AGGIORNAMENTO

AGGIORNAMENTO

My ox is in the cistern

Or maybe it’s my son;

in any case my neighbors say

The time for work is done.

It’s Sunday a.m. time for Mass

You’ll have to leave your ox or son

To welter in the chilly depths

For Mass has just begun.     

Then out of nowhere comes this Jew

Who says, “I’ll help you now,

For the neighbors all are hypocrites,

Not one would lose a cow,

Let alone a precious son

Or a field they needs must plow.”

Sunday is a special day

For being mindful of the way.

God deals with His creation.

Not by rigid iron-clad laws

That govern all behavior,

All our human flaws,

But leave the human heart untouched;

For that you need a savior

Who will give your son a loving hand,

Help mend your bad behavior.

Advent is upon us now,

A time of preparation

To welcome in the Holy One

To make all reparation.

Awaiting the Dawn

or the Night

(Intermittent Ambiguity)

Death, the invisible reaper,

Sweeps through the sky at night;

Only the ravens are wary,

Aware of his swift deadly flight.

Only the ravens can see him

only the ravens know

That death is the midnight reaper

The bringer of darkness and woe.

Death will torment each one of us,

Gather us into his fold;

Only the bravest will face him,

The one who in faith remains bold.

Death the invisible reaper

Blots out the stars as he glides

Seeking the next son of Adam

The one who in faith never hides,

Who sends the ravens off shrieking

Unsettling the settled this night;

Only the ravens can see him

And the child who stands in the light.

Image: that’s Earl, from MUTTS. No ambiguity there!

But dogs are like that in my experience.

OCTOTHORPS# —#LES

What a delightful word. I learned it by missing it on an online quiz. I could see the eight in it, but eight what? Eight thorps? I’m still not sure about that; however, if you look at the number of ends visible on the hashtag lines, you can see that there are indeed eight. Hence, apparently, a hashtag is an octothorp, though why we need two words for such a symbol I shall delve into another time.

A week ago Sunday evening I was making my way from my downstairs room to the laundry room/bathroom where I finish up the day, brushing my teeth, taking my medicine. I had just stepped into the hallway when all hell broke loose and I found myself moving at light speed down the hall, following behind my walker, then crashing into the laundry room/bath room door frame. No bones broken but I had fallen and I could not get up! I called for help since I was flat on the floor, bleeding and sore. She came, she called our son, he came and managed to get me into my wheelchair and thus to bed. My son bandaged the bleeding spots; I took some drugs and blissfully slept, waking up off and on, took some more drugs and tried not to think about it.

That is the second time such a thing occurred and I still have no idea how it happens. Thus I live on the edge, truly terrified each time I step into the hall, and I count myself fortunate each time I make it safely back to my room. All of these words may account for the content of what follows; probably not but who knows? Accidents occur but there are no accidents. Lately I have felt very much like Job. Apparently, God has left Satan free to test me. Well Satan has touched every part of my body at this point. And, yes, I have tried to be righteous, but with not great success, and I know I wasn’t there when the Big Bang occurred or when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, so maybe the testing could ease off?

Thus we begin:

Just let me die, Lord

I feel so solid, substantial, so real.

How then can I die, cease to be?

I’m willing to participate, cooperate,

Say farewell, adieu, say goodbye

But the Angel of death presses on,

Passes by, says “soon enough, old guy.”

I scrubbed the blood off my forehead,

Rubbed till my skin felt raw.

“Dead is dead,” the dark Angel said,

“Don’t be so anxious to die!”

Yes, but I’m tired, I’m a burden

My body fails me every day, every way;

My mind has the habit of sin, nasty sin,

So just let me die, pass away.

“Pass away, fool?  What a dumb phrase!

Only the winds and days pass away.

People die, disappear in the fire

Or down in the ground in a box

There’s only one hope and you know it;

It’s surely not pie in the sky.

If God knows your name and remembers,

It’s resurrection in the sweet by and by.

Today’s Thought

Perhaps a somewhat comic interlude:

Like the bat hanging

Tight to the bare limb,

The last autumn leaf

Tries to imitate him.

Like a yellow bird

Flying upside down,

The last autumn leaf

Floats gently to the ground.

[without attending too much to the content of the above, cast your eyes and ears upon the almost perfect form!]

Angel and Man

The single-minded Angel

Beholds the face of God,

Surrounded by celestial light

He need not reck the rod.

The human soul by contrast

Is blinded much by sin;

The only way for him to see

Is to look for God within.

Prayer is a conversation,

A turning toward the Lord;

Silence is an answer,

Communication is restored.

Father, let your silence

Re-establish our concord,

For without your loving presence

Human life has no reward.

[It might seem as though I saw them when I had my close encounter with the bathroom floor, but that is not the case. I was sitting when I saw them exploring for three days. But then alas! Death took them: curled and shriveled the were:]

Three many legged crawly bugs

Lived on my bathroom floor.

I watched them for a day or two

Or maybe one day more.

Each crazy creepy crawly bug,

Short and thin as a thread,

Walked the floor that third day,

Then turned up truly dead.

I miss the creepy crawly bugs,

Miss watching them explore

Every nook and cranny

On our new-tiled bathroom floor.

Thank God for little bugs and things

With alien paraphernalia;

I see them in my sleep sometimes

Without their genitalia.

[Sorry! But you try to find a decent-hmm-rhyme with paraphernalia! Beside it makes me chuckle after a touch of dreariness. I hope you are keeping track of the central idea at work throughout thes verses and such. I need to check but I believe there’s one more:]

What’s in a picture: three owls three:

Portrait: Three Owls

Three owls sitting on a broken window sill;

Looking like people look who mean you Ill;

One looks quirky, two look at me,

Haunting expressions for one to see.

What do they mean, those strange owls three?

Are they omens of disaster to be?

Should I be concerned that they’re looking at me,

When they ought to be looking for an ancient oak tree?

ABDIEL & ESOLEN

[I thought it time to hear someone else for a change; Abdiel is one of my favorite literary characters.]

Well Done, Servant of God

Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen: If you welcome the light as it has been revealed by God and not by the current age, you will begin to think aright, and you will begin to know yourself.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2024

There is a scene in Milton’s Paradise Lost that affirms my resolve to fight against bad ideas and the unrealities they assume or help to spread, like a contagion.  The seraph Abdiel, whose name means “Servant of God,” has refuted Satan on each point the tempter has made to his followers – for Satan is stirring them up to rebellion against the Son of God.

Abdiel has done so with a combination of precise reasoning and zealous passion.  But Satan rejects the truth, mocking both it and its messenger.  Rather than concede a single point, he commits himself more deeply to falsehood, going so far as to deny that he is any kind of creature at all.

“We know no time when we were not as now,” he boasts, “Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised / By our own quickening power.”  He tells Abdiel to go and deliver the tidings to the Son of God, that war is on the move, and he ends with a threat.  “And fly,” he says, “lest evil intercept thy flight.”

Abdiel is not cowed.  Thousands and thousands of rebels are encompassed around him, deaf to his words and dismissive of his zeal, which they judge as “out of season,” or “singular and rash.”

But one soul devoted to the truth is mightier than thousands of liars and fools.  The rebels have completed their break with truth, and now, says Abdiel to Satan, “Other decrees / Against thee are gone forth without recall.”  He leaves their camp alone, scorned by all:

So spake the seraph Abdiel, faithful found,
Among the faithless, faithful only he;
Among innumerable false, unmoved,
Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified;
His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal,
Nor number nor example with him wrought
To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind
Though single.  From amidst them forth he passed
Long way through hostile scorn, which he sustained
Superior, nor of violence feared aught,
But with retorted scorn his back he turned
On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed.

Milton, no doubt, thought of himself as an Abdiel, so deeply committed to what he saw as theological truth, that he could not find it in him to join any particular church; it is this individualism that marks him as the first of the moderns, though in most other ways he is better seen as the last man of the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.

But that biographical wrinkle is not pertinent to the scene and its drama, since Abdiel is not going off to be by himself, nor has he come up with any peculiar doctrine of his own.  He leaves Satan’s camp to join the camp of the eternal God, and thus can the Catholic reader in our time see in Abdiel a model for a fuller devotion to the Church as the repository of truth.

But how do you commit yourself to the truth?  We have the Scriptures, the Catechism, and magisterial teachings from the Church’s very beginning.  Yet it is not always clear how these teachings apply in a current controversy, and people argue about their scope and significance, and human words are powerless to deliver ultimate realities.

Thus are we often in a muddle not entirely of our own making.  And then the psychological pressure to go along with everyone near you is intense, and going along involves both assenting to a proposition and taking part in an action, whether actively or permissively.

Action and vision in man are inextricable: we act according to what we see or think we see, and we see, or think we see, according to what we do.  We have no direct apprehension of reality apart from ideas, and we have no ideas unaffected by what we do.

This being so, we can perceive that sin and falsehood are intervolved, and thence we may posit several reliable signs to direct us at least away from the quicksand.

• Whatever I have come up with on my own is probably false, because it is likely to be partial in both senses of the word: I see only in part, and I am partial to my ideas and to the deeds they will justify.

• Whatever depends upon the passions of the hour is probably false, because truth is everlasting and does not alter with the calendar.

• Whatever pursues its own way to the exclusion or the ignoring of other considerations is probably false, because one truth illuminates and uplifts another, rather than shrouding it in twilight or darkness.

• And of course, whatever leads to absurdity or self-contradiction is certainly false.

To be cavalier about truth is, I think, to reverse what Jesus says about the kingdom of God.  The merchant seeking precious pearls finds that one pearl of great price, and he sells all that he has in order to obtain it.  The merchant is not content with a shiny rock that is no pearl, nor, I suppose, will he use the pearl as a paperweight or a doorstopper.

It is also to cast contempt on the work of Christ and on the preaching of the apostles.  “For you were once darkness,” says Saint Paul to the church at Ephesus, “but now you are light, in the Lord.”

Saint Peter urges every believer to praise God, “who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”  On our own we are all in darkness.  Try to see God by your own light, and you will see not even yourself, but an idol of yourself.  But if you welcome the light as it has been revealed by God and not by the current age, you will begin to think aright, and you will begin to know yourself.

And then, while all the world is going mad, as the world is wont to do, you can be like Abdiel, and you can be sure that you are not alone, no matter what the world and its proud princes say.

Image: The Fall of the Rebel Angels by Hieronymus Bosch, 1512 – 1515 [Museo del Prado, Madrid]. The entire Paradice Lost is worth reading, but the war is of particular interest. As I remember it lasts three days with Michael playing a significant role at one point. In a sense the opposing forces are more or less equal, but on the third day, Christ takes over and it’s no contest. Christ simply exercises his Godly power and does what you see in Bosch’s image: he delivers a divine blow, a wallop that knocks the evil angels down to Hell. So much for Satan’s pride and lack of wisdom. You might notice in Esolen’s Satan quote that Satan is reduced to uttering foolishness: self-created indeed! As if I was or you were. His speech is utter nonsense and finally in PL he is simply seen as a fool.

ENDS WITH A COMET—LES

One of my many favorite Psalms:

Psalm 139

R/ (24b) Guide me, Lord, along the everlasting way.

O Lord, you have probed me and you know me;
you know when I sit and when I stand;
you understand my thoughts from afar.
My journeys and my rest you scrutinize,
with all my ways you are familiar. R/

Truly you have formed my inmost being;
you knit me in my mother’s womb.
I give you thanks that I am fearfully, wonderfully made;
wonderful are your works. R/

My soul also you knew full well;
nor was my frame unknown to you.
When I was made in secret,
when I was fashioned in the depths of the earth. R/

Alleluia, alleluia. Blessed are those who hear the word of God/ and observe it. Alleluia, alleluia.

It occurred to me that I ought to put words down that were edifying before anyone got to my words. My words, as we used to say, are a crap shoot. The metaphor is dice, I believe. In any case when I woke up in the middle of the morning today, 3 or 4 a.m., there was an image in my mind. There is first sunlight on a fairly new concrete sidewalk; the wall of a large brick building on the right if you are going down; there is a black, pipe-like railing on the left; behind the railing going down there is a sloping hill of green grass from the top of the walk to the bottom; the grassy section is only about two feet wide and leads down to the ever present blacktop parking lot. I knew where I was: the left side of the mall movie theater in Richmond. The emotion is the utter delight I used to take in walking down that sidewalk to get to the car. I was outside; we had seen a movie that we enjoyed, and life was and is a good gift. I miss, terribly at times, the joy at being out and about; now the image is what I see out my window that’s close to the end of my bed.

It’s a beautiful new window thanks to the efforts of my wife and the craftsmanship of the man from Lowe’s. The view is filled with leaves of 4 or 5 different trees: maple, oak, dogwood, redbud. The view is like a kaleidoscope of changing images: bare branches in winter, the sunlight on gray bark is surprisingly beautiful; the various variety of buds in the spring; then the profusion of wonderful green leaves throughout the summer and into the fall before the withdrawing sap turns them into a rich colorful tapestry of yellows, golds and numerous shades of red. The leaves fall, the deep blue of the sky becomes visible and winter is once again upon us. Life is a very good gift even when one is afflicted. I read a passage from a book today called something like A Year with the Mystics. There is a reading, usually from one of the church fathers, for each day of the year. I find Brother Lawrence’s perspective quite helpful:

I will not ask God to deliver you from your trials, but I will ask him earnestly to give you the patience and strength needed to suffer as long as he desires. Find consolation in him who keeps you fixed to the cross; he will release you when he judges it appropriate. Happy are they who suffer with him. Get used to suffering, and ask him for the strength to suffer as he wants, and for as long as he judges necessary. The worldly do not understand these truths, and I am not surprised; the reason is that they suffer as citizens of this world and not as Christians. They consider illnesses as natural afflictions and not as graces from God, and therefore they find in them only what is difficult and harsh for our nature. But those who regard them as coming from the hand of God, as signs of his mercy and the means he uses for their salvation, ordinarily find great sweetness and perceptible consolations in them.

I wish you were convinced that God is often closer to us in times of sickness and suffering than when we enjoy perfect health. Seek no other doctor but him. I think he wants to cure you by himself. Place all your trust in him, and you will soon experience the benefits we resist when we trust more in medical remedies than in God. Whatever remedies you may use, they will only work to the extent that he will permit. When suffering comes from God, he alone can cure it, and he often leaves us with physical illness in order to cure our spiritual illness. Find consolation in the sovereign doctor of body and soul.

—Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, On the Practice of the Presence of God

I am not certain whom Brother Lawrence was addressing though it seems as though he was addressing me.

One other thing: there is a comet out there that may be visible with the naked eye in a few days. I shall be sorry to miss that. When we were setting out for my wife’s relatives in the Rio Grande Valley back in the last century, ha!, 1975 probably, we left late at night, 1 a.m. I seem to remember; there over the house across from us was a comet with a magnificent tail spread out across the sky. Speaking of gifts: I can still see it in my mind’s eye. I didn’t know it was there when we set out; I don’t know its name to this day, but it was magnificent. What a universe we live in. Deo gratias! Thanks be to God!

After the barn door was closed. Comet west must have been the one I saw. I almost began to think I had imagined it though the image is clear: in the northeast with the tail extending south. The information is from Wikipedia.

Comet West, formally designatedC/1975 V1, 1976 VI, and 1975n, was a comet described as one of the brightest objects to pass through the inner Solar System in 1976. It is often described as a "great comet."^[3]

History

It was discovered photographically by Richard M. West, of the European Southern Observatory, on August 10, 1975. The comet came to perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) on February 25, 1976.^[1] During perihelion the comet had a minimum solar elongation of 6.4° and as a result of forward scattering reached a peak apparent magnitude of −3.^[2]From February 25–27, observers reported that the comet was bright enough to study during full daylight.^[2]

Despite its brightness, Comet West went largely unreported in the popular media. This was partly due to the relatively disappointing display of Comet Kohoutek in 1973, which had been widely predicted to become extremely prominent: scientists were wary of making predictions that might raise public expectations.^[4]

The New York Times, however, reported on March 2, 1976 that West was "a comet that may prove one of the brightest in this decade" and would be "visible to the unaided eye

More Narrative Nonsense? les

Narrative Nothings with apologies to anyone who decides to read them. The first two verses are mostly autobiographical; “mansion so fine” in “The Neighbor” is stolen from a song that keeps playing in my head: “The Whistling Gypsy Rover,” especially as sung by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. I would provide a link if I knew how to do that.

Mary: the Begining

She walked into my working place*;

I was stocking new shirts on the shelves.

She strolled down my aisle with a heart-warming smile

and an innocence born free of guile, I thought;

An innocence born free of guile.

“Hello,” I said, looking up at her

As she started to pass me by;

“You’re lovely as springtime, summer

And fall, whose beauty is like

Bright snow on a wall.”

That’s when I ran into the snow-covered wall and finally gave up writing here. The poverty-stricken sort of ballad-like verses that show up next are a kind of a fanciful continuation. Oh yes: the place* was the J. C. Penny store in Tiffin, Ohio. I worked there for three or four years; it paid for my college fees as well as a summer trip to Mexico in 1961. Those were the days. In Mexico City I almost got arrested twice—faulty car muffler first time. The enormous trooper let me go for an 800 peso bribe; the second time was for a traffic violation; I thought I was just driving the way everyone did. I almost got engaged too. Another Maria. Her father was a general in the Mexican army. This policeman wanted to take me to jail. I pretended not to speak a word of Spanish this time and drove him to the General who fixed it for me. I was supposed to go back to Mexico City but I got shot down outside of Rosa’s Cantino. Alas.

The Neighbor

She lives next door in a mansion fine

With two dogs, a cat and her mother;

And I would dream of her dark brown eyes,

That someday I might be her lover.

I knocked on the door of the mansion so fine,

‘Twas answered by her old wrinkled mother

With a glass of wine, two barking dogs,

And a cat that was under deep cover.

Her mother looked me straight in the eye,

“What do you want, young man?” said she.

“To steal a kiss from your daughter!” I said.

The old lady laughed and shook her grey head,

Then slammed the door in my face;

She slammed the door in my face!

What did you expect, you silly young man?

I thought to myself as I shuffled away;

Audacity doesn’t play well these days,

No matter what others might say.

I put on my best shirt, jacket and tie;

I bought her twelve red roses.

Then I returned to the mansion so fine,

With my head now full of supposes.

Suppose your lady has a rich fond friend;

Suppose she’s engaged to another.

What shall I do if she doesn’t like me

And threatens to call a mean brother?

I’ll take my chances in true love’s affair,

For she is a lady so lovely

That I will risk my heart’s desire

To win the love of the lady so fair.

I knocked on the door of the mansion so fine

Hoping the lady would answer.

She opened the door and kissed me once

With lips as sweet as fine cherry wine.

She is a lady so fine and so fair,

My wife I’m soon to make her;

The priest will say, “Do you do?” “I do!

“Till it’s time for the old undertaker!

“Till it’s time for the old undertaker.”

[Well, that’s what “till death do you part” means! As for the crow outside my window and below, you might say it was Biblically hatched.]

Providence?

A very big crow, black as sin,  

Landed in our front yard maple,  

He cocked his head and cleaned his beak. 

As if for a dinner table. 

And not just for this leafless fable.

Next he preened his dusty black feathers,  

One by one, down and up he went.  

The idle dust floated to the rich grassy ground, 

Through the mild and sun-lit summer air,   

While the bird worked totally unconcerned,  

Under vast providential care.  

The image: That’s Georgina Reilly who played a coroner for several seasons on “Murdoch’s Mysteries.” She has a rather wonderful smile. The picture doesn’t quite capture the smile, but it is close. The Canadian series ran for 17 seasons.

Skewed Verse—Les

Facebook Conversations

(for Gin Petty)

Nature’s Wisest

The humble bumble bee returned at once

To his favorite flower,

Seeking for his Queen to be

In his romantic bower.

Alas he found no lass at all,

Just a broken petal;

So he turned and flew away,

Put petal to the metal.

The moral of this hasty tale:

Beware the sharpened stinger,

Especially when your honey leaves

You with a bruised humdinger!

The Bee’s Den Mark!

Or Heigh Ho the Hive!

“Two bees or none!” cried Hamlet,

Pounding on the small hive door.

“Off with his head!” yelled the surley Qunen,

“Before he asks for four!”

Hamlet drew his bright broad sword;

A snickersnee from his weapons’ hoard.

He called for some jam and he called for some tea

But alas for Hamlet it was not to be!

The surley Queen in her elegant pride,

Crossed her eyes and nearly died:

“Tell that idiot pounding at the gate

Either to be gone or become my mate!”

All the drones in the sweet honey hive

Knew how to be in order to thrive;

Each drew his stinger and staged a coup,

Leaving Hamlet behind with nothing to do.

With Gravity

Rain falls,

Fires rise;

With gravity

All is surprise.

Rolling waves rise and fall.

Winds blow softly across the seas;

Clouds drift slowly across the sky,

Sap rises in the dark wood trees

That whisper deep down earthy thoughts.

Daffodils push upwards daily,

While startled deer frolic gaily.

With gravity.

God the Father loves the Son,

The Holy Spirit three in one;

The hidden Word each thing creates,

While Adam sees and celebrates.

Thus was Eden before the Fall;

Eve thought then she knew it all,

Gave Adam the fruit; and he did eat!

Bitter fruit that came with heat:

Cherubim with swords of fire

Guard well the Gate and never tire.

With Gravity .

“The Assumption”—Richard Crashaw

I experienced the need to post something but discovered that I had nothing to say. Then I found this. Since today is the Feast of the Assumption and a holy day of obligation which I am cut off from, I thought it only appropriate that I participate this way: thus a poem from our past to celebrate an event in our present. les

On the Glorious Assumption of Our Blessed Lady

Richard Crashaw (1613-1649)

MONDAY, AUGUST 12, 2024

Hark! She is call’d. The parting hour is come.
Take thy farewell, poor world! Heav’n must go home
A piece of heav’nly earth, purer and brighter
Than the chaste stars, whose choice lamps come to light her
While through the crystal orbs, clearer than they,
She climbs and makes a fair more milky way.
She’s called. Hark how the dear immortal dove
Sighs to his silver mate, ‘Rise up, my love!
‘Rise up, my fair, my spotless one!
‘The winter’s past, the rain is gone.

‘The spring is come, the flowers appear.
‘No sweets but thou are wanting here.
‘Come away, my love!
‘Come away, my dove! Cast off delay.
‘The court of Heav’n is come
‘To wait upon thee home. Come, come away!
‘The flowers appear,
‘Our quickly would, wert thou once here.
‘The spring is come, or, if it stay,
‘Tis to keep time with thy delay.
‘The rain is gone, except so much as we
‘Detain in needful tears to weep the want of thee.
‘The winter’s past.
‘Or, if he make less haste,
‘His answer is, Why, she does so.
‘If summer come not, how can winter go?

On the golden wings
Of the bright youth of Heav’n, that sings
Under so sweet a burthen. Go,
Since thy dread son will have it so.
And while thou goest our song and we
Will, as we may, reach after thee.
Hail, holy queen of humble hearts!
We in thy praise will have our parts.
Thy precious name shall be
Thy self to us, and we
With holy care will keep it by us.
We to the last
Will hold it fast
And no Assumption shall deny us.
All the sweetest showers
Of our fairest flowers
Will we strow upon it.
Though our sweets cannot make
It sweeter, they can take
Themselves new sweetness from it.

Maria, men and angels sing,
Maria, mother of our King.
Live, rosy princess, live. And may the bright
Crown of a most incomparable light
Embrace thy radiant brows. O may the best
Of everlasting joys bath thy white breast.
Live, our chaste love, the holy mirth
Of Heav’n, the humble pride of earth.
Live, crown of women, queen of men.
Live mistress of our song. And when
Our weak desires have done their best,
Sweet angels, come and sing the rest.

© 2024 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.orgThe Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

Image: Assumption of the Virgin Between St. Minias and St. Julian by Andrea del Castagno, 1449–1450 [Gemäldegalerie, Berlin]

Feminine Beauty: further considerations - Les

[This essay is as of yet unproofed, which will occur in the near future, but I thought that I should get it out there in case the afíb gets me tonight. Hmm!]

A very good friend, a lovely lady of long acquaintance, has suggested that I reveal more of my relationship with feminine beauty by bringing it even closer to home. In other words, I have a wife! How does that relationship fit in to the meaning of feminine beauty, as I understand it? Actually she has called me out on the one thing I avoided thinking about. Therefore, this essay is even more autobiographical than the last.

Nevertheless, in cleaning up my notes, I found this following entry from a year or so ago by Bishop Barron wherein he defines a pattern of behavior that fits my own behavior regarding feminine beauty. Thus I have included it first here. If you have seen the episode of The Chosen that dramatizes this encounter, you might remember the joy of the woman when she experiences what Jesus has to offer her. [I have no idea any more of either the season or the episode number.]

Then today (6/20/24) while reading Benedict XVI’s Church Fathers, in his third chapter on Saint Augustine I came across this well known and beautiful quote from the Confessions which I have for years delighted in as a commentary on my own life and experience. One of the delights of reading for knowledge as well as for pleasure is the delight in finding oneself reflected in the work of another. The two quotes from Augustine are not only expressive of my own experience and understanding, but I believe they are universal: our hearts are restless; not just mine, but that is our human universal, existential condition.

Since I have listed two sources for discussing my relationship with members of the opposite sex, I thought it prudent to list the third source, especially relevant. The third source [any bets?] is Dante. Dante is extremely important in providing a perspective on what I might call the “double billing.” In other words Dante is married to Gemma Donati and has four children with her before he is sent into exile from Florence, but his poetry throughout his life is about the meaning another woman, Beatrice Portinari, has in his life and in his understanding the meaning of his life. The meaning for Dante resides in understanding the meaning of the romantic love he experienced in the presence of Beatrice, which he documents or expresses in his La Vita Nuova and then even more profoundly in the Divine Comedy. While Dante’s relationship with Beatrice began at an early age, eight or nine, her early death at 21 became an important element in his thinking about her meaning and would not have interfered with his marriage to Gemma which no one seems to know much about.

At this point it appears to be necessary to point out the relevance of the passages cited below. First the restless heart: we appear to be made so that we have this desire; one can either believe it’s not true, or try to ignore it, or set about trying to fulfill it. Paul Tillich, if I remember correctly, calls this our ultimate concern. He too says in effect that every one has one, but that one needs to make certain that what he or she finds is truly absolute. [See his Dynamics of Faith: as Cicero did for Augustine, Tillich’s book did for me]. I suspect Augustine sought to find fulfillment in “love” relationships (relationships that were necessary to him but that didn’t work intellectually) and then in the real pursuit of truth that began with his reading of Cicero and reached its climax with his discovery of Plato and then Saint Paul.

Consider then what Augustine says in the tenth book: his pursuit is the pursuit of beauty in the external world. Surely that includes the presence of beauty in the beloved. In my case, I was always excessive like Shel Silverstein’s Hector the Collector. I found beauty everywhere: stones, rocks, gems; beer cans; comic books, to name just three. But my real interest was the pursuit of beauty in the “beloved,” which started at an early age (see “The Empty Schoolyard”). Feminine beauty is absolutely astonishing and, I think, comes closer to revealing the divine (as in Dante) for me rather than nature which also has that capacity or virtue (see Wordsworth’s Prelude). In the Middle Ages the “rules” of romantic love said that married love and romantic love must be separate: Gemma and Beatrice. However, the ideal of romantic love could, it seems, devolve simply into sexual enjoyment. And then all is lost. Consider Dante’s Paolo and Francesca and what they were reading and where it landed them. Consider Lancelot and Guinevere. They ended up in bed and eventually brought down Arthur’s Camelot. The reason married love doesn’t work finally is that the vision of the divine in the beloved comes up against her (or his) fallen nature in the day to day struggles of living a married life. Of course in the modern world dating itself will reveal the struggle first and marriage then should come with few surprises. Romantic love may well fade away in marriage only to let a real substantial love for the other take its place. At least that’s my experience.

Back to my sources then. The woman at the well has five husbands. What is she looking for in her relationships. Obviously she doesn’t find it in her husbands; only when she encounters Jesus the Lord does she discover the real absolute, the real divine, the love that passes all understanding. I intended to explore these matters after the quotes, but it seems to me I have said it here for the most part. Feminine beauty always attracts me; I can’t quit looking, but I also know now what it means. Feminine beauty is there to delight in but not to mistake that for sexual license or for concupiscence. When Augustine found the Lord in Saint Paul and within himself, he gave up the second mistress. Neither is this thou. All good things can reveal God for he made them, but none can take the place of God.

An interesting and final perspective on this is in Milton’s Paradise Lost which begins with our perspective focused on the prelapsarian Adam and Eve. We see them as God created them. The narrator makes it a point to image the relationship between the principles or virtues of Beauty and Wisdom in them. Adam was given the virtue of Wisdom; Adam knows and understands more than Eve. However, the Wisdom he has is for her; she inquires about creation; he explains. He is more knowledgeable than she is but not necessarily smarter, all things considered. Eve, on the other hand, is given the virtue of Beauty, and once again the Beauty is for the other, for Adam and is in a sense the image of his Wisdom. Together they are whole and complete as their lives are God-centered. When they become disobedient it is revealing to see the way in which our world emerges in them. (Read the poem. If you desire a commentary on this subject see my essay on Wisdom and Beauty in PL which I referenced in the preceding essay.)

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Bishop Robert Barron

At high noon, on a very hot day, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman by Jacob’s well. To her enormous surprise, for Jews typically did not associate publicly with women or Samaritans, he asks her for a drink. When she balks, he calmly says, If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, “Give me a drink,” you would have asked him and he would have given you living water. The woman comes day after day to this well, draws the water, consumes it, and then becomes thirsty again, prompting her to return once more. Jesus is offering her not just a single refreshing drink but something that will satisfy her thirst forever: the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

The obsessive and repeated journey to the well is a symbol of what the spiritual tradition calls “concupiscent desire,” which is to say the attempt to satisfy our longing for God through something less than God. When we seek to slake our infinite thirst for God with some worldly good—wealth, honor, pleasure, power—we are necessarily frustrated, and the pattern of our desire becomes addictive. Jesus offers the Samaritan woman grace, which is to say the divine life itself, and this will indeed become a spring bubbling up forever, for God’s life is inexhaustible.

This is why, at the end of the story, the woman puts down her bucket, the instrument by which she had drawn water for many years. She could abandon her errant, frustrating, hopeless pattern of desire, for she had found grace, the water gushing up to eternal life. That quote goes along with the idea Augustine expresses in the first chapter, also quoted below.

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Saint Augustine

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried aloud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours. Confessions X

“You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (I, 1, 1).

_____________________________

I chose this image of the pianist Olga Scheps because it reveals various things about feminine beauty in our culture. I enjoy listening to Olga playing classical music and watching her as she plays. In a way you would be hard put to see the Olga pictured here as the same person playing Mozart or Chopin or Beethoven. When playing she gives us the gift of her talent and her hair is always up, and her look intense and determined. She is an artist at work. When she concludes the music, she stands, places her hand on her chest, smiles and bows. I find that Olga quite beautiful, quite fetching.

In the photo you find something, alas, quite different. The buyers and sellers have betrayed the pianist Olga—the piano is now in the background— the pose is supposedly relaxed and seductive with the slight come hither smile, not at all like the smile at the end of the concert. This Olga suggests concupiscente, pleasure indeed, but not now the pleasure of the music but only the pleasure of seductive beauty which you will certainly receive if you buy the album. Note how the music she plays is a reality and can reveal any number of goods while the album image is only an illusion to arouse desire.

Feminine Beauty - This also is Thou; Neither is this Thou - LES +/-

Surprise! Feminine beauty? I may get there in a bit, but the quotation from Magnificat, and a conversation I had earlier this morning with a very good friend also play an important part. The conversation dealt with, among other things, Neil Gaimen’s novel, Stardust, and then the movie that was made from the novel, also called Stardust. For the sake of economy and clarity, our central concern was with the Catholic sacrament of Confession and my delight in feminine beauty.

Essentially, when does my delight in feminine beauty become a sin that ought to be rejected, confessed, and given up? My primary example was Claire Danes who plays the fallen star in Stardust, though there are two other beautiful actresses in the movie as well: Sienna Miller and Michelle Pfeiffer. As I explained to my friend, feminine beauty has always been close to the center of my interests in life, and now at almost 84 it seems to be the last thing that I have to struggle to let go of in this life. The reason is thus: feminine beauty, like any number of other things in creation, may very well reveal God; feminine beauty, however, is not an absolute, not divine, and therefore must finally be given up. Even though it is a good thing and desirable, one (this one) must let go. Consider Paolo and Francesca in The Divine Comedy. Their sin goes much deeper than simply a desire for beauty, as a close examination of the text should make perfectly clear.

To see a right attitude toward feminine beauty in literature, consider Adam’s reaction to the unclothed and beautiful Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book 4 and following. Much of that poem is about the consequence of his failure to trust God and give up Eve in light of her disobedience. You might say Adam chooses Eve’s beauty and (former) goodness over God’s inherent, absolute beauty and goodness. [For the difference between “Undivided Beauty,” unfallen Eve, and the consequences of that fall for Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, see my essay in Christianity and Literature: Wisdom and Beauty: Two Principles in Paradise Lost. L. Eugene Startzman. Available accessResearch articleFirst published June 1, 1987pp. 26–39. xml PDF / EPUB.]

To turn to Dante again, Dante, the literary character, near the end of the poem has followed Beatrice, her intelligence, beauty and goodness, all the way to the ninth circle of Heaven, but he is required to give her up, let go, before he can meet or see God and Christ in the center, so to speak. The character who takes her place is a contemplative, Saint Bernard; the way of contemplation is the negative way, “neither is this Thou.” Dante, having found Beatrice, does not get to keep her. That’s crudely put but it gets at the truth.

Okay, back to the poverty of my mundane problem. On the one hand, there is the very delightful and beautiful Claire Dane’s character, Yvaine, in the movie. There is, I submit, nothing wrong in my seeing and delighting in those qualities, as does her counterpart in the movie, Tristan Thorne. In the novel and somewhat in the movie, Tristan is required to give up his superficial first love, Victoria (Sienna Miller), and then come to see the “fallen star” as a valuable woman (person) in her own right and not simply a thing to be bound and dragged as a gift in exchange for Victoria’s “love.” Of course he does change, develop and “grow up as a consequence of his time with her. An interesting element of the movie in this regard is that Victoria becomes more “ordinary looking” by the end of the movie while Yvaine chooses to reveal her extraordinary inner “intense starlight.” In a sense we experience that moment in the movie to understand who she really is and the gift she is bringing to Tristan. It is this inner reality that defeats finally the evil witch who with her two evil sisters is determined to kill the star woman and take her heart in order to gain for themselves beauty, youth, and extended life. There are more ways in the novel and the movie in which these goods and evils unfold and play out though my central concern should be clear enough.

As I was thinking about my problem with feminine beauty, I happened to remember the way in which this concern manifested itself when I was a hormonal teenager, 15 or 16. Even then I had acquired a small collection of beautiful women which I kept in the top drawer of my chest of drawers. Pictures, let me quickly add; these were images of beautiful women, Ava Gardiner for one; they were not lewd images or pornographic images. That kind of image, I knew, even then, would have been a betrayal of what delighted me.

The heart of my small collection and probably the only reason I remember this collection, besides the lovely Ava Gardner, is that it contained a studio photo of an Italian actress, Rossana Podesta, who played Helen of Troy in a 50’s movie of the same name. She was so beautiful. In fact she was so beautiful that I wrote to the California studio requesting a photo of her. No response. Two years went by and one day in my parents’ mail there was an envelope for me from Italy. Italy! Inside was a studio head shot of Rosanna Podesta. I was overawed. I now had a real treasure to possess; however, as I grew a little older my collection began to gnaw at my conscience. Somehow I knew it had to go because these images were simply shadows of real young ladies, the kind of young ladies whom I had begun dating. To my credit I knew the collection had to go. [Talk about God being at work in my young life!] They were, after all, only paper, not flesh and blood. No problem, I thought. I shall tear them up and throw them away. Well, all but one, of course: Rossana. I could hold on to that one; no harm, surely. Hold on to; let go. Deep down I realized that she had to go too. That hurt. I destroyed the entire collection, and to this day there is something within me that regrets that loss. I suspect that in some sense there is something within me that keeps the problem alive: hold on; give up. “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” From the outside I am certain the problem seems petty; from the inside it is not.

My problem then is not the delighting in the character’s (actress’s) beauty, but in my desire to hold on to it and somehow, impossibly, possess that beauty for my self. The problem is then not being able to say “no” and to let it go. Simply put, I have trouble letting go. In the movie the central characters exchange hearts, give their love to one another, then marry and become the King and Queen of the land of Stormhold. Again King and Queen are appropriate images for man and woman who were made in the image of God (Genesis). Adam and Eve were, in Eden, King and Queen, not by holding on to their identity as first man and woman, but by letting go, obeying GOD. The problem again looks petty from the outside—just one fruit from an entire garden full of fruit trees. Clearly, from the inside the problem is enormous. But that’s a problem (inside/outside) that I like Milton’s Adam and all Shakespeare’s Kings and Queens must work out, and as I see by my response to Yvaine in the movie, I’m still not ready to meet God face to face.

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This passage from Mark always seems relevant in the love Jesus offers and in the young man’s failure to follow through, almost inability to follow through.

A reading from
the holy Gospel according to Mark10:17-27

As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up, knelt down before him, and asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus answered him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; you shall not defraud; honor your father and your mother.” He replied and said to him, “Teacher, all of these I have observed from my youth.” Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him, “You are lacking in one thing. Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” At that statement, his face fell, and he went away sad, for he had many possessions.

Of course the young man’s sadness is not the end of the story, for there is hope as well, as Jesus explains:

Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the Kingdom of God!” The disciples were amazed at his words. So Jesus again said to them in reply, “Children, how hard it is to enter the Kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the Kingdom of God.” They were exceedingly astonished and said among themselves, “Then who can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “For men it is impossible, but not for God. All things are possible for God.”

If the habit of sin is too deeply entrenched, God will not let us be lost as long as our desire for Heaven is great as well. Two wonderful images from literature reveal the continuation of man’s inability. The first is found in C. S. Lewis’s Great Divorce. Another young man finding himself on the threshold of Heaven has a red lizard on his shoulder, riding him. The Angel he meets there requires that he get rid of the red lizard before he can proceed further up and further in. The young man cannot do it, though he would like to. The Angel will take the red lizard from him, but only if the young man agrees. He reluctantly agrees. The Angel takes the lizard off, breaks its back, throws it to the ground where it is transformed into a magnificent stallion that the man then climbs up on and rides into the Heart of Heaven to the astonishment of all those watching. This encounter is, for this reader, unforgettable.

The second passage is from Dante’s Purgatorio, no surprise I imagine! Dante, the character, has climbed the incredible high mountain with Virgil, his guide, and another poet, Statius, who has been cleansed from his habit of sin and thus released. One thing remains for both Statius and Dante and that is walk through the refining fire at the top of the mountain. The fire is an image of the Cherubin with flaming sword who guards the entrance to Eden. Dante is terrified; he can feel the heat. He has seen men burned to death. He stops. Virgil, however, explains that the Garden of Eden and especially Beatrice await him on the other side. Dante is required to screw his courage to the sticking place and walk through. Virgil will lead, Statius will follow Dante who is in the middle between them. Here is another unforgettable image. God will do the final cleansing but the sinner must agree; the two parties work together and whatever the sinner is finally holding on to shall be consumed. Gulp. Right reason tells me that these encounters are good and true images of the really real. No one holding on to anything can meet God face to face.

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I imagine anyone who is still with me may be wondering what this meditation has to do with anything written above. First we live in a culture that has simply denied the validity of this kind of thinking about human nature and objective reality. Instead our images of the human have simply deteriorated into subhuman categories. Whether you understand the human self as substantive King and Queen or perversely as Drag Queen and Narcissus, you will be defined by your choice. If you have a sound understanding of the first, the ontological meaning of King and Queen, you will recognize the second as a great perversion of the first. How do you go about understanding the first, if you don’t already? Well, I was an English literature teacher and our great literature frequently explores the meaning of these images of the human. Malory’s King Arthur is one of my favorites, though there is something about his Kingship that eventually brings down the Round Table and Camelot, something worth discovering about human nature.. Renaissance literature is filled with images of Kings and Queens. King Lear is truly a great example, for at the beginning of the play he is everything a King should not be; then, through a magnificent unfolding of the action of the play, the King Lear discovers what true kingship really means, and we discover it with him; our humanity, as well as his, is at stake here. Then there is the weak Richard II, the flawed and guilt ridden Henry IV and Shakespeare’s crowning character, Henry V. I wouldn’t want to leave out, of course, Macbeth and his Queen, Lady Macbeth. We may also slip back in time to Greece particularly, and the Kingship of Oedipus and the riddle at the heart of that play. Literature! Do you have “chronological snobbery”: “I won’t read anything written before 1950!” Or perhaps “gender bias?” “All that early literature was written by dead white men!” If, on the other hand, you believe there is such a thing as objective truth, you must be willing to follow wherever it leads or to what ever reveals it. “Follow me.”

Another area regarding images, one I have little interest in, yet one that seems to fascinate many others: that’s the image of the British monarchy about which our culture can’t seem to get enough images and information. Elizabeth I was always a person of fascination for me given her times, my interest in the feminine and the fact that she was a woman in it, struggling to maintain her power and her integrity. The second Elisabeth, for me not so much, though I suspect that she, like Victoria, has much to reveal.

The third focus on Queen as image should not come as a surprise: in Dante the Virgin Mary from Heaven sends Saint Lucy to Beatrice, Beatrice to Virgil, Virgil to Dante., the character in the poem. There we have a series of images of Grace in action that also reveal various principles of the divine and human, particularly Mary’s response to God through the image of the Angel Gabriel: “Let it be to me according to your word.” What we see here at the heart of the human, so to speak, is that there are really only two meaningful responses, “Yes” and “No.” I suspect (believe) that there is fundamentally only one question and we find that in the text that seems so irrelevant to many in our culture.

In any case I liked the way the meditation below defined the role of the Holy Spirit in my considerations of feminine beauty, though I divided the meditation a little differently from the original, to emphasize the role of the burning bush as an image of reality.

Regarding the image to go with this essay, I found some from the movie but they didn’t transfer well to this text. One was a Sandro Botticelli image of the Virgin and Child; Botticelli’s works delight me; think of the most famous one which would be an extremely apt image for this essay.. However, the machine wouldn’t load the Botticelli image, so I shall try the Claire Danes image. It wouldn’t upload that one either. Rosanna Podesta? Nope! Does God keep saying “no” here? Apparently, since I do not have an acceptable image for this text and may have to “publish” this text without it. If I can figure out what has gone wrong, I shall add an image later, though it almost seems fitting not to have one, very fitting. “Neither is this Thou!”

Accepting the Kingdom of God [Magnificat’s Meditation for today, Saturday, 5/25/24.]

I behold you, O God, Father, Word, and Spirit, and I know you are looking for your creature with sovereign wisdom and eternal goodness; so that it seems that you have no glory or pleasure except in your creature who is yet so vile. Your Spirit is the love by which you try to attract him.

And his heart which receives this Spirit is like the bush that Moses saw, burning but not consumed.  With supreme purity, it burns with the desire that God may never be offended, and it is consumed with the desire that God be honored, although it does not seem to be consumed.

Come, come, Holy Spirit! Come, union of the Father, contentment of the Word, glory of the angels. O Spirit of Truth, you are the reward of the saints, the refreshment of souls, light in darkness, wealth of the poor, treasure of those who love, abundance of food for the hungry, comfort of pilgrims, and in a word, the One who contains all treasures.

O Holy Spirit, with everlasting wisdom you gently urge rational creatures who want to receive your gifts, but you do not take away their liberty. You knock at all hearts, but you knock gently, urging each one to prepare to receive these gifts. Softly singing, you are the source of sweet tears. Rejoicing and lamenting, you strive ardently that everyone may be disposed to receive you. May the intellect admire, the will and memory understand your immense goodness, O Holy Spirit, in infusing yourself and all your gifts into the soul! O Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Word, you infuse yourself into the soul so gently that it does not understand you, and, not being understood, your ineffable gift is esteemed by few. Yet besides your goodness, you infuse into the soul the power of the Father, and the wisdom of the Son. The soul, having thus become powerful and wise, is made fit to bear you within itself as a sweet Guest, cherishing you, that is, behaving in such a way that you take pleasure in it and do not leave it.

Saint Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi

Saint Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi († 1607) was a Carmelite nun and mystic in Florence. / Cited in Divine Intimacy: Meditations on the Interior Life for Every Day of the Liturgical Year. Translated by the Discalced Carmelite Nuns of Boston from the original Italian edition Intimità Divina del P. Gabrielle di S. Maria Maddalena. © Monastero S. Giuseppe – Carmelitane Scalze. Published by Baronius Press. www.baroniuspress.com. Used with permission.

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SKUNKED! 0/6! - LES

May 8, 2024.

Sometimes my life stinks!

Nevertheless, here we go, diving in. I love it when things rhyme, though I had to have the machine tell me how to spell it, rhyme, that is. Thank goodness for Siri too. She’s quite good at spelling and definitions, at least when she understands what I’m asking. However, she never leaves the answer up quite long enough!

Lately, last two months, probably, I’ve been playing WORDLE, though the machine didn’t like the spelling and changed it to WORDLESS the first time. As I say, I’ve been playing it every night for a few months now. I wish I could say I was good at it, but I value truth too much to lie about it. For those of you who don’t know, the player gets 6 tries to find the five letter word of the day. If you get the right letter in the right place, the letter turns green. If you get the right letter in the wrong place, the letter turns yellow. If the letter is not in the word, the letter turns gray or black. And you have to use real words. I probably average four out of six correct per game, which shows up in my gmail each day around 5 p.m. Three or four times I have gotten the answer on the second try. Woo hoo! Hot doggie!
Call the local newspaper! Unfortunately, five or six times I have failed to get the answer in six tries. 0/6! Talk about feeling stupid! I wanted to say shitty, probably because I watch too many Coen brothers movies and the language in their movies tends to be, at times, unimaginative. The Big Lebowski, for example, though the spelling looks a bit off. The Dude, however, is a fine character, regardless of his language. Even the Sam Elliot “narrator” mentions the excessive cussing to him, to no apparent avail though.

Back to the game. Several of my losses, three,I think, were to the “ears” line. The last time I lost the game the final choice was between “hears” and “wears.” Something kept whispering “wears.” I, of course, ignored the intuition and chose “hears.” Then the little white screen at the top drops down to say something that feels like, “hey stupid, the word was “wears.” Once the word was “fears” and I almost peed my catheter for I hadn’t even noticed “fears.” Of course, peeing my catheter isn’t saying much, given the way the damn thing works. Consider: bears, dears, gears, fears, hears, pears, rears, sears, tears, wears, and years. Now you have four choices or sometimes only three. It begins to Erik me, Erik me?, I thought I had written “irk,” though I may have started with an e as in “Erik.” You know, sometimes it is not easy being almost 84. Technology has developed somewhat, to speak candidly . In college and later, I wrote all my first drafts in cursive (cursive?) and then rewrote the next draft, very carefully, on my Olympia typewriter, a Christmas gift from my parents when I was about 19 and an English major at Heidelberg in Tiffin, Ohio, not Germany. However, if the student majored in German, he or she might be eligible for a junior year abroad. I minored in Spanish and spent six weeks, before my senior year, in Mexico City at Mexico City College, 6 education credits through Ohio State University. Go buckeyes! The typewriter lacked spellcheck. Go computers!

Well, that’s all for today though I should probably have described my two hour appointment with the eye doctor (I know there’s a name for them) yesterday; the problem is I’m still recovering. “What’s the lowest line you can read?” I see one on the floor! “Which is clearer, the red or the green?” I saw red and yellow, and it was usually the yellow though I played along and said “green.” Two hours later I couldn’t even hold my head up. “Now we just need to dilate your pupils for a more accurate glaucoma test. Put your chin in the little cup and your forehead on the ceiling…”

May 11, 2024. After supper. Meds taken.

Before I opened this page, I had a great deal to say; yet now I sit here, having forgotten whatever it was. I remember it had something to do with supper and eating and the fact that I have to use utensils made for the differently abled (the imp changed “abled” to “baked.” Well, why not. I’m feeling a little “differently baked” tonight. I tried to send an email a few minutes ago, but I couldn’t get the keyboard to appear, magically or otherwise. Technology! My typewriter never refused to let me use its keyboard. But then I had to ask Siri how to spell “utensils” a moment ago, and my typewriter was never willing to indulge me that way.). My writing gets more like Tristram Shandy’s every day.

I‘ll try again. I’m definitely “differently abled” after about 40 years of peripheral (thanks Siri!) neuropathy, severe, combined recently with rheumatoid arthritis. My body doesn’t know whether just to disappear into nervelessness or rock all my joints. In any case I need utensils for the HANDICAPPED, he shouted. These utensils (I can spell it without help now) have large black rubber or plastic (I have no idea, having never really felt one) grips for spoon, fork, and a knife that couldn’t cut hot wax, let alone butter or a tender piece of chicken. My wife brought down a nice plate of barbecued pulled pork, an open-faced sandwich on wheat bread with provolone, the bread nicely sliced in half, along with a serving of a potato with butter that tasted as though it were trying to return to its aboriginal state: but good, honey, quite good! The potatoes were like a small mountain range between the two halves of the sandwich. I aso was given an orange cut up into bite-size pieces, also very tasty.

I should hasten to explain that I eat everything with a utensil. I like gummy bears from Germany made in Maryland, but I have to eat them with a fork, for when I use my fingers to pick up anything small, whatever it is, if I am trying to get it to my mouth, the odds are very good that it will disappear half way there. I drop things frequently and with great regularity. By the end of the week my hospital gown looks like a colorful buffet, even though I hold a paper plate under my chin to catch the droppings. The lift chair where I spend much of my life is quite large so that it could accommodate me and a dog. My dog is gone (though the house now contains four small dogs), I miss him greatly, Simon, a dachshund. In any case, I have used the chair so long that the seat has pulled away from the sides. The inside of the chair probably looks like a grocery-hardware superstore by now—which brings me to the reason for this brief outburst.

Did I mention that my short term memory is not too good? Probably not, but I have mostly forgotten (thank you Siri). In any case my lap board is a tad tilted. Things roll if I am not careful. Tonight I put the fork down, forgot to secure it because of a momentary distraction. Shoot, I said, or some such close relative. I looked around, moved the lap board, and found the fork on my hospital gown. I swore an oath then and there to be more careful, pulled the lap board back into place, set the fork down and picked up the spoon to deal with the potatoes. Thinking to use the fork to attack the pork, I put the spoon down only to discover that the damned thing was gone again! I felt around on the chair and my lap to no avail, of course. This time the chair was quicker than my hand and eye and undoubtedly swallowed my fork.

Well, I feel like a character in a Coen brothers’ film, probably The Big Lebowski. I dug another fork out of my ceramic utensil holder and went back at it. This time I treated the entire utensil-eating experience like reciting the Rosary: keep your eye on the fork, keep your eye on the fork, keep your eye on the fork, where’s the damn spoon?

Now that I have described my evening, I hear the clock striking 10, time to make it to the bathroom with its “differently abled” toilet, where I sit to take care of the nightly chores: which involve taking my nightly dose of lactulose to offset the binding drugs I also take throughout the day, then brushing my teeth, trying not to drop anything, like a toothbrush or a bottle cap (each has happened once), then end my evening with a brief bidet spray, just in case!

May 13, 2024. Before supper. Meds not taken.

I thought I was through recounting my mystical experiences, but then WORDLE was a challenge yesterday with an interesting outcome. I put the word “raise” into the first of the empty boxes. The “r” and the “i” were highlighted yellow; the letter “e” was highlighted green. Wow, I thought, 3 out of 5. The problem was that the word could not begin with “r,” have “I” in the middle, and had to end with “e.” From wow very quickly to whoa. I sat and looked and tried to think of a word with those letters that would fit. My mind was blanker than usual. Humbled once again by a game and a puzzle I could not solve, I opened my word finder and filled in the appropriate slots: r and i in the middle, ends in e, exclude a and s. 5 letters; only common words! I hit “find it.” The finder gave me two columns of words, 20 to 30 I guess. The problem was that as far as I could see, all their words had the i in the middle, like “tribe,” “bribe,” “pride,” etc. every word in the two columns fell to that pattern. Then I looked more closely and found only one that was different: “eerie.” Surely not, but I could not think of another possibility, so I returned to the puzzle, typed in “eerie,” and hit enter. All the letters turned green and began jumping up and down as they do when you find the right word. 3 e’s: I remember I went 0/6 once when I first started playing because it didn’t occur to me that you might have to double a letter to find the answer. “Eerie,” I wouldn’t have thought of that before the next ice age. However, yesterday = 2/6! And now it’s time to play today.

Back two minutes later. I entered “raise” again; 3 vowels and it keeps working. This time “s” and “a” came up yellow. I decided to try “shall” because that was essentially all my weak brain could think of, and it was five letters. I entered “shall” and 4 of the letters turned green. I had to lean close to the screen to make certain both “l’s” were green. Wow! I letter off. I typed in “stall”; everything turned green and began jumping up and down; the white sign descended telling me that I had solved it in 3 tries but could probably do better. As Bugs Bunny would say, “ What a maroon!” Anyway, for five days since my first description, I am 3/6, 4/6, 3/6, 2/6, 3/6. It almost looks like I know what I’m doing now, which, of course, is seldom the case with anything any more, or ever.

Horror/Hope/Joy - LES

5/11/24: Tomorrow is Ascension Sunday, and in the Magnificat meditation for today, I found an interesting writing by a Dominican sister, Mary Jean Dorcy which I copied below, along with the Gospel reading for today. Having read the Gospel selection first, I found the problem that always occurs when I read this selection, actually, a problem and a promise that seem like the bottom and the top of one figure, call it “T” if you want a visual. If Jesus is who we Christians affirm that he is, that is, God incarnate, then what he says is! Whatever we ask the Father for in Jesus’ name, we will receive. Obviously we are not talking about dollars and cents here or Cadillacs and mansions. The context of the person asking should be clear. That is, the person asking ought to be inside the faith, in love with Jesus and thus asking from that perspective of love and humility. Suddenly, in a moment of clarity, I see that the problem is no longer a problem. As I said on another page, writing can be for me a means of discovery, an earnest desire to discover and communicate truth as I understand it.

That understanding then makes the promise sharper and clearer: that our joy may be complete. Martin Buber, I—Thou, introduced me to the idea that “real life is meeting.” That’s also a chapter title (I think) in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. Frequently what we see here and now, in this life, to borrow Plato’s image, are images, shadows on the wall of the cave. Saint Paul says a similar thing, as everyone used to know, regardless of whether they believed it. Now we see through a glass darkly, or in a mirror dimly, then face to face. The point is that Heaven is about real meeting, real seeing. C. S. Lewis wrote somewhere, maybe in Letters to Malcolm, chiefly about prayer, that “Joy is the serious business of Heaven.” Well, the bottom and the top, no problem, two promises, one reality. Suddenly, Mrs. Turin’s image of all the souls on the road up to Heaven, singing Hallelujah came to mind and I smiled.

Now for the Sister’s meditation. First, as I was lying in bed looking out my window at the solitary view, trees—a redbud, a dog wood, several maples and several oaks—it occurred to me that a filmmaker could do a seasonal view of the trees—springtime budding and then blooming, becoming summer’s lush green foliage, leaves everywhere on all the trees, then fall’s colorful variety, leading to the “bare ruined choirs” of winter. It strikes me that is a good image for the life I was given too, with the onset of winter well underway. What the good Sister said about the nature of Saturday led me to see another perspective on time and stages.

The first stage occurs with Good Friday and the meeting of the crucified Christ. That image produces in me an experience of horror. This suffering should not be, not for any man, not for this man especiality. Horror, sorrow, humility. In a sense, the darkness of Holy Saturday is where we live. In the liturgical year, three days, Good Friday to Easter Sunday, but the Saturday before the Ascension, is the last of another series of 40 days this time, and the idea of darkness bound with hope, that His going means that a world-changing transformation is coming. After Ascension is Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Spirit, the bringer of joy. In a sense then I find that I have a kind of double vision—Heaven is unfolding before us, but Heaven is not yet. Jesus calls it the kingdom. We have then hope in the darkness when we experience the absence and long for the coming, the return; and we have the joy of the resurrection and the faith given to us by the descent of the Holy Spirit who is love with knowledge and understanding. Faith, Hope, Love, these three: there should be no such thing as a morose Christian, a painful one, certainly, but not morose, not grumbling like the Israelites in the desert and even in the promised land, for joy is the serious business of Heaven, the Kingdom.

A reading from
the holy Gospel according to John 16:23b-28

Jesus said to his disciples: “Amen, amen, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in my name he will give you. Until now you have not asked anything in my name; ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete.

“I have told you this in figures of speech. The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures but I will tell you clearly about the Father. On that day you will ask in my name, and I do not tell you that I will ask the Father for you. For the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have come to believe that I came from God. I came from the Father and have come into the world. Now I am leaving the world and going back to the Father.”

The Gospel of the Lord.

______________________________

Before the meditation we perhaps need only to be reminded of the heart of Mary’s faith, which ought also to be the heart of any Christian’s faith: “Let it be to me according to thy word.” That, along with Saint Thomas’s “My Lord, my God.”

Believing That Our Joy Will Be Complete

Since the earliest years of the Church, Saturday has been kept as a day especially dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. It was on the Sabbath that Jesus lay in the tomb, his followers scattered and terrorized and his cause, according to all the evidence, a failure. What the rest of Christ’s dear ones were doing on that Saturday we do not know, but we know what Mary did: She waited, prayed, and hoped. Her faith did not falter on that dark day and night of waiting, and these many years later we honor that faith….

[We] are looking back to a valiant woman who watched the dark come down over all the world’s hopes at Calvary; a woman who waited, keeping in mind all these things, pondering them in her heart (Lk 2:19), knowing that God had not deserted her, no matter what the evidence, and that there would be an Easter morning. Most of us will hope as long as there is life. Mary hoped even beyond this. The very picture of a brave woman defying death itself with hope should change our whole perspective toward death for ourselves and for our dear ones. Mary watching through the night had faith enough to see beyond the great stone that was rolled across the tomb, and to believe that, as Christ had said, he would rise again…. We see now how fitting it is that God’s Mother waited through a dark night to teach us patience in waiting.

Our Lady of Faith, Mother of all the lonely and the frightened of all the ages, help us to keep faith through the long days and the longer nights: faith in God, who does not desert us, who is with us all days, even unto the consummation of the world (Mt 28:20). Mother of all, you whose faith did not falter because your love was so great, make our hearts large, that God may fill them with his love forever.

Sister Mary Jean Dorcy, o.p.

Sister Mary Jean († 1988) was a Dominican sister and a prolific author and illustrator, especially of children’s literature. / From The Carrying of the Cross: Thoughts for Women on the Passion of Christ. Copyright © 1959, St. Anthony Guild Press, Paterson, NJ. All rights reserved.

Beastly Doggerel - LES

If I could do better I certainly would,

Or nail myself to some other good.

Alas, I try with consequence grim,

Giving birth to strange creatures,

And one sorry hymn!

Ominous Birds

A murder of crows settled down

On our land; nary a frown

Did I see—just seven black birds

Hanging loose in the sky, no words

Can capture the fright that I feel,

As outside my window they wheel

In their flight and wheel till they vanish

Into the light, and wheel till they vanish

            From sight; seven large birds

                     Black as night .

Hungry Creatures

Six raccoons live somewhere nearby,

Showing up each night after dark;

They treat our deck and balcony

As though it’s a rich food court park.

They’ll eat cat food and table scraps,

They’ll tussle and fuss on a lark,

It seems, and bat one another

Around, while the little dogs bark.

A committee of  plump raccoons

Shows up promptly each night at dusk;

Without any motion they vote—

For victuals kill hunger, not husks.

Evil Beast

The wart hog from hell runs aground

When he spies fair maiden at hand;

Be she chaste, good and beautiful,

His rank evil lust turns to sand.

The wart hog is frozen in place,

For it’s virtue that wins this race.

Our Lady’s protected by grace.

A Backyard Rumble

A groundhog lives in our sunny backyard;

He stays well hidden for the dogs give chase

When they find him emerge for a repast.

He eludes them with panache and grace.

All Hell Breaks Loose

A wave of dark beasts flows over the lawn,

Their red eyes glowing like embers of fire,

Chittering loudly and clearly forthwith,

Their mouths salivating with foul desire.

Save me from Satan, my sweet Lord on high;

Lest the foul beasts drag me down to the gate

And feed me to Cerberus, guardian grim;

Don’t let the three-headed dog be my fate.

The Angel of light swooped out of the sky,

Sending beasts back to Hell, howling with fright.

With the land clear of the crew out of Hell,

The Angel ascended in silent light.

More Ominous Birds

An unkindness of ravens perched

On our roof, intending no good

To the neighborhood, or the land.

Symbols of dread, choosing to stand

Rather than soar in the darkness,

Ominous black birds in a band.

Why an “unkindness” of ravens?

Why call them a “murder” of crows?

Does naming determine their nature?

Would that be what someone close knows?

Ominous Beasts

A congregation of six crocodiles

Met in an old rugged church in the swamp;

“Or are we a menace?” the old elder asked,

His teeth protruding like moss on a stump,

Let’s first take a vote and then sing a hymn,

To the God of all gators and reptiles grim

Praise Him, alligators, praise him.

The Artificial Bird

All we were left was the bird on the lawn,

Cracked, weather-worn, and dripping with moss,

Forever grounded with wings tucked too tight—

The Holy Spirit had suffered great loss,

Wounded, speechless, incapable of flight.

My chest constricted, the silence within

Almost o’erwhelmed me; it felt more like sin.

Ascension approaches, our Lord takes wing,

Soaring from view; what will summer soon bring?

Ascending, descending, new bird of prey?

Lord have mercy; come soon and stay.

Gotcha!

F O’C: A TEMPLE…— LES

Hopkins’ poem ends with one thing greater than beauty and that is grace. Grace is what is revealed and operative in F O’C’s A Temple of the Holy Ghost. In a story full of some very unattractive characters the reader is led to see the affirmation of the title image: we are [ought to be] temples of the Holy Spirit; we should be like the tattooed Parker at the end of his story, the body of Christ.

O’Connor stories work in certain patterns. We are first introduced to fairly seriously flawed characters. Ruby Turpin, for example, who is proud and terribly self-satisfied, and O. E. Parker who is smug and lazy and extremely dissatisfied. In this story the main character, whose point of view carries the story, is a 12 year old “child,” proud, unattractive, and frequently unpleasant and mocking of those around her, yet she is also intelligent and perceptive.

Second, there is almost always a tension in the story between the main character and one or more of those around her or him. With Ruby the tension exists between her and most of those in the doctor’s office with her; the tension reaches its startling climax when Mary Grace throws the book and hits her in the head. With Parker the tension exists primarily between himself and his wife, Sarah Ruth, though it also occurs between himself and the 70 year old lady for whom he works. In A Temple of the Holy Ghost the tension exists between the never-named child and most of those around her, but especially with the two 14 year old convent girls who come to stay over the weekend with her and her mother. That they are two years older than the child is important because they have reached puberty and understand things that the child doesn’t.

The third aspect or characteristic of each short story involves the way the flawed character behaves that makes him or her subject to the responses of the surrounding characters. Ruby’s self-satisfaction overwhelms the doctor’s office until Mary Grace is insanely driven to respond violently; oddly, Mary Grace’s response is as humorous as it is shocking and understandable. Parker’s dissatisfaction leads to his lack of attention, which results in the tractor accident, which drives him (pun intended) the fifty miles to the city and the tattoo artist’s office. In the child’s case her pride and curiosity cause her to trick the two visitors into revealing what they saw in the tent at the fair, the encounter with the pious hermaphrodite.

The fourth element in the story is the way in which the usually violent response to the character flaw leads to the possibility of insight, as in the case of Ruby and Parker. Each will have to live out the rest of his or her life with the new understanding of self and reality. The operation of divine Grace in an O’Connor story operates entirely within the natural world through secondary causes. You might say truthfully, I think, that God uses our flaws and our contexts to bring us to vision and salvation. Sometimes, however, the character’s insight or vision occurs at a moment of death. Such is the case with the grandmother in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Mrs. May in Greenleaf. In A Temple… the pattern works somewhat differently. The transforming encounter occurs as the two convent girls describe the “freak” who has revealed [pun intended] him/her self to his fairground audience; the so-called freak is a hermaphrodite, having both male and female genitalia. The revelation of this to the child leads to her third fantasy vision in the story: this time she imagines a kind of Pentecostal religious service which will be a counterpart to the Catholic Mass that occurs almost immediately after.

The fifth aspect of the story is the way in which the author’s imagination weaves a pattern in each detail throughout the story that reveals the real Idea of the story. I would say that the real meaning in the child’s story is the way in which matter, especially flesh and blood matter, reveals spirit. As with Mrs. Turpin’s story and Parker’s story the Ideas are there from the beginning. As we see in the opening paragraph, the unattractiveness of the central characters is emphasized and focused along with the controlling image of flesh and blood as the Temple of the Holy Ghost:

“ALL weekend the two girls were calling each other Temple One and Temple Two, shaking with laughter and getting so red and hot that they were positively ugly, particularly Joanne who had spots on her face anyway. They came in the brown convent uniforms they had to wear at Mount St. Scholastica but as soon as they opened their suitcases, they took off the uniforms and put on red skirts and loud blouses. They put on lipstick and their Sunday shoes and walked around in the high heels all over the house, always passing the long mirror in the hall slowly to get a look at their legs. None of their ways were lost on the child.”

The most important element in the opening is the attitude toward the central image: the convent girls see it only as a joke, an image or idea to laugh about, in a sense an image for fun and laughter for a person who is on the “inside,” or in on the secret knowledge, so to speak. Tied to the Temple image is the girls’ immediate unattractiveness, especially Joanne’s. Her appearance is positively ugly. What the story accomplishes is the transformation of this attitude of”silliness” regarding the Idea until by the end of the story the idea of flesh and blood revealing spirit is the central reality of life, the child’s life at least, as well as the life of the church, its central reality as primary Temple too (pun intended).

The third aspect of the paragraph is the mirror and its reflecting capacity. First, one might notice that the girls change out of their convent uniforms into their secular clothes as if the two realms, sacred and secular, were separate realities. The girls then use the mirror to admire their legs, their flesh and blood bodies, so to speak. Again, what flesh and blood reveal by the end of the story is the presence of spirit, the Holy Spirit, not only in flesh and blood but in the entire material world, as the two realms are brought together in the Mass, in the child’s imagination, as we shall see in a bit. Looking again at the opening paragraph we find that the convent from which the girls come is “Mount St. Scholastica,” the name pointing to the most important theologian, Scholastic theologian, in the Catholic Church—St. Thomas Aquinas. Here is one of those details that reoccur throughout the story and help reveal the story’s Idea. St. Thomas is the author of the Eucharistic hymn sung at Mass and he was called “the dumb ox,” an epithet the child applies to Wendell and Cory for their ignorance regarding the Latin hymn sung by the girls. As I have said every detail in the story contributes to the Idea of the story, its meaning.

The final detail in the quoted section reveals the presence of the child and her watchfulness. This presence is especially important as her mother prevails upon the girls to explain “the joke”:

“She asked them why they called each other Temple One and Temple Two and this sent them off into gales of giggles. Finally they managed to explain. Sister Perpetua, the oldest nun at the Sisters of Mercy in Mayville, had given them a lecture on what to do if a young man should—here they laughed so hard they were not able to go on without going back to the beginning—on what to do if a young man should—they put their heads in their laps—on what to do if—they finally managed to shout it out—if he should “behave in an ungentlemanly manner with them in the back of an automobile.” Sister Perpetua said they were to say, “Stop sir! I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost!” and that would put an end to it. The child sat up off the floor with a blank face. She didn’t see anything so funny in this.”

While the transformation begins in the first sentence of the story, here we begin to see how the perspective of the child will carry the real meaning of the story. She doesn’t “see anything so funny in this.” First is the child’s understanding that the Temple image is serious. We might even say that the end is here contained in the beginning, for shortly after this revelation, we find a new attitude toward the governing image:

“Her mother didn’t laugh at what they had said. “I think you girls are pretty silly,” she said. “After all, that’s what you are—Temples of the Holy Ghost.”

The two of them looked up at her, politely concealing their giggles, but with astonished faces as if they were beginning to realize that she was made of the same stuff as Sister Perpetua.

Miss Kirby preserved her set expression and the child thought, it’s all over her head anyhow. I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost, she said to herself, and was pleased with the phrase. It made her feel as if somebody had given her a present.”

First, the child’s mother takes the idea seriously and is thus identified with the girls’ teacher, Sister Perpetua. Historically, Perpetua was one of the first female martyrs for the Christian faith. Thus, you might say, we can see how truly serious the idea is in the beginning, both historically and thus in the story, even though the girls maintain their perspective, though they are “astonished” to find in the mother “the same stuff” as in Sister Perpetua. The story is the child’s and therefore her attitude becomes the most important. While the child arrogantly dismisses the understanding of Miss Kirby whom the child doesn’t really know, the child now understands the idea as a “gift,” a “present.” And that, of course, is what the image of being a temple is all about. The presence of the Holy Spirit within is a gift of Grace, freely given. As Parker’s direction was subtly changed by his vision of the tattooed man at the fair, the child’s “ direction”is subtly changed here. What, for example, does the gift mean.

While as I have said before each detail in the story reveals the story’s meaning, yet there are two major encounters before the end that stand out. The first is the exchange of songs by the Pentecostal boys and the Catholic girls. The second is the child’s fantasy vision after learning what is present in the tent (tabernacle) at the fair. Each element moves our understanding toward the ending. First, Wendell and Cory sing two hymns to the girls as if they were love songs, which of course they are; the girls in turn sing the untranslated Eucharistic hymn, the tantum ergo, which is also a love song, St. Thomas’s love song to Christ and the “real presence” in the bread and wine. A translation is worth reading:

Down in adoration falling,
Lo! the sacred Host we hail;
Lo! o'er ancient forms departing,
newer rites of grace prevail;
faith for all defects supplying,
where the feeble senses fail.

To the everlasting Father,
and the Son who reigns on high,
with the Holy Ghost proceeding
forth from Each eternally,
be salvation, honor, blessing,
might and endless majesty. Amen.

Our human senses are weak, keeping us from seeing what is truly present in the Eucharist during the Mass, the real body and blood of Christ. What enables the (Catholic) Christian to say “Amen” to this element is of course faith. Faith is what enables the person to affirm that reality. It is interesting that in the Coen brothers’ film Hail Caesar, George Clooney, the Roman centurion standing before the crucified Christ on his cross, makes a tremendous speech regarding the man whom he had met once before. The problem is that the actor forgets the transforming word, faith, thus leaving the world of the movie stuck in its pervasive secularism. As in Aquinas’ hymn, without faith the person is blind. Faith, however, the gift of the Holy Spirit, enables the person to see the presence of God, not only in the Eucharist in the story but in the whole material world. In other words the sacred and the secular will become one in the story.

Before we get to the end though we need to see the absolutely necessary element to complete the pattern, the Idea, and that is the presence of the freak. Like the ark of the covenant in ancient Israel, the freak is found in a tent in the fair, where their is again diversity, males on one side of the tent and females on the other; there is, however, a disturbing unity of sorts, for the freak is a hermaphrodite, having both male and female genitalia. The crucial element is in what he says to the divided audience about how his “condition” occurred. As the convent girls reveal to the child, the freak accepts his situation as being the consequence of God’s will. And like Jesus in the garden before his passion, he doesn’t “dispute” it. The central thing that happens in this scene after the girls explain what they saw in the tent is that the child has a fantasy vision wherein she imagines the freak (and herself) in the presence of a Pentecostal worship service:

[“Raise yourself up. A temple of the Holy Ghost. You! You are God’s temple, don’t you know? Don’t you know? God’s Spirit has a dwelling in you, don’t you know?” “Amen. Amen.” “If anybody desecrates the temple of God, God will bring him to ruin and if you laugh, He may strike you thisaway. 

A temple of God is a holy thing. Amen. Amen.” “I am a temple of the Holy Ghost.” “Amen.”

The people began to slap their hands without making a loud noise and with a regular beat between the Amens, more and more softly, as if they knew there was a child near, half asleep.]

What the freak says takes us back to the first lines of the story. If you laugh and treat this condition as a joke, the freak says, God may strike you this way. We have come from the idea of one’s being a Temple as a joke to the perspective of absolute seriousness regarding the Idea. Here we are at the very heart of reality, especially as a vision in the child’s mind. The consequence of that vision becomes immediately apparent as, after accompanying the two girls back to the convent with her mother and in the grossly foul smelling Alonzo’s cab, the child finds herself (language deliberate] at the Mass being celebrated there:

[The child knelt down between her mother and the nun and they were well into the “Tantum Ergo” before her ugly thoughts stopped and she began to realize that she was in the presence of God. Hep me not to be so mean, she began mechanically. Hep me not to give her so much sass. Hep me not to talk like I do. Her mind began to get quiet and then empty but when the priest raised the monstrance with the Host shining ivory-colored (like the sun) in the center of it, she was thinking of the tent at the fair that had the freak in it. The freak was saying, “I don’t dispute hit. This is the way He wanted me to be.”]

Before this moment the child has discovered that by looking through several strands of her hair pulled across her eyes that she can see the sun (son); otherwise she must squint. During the Mass that occurs after that discovery, the child then has a moment where the two realms, following her confession of sin, are seen as one, the sacred and the secular together, wherein the freak is seen as the Host; thus in the (Catholic) Christian perspective, the freak becomes the bearer of the presence of God. Here we might remember Flannery’s justly famous comment at the party in New York when she was asked about the real presence in the Eucharist: “well if it’s just a symbol to Hell with it.” This story also testifies to how we understand the revealing capacity of matter, for the child’s final vision in the story affirms the unity of sacred and secular, the revealing capacity of matter, even as the child now simply “notes” the flesh of Alonzo whereas before she had treated him as a joke because of his disgusting appearance and smell. Now however the final vision we have in the story is the Eucharistic sun (son) and the path to it beyond the world , beyond [Dante’s] dark wood, in a dimension all its own . Lest we miss the fullness of the connection of the divine presence in the fair and the world, Alonzo from the front seat of his cab explains that the fair (and thus the freak) has been shut down by the current religious element assisted by the police, just as in NT times pre crucifixion:

[“They shut it on down,” he said. “Some of the preachers from town gone out and inspected it and got the police to shut it on down.”]

Following that identity, we see that final vision from the child’s perspective, the final image of the sun(son) in the story and the way to it (him):

[Her mother let the conversation drop and the child’s round face was lost in thought. She turned it toward the window and looked out over a stretch of pasture land that rose and fell with a gathering greenness until it touched the dark woods. The sun was a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood and when it sank out of sight, it left a line in the sky like a red clay road hanging over the trees.

Image: 1/24/24 TCT Christ the Saviour with the Eucharist by Juan de Juanes (Vicente Juan Masip), 1545 – 1550 [Museo del Prado, Madrid.

[I haven’t proofed all the essay yet, thus who knows what the Imp of the Perverse might have changed or what some of my overly modified sentences might have ended up saying. As for now, it’s rewarding to me writing these things, for writing is discovery, such as the two realm image in the first paragraph. I saw it before but hadn’t thought about it. Writing is also somewhat exhausting! I hope these O’Connor essays are worth it out there too, so to speak.]

Hopkins/Maier/Scruton/Reid- Beauty

Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2023

To what serves mortal beauty

dangerous; does set danc-
ing blood the O-seal-that-so

feature, flung prouder form
Than Purcell tune lets tread to?

See: it does this: keeps war

Men’s wits to the things that are;

what good means–where a glance
Master more may than gaze,

gaze out of countenance.
Those lovely lads once, wet-fresh

windfalls of war’s storm,
How then should Gregory, a father,

have gleanèd else from swarm-
ed Rome? But God to a nation

dealt that day’s dear chance.
To man, that needs would worship

block or barren stone,
Our law says: Love what are

love’s worthiest, were all known;
World’s loveliest–men’s selves. Self

flashes off frame and face.
What do then? how meet beauty?

Merely meet it; own,
Home at heart, heaven’s sweet gift;

then leave, let that alone.
Yea, wish that though, wish all,

God’s better beauty, grace.

____________________

Francis X. Maier, The Face of God, The Catholic Thing. 4/24/24. Excerpt:

People leave the Catholic Church and the wider Christian community today for many different reasons.  But one of those reasons is the unconvincing, bourgeois mediocrity that can be too common in our worship – which then infects the whole atmosphere of Christian life.

My point is simply this:  Ugliness kills the spirit and explains the impulse for desecration that infects so much of modern “art.”  Ugliness dumbs down the imagination, softens the brain, and hardens the heart.  People of faith have a hunger for beauty and mystery and belonging to a story; the story of a living, believing community, ongoing and true across cultures and time.  And they’re too often not getting that in their local churches.

In his book Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, Scruton wrote that:

Our need for beauty is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people.  It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition, as free individuals seeking our place in a shared and public world.  We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust.  Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves.  The experience of beauty guides us along this second path:  It tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perception as a place fit for the lives of beings like us.  But beings like us. . .become at home in the world only by acknowledging our “fallen” condition. . . .Hence the experience of beauty also points us beyond this world to a “kingdom of ends” in which our immortal longings and our desire for perfection are finally answered.

This is why a hunger for beauty and the religious frame of mind are so closely related and so vital for human flourishing.  They both flow from a humble sense of human imperfection while reaching for the transcendent.  For better or worse, it’s also why so many young families seek out the beauty and mystery of the old Latin Mass.

We need beauty to ennoble our imagination, to guide our scientific intuitions, and to poke through the blather and venom of “wokeness.”  We need it to see reality clearly.  We need beauty because it keeps us human.  Beauty tells us that despite our sins and failures, Creation is good.  And behind it is a Creator who loves us.

____________________

Poem repeated:

Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2023

To what serves mortal beauty | dangerous; does set danc-

ing blood the O-seal-that-so | feature, flung prouder form

Than Purcell tune lets tread to? | See: it does this: keeps warm

Men’s wits to the things that are; | what good means–where a glance

Master more may than gaze, | gaze out of countenance.

Those lovely lads once, wet-fresh | windfalls of war’s storm,

How then should Gregory, a father, | have gleanèd else from swarm-

ed Rome? But God to a nation | dealt that day’s dear chance.

To man, that needs would worship | block or barren stone,

Our law says: Love what are | love’s worthiest, were all known;

World’s loveliest–men’s selves. Self | flashes off frame and face.

What do then? how meet beauty? | Merely meet it; own,

Home at heart, heaven’s sweet gift; | then leave, let that alone.

Yea, wish that though, wish all, | God’s better beauty, grace.

_____________________

James Patrick Reid, Beauty and Providence. The Catholic Thing. Wednesday, April 3, 2019. Complete:

God declares His creation “good” seven times in the first chapter of Genesis. On the seventh occasion (seven being the number of perfection or fulfillment), He calls the work “very good.”

Yet sin has made a mess of things. Often the goodness of creation seems hidden or marred; or it shines through only occasionally, offering fleeting glimpses. The world is not, in general, “picture perfect.” One of the functions of art is to provide loci to which we can turn to experience the shining through of goodness, of beauty, whether the locus be a symphony, a poem, a painting, or some other work.

Things exist because God upholds them, but then things decay. God providentially governs creation with Fatherly care, yet terrible things happen all the time. Under such conditions, the experience of beauty can be poignant, as a glimpse of unattainable perfection; and the more intense the ray of beauty is, the more it rends the heart.

One can sympathize with the sentiment expressed in Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat (trans. Edward FitzGerald):

Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire!

Would not we shatter it to bits — and then

Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!

In the present “sorry scheme of things,” it can be hard to believe in divine providence or in transcendental beauty. If faith is, as atheists might claim, an escape from reality, then all fine art is but a diversion or an analgesic, or a Promethean attempt to create order and meaning within a chaotic universe.

Art consists in “re-moulding” things “nearer to the heart’s desire.” In a masterpiece, everything is providentially ordered, harmonized and resolved, and the process often includes a radical re-interpretation of sensory data.

It always entails a special way of seeing, akin to the vision of faith, which sees all things working “together unto good.” (Romans 8:28) From a Christian point of view, an artistic transformation of perception and material, resulting in a work of beauty, is not a divergence from reality, but a testimony to the deepest truth of things.

Let us look at The Martyrdom of Saints Cosmas and Damian and their Companions, painted by Blessed Fra Angelico (1395-1455). At the left, a group of casually swaying and apparently indifferent onlookers culminates in a blue-robed man, whose face and gesture register the beheadings with trepidation. The walled city behind these onlookers repeats their verticality and their shape as a group, but in an austerely cool and geometric fashion. The towers diminish into the distance, and their echoes fade in the far-away hill towns.

Suddenly our attention is pulled to the foreground by the tree trunks, which echo the vertical towers, but now with the insistent regularity of prison bars – or heartbeats like hammer blows. Then even these heartbeats die away into the brown hill. Nature holds her breath as the hill stretches diagonally up to the right, along the very axis of the executioner’s sword, and the curving line of the road offers a track for the weapon’s fatal swing.

The painting magnifies God’s conservation and providential governance of creation, through the rhythmically ordered interrelations of all its lines, shapes, colors and volumes, notwithstanding the fact that the picture shows even elements of the natural world co-operating with man’s malevolent act.

In a masterpiece, every shape, every line, every nuance and every note of color, occurs at just the right time and place in the organic unfolding of the whole. The providential choreography of the pictorial elements in a great painting cannot be copied from nature; it must be transposed to the canvas or panel as experienced by the artist internally.

The painter must feel the pressures, the weights, the pushes and pulls of pictorial forces, in all their interrelations; he must know and feel his work from the inside. A painting is a masterpiece insofar as all things in it suffer a rebirth to an existence in which they work together for good — for beauty.  It is produced from, and manifests, a personal relation to the forces of nature, of reality –- to providence, in fact.

Artists and art lovers must cultivate this sensibility, just as Christians must cultivate the love of God in order to see all things working together for good. Both the saint and the true artist see things as a providential arrangement, and both would maintain that their vision is true at a deep level, however shocking and objectionable such faith may appear in the face of all the terrible things that go on.

The sensibility of the saint and that of the artist are as related as the two meanings of the Greek word kalos: “good” and “beautiful.”  What a saint expresses by his words and deeds, and by his very appearance, is the life that wells up within.  Similarly, an artist is always expressing his inner life in his art, no matter what the work’s motif.

Hence the saying of Cosimo de Medici, which became a proverb in Renaissance Florence:  “Every painter paints himself well.” Cosimo was a patron of Blessed Fra Angelico (whose memorial is celebrated in chapels of the Dominican Order on February 18).

Look again at the painting. The execution of these five innocent men takes place in a flowery meadow, with glorious light and color everywhere. The tops of the trees lift triumphantly into the heavens, so that the verticality of their trunks sustains the red-robed kneeling martyr. This is martyrdom seen from a saint’s point of view.

The transformation of perception and materials in art points to the final transfiguration of the cosmos itself (Revelation Chapter 21), and the fulfillment of the heart’s deepest desire.  “Behold,” says the Crucified, “I make all things new.”

 *Image #1: The Martyrdom of Saints Cosmas and Damian and their Companions by Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro), c. 1440 [Musée du Louvre, Paris]

Image #2: Face of God (detail from “Creation of the Sun and Moon”) by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, c. 1510 [Sistine Chapel, Vatican] Included with Maier’s essay.

Okay—I got carried away!

Following: What Others Say — Les

Ever since I discussed the idea of following Jesus in his Ascension to Heaven in the way in which Beatrice scolded Dante for not following her to Heaven in living his life, I have discovered various other sources who defined the meaning of following Jesus. I thought it might be useful for me, and for any readers who are still with me, to include them here, because I noticed that most of them will lead well into the discussion of A Temple of the Holy Ghost and where that funny and profound story ends. I shall start with another relevant Biblical passage wherein we find the image of Jesus the Good Shepherd:

A reading from
the holy Gospel according to John 10:1-10

Jesus said: “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever does not enter a sheepfold through the gate but climbs over elsewhere is a thief and a robber. But whoever enters through the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens it for him, and the sheep hear his voice, as he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has driven out all his own, he walks ahead of them, and the sheep follow him, because they recognize his voice. But they will not follow a stranger; they will run away from him, because they do not recognize the voice of strangers.” Although Jesus used this figure of speech, they did not realize what he was trying to tell them.

So Jesus said again, “Amen, amen, I say to you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. A thief comes only to steal and slaughter and destroy; I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.”

Ironically the passage begins with Jesus defining the wrong way to proceed, climbing the wall of the sheepfold, presumably to steal the sheep.  In C. S. Lewis’ Narnian Chronicle, The Magician’s Nephew, there’s a nice gloss on this passage and image: the very evil witch in the story climbs the wall to that garden, to steal the apple that will ensure her immortality.  Since she has entered the wrong way, the apple will work, but not to her pleasure.  The right way into that Eden-like garden is through the gate.  And as Jesus makes clear in his comment following the image here, Jesus is the gate and to follow him is to listen to his voice, and follow his words.

The introduction to the liturgy yesterday, April 22, 2024, provides a clear focus for what it means to follow the shepherd using the Psalmist’s image of “the face of God”:

Monday of the Fourth Week of Easter

“Athirst is my soul for God, the living God. When shall I behold the face of God?” This thirst for the vision of God is planted in us by baptism, a gift from the Holy Spirit. It leads us to hear and recognize Christ’s voice; it moves us to follow him with the confidence that “God has granted life-giving repentance.” Peter’s vision confirms the truth that only Christ’s saving sacrifice makes us clean. At every Mass we “go in to the altar of God” to eat his flesh and drink his blood.  (The April Magnificat)7

The face of God is now understood as the face of Christ, our shepherd. He is the only one who can truly satisfy that desire that we all have for real fulfillment and meaning. The idea and image are the same as presented in the lovely Psalm 63 which begins with the acknowledgment: “O God thou art my God.” The Psalmist continues by revealing that each day in a sense begins with that pursuit: “early will I seek thee.” The nature of his desire is imaged immediately after: “my soul thirsts for thee, my flesh longs after thee, in a barren and dry land where no water is” [quote remembered from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer]. That barren and dry land is where we all live today and where there is only one source of life-giving, fulfilling water. Jesus makes that clear as he tells the much-married Samaritan woman at the well; the only source of that eternal, life-fulfilling water is himself:

9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” (John 4: 9-14)

The liturgy for April follows yesterday’s good shepherd image with a second account the following day, April 23 from later in the same chapter of John:

A reading from
the holy Gospel according to John 10:22-30

The feast of the Dedication was taking place in Jerusalem. It was winter. And Jesus walked about in the temple area on the Portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long are you going to keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.” Jesus answered them, “I told you and you do not believe. The works I do in my Father’s name testify to me. But you do not believe, because you are not among my sheep. My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one can take them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.

With what seems like a bit of synchronicity at work in my life, I happened to be reading “Meditation 26” in Father PeterJohn Cameron’s A Brief Primer of Prayer. The entries are fairly short and this one happened to be based on the same image from John. I was going to choose quotes from it and then go to another source I had, but I decided to include the entire meditation since it is quite apt:

Meditation 26

Following is prayer and life is something we learn.

Prayer as a following is an asking for the Good Shepherd to pass on his own vitality and excellence to us.

Of all the apt images Jesus could have chosen to symbolize himself as Savior, he opts for the Good Shepherd. For a good shepherd is all about dedicating himself to the welfare of his sheep, even to the point of radical sacrifice and extreme personal risk. The greatest respect and “esteem” a sheep can show a shepherd is to follow him.

There is something distinctive and attractive about the shepherd—unique. Jesus speaks about the shepherd’s voice (Jn 10:3-5). Following is our response to the attractiveness, the singularity of the Good Shepherd. It is an outward act that expresses our desire to share in the life of the Good Shepherd so as to make our own the truths and values that set him apart. The closer we stay to him, following as his flock, the more we become our true selves.

Life is something we learn by following Someone who is fully alive. The following of prayer is an asking for the Good Shepherd to pass on his own vitality and excellence to us. Following means committing our whole self to the exceptional Shepherd, offering to him our personality, our intelligence, our freedom. Following changes us. Following is a way of acknowledging that things in our life need to change.

Cardinal Ratzinger wrote: “‘Following’ is something interior: a new direction for one’s life—surrendered to the will of another, so that being with this other and being at his disposal are now the really important content of a human existence. ‘To follow’ means to entrust oneself to the Word of God, to rate it higher than the laws of money and bread, and to live by it. Only in losing themselves can human beings find themselves. To follow Christ, then, means to enter into the self-surrender that is the real heart of love. To follow Christ means to become one who loves as God has loved. In the last analysis, to follow Christ is simply for people to become human by integration into the humanity of God.”

We can begin to follow by joining in this beautiful prayer of a 14th-century abbot, Venerable Raymond Jourdain:

O good Lord Jesus Christ, my sweet Shepherd, what return shall I make to you for all that you have given me? What shall I give you in exchange for your gift of yourself to me? Even if I could give myself to you a thousand times, it would still be nothing, since I am nothing in comparison with you. Although I cannot love you as much as I should, you accept my weak love. Give me your most ardent love by which, with your grace, I shall love you, please you, serve you, and fulfill your commands. May I never be separated from you, either in time or in eternity, but abide, united to you in love, forever and ever. Amen.

And then I found Bishop Baron’s “reflection” on today’s Gospel. He adds an interesting perspective on following Jesus—the nature of the end of the journey:

Fourth Week of Easter

John 10:22–30

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus explains why his sheep listen to him and follow him. They do so because he is leading them to eternal life.

He says, “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish.” The life of heaven, where we “shall never perish,” is that place where death and sickness have no power over us, where we see God face-to-face.

Heaven and earth are always connected in the biblical imagination; that’s true. But heaven should never be reduced to earth, as though religion is just about this-worldly ethics, social justice, or psychological well-being. No; the Christian faith is about a journey beyond this world to the heavenly Jerusalem.

Everything in the Christian life—from our ethical behavior, to prayer, to the liturgy, to works of justice—all of it is meant to conduce to that end. So listen to the voice of the shepherd and follow him wherever he goes.

Here is a final perspective on what it means to follow Jesus, the shepherd:

Following Jesus means nothing other than reproducing his virtues in ourselves, in order to do all things well. It is trying to assume his imprint on our bodies and our souls that we might be entirely transformed into him. He passed through this world doing good. He did all things well. He cannot see suffering without being compassionate. Wherever he finds pain, he consoles and brings sweetness to the suffering, as much in his earthly life as in the Holy Eucharist, because the heart of Jesus does not change. The Good Shepherd, he says, knows his sheep and he is pleased that they know him. “I have other sheep,” he says, “but that one grieves me and I want it to return to my fold.” He would welcome sinners and he would be all things to all men.

When one strikes a harp, it responds only with harmony. When petals are removed from a flower, it gives its best perfume. The good soul is both a harp and a flower. When it is wounded by criticism and torn apart by ingratitude, it can only respond with harmony and the perfume of goodness. How beautiful are the souls that seem to pulsate with self-sacrifice and with kindness.

Jesus’ obedience was even to the point of death on the cross in order to save us. His mortification subjected him to the grind of everyday work. His zeal moved him to go from town to town healing the sick, consoling, teaching—becoming all things for all men. That is our model. The one who went about doing good. People would say, “Goodness itself has appeared in our midst.” And we have that Goodness—that crucified Jesus—within our grasp in the Holy Eucharist and in our hearts…. Jesus here poses the spirit of self-renunciation and mortification as the indispensable condition for following him, for imitating him, for going through this world performing good works. He invites us to taste the sweet pain of a life of voluntary sacrifice, in union with him.

Blessed Concepción Cabrera de Armida

Blessed Concepción († 1937), also known as “Conchita,” was a wife, mother, widow, and mystical writer. She was the first Mexican laywoman to be beatified.

Coda: it occurred to me early this morning that if following Christ involves prayer, then it would be fitting to end with one. Thus, here is a prayer by Saint Thomas Aquinas:

Grant me,

O Lord my God,

A mind to know you,

A heart to seek you,

Wisdom to find you,

Conduct pleasing to you,

Faithful perseverance in waiting for you,

And a hope of finally embracing you.

Amen.

THE EMPTY SCHOOLYARD - LES

Both of the verses below are based on memories of real experiences. In “Absence” it was Saturday afternoon, and my parents were off to the country for some reason which I have forgotten, and I w as off with them. Reluctantly, of course. I was probably 10 or 11, having finished the fifth grade. I had arranged to meet my young lady friend, Mary Kay, at our grade school playground at four o’clock. I kept reminding my parents of the importance of that rendezvous and they kept reassuring me that we would be home in time.

It turned out that we were 15 minutes late getting home. Alas! In great eagerness, nevertheless, I ran the two blocks from our house to the Miami school playground, only to encounter absolute emptiness. I was devastated, of course. The emptiness was overwhelming. She wasn’t there, she hadn’t waited, I assumed. Thus I slowly returned home, probably angry at my parents for frustrating my desire, angry at her for not waiting. The experience of the empty playground, however, and my frustrated will, became for me a major image of Hell, that absolute emptiness, no person there but me, and my will, an image I then used and developed in a public lecture on Dante’s Hell for a sophomore course at Berea College.

The final irony in the experience though was that I found out on the following Monday that she hadn’t remembered we were to meet there and thus had not gone at all. She and I were also at another time to go together to a movie one Saturday or Sunday afternoon. That didn’t work out well for me either. I walked the mile to her house, but she couldn’t leave then to go with me because her parents and she had company, guests. We agreed, therefore, to meet at the theater, the Ritz theater, the only theater in Tiffin, since I was told to go on. We were to meet on the left side of the theater. Of that I am absolutely certain. There were two rows, three sections. I sat on the outside seat next to the row in the middle section, on the left side of the theater, so as not to miss her; she of course, it turned out, went to the right side. I never found her then, and walked sorrowfully home alone after the movie which was probably a western. More desolation. Girls!

Absence

My parents made me go with them

To a country destination.

They made me late for a fifth grade date;

O, vanity and desolation!

We were to meet at the schoolyard,

Perhaps at half past four;

When I arrived she wasn’t there;

I was alone just like before.

The schoolyard was so empty;

No one on the swings.

It seemed as though this was the worst

That life could ever bring.

In later years I saw the place,

As an image of broad Hell:

All alone in a schoolyard

And nary a soul to tell.

The next one is about a neighbor’s child who with several of her friends went trick or treating one chilly Halloween evening. She lived two doors down the street from us. Her parents are good people, still there. We are still here, two doors up the street. Later in life she contracted some hideous cancer and died at age eighteen, on a blustery March day, 2005. She was a beautiful child and becoming a beautiful adult. She died; no one knows why. Neither do I. The cancer was unbeatable. What we desire in life, however, are answers, final causes. Meaning that makes sense. Purpose.

Sara

When she knocked that Halloween,

I jumped back with a start!

I gave her all our candy,

But I would have given my heart.

She was a child enjoying life,

Innocent of adult-made strife.

The monster thing that stole her life,

A looming shadow in the night.

That shadow follows each of us,

From dusk to dawn, dawn to dusk.

It caught her in her early days;

Death devours, so many ways.

Yet, always life is ours to praise.

Amen and Alleluia.

Following PARKER — LES

Well, I thought I was done with following, but then I encounter a good image from a text on prayer; even better, as I was listening to the storm very early this morning an idea occurred to me regarding Flannery O’Connor that seemed worth following, so to speak. So far it will be called “Images and Endings.” The idea is to see how 4 FO’C characters understand Jesus in their own stories and then see where that understanding leads them. The 4 stories that immediately occurred to me are: A Good Man Is Hard to Find [the Misfit & the grandmother], Greenleaf [Mrs. May & Mrs. Greenleaf], Parker’s Back [O.E. Parker & his wife, Sarah Ruth], & A Temple of the Holy Ghost [the Child & the Hermaphrodite]. Depending on how this work unfolds, then perhaps these two as well: The Enduring Chill [Asbury & the Jesuit Priest], or Good Country People [Hulga Joy Hopewell & the satanic Bible Salesman]. The stories are all so good that I get excited just thinking about them again as their images roll around in my mind: The Bible salesman making off with Hulga’s wooden leg; the icicle descending on Asbury; the Hermaphrodite preaching in the tent; Parker’s tattoo of Jesus on his back; Mrs. May “embraced” by the Greenleaf bull; & the Misfit’s rejection of the grandmother’s gesture. While I was leaning toward A Good Man when I first thought about the idea, in remembering the stories just now, Parker’s Back seemed a better place to start .

O. E. Parker is a haunted man, a somewhat empty man who also feels that someone is after him. As a consequence of his emptiness and dissatisfaction, he fills his body with tattoos, searching for meaning in the numerous images of creation, from inanimate to animate; nothing, however, satisfies Parker, reminding me of St. Augustine’s familiar quote from the Confessions: “our hearts are restless till they rest in thee.” As a consequence of his emptiness Parker marries Sarah Ruth Cates, a strict Old Testament oriented legalist. “She was forever sniffing up sin.” Parker thinks he understands Sarah Ruth but what worries him is that he doesn’t understand himself. The narrator reveals Parker’s perspective throughout almost all of the story and describes the nature of the marriage: “This ugly woman Parker married was his first wife. He had had other women but he had planned never to get himself tied up legally.” The Old Testament images and details are pervasive as the “legally” in this quote reflects not only his marriage ties but also his ontological situation of dissatisfaction. Later in story we learn about the exchange of names and the OT grounding of the marriage. Parker hates his name uses only the initials, O. E. Sarah Ruth, however, makes him explain, which he does in a whisper. Sarah Ruth repeats what he whispered:

[“Obadiah Elihue,” she said in a reverent voice. “If you call me that aloud, I’ll bust your head open,” Parker said. “What’s yours?” “Sarah Ruth Cates,” she said. “Glad to meet you, Sarah Ruth,” Parker Sarah Ruth’s father was a Straight Gospel preacher but he was away, spreading it in Florida.]

OT prophets for O. E., OT women for Sarah Ruth’s name and both women are essential to the genealogy of Jesus. It should also be clear to the Christian reader at least that Parker’s sense of being haunted is reflective of God’s pursuit of him, particularly Jesus as we discover soon enough.

The interesting heart of the story is the way Jesus is present in the story. First Parker simply uses the name as an expletive when he pretends to hurt himself on his truck in order to attract Sarah Ruth who is sitting on the porch of her mother’s house:

[Suddenly Parker began to jump up and down and fling his hand about as if he had mashed it in the machinery. He doubled over and held his hand close to his chest. “God dammit!” he hollered, “Jesus Christ in hell! Jesus God Almighty damm! God dammit to hell!” he went on, flinging out the same few oaths over and over as loud as he could.

Without warning a terrible bristly claw slammed the side of his face and he fell backwards on the hood of the truck. “You don’t talk no filth here!” a voice close to him shrilled.]

Moved by the image of beauty and wholeness he sees in a tattooed man at a fair, Parker has been pursuing that same transfigured wholeness through his own tattoos and then in his marriage to Sarah Ruth. The narrator tells us first that [It was as if a blind boy had been turned so gently in a different direction that he did not know his destination had been changed.] Thus the pattern of Parker’s transformation begins.

Both elements of tattoos and marriage come together dramatically while Parker is working, driving a tractor, baling hay in a field for an old woman who has left an old tree in the middle of her field simply because she loves old trees. So distracted by his dissatisfaction and thinking about getting a tattoo on his back, the only part of his body that is still empty of images, a tattoo that would please Sarah Ruth, Parker hits the tree whereupon he has a Moses and burning bush experience:

[The sun, the size of a golf ball, began to switch regularly from in front to behind him, but he appeared to see it both places as if he had eyes in the back of his head. All at once he saw the tree reaching out to grasp him. A ferocious thud propelled him into the air, and he heard himself yelling in an unbelievably loud voice, “GOD ABOVE!” He landed on his back while the tractor crashed upside down into the tree and burst into flame.

The first thing Parker saw were his shoes, quickly being eaten by the fire; one was caught under the tractor, the other was some distance away, burning by itself. He was not in them. He could feel the hot breath of the burning tree on his face. He scrambled backwards, still sitting, his eyes cavernous, and if he had known how to cross himself he would have done it.]

Parker, though he doesn’t quite understand it, has had a religious experience that sends him into town to his usual tattoo artist where he asks for a picture of God. The artist’s response is precise and, given the owl tattooed on his head, wise:

[“Who are you interested in?” he said, “saints, angels, Christs or what?”

“God,” Parker said.

“Father, Son or Spirit?”

“Just God,” Parker said impatiently. “Christ. I don’t care. Just so it’s God.”]

There is no mistaking the underlying meaning here and the gap between Parker’s understanding, the expletive again, “Christ,” and the knowledge that Christ is God, the second person of the holy Trinity: God the Son. Parker gets the book with the only real image of God possible, and, rejecting the soft contemporary images, flips his way into the past images where one in particular demands his attention:

[On one of the pages a pair of eyes glanced at him swiftly. Parker sped on, then stopped. His heart too appeared to cut off; there was absolute silence. It said as plainly as if silence were a language itself, GO BACK. Parker returned to the picture—the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes. He sat there trembling; his heart began slowly to beat again as if it were being brought to life by a subtle power.]

The image patterns that have been present explicitly as well as subtly from the beginning such as creatures, light, trees, the journey and especially eyes help provide the meaningful unity for Parker’s transformation and they all come together in the final section of the story. At the beginning we learned that Sarah Ruth’s eyes “were gray and sharp like the points of two icepicks,” reflecting her penetrating, judgmental nature.

Parker’s eyes were the only truly mysterious thing about him:

[He stayed in the navy five years and seemed a natural part of the gray mechanical ship, except for his eyes, which were the same pale slate-color as the ocean and reflected the immense spaces around him as if they were a microcosm of the mysterious sea.]

The old lady he worked for told him about the tree and treated him “as if he didn’t have eyes.” And of course he doesn’t. In a sense he is still the blind boy being, no longer gently, turned to the light that will strike him near the end.

The eyes in the tattoo of Christ now on his back in its severe and beautiful majesty are eyes to be obeyed. He tries to ignore that element, goes to a bar, is made to reveal his new tattoo, which leads to silence and then a fight wherein like Jonah he is tossed out onto the street. Finally he believes that Sarah Ruth will be pleased with his new tattoo, his image of God, but of course her response, once she makes him fully identify himself and lets him into the house, is predictable:

[“Another picture,” Sarah Ruth growled. “I might have known you was off after putting some more trash on yourself.”

Parker’s knees went hollow under him. He wheeled around and cried, “Look at it! Don’t just say that! Look at it!”

“I done looked,” she said.

“Don’t you know who it is?” he cried in anguish.

“No, who is it?” Sarah Ruth said. “It ain’t anybody I know.”

“It’s him,” Parker said.

“Him who?” “

“God!” Parker cried. “

“God? God don’t look like that!”

“What do you know how he looks?” Parker moaned. “You ain’t seen him.”

“He don’t look,” Sarah Ruth said. “He’s a spirit. No man shall see his face.”]

Like the ruling religious orders of Jesus’ own time, Sarah Ruth judges him from that legal perspective:

[“Idolatry!” Sarah Ruth screamed. “Idolatry! Enflaming yourself with idols under every green tree! I can put up with lies and vanity but I don’t want no idolator in this house!” and she grabbed up the broom and began to thrash him across the shoulders with it.

Parker was too stunned to resist. He sat there and let her beat him until she had nearly knocked him senseless and large welts had formed on the face of the tattooed Christ. Then he staggered up and made for the door.]

The image of crucifixion comes to the surface very quickly here. Parker’s back and Christ’s face are being severely beaten, and Parker is truly stunned. All he can do is stagger out the door. But then an interesting literary thing takes place. Where we have been with Parker’s perspective throughout the story, the final paragraph shifts to Sarah Ruth, and we now look at Parker through Sarah Ruth’s eyes:

[She stamped the broom two or three times on the floor and went to the window and shook it out to get the taint of him off it. Still gripping it, she looked toward the pecan tree and her eyes hardened still more. There he was—who called himself Obadiah Elihue—leaning against the tree, crying like a baby.]

Therefore, everyone who reads this story is made to experience that judgment and rejection. Of course what she sees and what we experience needs interpretation. Parker is on the ground being supported by a fruitful tree, suggestive of the cross upon which Jesus was crucified. Ne xt, he is “crying like a baby.” While that is part of her rejection, it nevertheless suggests several things: Sarah Ruth is pregnant but what she has given birth to here finally is Parker’s new life. God’s Grace has transformed Parker almost in spite of himself. Parker would be one of Mrs. Turpin’s “white trash.” Yet as in that story Parker is the one saved because unlike Sarah Ruth, Parker has no image of God and thus is open to receiving an accurate one, one that makes him whole and complete:

[Parker bent down and put his mouth near the stuffed keyhole. “Obadiah,” he whispered and all at once he felt the light pouring through him, turning his spider web soul into a perfect arabesque of colors, a garden of trees and birds and beasts.]

In the end Parker has become completely and in a sense subtly the body of Christ.

Read it. What a good story. My problem is that there is no way that I can do four or six stories. It seemed simple when I first thought of it: the image—the face of Christ; the ending—Parker as baby, the new life lived under grace. That was what I was aiming for, but anyone who is still with me will see what happened. Ha. Reflecting on what’s next, I see that the only other story to deal with under this title of Image and Ending, is the story of the Child and the Hermaphrodite, that is “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” FO’C’s complete stories are available with a subscription to Kindle Unlimited. I think purchasing the collection on Kindle or paper is not very expensive and it is certainly worth having. So is her collection of essays: “Mystery and Manners” and her letters: Habit of Being.

My image for this essay is the image of Christ Harrowing Hell:

That Image goes with the idea of following the resurrected Christ to Heaven. Cogito! I forget whose image this is but I’m sure I have the information.

Found it: The Harrowing of Hell by Bl. Fra Angelico, c. 1440 [Museo di San Marco, Florence]

REVELATION FOLLOWS — LES

Intended to add this section to the last entry, but having lost a number of texts with this technology, I hated to take a chance. Also the type is smaller than I care for and I have no idea how to change it or even if one can. So, another entry.

the title of this entry is also a play on the image of following Christ to Heaven. The minute I thought of other literature where the image is revealed, Flannery O’Connor’s wonderful short story, “Revelation,” came to mind. Lying in bed the other morning, unable to get back to sleep, it occurred to me that not only is there a blessing in the image, but there is also a danger. “Revelation” reveals both the danger and the blessing.

Mrs. Turpin’s husband Claud has a badly wounded leg which he reveals to the patients in the office waiting to see the doctor. However, as the story begins, the text focuses on Claud’s wife and suggests that there is a danger in her presence:

[THE doctor’s waiting room, which was very small, was almost full when the Turpins entered and Mrs. Turpin, who was very large, made it look even smaller by her presence. She stood looming at the head of the magazine table set in the center of it, a living demonstration that the room was inadequate and ridiculous. Her little bright black eyes took in all the patients as she sized up the seating situation.]

Mrs. Turpin is judgmental of everything and everyone: she looms over the table, and is a”living demonstration” of the ridiculous and the inadequate. And it turns out that is a marvelous image of the danger of the way to Heaven. The danger is that she deludes herself into believing that she loves Jesus above all things when the story makes it clear that she truly loves herself above all things. Well, she does love Claude and she does love her idea of Jesus, always a real danger. For example, near the heart of the story. In talking to the mother in the story who is a counterpart of herself and her values, she exclaims, joyfully:

[“If it’s one thing I am,” Mrs. Turpin said with feeling, “it’s grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!’ It could have been different!”]

In one sense she is a good woman who helps her community but the problem is that her perpetual center of concern is herself. What she is about to learn in the story is how her life and vision ought to have been different. While Mrs. Turpin’s counterpart is the mother, her daughter, who has lived with those values and that blindness all her life is about to change everything for Mrs. Turpin. The daughter’s name is, significantly, Mary Grace. She is the secondary cause that God uses in the story to reorient Mrs. Turpin away from herself and to Him. Watch; the quote immediately follows the preceding quote:

[For one thing, somebody else could have got Claud. At the thought of this, she was flooded with gratitude and a terrible pang of joy ran through her. “Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!” she cried aloud.

The book struck her directly over her left eye. It struck almost at the same instant that she realized the girl was about to hurl it. Before she could utter a sound, the raw face came crashing across the table toward her, howling.

Mary Grace’s book, entitled “Human Development,” which hits her left eye, is not the end of the action. Mary Grace tries to strangle Mrs. Turpin and before the doctor can remove her from Mrs, Turpin, she delivers a message. The really interesting thing is that Mrs. Turpin knows that Mary Grace is a messenger:

“What you got to say to me?” she asked hoarsely and held her breath, waiting, as for a revelation.

The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs. Turpin’s. “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,” she whispered. Her voice was low but clear. Her eyes burned for a moment as if she saw with pleasure that her message had struck its target.]

And there it is. She thought she was on her way to Jesus only to be told that she’s an “old wart hog” from Hell. The thing that makes Mrs. Turpin such a magnificent character is that like Lear and Oedipus she is determined to get at the truth, for she knows that this judgment comes from a deeper dimension, from God himself:

[“I am not,” she said tearfully, “a wart hog. From hell.” But the denial had no force. The girl’s eyes and her words, even the tone of her voice, low but clear, directed only to her, brooked no repudiation. She had been singled out for the message, though there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied. The full force of this fact struck her only now. There was a woman there who was neglecting her own child but she had been overlooked. The message had been given to Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman. The tears dried. Her eyes began to burn instead with wrath.]

Notice the way the concrete act, struck with the book, becomes a mental force; she is “struck” with a realization. Notice too that in this crucial passage that her name is Ruby. She has misdirected the focus of her life, evident even in this passage. Others there she believes deserved the message, the neglectful mother, the “white trash” woman. God may be attacking her values but her name is Ruby and she too is valuable.

In terms of the action in the story, Ruby’s wrath at being so badly treated, she thinks, leads her to the hog pen, like Jacob, to wrestle with God and vent her spleen. The hogs in the story have been an image of humanity, and the Turpin’s raise them, a grunting and a rooting and a groaning. Ruby has a hose and signifcantly hits one in the eye until finally, determined to know the truth, she roars out a question that immediately becomes her answer, but first all her obscene values come tumbling out of her mouth:

[“What do you send me a message like that for?” she said in a low fierce voice, barely above a whisper but with the force of a shout in its concentrated fury. “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” Her free fist was knotted and with the other she gripped the hose, blindly pointing the stream of water in and out of the eye of the old sow whose outraged squeal she did not hear.]

Next: [“If you like trash better, go get yourself some trash then,” she railed. “You could have made me trash. Or a nigger. If trash is what you wanted why didn’t you make me trash?” She shook her fist with the hose in it and a watery snake appeared momentarily in the air. “I could quit working and take it easy and be filthy,” she growled. “Lounge about the sidewalks all day drinking root beer. Dip snuff and spit in every puddle and have it all over my face. I could be nasty. “Or you could have made me a nigger. It’s too late for me to be a nigger,” she said with deep sarcasm, “but I could act like one. Lay down in the middle of the road and stop traffic. Roll on the ground.”]

Finally: [She braced herself for a final assault and this time her voice rolled out over the pasture. “Go on,” she yelled, “call me a hog! Call me a hog again. From hell. Call me a wart hog from hell. Put that bottom rail on top. There’ll still be a top and bottom!”

A garbled echo returned to her.

A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, “Who do you think you are?”

The color of everything, field and crimson sky, burned for a moment with a transparent intensity. The question carried over the pasture and across the highway and the cotton field and returned to her clearly like an answer from beyond the wood.

She opened her mouth but no sound came out of it.]

God uses secondary causes in our lives. Ruby’s question to God, returns as an echo and answer from God, in a way the kind of answer the pious Job receives. “Who do you think you are?” Notice the language throughout; the watery snake in the air, the visionary light, and Ruby silenced as was Job. The reason this story came to mind first is what happens next. Ruby, finally silenced, receives what I will call the real way to Jesus in the story, his real centrality in one’s life and the need for real humility:

[A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.]

As in the beginning of the story the narrator focus Ruby’s small eyes, suggesting the smallness of her vision of realty that has just been firmly dealt with. She too was shocked and altered as she saw that all her virtues did not amount to a reason for self-satisfaction and pride. The final image in the story given my concerns is worth citing:

[At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.]

It suggests that what she is hearing now is that she is attuned to those souls who are on their way to Heaven. Given what she has seen and heard throughout her experience in the doctor’s office, what else would it be? The world itself reveals the presence of God, if one isn’t too busy thinking about oneself to look and listen. How could she not be changed forever?

Image: what a marvelous teller of tales worth reading, she was.. “If it’s only a symbol, to Hell with it.” Indeed, indeed.

Our journey is truly about real presence! This essay will probably do it for the idea of “following,” unless I remember or discover another work of literature that provides another compelling insight or perspective on the fundamental idea. There is, after all, much more that might be worthwhile regarding this story, the way in which the doctor’s office reveals itself to suggest the image of Plato’s Cave, for example, and what that signifies. Well, read the whole story, carefully. Grace is operative in almost all of her stories and in the two novels. Ha! Read them all. Hallelujah!

Another Follow Up — LES

I can’t quite get used to these new textual mechanics, er, so to speak. In any case here we go again.

I was thinking about the image of following when, God above, it finally occurred to me to see how the Gospels deal with it. I read Mark’s brief account first, then turned to my favorite Gospel, John. Here is the NRSV account:

And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. 18 Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” 19 (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, “Follow me.”

Peter is responding to Jesus question as to whether Peter loved him. Jesus asks three times, thus, I assume paralleling the three times Peter fearfully denied him around the campfire and before the crucifixion. The quote starts with Peter’s third affirmation and includes Jesus’ prediction of Peter’s future suffering and death. My primary concern here, of course, is with how Jesus ended the image: “Follow me.” The next part of the text recounts Peter’s asking about John, the beloved disciple and the author of the Gospel:

20 Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them; he was the one who had reclined next to Jesus at the supper and had said, “Lord, who is it that is going to betray you?” 21 When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, “Lord, what about him?” 22 Jesus said to him, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!”

Artistically, it seems to me, the second order or command is perfect and necessary for what is being communicated here. The first “follow me” is clearly directed to Peter; the text makes that very clear: “Peter, follow me!” The repetition of the order shortly thereafter, in my understanding, makes it universal. Clearly, succinctly, he says, directed to all of us whom, like John, he loved and who now like, Peter, love him: “Follow me!” The rest of the text not only reveals the command but puts it in the context of love

Writing is interesting. I had not noticed the way the passage worked until I started following up (pun intended) the idea of following Jesus based on the theological facts (ha!) of the Ascension of Jesus and the Assumption of Mary. Writing has always been for me not only a means of communication but also an exciting means of discovery. Unfortunately, God forgive me, I spent too much of my life, like a magpie, pursuing and collecting bright shiny objects and other stuff, and not enough time writing especially for discovery, since writing always worked for me that way. Have an insight into a delightful text and attempt to communicate that insight and go from there. And so I did, but not often enough.

Image: From apod.nasa.com. 3/19/24 A Picturesque Equinox Sunset Image Credit & Copyright: Alan Dyer, Amazingsky.com, TWAN

FOLLOWING — LES

Oh dear. Everything has changed since the last time I wrote anything here. Squarespace keeps changing things and I have had enough trouble keeping up with the original. In any case, here we go!

What I recently became interested in was the idea and image of following and its two primary meanings. First there is the literal idea of physically following someone: “Follow me but stay close.” Dante follows Virgil through Hell, for example. Our new little dog Spooky follows Mary everywhere in the house and out. The second meaning is that used on kindle: whenever I click on an author, the site gives me the opportunity of “following” that author so that each time he or she writes a new book, I will be notified. Following then becomes a metaphor for paying attention to what someone is writing or doing. What occurred to me very recently as I was listening to Bishop Barron define the Ascension in the “Word on Fire” Rosary was the consequence for us of the meaning of the Ascension. In effect the Ascension meant that we were to follow Jesus to Heaven in our thoughts, our behavior, our prayers—in other words in our lives and how we now live them. In an email I sent to three good friends I attempted to define this following of the resurrected Christ, which I will now try to find and somewhat copy here—God willing.

Got the first one:

Bishop Barron explained the Ascension by saying that, as best as I remember, Christ went more deeply into” our world; into a “dimension that transcends” our world but is in some way linked to it. In so far as I can remember that is what Bishop Barrón said in attempting to define what the second mystery of the “Glorious Mysteries” in the Rosery meant, I.e. the Ascension of Christ at the end of the 40 days, refuting the “up, up and away” interpretation. This explanation or language I found compelling. It occurred to me when he said that that I suddenly understood something about the meaning there that I hadn’t understood before. The insight continued in his explanation of the fourth mystery, the “Assumption” of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and It involves both more insights and connections.

The first insight or connection is from Dante’s Purgatorio, when Beatrice harshly accuses Dante, in a sense, of serious betrayal. She says that when she died he should have followed her to Heaven in his life, thinking and orientation instead of betraying his vision of the goodness he saw in her when she was alive and walking on the streets of Florence by pursuing other women. That’s what the Ascension is revealing: we are meant to follow Jesus to Heaven in our lives, in our minds. And our behavior. I found the image and idea exciting as it suddenly gives a clear purpose to how I ought to be living and especially behaving. There is a concreteness and specificity to my understanding that wasn’t there before.

When Bishop Barron dealt with the Assumption, the fourth Glorious mystery, I saw or understood Mary to be the person who had literally and spiritually done that in the way Barrón described that mystery. Body and spirit she followed her son to Heaven. The second literary connection that occurred to me occurs at the end of the BBC King Lear which I watched yesterday. The image of Christ in the play is truly Cordelia who embodies the kind of sacrificial love for her father that Christ reveals for his. When Lear first sees her after he awakens from his madness, he says first, “You do me wrong to take me out of the grave” and “you are a soul in bliss and I am bound upon a wheel of fire.” At the end of the play, beautifully acted In the BBC production by Michael Hordern, Lear holds a feather to Cordelia’s lips and dies with great joy in thinking that in spite of everything she truly lives. And of course what lives in the play is her spirit, the realization of the presence of the love she has revealed throughout the play. [No character in the play dare say that her love is Christlike since there is a law in England at the time against using the name of God or Christ on the stage! Edgar is another image of the same love and the BBC production has him in his feigned madness wearing a crown of thorns—nudge, nudge! Most earlier critics acknowledge that this is the most Christian of the plays, though it is full of references to the pagan gods.] As Marjorie Garber in “Shakespeare After All” rightly points out, Lear and Cordelia image a reversed pieta, father holding his dead Idaughter on his lap.

The third artistic connection I saw was from the movie Risen. At the end of the movie when the risen Christ must leave those who love him dearly, for he has commissioned them to go out and spread the message, Jesus continually moves farther from them until he vanishes into this vision of beautiful, intense light. And one way of interpreting that as the movie more or less reveals is that we are to follow him, the same image as visible or understandable in the other two works, as the Roman Tribune does exactly that in walking out of the desert to the little Inn, then telling the story, and paying with his Tribune’s ring. Wow. In the movie the end is also in the beginning!

Follow up [pun intended].

When once the metaphor of following Christ to Heaven, or Beatrice to Christ as Dante should have done immediately long ago, I began to see how omnipresent the image of following really is.  For example in the liturgy for today (4/15/24] the Psalm quoted is from 119; the response is:  “Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord.”  Of course the word “follow” jumped out at me, so I went to 119 in the Grail book of psalms and reread Psalm 119with that image in mind.  All sorts of interesting things occurred throughout the Psalm:

“105 Your word is a lamp for my feet, 

and a light for my path.”

“101  I keep my feet from every evil path, 

to obey your word. 

102  I have not turned away from your decrees, 

which you yourself have taught me.”

“59 I have pondered my ways, 

and turned my steps to your decrees. 

60 I made haste; 

I did not delay to obey your commands.”

“35  Guide me in the path of your commands, 

for in them is my delight.”

“1  Blessed are those whose way is blameless, 

who walk in the law of the LORD! 

2  Blessed are those who keep his decrees! 

With all their hearts they seek him.”

It seemed to me, though I read through the Psalm quickly,  that the entire Psalm is a text for truly following the Lord/Christ [OT/NT].  It looks as though verse 176 ought to be at the beginning though having it at the end should remind us of the image of Christ as our shepherd, a confession as we leave the Psalm that we have strayed, and a plea that if we do  stray Christ might come for us, and the last thing it does is remind us of the importance of memory in our pilgrimage—Christ after all is risen, no matter how bleak it gets at times. Remember that! It’s a rich verse here, but then so are they all.

“176  I have strayed like a sheep; 

seek your servant, for I do not forget your commands.”

I can very easily see 119 as a handbook for the way to follow Christ.

The second thing below is the last part of Saint Augustine’s meditation for today.  Again with the image of following him in my mind I saw that what Augustine said is right at the heart of that.  Our hearts are restless until…how do we follow?  “Love, and you do it.”

Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord.

when you hear “Believe in Christ,” don’t imagine it’s enough for you to believe Christ, that is, to believe that the things Christ says are true; don’t imagine it’s enough for you to believe that Christ is himself the one whom God foretold through the prophets; but believe in Christ, that is, love Christ. It is when you have fulfilled this that nothing more will be required of you, because love is the fullness of the law (Rom 13:10). When you’ve believed in Christ like that, so that you have that kind of ardent love for Christ, see if you won’t be able to make these words your own: Who shall separate us from the love of God? (Rom 8:35). So don’t waste time wondering how to do what Christ commands; you cannot not do it if you love Christ. Love, and you do it.

Saint Augustine

Image: the Annunciation.8