It’s been awhile but we’re getting back in the saddle tomorrow!

These pork shoulders about 5 hours in; probably about halfway there.

Enjoying a short summer break in classes before things pick up again in late August. There'll be a retreat that ends with our candidacy Mass, then we're back in the thick of it the weekend after. The shift from aspirant to candidate signals an end to the period of discernment even as we begin more intense study and practicums.

Accordingly, the booklists have landed, and here's what's on tap. First up is Early Church History, which I'll be doing online through most of the Fall:

  • The Confessions, St. Augustine
  • Early Christian Writings
  • The Early Church, Chadwick
  • On The Incarnation, St. Athanasius
  • The Life of Antony and Letter to Marcellinus, St. Athanasius
  • Origen's basic writings

The in-person semester starts with Ministry of Deacon:

  • The Deacon at Mass, Ditewig
  • Theology of the Diaconate, Cummings, et al
  • The Deacon Reader, Keating

Neither of these lists includes the raft of articles and PDFs that have also been posted. For myself, I'm forcing myself into some downtime: catching up on some magazines, occasional video games (these days that means Vampire Survivors and Factorio), and I may even dust off the radio kit. 

Mystagogy has wrapped up, so I'm going to pivot our neophytes into an 8-week bible study, portions of which we used when I was in class a couple of weeks ago. We tried to launch some small groups a few years ago, but Covid put an end to them about 2 weeks in. We've been trying to emphasize intentional discipleship these last few months. My prayer is that this group lectio will help us all to draw closer to Jesus, which is the essential prerequisite for...well, for basically everything else we do.


Class is going well; we're covering a lot of ground but it's a small group (7 folks total), and Fr. Josh is a very engaging teacher. Having picked up a bit of SMA merch, I'll need to swear off any more visits to the bookstore. The to-read pile is fairly well set for the next few months. The gift shop, which is elsewhere (and too far to walk in this heat), is another matter. Will try to roll by there on the way out of town.

St. Meinrad Archabbey Church. Here for the week.

Ahora, una cosa diferente

Quiero escribir un poco en Español. Estoy tratando a mejorar mi vocabulario spiritual y al mismo tiempo usar las letras como 'ñ' en Linux. Hablo Español de niño y estudié en la escuela y la universidad. Si estoy ordenado al diácono, naturalmente quiero hablar, leer, y enseñar en dos lenguas.

Bueno, ya tengo La Biblia de Jerusalén (por consejo de un sacerdote en nuestra parroquia). También me dijo que leyera libros de Raniero Cantalamessa. Ya he comenzado Tu Palabra Me Da Vida . Con mi pobre Diccionario Universidad de Chicago y Google Translate, estoy progresando.  A veces, estoy traduciendo en mi mente, pero otros veces, estoy leyendo como un movimiento de agua.

Un verano en la universidad, yo pasé 3 o 4 meses trabajando en un mercado, empacando comida en pequeñas cajas de plástica - dulces, hierbas secas, etc. Todo los trabajadores (menos yo) eran centroamericanos. Al final de este verano, estaba soñando en Español. Quiero volver a ese nivel otra vez.

Just finished the last class of the year - a two-month session on the Old Testament. The teacher was great and I think a lot of us came away with our heads spinning from all the new material.  I'm heading up to St. Meinrad's in a couple of weeks for a  one-week intensive course called Ministry in a Multicultural Context, taught by Fr. Josh Johnson. Maybe it's just the Baader-Meinhof effect, but all of a sudden I'm seeing him pop up all over my various feeds. His assigned readings are Forming Intentional Disciples by Sherry Weddell, Mother Teresa's  Secret Fire by Joseph Langford, and some articles about his work down in Baton Rouge. I'm almost done with the Langford book and it's been great.  Sherry Weddell's book is a repeat for me - I read it years ago on the Kindle and really liked it. I bought a hard copy that I could mark up and underline.

It's looking like we'll get July off. There's a retreat scheduled for us in August, and it'll end with a Candidacy Mass, marking the formal change from aspirants to candidates. Classes resume directly afterward: Ministry of Deacon (in person) with Early Church History  (online). The syllabus is showing a lot of New Testament stuff for the upcoming year: the Epistles, Synoptics, and a section on the Johannine literature. We'll be closing out with Ecclesiology and Sacraments.

All the kids are out of school, so things are feeling a little more relaxed around the house. Many of the college kids are doing summer courses, as is my wife, who is working through her own post-graduate work - an M.Ed. She's also returning to the classroom this fall, teaching middle-school math at our parish school, and will probably start preparing for that in a month or so.

I've decided not to stress about the vegetable garden. It's very weedy but the tomatoes are still growing and the garlic's about ready to harvest. Blackberries will be coming in soon and the grapevines are going crazy. Crossing my fingers that we'll see some figs this year.  The long game of fruit trees (and perennials generally) seems to be suiting my temperament and bandwidth lately.

Grilled paella - one of our go-tos when we’re feeding a crowd.

Reflecting on Girard

I've been noodling on René Girard's memetic theory of desire for a little while now, and the more I think about it, the more it seems to explain. Here it is, in a hopelessly tiny nutshell.

We are, writes Girard, imitative creatures in terms of our desires. We often don't know what we want, so we look to others for cues. Our desires then tend to be triangular: there is the individual, the other person, and the object of their mutual desire. All of advertising basically works like this. We want a thing because we see a desirable person, a person we wish to imitate, desiring that same thing.

The first lesson here is that we ought to be careful who we imitate, but that's not where I'm going in this reflection. Where I'm going is the end result of shared desires, which is, inevitably, conflict.

Girard suggests that too many people wanting the same things leads inexorably to conflict.  Humans, he notes, will eventually kill their rivals in ways usually not seen in the animal world. Tussles within animal groups become violent, but rarely to the point of death. Once a victor emerges, the social order is set, and the rival either occupies a  submissive position in the hierarchy or leaves the group entirely. Humans, on the other hand, will eliminate the rival completely. When this tendency is coupled with the equally human urge for revenge -  the result is transgenerational violence, each group seeking retribution from the other in turn. For Girard, this is the ultimate doom of humanity and an insurmountable barrier to any sort of actual society. We'd just end up killing each other off completely. Yet we have societies. How? It turns out that there's an escape valve for releasing the energy of conflict.  Girard identifies this as the scapegoat mechanism.

The scapegoat mechanism emerges when a society reaches a period of crisis that threatens to tear it to pieces, largely rooted in the triangular desires mentioned above. A person (or group) will be identified as the cause of the crisis. This person or group will almost certainly be different from the majority. In the case of an individual, it's usually someone who looks different, perhaps by way of a disability. The group will be someone at the margins. In either case, a contagion takes hold until widespread agreement that this person/group is The Cause of All The Trouble. What happens next? The rapid agreement suddenly diffuses - or rather redirects - the energy towards a common target. All of a sudden, there's an ersatz peace as everyone stops fighting each other and looks instead to this person/group.

What comes next is inevitable: the person - and we'll stick with an individual - is killed or driven out of society. Everyone feels better, and the crisis appears to be over. In fact, the relief at deliverance from the crisis may translate into gratitude towards the victim. When the crisis returns, as it always will, memories of the initial sacrifice return and the scene is replayed. Over time, the sacrifice becomes ritualized and set into the stone of mythology, where the victim's death becomes a divine gift. All myth, for Girard, reduces to this cycle of imitative violence and the victim whose sacrifice restores the order of the cosmos.

Examine the myth closely, and the sacrifice of the victim is the correct, required action. Girard uses the example of Oedipus - his punishment and exile are, in fact, the proper responses to the incest and murder he unwittingly committed. His blindness, a kind of self-exile, removed the plague and restored order to Thebes. The sacrifice of the victim was not only right; it was just.

This, for Girard, is where Christianity parts ways with myth, for at no point in the scriptures are the victims anything other than innocent. As a counterpoint to Oedipus, Girard points to the story of Joseph in Egypt.  Out of jealous desire, his brothers plot to kill him. Again and again, he is unjustifiably made a victim, and at a moment when his brothers are delivered into his hands, he shows mercy. Leaping from there to the Gospel, we see in Jesus Christ a victim of absolute, unquestioned innocence. We even hear from the High Priest in John 11:50 that it is better for one man to die than for the whole nation to perish. For Girard, the Bible throughout - and the Gospels in particular - detonates myth's entire structure and the received cycles of violence with their self-justified scapegoating of others. Nowhere in myth is there a small group of followers proclaiming the innocence of the sacrificial victim afterward. Nowhere in myth is the notion of an innocent victim at all.

I recently finished Girard's I See Satan Fall Like Lightning , which goes into a fair bit of detail and can also seriously use some better cover art. There's also a podcast featuring a series of seminars led by Girard himself that I'm working through. The sound quality on them is a little uneven, though. Bishop Robert Barron discusses Girard here, too, and about a billion times better than I ever could. It's all been a bit mind-blowing, as if a puzzle piece I hadn't known was missing suddenly dropped into place.

I wonder what he would have made of the social media landscape. In one podcast, he obliquely touched on the difference between the distant past and the present in terms of isolation. Archaic societies were more isolated than the present, and perhaps this made a difference in the way ideas spread.  The urge to form "societies" seems to be built-in since we can easily opt in to our own respective worldview bubbles.  The scapegoat mechanism certainly seems to be alive and well in any event.

 

Gray ratsnake. One of the kids spotted it the other day and I’ve been trying to catch a look at it since for a positive ID.

Muscadines are really taking off this year. This is ‘Triumph;’ we also have a ‘Tara Gold’ that’s doing well.

Just got the email that Emergence Vol. 3 is available for pre-order! Pre-ordered! Such great work and beautifully produced too.

So I’ve ventured back into the Fediverse after some time away. Pros/cons about enabling the ActivityPub stuff for Micro.blog? I like the idea of integration/crossposting but want to know if I’m unleashing a hamster avalanche first.

Kitchen is out of commission while some work is being done so I'm using the green egg as an oven tonight.  Trying to embrace a paleolithic outlook with respect to dinner time, which is to say that it'll be done when it's done. Hungry now? Go forage for grubs.