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.

I’m not quite a quarter of the way through Rebecca West’s monumental travelogue of pre-World War II Yugoslavia. It’s wonderful stuff, and there’s seems to be a quotable passage on just about every page. I started it while on a trip, which seemed appropriate. Christopher Hitchens wrote the forward this edition, and while I usually skip long introductions, this one was very much worth reading and I’m glad I stuck through it. It’s easy to forget what a formidable writer he was.

Things have been very busy around here lately - lots and lots of things happening to fall on the onset of summer. Retreating into book and study has been a blessed relief. The vegetable garden is off to a good start and I hope to do a little antenna construction in another couple of weeks when (ho, ho) things calm down a bit. Not sure what book(s) will be going into the on-deck circle.

I heard an interesting review the other day of the late Tony Horwitz’s Spying on the South, and may add that. Just seems like a travelogue sort of season. I’m also pursuing catechetical certification from our diocese, by way of completing a series of online training modules. I recently completed the first lesson of the first module and can now use homoosious correctly in a sentence.

Speaking of mysteries, I’ve been in pursuit of a minor one concerning some utility lines which cross our property. We live on about 5 acres of land and there are a couple of old poles carrying lines on to (and off of) the property into parts unknown. Vines are beginning to completely consume one pole and I was a little hesitant about cutting them myself, owing to a profound respect for high voltage. My wife suggested we ask the local power company to take care of it so we called them and they sent a man out. He looked at the poles and declared two things. First, the lines were almost certainly not carrying power. Second, they did not belong to our local utility. I called our county planning office, and they sent me to the register of deeds, who in turn suggested I come by to look through property records. Someone along the line would have granted an easement to someone else for the poles and I’d need to find the transaction by hand.

On a whim (well not quite a whim - the local utility guy suggested it), I contacted the TVA and they responded nearly immediately. The easement was theirs, and they moreover sent me an image of a document dating from 1920 showing the transaction, signed by the person who owned all this land at the time. Now I’m conflicted. On the one hand, I am tempted to petition the TVA to abandon the easement, or the piece of it that crosses my yard at the very least. On the other hand, disappearing back into obscurity also has its appeal and the last thing I want to do is stir up some big institutional machine into deciding that, hey, this easement is actually pretty cool and we were just thinking about re-energizing everything along there. In any case, a couple of semi-abandoned poles have some interesting HAM RADIO potential, as long as no one’s going to throw a switch at some point in the future.

From a place of profound respect, Rabbi Jacob Neusner tells the story of an encounter with Jesus, of hearing the Sermon on the Mount, and turning over these new teachings on the Torah in his mind. In his book, A Rabbi Talks With Jesus, Neusner explores the places where the teachings of Christ shed brilliant light on the Law of Moses and carefully considers those things where, in the context of the Law, the two part ways. The terms are set very clearly at the outset: in no way is this a polemic against Christianity, and less still should it be read as Jewish proselytizing (if in fact there could be such a thing).

A few impressions, then, having completed it and in no particular order:

I thought the Rabbi makes an excellent case for his final conclusion - that in the context of the Torah, the Sermon on the Mount would have been insufficient for him to turn away from everything to follow Him. They part on friendly terms after several conversations and much meditation on the part of the listener. The imagined encounter brought to life the larger numbers of people in the crowds who heard Him teaching - many must have struggled similarly. And yet, even so, many did, in fact, choose to follow, even as the words of Jesus are made all the more radical some places than I might have appreciated prior to this book. Chief among these, Neusner points out, is the cosmic shift between the teachings of the Torah, which concern all of eternal Israel, and deeply personal nature of an encounter with Christ, who speaks principally to the individual. Where the Rabbi sees this as a departure from the eternal law and thus ultimately irreconcilable with the notion of Israel as a nation, a Christian sees the Word made flesh precisely to encounter humanity individually and concretely.

In the book, Neusner consults with a contemporary master of the Torah to answer the question “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”. The master responds with an answer which traces through the prophets, from Moses to Habakkuk, who finally comes to rest on But the righteous shall live through his faith.

“So,” the master says, “is this what the sage, Jesus, had to say?”
I: “Not exactly, but close.”
He: “What did he leave out?”
I: “Nothing.”
He: “Then what did he add?”
I: “Himself.”
He: “Oh.”
I: “‘But the righteous shall live by his faith.’ And what is that? ‘It has been told you, man, what is good, and what the Lord demands from you, only to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly before God.'”
He: “Would Jesus agree?”
I: “I think so.”
He: “Then why so troubled this evening?”
I: “Because I really believe there is a difference between ‘You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy and ‘If you would be perfect, go, sell all you have and come, follow me.'”
He: “I guess then it really depends on who the ‘me’ is.”

I came across references to this book in Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI and recommend it to anyone who is at all interested in Christianity, Judaism, the places where they two intersect, and most importantly, the places where they must remain separate. This is a great book, and very much worth a read.

A certain philosopher asked St. Anthony: Father, how can you be so happy when you are deprived of the consolation of books? Anthony replied: My book, O philosopher, is the nature of created things, and any time I want to read the words of God, the book is before me.

Another:

Abbot Lot came to Abbot Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and according as I am able, I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: Why not be totally changed into fire?

Both from The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century, Thomas Merton (Trans.)

Having pruned my Twitter list back to what I consider the bare essentials (namely: friends, other hams, a few religion writers, and local groups/organizations/entities), I’ve been rediscovering the joy of RSS feeds. I was a hardcore Google Reader user until its unfortunate demise, then switched to Feedly. At some point I stopped using it, but my account was still there, so I purged and rebuilt all the feeds and now check it about twice a day for news updates and all the goings-on. It was a nice surprise that most of my favorite sites still offer RSS feeds, though it occasionally took a little bit of right-click+view-source to find them. Only two sites remain - Garden & Gun and The Nashville Scene but I haven’t given up yet.

We had a perfectly lovely Easter weekend, and managed to make all of the liturgies of the Triduum: Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil. I was privileged to sponsor a young woman who was confirmed and received her first Holy Communion. It was wonderful to see such a large cohort, both candidates and catechumens, received into the Church. Being involved with RCIA has been a blessing these past few months such that I’ve decided to pursue catechetical certification in our diocese. There’s an option for online learning that would fit well with my schedule and I’m pretty sure I could complete it well under the three allotted years.

I picked up Mysterium Paschale again over the weekend to revisit von Balthasar’s exploration of Holy Saturday.

The more eloquently the Gospels describe the passion of the living Jesus, his death and burial, the more striking is their entirely understandable silence when it comes to the time in between his placing in the grave and the event of the Resurrection. We are grateful to them for this. Death calls for this silence, not only by reason of the mourning of the survivors but, even more, because of what we know of the dwelling and condition of the dead. When we ascribe to the dead forms of activity that are new and yet prolong those of earth, we are not simply expressing our perplexity. We are also defending ourselves against a stronger conviction which tells us that death is not a partial event. It is a happening which affects the whole person, though not necessarily to the point of obliterating the human subject altogether. It is a situation which signifies in the first place the abandonment of all spontaneous activity and so a passivity, a state in which, perhaps, the vital activity now brought to its end is mysteriously summed up.

It is in death, as the introduction to this book points out, that we find Christ’s most radical solidarity with us. Even so, it feels like Holy Saturday almost gets lost in the shuffle. One moment we’re celebrating the institution of the Eucharist on Holy Thursday. The next night we’re revisiting His Passion and venerating the wood of the cross. Saturday comes and all eyes look to the west and the setting sun which marks the beginning of the Easter Vigil. We might pause on Saturday morning to feel the stillness of the earth in the pause between pauses. Everything holds its breath waiting for death itself to start working backwards, as Aslan explained to the children.

On the strength of Alan Jacobs' recommendation, I’m adding Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West to the book pile. He mentioned it again recently in a blog post, too.

Finally, a random nit: I wish authors would provide translations of foreign-language quotes in the footnotes. But, comes the response, the intended audience of this book will certainly be fluent in patristic Greek. But since the author already knows what it means, why not throw a crib into the notes? And if not the author, then perhaps the editor? Google Translate isn’t bad most of the time but I’m damned if I even get the gist of an eis hadou katiēi, sunkatelthe, gnōthi kai ta ekeise tou Christou mystēria, which is auto-translated as “if he walks in a bowl, he is conscious, knowing, and consuming the mysteries of Christ.”

“If he walks in a bowl” has me scratching my head a bit for sure.

Twitter has pretty much been my only social media presence for some time now, though I consume way more than I contribute. I tend to follow three groups of accounts:

1. Friends (including other hams) and people/organizations that are locally rooted in my city, county, and state. This is my main feed and numbers about 200 different accounts.
2. A list of news organizations called “breaking,” which I usually turn on when Something Big is going on.
3. A list of religion writers/leaders from across the spectrum: Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim.

I used to have a list strictly dedicated to industry-related things but got tired of the infighting and ego-stroking. I dropped Facebook some time ago. I do have an Instagram account, but only follow family members. So, to be fair, it’s not like a had a large social footprint to start with. Even so, laying Twitter aside for several weeks has had an interesting effect. Without putting too fine a point on it: I can think longer and more clearly about things. I dipped back into the religion list for a little while the other day and couldn’t shut it down fast enough and, mind you, it’s not as though there’s much in the way of acrimony. It’s just so much. So after Lent, I’ve decided to pare back my usage to my main timeline and boot the other lists. If Something Big happens, I will certainly find out about it via other means. My account will remain private and I’ll probably continue using it in something of a read-only mode. The two exceptions will be severe weather spotting (our local NWS office monitors for a particular hashtag) and PM’ing my brother. That’s about it.

This post at GetReligion really drove the point home for me, and not because I’m a pastor. I am not. I’ve concluded that while, yes, social media has done some good things it is on balance not a net good for us. Not personally, not at a community level. And certainly not as a media with an underlying profit motive that requires constant engagement via the constant stimulation of primal urges. Tmatt goes into more detail in his weekly column, which is also well worth reading

Don’t get me wrong. I love the Internet, mostly because it’s still possible for me to use it the way I always have - as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. It’s still imminently possible to research, learn, and communicate with tools that let me control what I’m seeing and how much I share. It takes some work, to be sure, and it ought not, but this is the way it is for now.

So books: still on Jesus of Nazareth. Finished up The Culture Code, which was a little better than I expected. Not sure what I’ll go to next. Itching for some fiction, but not sure what.

The Office of Readings today included a portion of a homily by Origen on Leviticus. At Mass yesterday, the Gospel for the second scrutiny was read: the story of the man born blind. Eyes, seeing, and light are - not surprisingly - taking center stage as we build up to Easter. Eyes have been on my mind lately quite a bit as well: I’m dealing with a pernicious and annoying problem in one eye that has sorely tested my wherewithal for patient suffering.

There is a deeper meaning in the fact that the high priest sprinkles the blood towards the east. Atonement comes to you from the east. From the east comes the one whose name is Dayspring, he who is mediator between God and men. You are invited then to look always to the east: it is there that the sun of righteousness rises for you, it is there that the light is always being born for you. You are never to walk in darkness; the great and final day is not to enfold you in darkness. Do not let the night and mist of ignorance steal upon you. So that you may always enjoy the light of knowledge, keep always in the daylight of faith, hold fast always to the light of love and peace.

Added to my reading stack: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, thanks to slowly growing interest in Lisp. I’ve also been looking at Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation and working through a few tutorials. I am not likely to make a mid-career change to Lisp developer, but I am thoroughly enjoying thinking about computers and programs a bit differently. Quite a bit differently, actually. Just as a purely mental exercise it’s been worth the effort so far. If I could just get used to emacs keybindings now…

In other, semi-related tech news: I tweaked my at-home Linux setup to use the i3 tiling window manager. So far so good. Having to break a few habits related to xfce’s workspace switching, but otherwise I think it’s going well. Some radio apps aren’t particularly well-suited to tiling, or I haven’t figured out how to make them so. There’s always float mode, I suppose.

Jesus of Nazareth, a personal meditation by Pope Benedict XVI on the person of Christ, focuses on the portion of Jesus' public life from His baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration. The little book is dense, which ought to come as no surprise given Benedict’s extensive academic background. I say this to say that it’s slow going.

Proceeding through the Sermon on the Mount, the Holy Father offered this meditation on the second Beatitude:

Let us go back to the second Beatitude: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Mt 5:4). Is it good to mourn and declare mourning blessed? There are two kinds of mourning. The first is the kind that has lost hope, that has become mistrustful of love and truth, and that therefore eats away and destroys man from within. But there is also the mourning occasioned by a shattering encounter with the truth, which leads man to undergo conversion and to resist evil. This mourning heals, because it teaches man to hope and to love again. Judas is an example of the first kind of mourning: Struck with horror at his own fall, he no longer dares to hope and hangs himself in despair. Peter is an example of the second kind: Struck by the Lord’s gaze, he bursts into healing tears that plow up the soil of his soul. He begins anew and is himself renewed.

Some time ago, I was talking to a priest about confession, and one of the things that I told him was that I was having a bit of trouble with the examination of conscience forms that you find online in various places. They generally follow the Ten Commandments, and frankly I found myself having a difficult time finding myself in them. On the other hand, I couldn’t for a moment believe that I’d spent the weeks since my last confession in a state of complete perfection. Oh sure, there was the usual collection of venial sins, but what could I go to re-frame self-examination? He suggested that I begin looking to the Beatitudes. This turned out to be really good advice, for where the Decalogue is pretty cut-and-dried (“Do not kill,” even allowing for all of those things that stop short of actual murder but nevertheless gravely harm the spirit of another), the Beatitudes force the reader to put himself into the place of, for example, a peacemaker.

What would the blessed peacemaker look like? How would he react in this particular situation, or how would he respond conflicts large and small? And, then: was this me? Did I live this out? What action, stillness, word, or silence did I omit, thus falling short? We first have to dare to imagine what the blessed look like. Well not entirely imagine - the example stands before us in the person of Christ. We have to imagine a hunger and thirst for righteousness, see ourselves hungering and thirsting for the righteousness of the kingdom and all that entails. Then and only then are we animated to act and speak, or more importantly, remain still and silent. With God’s grace, we will be the peacemakers, poor in spirit, and meek He described.

Jesus of Nazareth extensively quotes Jacob Neusner’s A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, which will probably wind up on my to-read list shortly. It seems to have been favorably reviewed by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and looks to be an excellent follow-on to Sacks and Soloveitchik.

A friend of mine loaned me a copy of Peter Kreeft’s Symbol or Sustance: A Dialogue on the Eucharist which posits an imaginary dialogue between C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Billy Graham, discussing the Real Presence from their respective traditions. I’m always a little suspicious of imaginary dialogues from real people, but I thought Kreeft did a good job preserving the individual voices without sliding into wish-fulfillment. Kreeft, a Catholic, deeply respects the integrity of the three positions. As he states in the introduction, this is the only way it could work without turning one or more of the characters into caricatures. The book contains a few occasions of Lewis and Tolkien reading from their notes and papers, including this bit from Lewis' The Weight of Glory:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, marry, snub, and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean we are perpetually solemn. We must play. But out merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously — no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner — no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat — the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

Today will be a double-post sort of day. I came across a section in Jesus of Nazareth on the second Beatitude and want to spend some more time ruminating on it.

I’m laying the Nouwen collection aside for awhile. He’s a good writer, but I’m starting to feel like this anthology could be retitled Henri Nouwen and the Nth Voyage of Self-Discovery. Maybe it was too much Nouwen at once. Our pastor made a reference to Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth during his homily last Sunday, and I happened across it in a used-bookstore the next day. Recognizing Divine Providence in action, I snatched it up for $4. So far so good. I will probably also pick up the two follow-ons, which cover the infancy narratives and the events of Holy Week respectively.

Yesterday was the seventh anniversary of my brother’s death. I think about him often, and he was especially on my mind in the days leading up to yesterday. Lots of things went on yesterday: loved ones struggling with decisions, the daily madness of a family of eleven, really big moments at work. In the midst of it all, the veil between us thinned somewhat. We prayed for him, and trust that he does so for us.

Today’s Office of Readings included a homily from St. John Chrystostom, bishop:

Our spirit should be quick to reach out toward God, not only when it is engaged in meditation; at other times also, when it is carrying out its duties, caring for the needy, performing works of charity, giving generously in the service of others, our spirit should long for God and call him to mind, so that these works may be seasoned with the salt of God’s love, and so make a palatable offering to the Lord of the universe. Throughout the whole of our lives we may enjoy the benefit that comes from prayer if we devote a great deal of time to it.
Prayer is the light of the spirit, true knowledge of God, mediating between God and man.

Henri Nouwen writes a great deal about prayer. I’m making my way through a collection of eight of his books. I thought The Genesee Diary was wonderful and I recommend it to anyone who’s curious about either Nouwen or the ins and outs of life in a Trappist monastery. The homily above finds loud echoes in the Little Way of St. Therese: do small things with great love, and you turn them into prayer. The larger Nouwen collection is also good, though substantial parts of the books so far seem to be written for an audience of priests and those who form them. I just started ¡Gracias! - another diary, this time of his time in South America.

For Lent, I’ve left all social media behind. Wherever possible, I’m trying to leave the graphical Internet behind as well. I did this last year, too, and found the text-only web lends itself to a couple of good things. First, it’s a heck of a lot faster. I already filter our surfing with a pi-hole and run uBlock Origin in all of my browsers as an extra layer. But limiting the web to text-only browsers completely…well, speed is on a whole new level. There’s no javascript support, so most of the websites you’re likely to use won’t work quite right, or even render at all. Even so, I’ve found lightweight or text-only versions of just about everything I need: weather, news, research, and so on. I can read my mail with mutt, and there’s even a CLI twitter client which works pretty well, though I’m not using it. I do have to emerge from 1989 for work, though, but otherwise my main setup is retro-tacular. I already use vim for all of my editing needs, and irc is just as textual as it’s ever been. Emojis work even in the terminal.

In addition to being faster, I find it much easier to walk away from, which is important, since another Lenten focus for me has been to spend less free time in front of screens and more engaged in study, prayer, and family time. The online world is a constant visual assault. Strip everything back to elemental text and you really get a feel for just how bad it is.

Finally, it’s a nice bit of nostalgia. Folks my age and older still have the pre-Internet world in their living memory, and the early days looked just like this. So I’ll allow that maybe this is just a lot of old-geezer-wheezing. But…it really is faster and easier to leave. I mean, I’m not even kidding: I’ve seen one or two articles proposing the resurrection of gopher, and if you don’t know what that means, then it’s probably time. The sooner the better, I say.

I started and finished Joseph Soloveitchik’s The Lonely Man of Faith over the weekend. I was at a retreat and this little book was a nice break from the topics at hand. Are you supposed to take a break during a retreat? Isn’t a retreat supposed to be break of its own? A meta-break, then. It’s a short book - just over 100 pages - though portions of it are dense with philosophical terms that I had to lookup when I got back into cellphone signal range.

Starting with the two creation stories in Genesis, the essay’s main thesis is that man is created with two sides in constant tension: Adam the first, who is commanded to “subdue the earth” through his own powers in a sort of utilitarian imperative, and Adam the second, who is commanded to tend and cultivate the garden. Adam the first experiences community immediately; Adam the second experiences a profound loneliness that is remedied by his defeat. God puts him to sleep and, after an act of sacrifice, Eve joins him in garden.

The modern world, in Soloveitchik’s estimation (and this essay was originally published in the mid 60s') is full of the astonishing achievements of Adam the first. So much so that there’s not a whole lot of space left for Adam the second. Lacking any immediate utility, transcendent questions are left unasked, or worst, asked and answered with more technology.

Let me diagnose the situation in a few terse sentences. Contemporary Adam the first, extremely successful in his cosmic-majestic enterprise, refuses to pay earnest heed to the duality in man and tries the deny the undeniable, that another Adam exists beside, or rather, in him. By rejecting Adam the second, contemporary man, eo ipso, dismisses the covenantal faith community as something superfluous and obsolete. To clear up any misunderstanding on the part of my audience, I wish to note that I am not concerned in this essay with the vulgar and illiterate atheism professed and propagated in the most ugly fashion by a natural-political community which denies the unique transcendental worth of the human personality. I am referring to Western man who is affiliated with organized religion and is a generous supporter of its institutions. He stands today in danger of losing his dialectical awareness and abandoning completely the metaphysical polarity implanted in man as a member of both the majestic [Adam the first] and covenantal [Adam the second] community.

Membership in both communities is willed by God, says Soloveitchik, and the proper response is to oscillate between both as appropriate, but not to advance one at the expense of the other, and this goes for the man of faith as well. There is good food for thought here. I came across a reference to this book in Essays on Ethics; shortly thereafter, my wife came across another in a TED talk by David Brooks. There are one or two places where I had to part ways with the author - the Incarnation changes our understanding of God’s immanence in ways otherwise accessible to Judaism - but they were brief detours and did not affect his point. The introduction points out that the footnotes mostly references to various Jewish sages and writing, but the essay is written in universals. Anyone could read this without the benefit of the footnotes and come out fine.

What is it then to be stable? It seems to me that it may be described in the following terms: You will find stability at the moment when you discover that God is everywhere, that you do not need to seek Him elsewhere, that He is here, and if you do not find Him here it is useless to go and search for him elsewhere because it is not Him that is absent from us, it is we who are absent from Him…It is important to recognize that it is useless to seek God somewhere else. If you cannot find Him here, you will not find Him anywhere else. This is important because it is only at the moment that you recognize this that you can truly find the fullness of the Kingdom of God in all its richness within you; that God is present in every situation and every place, that you will be able to say: ‘So then I shall stay where I am.’
— Metropolitan Anthony Bloom

Last night at RCIA, the catechumens and candidates learned about the mystical body of Christ and the communion of saints. I’m not sure how many of them understood it. I’m not sure how many of us do, either, to be honest. The discussion on saints was a little easier and some of the teachers and volunteers were asked to share their particular patrons. I talked briefly about Saint Benedict and how his Rule, though originally written to organize a monastery, contains deep wisdom for anyone seeking to live in community with others. Outside the confines of a monastery, adapted for life in The World, the Rule teaches us to encounter Christ here, now, in this particular place and with these people: a family, a neighborhood, an office, a parish.

The Benedictine motto ora et labora comes quickly to mind, maybe especially so for bookish folks. Work/study and prayer - what else does anyone need? Maybe it’s all any of use can do to work and pray within the confines of an all-too-crazy daily schedule. The demands on our attention are constant and unrelenting, and we seem to do our damnedest to keep it that way. The idea of carefully proscribed life within a monastic enclosure…well, what’s not to love about that? But you can’t flee from humanity into a monastery - Thomas Merton wrote that you only find humanity there again, perhaps writ larger for the smallness of the space.

Bookwise: I’m nearly done with Essays on Ethics and just ordered a couple of books by Henri Nouwen, one of which I’ll try to save for an upcoming retreat.