was for a long time “engaged” with way too many things. I know many people who still are, but can’t tell you what the city council decided last night about the big road projects or annexations, both of which have arguably more immediate impact on day-to-day life than a policy fight in Washington. This goes equally for church politics, by the way. The latest pronouncements in Rome are interesting and certainly deserving of attention, but certainly not more attention than the goings-on at our local parish (or diocese). This sounds like a suggestion for complete withdrawal from issues beyond the county line. I’m not sure that’s possible, or even desirable. Recalibrating how much attention is paid or calories burnt in response is possible and worth a go.

And this is all very Benedictine - the focus on the particular people in the particular place you find yourself. Even beyond the walls of the monastery, we can strive for stabilio. In the face of the “engagement” colossus of the connected “social” world, we can’t focus long enough on our own feet. The world longs to see us uprooted - physically, mentally, spiritually.

I regret not keeping a pencil alongside while reading Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; it’s chock full of great passages and now I have to scan for them. Last night I read the following bit and resolved to post it as soon as possible.

The West’s guide, Constantine, has been telling them the story of a church in Bosnia that contained the relics of Saint Luke. However there was another church, in Italy, which also possessed the relics of Saint Luke. Moreover, the Italian relic lacked a head, which was in the care of the Vatican, where the Bosnian Luke was still intact. Yet a third church in Italy claimed to have an arm of Saint Luke and had been using to effect miracles for some time. Constantine continues:

There is nobody today to whom that story would not seem absurd, except very simple people, too simple people, idiots. Those who believe in the power of relics and who are solemn will beg you not to talk of such things, not to recall how the stupidities of our ancestors made foolish a beautiful thing. But most people, whether they are believing or not, will only laugh. But the people of five hundred years ago did not see anything ridiculous in a dead man with two heads and three arms, all working miracles; and they did not feel suspicious because many monks made much money out of such dead men. They saw something else, which made them add a head and a head and make it one head, and two arms and one arm, and make it two arms, and we do not know what that something was. For me, I hate it when I read history and I see that now there is nothing where once there was something. It shows me that man has been eating food which has done him no good, which has passed out of him undigested.

I had laid aside Black Lamb to tackle The Conservative Sensibility by George Will, which has just been published. On the whole I thought it was pretty good, if a little repetitive in places. I liked his arguments about conservatism not necessarily being contingent on religious faith, but could have done without the cosmological rhapsodizing towards the end. Otherwise it was an interesting book and certainly he made quite a few points worth consideration. By design, it’s light on prescription. Much more of an extended think-piece/meditation. It’s nice to return to Yugoslavia.

Catechetical training continues apace. The garden’s growing in and the weather’s ramping into the usual summertime patterns. Things are, as usual, chaotic in our household but the chaos is at its usual level and so a little easier to live with.