La Vie En Rose: Edith Piaf - “Je vois la vie en rose…” (I see life in rosy hues)
Unchained Melody: The Righteous Brothers - “… lonely rivers sigh, wait for me, wait for me…”
In the Air Tonight: Phil Collins - “… if you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand…”
One of These Mornings: Patti LaBelle - “... it won't be very long, they will look for me, and I'll be gone.”
Moon Over Bourbon Street: Sting - “The brim of my hat hides the eyes of a beast, I’ve the face of a sinner, but the hands of a priest.”
Kid Fears: Indigo Girls - “Are you on fire from the years? What would you give for your kid fears?”
I Dreamed A Dream: Les Misérables - “… but there are dreams that cannot be, and there are storms we cannot weather…”
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: Warren Zevon - “It don’t matter if I get a little tired, I’ll sleep…”
Twilight Zone: Golden Earring - “Where am I to go now that I’ve gone too far? Soon you will come to know, when the bullet hits the bone.”
House of the Rising Sun: The Animals - “O mother, tell your children, not to do what I have done…”
O Fortuna: Carl Orff - “Sors immanis et inanis, rota tu volubilis status malus…” (Fate monstrous and empty, you whirling wheel you are malevolent...)
Have You Ever Seen the Rain: Creedence Clearwater Rival - “… there’s a calm before the storm - I know, it‘s been coming for sometime. When it‘s over, so they say, it‘ll rain a sunny day…”
Angel: Sarah McLachlan - “You are pulled from the wreckage of your silent reverie, you’re in the arms of the angel, may you find some comfort here.”
Secure Yourself: Indigo Girls - “Secure yourself to heaven, hold on tight the night has come, fasten up your earthly burdens, you have just begun…”
Navy Hymn - “Eternal Father, strong to save… Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, for those in peril…”
World Falls: Indigo Girls - “This world falls on me, dreams of immortality, every where I turn the beauty just keeps shaking me…”
I Will Always Love You: Parton/Huston - “Bitter sweet memories, that is all I am taking with me…”
Non, je ne regrette rien: Edith Piaf - “Balayées les amours, avec leurs trémolos, balayées pour toujours, je repars à zéro.” (I have wiped away my loves, and my troubles. Swept them all away. I am starting again from zero)
Dona nobis pacem
30.6.08
27.6.08
The still, small voice
do I ever really hear it?
Last First-day, one of my improbable friends - improbable only in that we are often world’s apart in our views, yet have found our correspondence mutually engaging and uplifting - asked me for my thoughts about this passage from Sayings of Light and Love, by St. John of the Cross:
See that you are not suddenly saddened by the adversities of thisworld, for you do not know the good they bring, being ordained in thejudgments of God for the everlasting joy of the elect.
She did not feel that she could embrace the notion that the adversities of this world are “ordained… for the everlasting joy of the elect.”
I read her mail after I got home from meeting, and wrote back to beg patience for my reply, given all that I had to do that day. Unfortunately, the rest of this week has been very trying, and I only got around to giving her a partial response yesterday. This entry incorporates and amplifies that response, and hopefully will, as I always hope of these entries, clarify my own thoughts on the subject by the simple act of trapping and organizing them in print; for I have had bees in my head my whole life, and, eschewing as I now do the expedient of a well-peated, single malt smoking, the only way to stop their buzzing is to write them into somnolence.
What immediately came to mind when I read the passage above was a Thomist explanation I read a few years ago about why evolution by random mutation is not a real issue for Catholics: what I call the "God as Elmer Fudd explanation." It incorporates random behavior into the Aristotelian doctrine of the Four Causes; in fact, it links deterministic chaos theory to Divine Providence. The explanation simply states that Divine Providence is like the discharge from the hunter's shotgun. The dispersal of shot is both random (the trajectory of any given pellet cannot be predicted) and constrained (there is a dispersal envelope with calculable boundary values), yet as long as the aim and timing are true, and Daffy is within range, some of the pellets will hit him; so, too, Divine Providence (the efficient cause), while leading inexorably to the Divine End, incorporates randomness in its action: Thus, the truly random mutations driving evolution nevertheless occur within the logos of creation, and tend to the Divine End. So, in this light, it seemed and seems to me, the adversities of life, even the ones we do not bring upon ourselves, are all ordained somehow to the good, unless we choose to make them excuses for turning away from God. What John of the Cross is saying, I think, is simply this: If we elect to take up the Cross, we have no cause to hiss “you’re dessssspicable” when we or those we love take a load of shot. Even in the most drastic case of the good person who dies young, Isaiah 57:1-2 should come to mind:
Observe how the righteous has perished, and no one takes it to heart; righteous men are being taken away, and no one takes notice. For the righteous has been taken away from the presence of unrighteousness; his burial will be in peace, he has been taken away from their midst. (Septuagint, New English Translation)
Shakespeare understood this:
By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once: we owe God a death: I'll ne'er bear a base mind: an't be my destiny, so; an't be not, so: no man is too good to serve's prince; and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next. (King Henry IV, part II, Act III, Scene II)
Christians, too, serve a Prince, and let it go which way it will. This is what passed through my mind after meeting, but I wanted to think about it some more before I wrote back to my friend; then, the steamroller showed up at my door. However, this turned out to be a good thing, for Third-day evening at vespers, as I went up to the upper yard to read, pray and watch the sunset, I’d like to believe I was guided to another insight into this matter: as I rooted through my messy study to pick up Douglas V. Steere’s Prayer and Worship, I spotted the same essay, The Nine Beatitudes, by the Russian Orthodox Archpriest Seraphim Slobodskoy, that had spoken to me about my broken spirit; the thought “You haven’t finished reading this” came to mind. I picked it up and carried it with me into the upper yard. Oddly and amazingly, the commentary concludes with a “Discussion on the Meaning of Evil.”
… this intertwining of evil into the plan for the management of the world did not appear to be some sort of belated addition for the correction of creation. The intertwining of evil was provided for in the act of the eternal will of God, in which was determined the creation of the world. For God is the eternal today! His foresight extends to eternity. It functions always and without interruption. (Missionary Leaflet #E29b, Holy Protection Russian Orthodox Church)
Karma mechanically rewards good and punishes evil acts; it is supremely indifferent, and one’s only choice is to escape from its field of influence. It is this escapist mentality that eventually led me out of the Theravada. We Christians - in whatever outward form we take - have elected not to run away, but to serve the Prince of Peace, and as John of the Cross tells us, however much it is beyond our fathoming we must trust that the trials of this life are ordered to the final Good End.
18.6.08
Not so much as a peep
of thanks.
Brushing my teeth a second time this morning, after a late and rebellious breakfast of bacon, dippy eggs, sautéed scallions with dill, spicy habanera hash browns, and homemade sourdough toast lathered in butter, I heard a bird chirping outside at a level somewhat lower than my head (I only occasionally adopt the “live-to-eat approach” to dining, but when I do so, I do it up well; and I could have waited for lunch and had hot pastrami, chicken liver, Bermuda onion, and sour cream on rye, for I have been craving that sandwich for weeks now, so I do not feel terribly guilty about breakfast). I was at the basement sink at the time, so that meant either the bird was one of those carnivorous, tunneling starlings I sometimes nightmare about, or that another local fledgling had fallen into a window well.
There are four about the house: two with a window opening into the basement, one opening into the garage, and one which simply has a hole through the cinder block for the dryer exhaust. All four have plastic dome covers, flush with the ground and screwed into plastic anchors set in the brickwork mortar; unfortunately, all four domes are damaged from careless lawn mowing and weed whacking, and every couple of years a baby bird manages to flutter through one of the holes in the plastic and trap itself.
Every couple of years, too, I think about removing the covers altogether, for no matter how careful I am at lawn work, I constantly gnaw away at the things; yet, I never do. In fact, really strong winds occasionally will work through the holes to finish the job of demolishing a dome, and I invariably replace it, knowing full well that by the next year it will be as scarred and incomplete as the sun-clouded one around the corner. I keep replacing them because they are important elements in my home’s percussion section.
I love the house-sounds during storms. The roof is the main element, of course, providing a basso profundo drone that counter-intuitively permeates the house from above: it rolls full-force down the stairs into the living room and along the hall into the rooms of the first floor, joining in each its ceiling-muted recapitulation. The three awnings add their metallic voice to the din, seemingly louder in decibels than the roof, though surely less in total power output: the large-slatted awnings outside the kitchen and living room doors amplify their beats in the open-sided resonance chambers they form with the concrete porches, so they dominate in those rooms; the smaller awning outside the bathroom window is sharper and tinny, therefore distinctive enough to be picked out of the mass of sound. On those days when the wind is howling its own contribution and slanting the rain, the selected section of windows will also add its silicate beat, but it is the well domes that routinely round out the barrage of sound - loud plastic cracklings, almost like hundreds of tiny wood slats slapping each other like vodka-crazed Cossacks with impossibly fast hands.
No, I am not about to get rid of the window-well covers, even if I do have to remove them every so often to rescue a bird; sure enough, there was a baby wren staring up at me when I put my eye to the ragged hole in the plastic over the “dryer well.” I removed the cover and went about my business, but an hour later I could still hear it chirping on the other side of the foundation. I could hear another voice higher up, too, at ground level, and when I went back outside there was the mother, perched on the well-rim, either encouraging her baby to fly, or damaging forever its self-esteem (“You were slipped into the nest! You can’t possibly be from one of my eggs!”).
Since the baby was clearly still in the well, I turned around and went into the garage to get my leather welding gauntlets: I don’t know if mother birds really will abandon a chick with human scent on it, but I never take the chance; too, who knows where its claws have been. Of course, it wasn’t about to let me pick it up, and sure enough, there was plenty of room between the wall of the well and the ground for it to scoot under. I plugged up the empty gaps with old rags, left it alone, and when I heard the mother come back, I went out and plugged the last one up also: it stared at me fiercely the whole time; but that was alright, for I cursed it roundly as I hung head down in into the three-foot well.
Eventually, I caught it in my gloved hands and lifted it out into the back yard. It immediately fluttered across the grass and disappeared into one of the drainage holes that pierce the rear retaining wall, where the snakes hang out. The mother quickly alighted in front of the hole and started chirping with far more agitation than before: this time I am certain her message was not one of gentle encouragement. Eventually, it came out, and eventually it managed to fly to the top of the wall; that done, the mother and child disappeared into the hedges at the base of the backyard hill, where it seems the nest is.
Pretty much the whole time this was going on, the neighborhood hawk floated about overhead. I hope the mother wren has other chicks.
Brushing my teeth a second time this morning, after a late and rebellious breakfast of bacon, dippy eggs, sautéed scallions with dill, spicy habanera hash browns, and homemade sourdough toast lathered in butter, I heard a bird chirping outside at a level somewhat lower than my head (I only occasionally adopt the “live-to-eat approach” to dining, but when I do so, I do it up well; and I could have waited for lunch and had hot pastrami, chicken liver, Bermuda onion, and sour cream on rye, for I have been craving that sandwich for weeks now, so I do not feel terribly guilty about breakfast). I was at the basement sink at the time, so that meant either the bird was one of those carnivorous, tunneling starlings I sometimes nightmare about, or that another local fledgling had fallen into a window well.
There are four about the house: two with a window opening into the basement, one opening into the garage, and one which simply has a hole through the cinder block for the dryer exhaust. All four have plastic dome covers, flush with the ground and screwed into plastic anchors set in the brickwork mortar; unfortunately, all four domes are damaged from careless lawn mowing and weed whacking, and every couple of years a baby bird manages to flutter through one of the holes in the plastic and trap itself.
Every couple of years, too, I think about removing the covers altogether, for no matter how careful I am at lawn work, I constantly gnaw away at the things; yet, I never do. In fact, really strong winds occasionally will work through the holes to finish the job of demolishing a dome, and I invariably replace it, knowing full well that by the next year it will be as scarred and incomplete as the sun-clouded one around the corner. I keep replacing them because they are important elements in my home’s percussion section.
I love the house-sounds during storms. The roof is the main element, of course, providing a basso profundo drone that counter-intuitively permeates the house from above: it rolls full-force down the stairs into the living room and along the hall into the rooms of the first floor, joining in each its ceiling-muted recapitulation. The three awnings add their metallic voice to the din, seemingly louder in decibels than the roof, though surely less in total power output: the large-slatted awnings outside the kitchen and living room doors amplify their beats in the open-sided resonance chambers they form with the concrete porches, so they dominate in those rooms; the smaller awning outside the bathroom window is sharper and tinny, therefore distinctive enough to be picked out of the mass of sound. On those days when the wind is howling its own contribution and slanting the rain, the selected section of windows will also add its silicate beat, but it is the well domes that routinely round out the barrage of sound - loud plastic cracklings, almost like hundreds of tiny wood slats slapping each other like vodka-crazed Cossacks with impossibly fast hands.
No, I am not about to get rid of the window-well covers, even if I do have to remove them every so often to rescue a bird; sure enough, there was a baby wren staring up at me when I put my eye to the ragged hole in the plastic over the “dryer well.” I removed the cover and went about my business, but an hour later I could still hear it chirping on the other side of the foundation. I could hear another voice higher up, too, at ground level, and when I went back outside there was the mother, perched on the well-rim, either encouraging her baby to fly, or damaging forever its self-esteem (“You were slipped into the nest! You can’t possibly be from one of my eggs!”).
Since the baby was clearly still in the well, I turned around and went into the garage to get my leather welding gauntlets: I don’t know if mother birds really will abandon a chick with human scent on it, but I never take the chance; too, who knows where its claws have been. Of course, it wasn’t about to let me pick it up, and sure enough, there was plenty of room between the wall of the well and the ground for it to scoot under. I plugged up the empty gaps with old rags, left it alone, and when I heard the mother come back, I went out and plugged the last one up also: it stared at me fiercely the whole time; but that was alright, for I cursed it roundly as I hung head down in into the three-foot well.
Eventually, I caught it in my gloved hands and lifted it out into the back yard. It immediately fluttered across the grass and disappeared into one of the drainage holes that pierce the rear retaining wall, where the snakes hang out. The mother quickly alighted in front of the hole and started chirping with far more agitation than before: this time I am certain her message was not one of gentle encouragement. Eventually, it came out, and eventually it managed to fly to the top of the wall; that done, the mother and child disappeared into the hedges at the base of the backyard hill, where it seems the nest is.
Pretty much the whole time this was going on, the neighborhood hawk floated about overhead. I hope the mother wren has other chicks.
11.6.08
A Broken Spirit
It seems that I am making some small amount of progress; ein bisschen, as the Germans would say.
A few days after Mother‘s Day, my dear friend of thirty-three years called, in response to a worried phone message and an e-mail from me that day, to let me know that the Florida wildfires (I had only learned of them that morning) had only caused her worried nights. My fears allayed, we moved on as usual to talk of many things: Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax-- Of cabbages--and kings--; also, as usual, the time passed far too quickly for me, and I said my reluctant “good night.” The next morning she e-mailed me to thank me again for my concern, to tell me that it was good to talk with me again, and to let me know that she “sensed a ‘tiredness’ in” me: tiredness as a sign of infection by one or more French diseases of the soul, rather than the physical sort.
Someday, I will learn that 1100 miles and a mediocre phone connection cannot protect me from her insight.
She was and is, as usual, right; ay, there’s the rub: I live in the usual world, and remain still my usual self. I believe - emphatically, as a truth of divine revelation - that “human progress” is an illusion. Behind the GUIs, beyond the tunnel diodes and CMOS, despite the claimed reductive certainties of scientism’s terribles simplificateurs and the obfuscating certainty of postmodernism’s denial of certainty, the new Ozimandias’s remain clueless:
All things are hard: man cannot explain them by word. The eye is not filled with seeing, neither is the ear filled with hearing. What is it that hath been? the same thing that shall be. What is it that hath been done? the same that shall be done. Nothing under the sun is new, neither is any man able to say: Behold this is new: for it hath already gone before in the ages that were before us. There is no remembrance of former things: nor indeed of those things which hereafter are to come, shall there be any remembrance with them that shall be in the latter end. (Eccles. 1: 8-11)
Two thousand years ago, one of the Empire’s “public intellectuals,” Pliny the Elder, bemoaned the huge trade deficit with India: the Greco-Romans could not get enough of things Eastern, and squandered specie in an unreciprocated trade. Two thousand years ago, the plant silphium sold for its weight in gold, and would soon be extinct: it was a potent abortifacient, and with all the sacred sex going on it couldn’t be cultivated to meet its demand. For those who couldn’t afford it, and were afraid of the other “remedies” to unwanted life, the simple expedient of infanticide was practiced with a casualness that would make a utilitarian bioethicist proud. The nobility of suicide and the duty to die was urged upon those who made it past childhood, but developed the misfortune of being ill or old without money. Two thousand years ago, Flavius Josephus wrote of the hatred between Nabataeans (Arabs) and Jews: the Romans were discovering that their entanglement in the Middle East was a costly one. Two thousand years ago, too, the Empire was embroiled in an unending war with the Parthians - the ancestors of the Iranians and Iraqis.
Yes, I am living in the pitiful rerun of the 1st century, and it gets me down now and again. I wrote back and shared my thoughts with her: She wrote back and, after a more catch-up material on events in FL, she told me flat out that she sensed that my spirit was broken: “I can only explain what I feel- which is a broken spirit.”
I was stunned: Me, a broken spirit? I spent the day composing my letter of protest: Sure, I do not doubt that a new darkness is falling upon the world, but I am still the cheerful pessimist you have known and loved!
But then in the evening, I took an Orthodox commentary on the Beatitudes with me into the upper yard to watch the sunset, and what was on the very first page, in the commentary on the First Beatitude?
“The Word of God says, A sacrifice to God is a broken spirit; a heart broken and humbled God will not despise.”
I really should learn to trust my friend’s intuition about me. I truly have been trying to cultivate my abandonment to God’s will, and no small portion of our phone conversation had touched upon this concept, but my friend being such a mover and shaker in the healthcare world it is possible that she sensed the feeling in me correctly, yet drew the wrong conclusions.
I really am a cheerful pessimist, and regard optimists with suspicion:
An optimist believes this is the best of all possible worlds: the pessimist agrees.
Now that’s my kind of joke!
Of course, the smile it brings doesn’t last very long, and it doesn’t take much to get my Irish up when confronted by secularists who distort the findings of science to attack the Faith on the one hand, and Christians who distort Scriptures to undermine the Faith on the other. Like I said, ein bisschen. Maybe I won’t feel so tired as I learn to be more humble, and simply accept that the misery than is coming down on the world is for a purpose. Then I can take my place in the ranks of the rearguard with a smile.
A few days after Mother‘s Day, my dear friend of thirty-three years called, in response to a worried phone message and an e-mail from me that day, to let me know that the Florida wildfires (I had only learned of them that morning) had only caused her worried nights. My fears allayed, we moved on as usual to talk of many things: Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax-- Of cabbages--and kings--; also, as usual, the time passed far too quickly for me, and I said my reluctant “good night.” The next morning she e-mailed me to thank me again for my concern, to tell me that it was good to talk with me again, and to let me know that she “sensed a ‘tiredness’ in” me: tiredness as a sign of infection by one or more French diseases of the soul, rather than the physical sort.
Someday, I will learn that 1100 miles and a mediocre phone connection cannot protect me from her insight.
She was and is, as usual, right; ay, there’s the rub: I live in the usual world, and remain still my usual self. I believe - emphatically, as a truth of divine revelation - that “human progress” is an illusion. Behind the GUIs, beyond the tunnel diodes and CMOS, despite the claimed reductive certainties of scientism’s terribles simplificateurs and the obfuscating certainty of postmodernism’s denial of certainty, the new Ozimandias’s remain clueless:
All things are hard: man cannot explain them by word. The eye is not filled with seeing, neither is the ear filled with hearing. What is it that hath been? the same thing that shall be. What is it that hath been done? the same that shall be done. Nothing under the sun is new, neither is any man able to say: Behold this is new: for it hath already gone before in the ages that were before us. There is no remembrance of former things: nor indeed of those things which hereafter are to come, shall there be any remembrance with them that shall be in the latter end. (Eccles. 1: 8-11)
Two thousand years ago, one of the Empire’s “public intellectuals,” Pliny the Elder, bemoaned the huge trade deficit with India: the Greco-Romans could not get enough of things Eastern, and squandered specie in an unreciprocated trade. Two thousand years ago, the plant silphium sold for its weight in gold, and would soon be extinct: it was a potent abortifacient, and with all the sacred sex going on it couldn’t be cultivated to meet its demand. For those who couldn’t afford it, and were afraid of the other “remedies” to unwanted life, the simple expedient of infanticide was practiced with a casualness that would make a utilitarian bioethicist proud. The nobility of suicide and the duty to die was urged upon those who made it past childhood, but developed the misfortune of being ill or old without money. Two thousand years ago, Flavius Josephus wrote of the hatred between Nabataeans (Arabs) and Jews: the Romans were discovering that their entanglement in the Middle East was a costly one. Two thousand years ago, too, the Empire was embroiled in an unending war with the Parthians - the ancestors of the Iranians and Iraqis.
Yes, I am living in the pitiful rerun of the 1st century, and it gets me down now and again. I wrote back and shared my thoughts with her: She wrote back and, after a more catch-up material on events in FL, she told me flat out that she sensed that my spirit was broken: “I can only explain what I feel- which is a broken spirit.”
I was stunned: Me, a broken spirit? I spent the day composing my letter of protest: Sure, I do not doubt that a new darkness is falling upon the world, but I am still the cheerful pessimist you have known and loved!
But then in the evening, I took an Orthodox commentary on the Beatitudes with me into the upper yard to watch the sunset, and what was on the very first page, in the commentary on the First Beatitude?
“The Word of God says, A sacrifice to God is a broken spirit; a heart broken and humbled God will not despise.”
I really should learn to trust my friend’s intuition about me. I truly have been trying to cultivate my abandonment to God’s will, and no small portion of our phone conversation had touched upon this concept, but my friend being such a mover and shaker in the healthcare world it is possible that she sensed the feeling in me correctly, yet drew the wrong conclusions.
I really am a cheerful pessimist, and regard optimists with suspicion:
An optimist believes this is the best of all possible worlds: the pessimist agrees.
Now that’s my kind of joke!
Of course, the smile it brings doesn’t last very long, and it doesn’t take much to get my Irish up when confronted by secularists who distort the findings of science to attack the Faith on the one hand, and Christians who distort Scriptures to undermine the Faith on the other. Like I said, ein bisschen. Maybe I won’t feel so tired as I learn to be more humble, and simply accept that the misery than is coming down on the world is for a purpose. Then I can take my place in the ranks of the rearguard with a smile.
31.5.08
Mackerel sky
There was a stunning sky fifth-day morning that had me outside into the brisk air as soon as I could brew my tea. I opened the window to my office, put my laptop speakers on the sill, a Missa de Angelis on the media player, and a threadbare Woolly Pully on me; then, I sat in the upper yard watching the clouds race by over head to the northeast. I have seen many such skies over the years, but this one was gorgeous. The puffy altocumuli marched across the aerial field not like hoplites in a phalanx, but as Roman legionaries in the assault: in ordered ranks, but with plenty of brilliant blue sword-room around each. Perhaps a more Friendly description is order, though: it looked like a blue-earth field of well-spaced cauliflower was sliding to the northeast above my head. Mass over, I sat silent for two or three whiles with the rising sun warming my back, then listened to the birds for a bit, hoping God would convince me once and for all from my malarial dualism.
It comes and goes. I have never really had a problem with Isaiah 45:7. In the Septuagint, this verse reads
Εγω κυριος ο θεος και ουκ εστιν ετι εγω ο κατασκευασας φως και ποιησας σκοτος ο ποιων ειρηνην και κτιζων κακα εγω κυριος ο θεος ο ποιων παντα ταυτα
I am the Lord God, and there is not any more. I am the one carefully preparing light, and I made darkness; the one making peace, and the one creating bad things. I am the Lord God, the one doing all these things.
The Vulgate has
ego Dominus et non est alter formans lucem et creans tenebras faciens pacem et creans malum ego Dominus faciens omnia haec
Douay-Rheims renders this thus:
I am the Lord and there is none else: I form the light, and create darkness, I make peace and create evil: I the Lord that do all these things.
It explains the verse, following Haydock, by asserting “The evils of afflictions and punishments, but not the evil of sin” are what God is declaiming here.
The New American Bible has
I am the Lord, there is no other; I form the light, and create the darkness, I make well-being and create woe; I, the Lord, do all these things.
It says “God permits evil for the sake of greater good.”
The Hebrew Ra` is variously translated from evil to calamity, so the Septuagint translation of “bad things” is a nice catch-all, I think. The Haydock explanation has always seemed unnecessary to me, and the NAB’s is just plain silly and misleading: neither ktizon nor creans suffers “permit” as a translation. One more example of a liberal commentary watering down the Faith.
I just see no reason for all the hubbub; at least, not if one accepts that creation is ongoing. God is creating or sustaining Creation each and every instant. Moreover, God “created all things that they might be” (Wis. 1:14), and Creation is utterly ab alio and not a se. So, in a “the buck stops here” sort of way, God clearly creates “bad things.” Nor has been too much a stretch for me to see the “tough love” God of the Old Testament. In any case, the alternatives aren’t better at all: Karma is pitiless - a fact that Western fans of eastern spiritualities prefer to forget, and the Bhagavad Gita is all about Krishna helping Arjuna get over his qualms about slaughtering his relatives; the Tao is also without mercy; one can always accept that all human endeavor is precisely as meaningful as that of the dinosaurs, but I have yet to meet a consistent atheist - every one I have ever met, including myself in mirrors past, has lived etsi Deus daretur when it comes to getting up in the morning and non daretur only when it comes to moral issues.
I think Genesis 1:3-5 says it all for Christians:
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
It has been understood since antiquity that Day and Night do not here have a physical reference, and the New Testament metaphorically connotes night with death, immorality and evil. God did not see that the darkness was good - only the light. Good cannot exist without its counter, and every culture has realized this. When I put the cosmic yin and yang behind me and accepted that Deus caritas est, the Night of Genesis became the necessary metaphysical black hole that allows Good and freewill to exist. It has to exist, else we cannot choose to love the Good God. Unfortunately, we can choose also to love ourselves, and with each such choice over God or our neighbors we move closer to that terrible event horizon. Fortunately, aside from that asymptotic reference point of Night, the rest of the metaphysical reality we sojourn in is in the Day. And it has been the Gospel Day for two thousand years. It should be easy to move about without hurting each other.
But it isn’t. I tell myself that with each soul that slips over the event horizon, the pull of the Night grows stronger. But how can that matter against the infinitely Good pull of God? Is our self-will so strong? Perhaps. But in my blacker moments, when I read about futile care theory, the resurgence of infanticide in the West, and quality-of-life protocols and “the duty to die,” I feel in my bones that Good and Evil may be eternally and equally matched. It may matter still for us individually which side we choose; but the War will never cease, and in 21st century America the Night is falling.
Mackerel sky, mackerel sky - never long wet, never long dry. It is gloomy today, and raining. Tomorrow is first-day, thank the good Lord.
It comes and goes. I have never really had a problem with Isaiah 45:7. In the Septuagint, this verse reads
Εγω κυριος ο θεος και ουκ εστιν ετι εγω ο κατασκευασας φως και ποιησας σκοτος ο ποιων ειρηνην και κτιζων κακα εγω κυριος ο θεος ο ποιων παντα ταυτα
I am the Lord God, and there is not any more. I am the one carefully preparing light, and I made darkness; the one making peace, and the one creating bad things. I am the Lord God, the one doing all these things.
The Vulgate has
ego Dominus et non est alter formans lucem et creans tenebras faciens pacem et creans malum ego Dominus faciens omnia haec
Douay-Rheims renders this thus:
I am the Lord and there is none else: I form the light, and create darkness, I make peace and create evil: I the Lord that do all these things.
It explains the verse, following Haydock, by asserting “The evils of afflictions and punishments, but not the evil of sin” are what God is declaiming here.
The New American Bible has
I am the Lord, there is no other; I form the light, and create the darkness, I make well-being and create woe; I, the Lord, do all these things.
It says “God permits evil for the sake of greater good.”
The Hebrew Ra` is variously translated from evil to calamity, so the Septuagint translation of “bad things” is a nice catch-all, I think. The Haydock explanation has always seemed unnecessary to me, and the NAB’s is just plain silly and misleading: neither ktizon nor creans suffers “permit” as a translation. One more example of a liberal commentary watering down the Faith.
I just see no reason for all the hubbub; at least, not if one accepts that creation is ongoing. God is creating or sustaining Creation each and every instant. Moreover, God “created all things that they might be” (Wis. 1:14), and Creation is utterly ab alio and not a se. So, in a “the buck stops here” sort of way, God clearly creates “bad things.” Nor has been too much a stretch for me to see the “tough love” God of the Old Testament. In any case, the alternatives aren’t better at all: Karma is pitiless - a fact that Western fans of eastern spiritualities prefer to forget, and the Bhagavad Gita is all about Krishna helping Arjuna get over his qualms about slaughtering his relatives; the Tao is also without mercy; one can always accept that all human endeavor is precisely as meaningful as that of the dinosaurs, but I have yet to meet a consistent atheist - every one I have ever met, including myself in mirrors past, has lived etsi Deus daretur when it comes to getting up in the morning and non daretur only when it comes to moral issues.
I think Genesis 1:3-5 says it all for Christians:
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
It has been understood since antiquity that Day and Night do not here have a physical reference, and the New Testament metaphorically connotes night with death, immorality and evil. God did not see that the darkness was good - only the light. Good cannot exist without its counter, and every culture has realized this. When I put the cosmic yin and yang behind me and accepted that Deus caritas est, the Night of Genesis became the necessary metaphysical black hole that allows Good and freewill to exist. It has to exist, else we cannot choose to love the Good God. Unfortunately, we can choose also to love ourselves, and with each such choice over God or our neighbors we move closer to that terrible event horizon. Fortunately, aside from that asymptotic reference point of Night, the rest of the metaphysical reality we sojourn in is in the Day. And it has been the Gospel Day for two thousand years. It should be easy to move about without hurting each other.
But it isn’t. I tell myself that with each soul that slips over the event horizon, the pull of the Night grows stronger. But how can that matter against the infinitely Good pull of God? Is our self-will so strong? Perhaps. But in my blacker moments, when I read about futile care theory, the resurgence of infanticide in the West, and quality-of-life protocols and “the duty to die,” I feel in my bones that Good and Evil may be eternally and equally matched. It may matter still for us individually which side we choose; but the War will never cease, and in 21st century America the Night is falling.
Mackerel sky, mackerel sky - never long wet, never long dry. It is gloomy today, and raining. Tomorrow is first-day, thank the good Lord.
23.5.08
Beauty Revisited
On t'a fait connaître, ô homme, ce qui est bien; Et ce que l'Éternel demande de toi, C'est que tu pratiques la justice, Que tu aimes la miséricorde, Et que tu marches humblement avec ton Dieu. Michée 6:8
I came across some years ago in my study of the religion of Shinto some passages from the main priest of the Tsubaki sect which speak, I think, to the Light Within:
The Spirit of Great Nature may be a flower, may be the beauty of the mountains, the pure snow, the soft rains or the gentle breeze. Kannagara means being in communion with these forms of beauty and so with the highest level of experiences of life. When people respond to the silent and provocative beauty of the natural order, they are aware of kannagara. When they respond in life in a similar way, by following ways "according to the kami," they are expressing kannagara in their lives. They are living according to the natural flow of the universe and will benefit and develop by so doing. To be fully alive is to have an aesthetic perception of life because a major part of the world's goodness lies in its often unspeakable beauty.
And,
This is why Shinto is associated with sacred spaces, originally places of either striking natural beauty, or places that had an atmosphere that could strike awe in the heart of the observer. Shinto has no need of formalized systems of ethics which instruct people how to behave. People who are trying to express kannagara will be living "according to the kami" and therefore will not require detailed regulations. If man were in need of detailed rules, claimed Motoori Norinaga, he would be little better than an animal that needs to be trained and retrained in order to behave properly. Humankind is surely beyond this type of morality. Beauty, Truth and Goodness are essentially related and when beauty is perceived, truth and goodness follow close behind.
Through participating in the spirit of kannagara, human beings, earth and heaven can achieve harmonious union. When their relationship is perfectly harmonious, the ideal universe comes into being.
The emphasis on sacred spaces and beauty struck a resonating chord in me. It took me a layer or two of time, but I finally was able to discover just what in my memory was sounding the note. In his essay “The Creative Mind” (Science and Human Values, 1956), Jacob Bronowski wrote:
When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought: beauty, he said, is ‘unity in variety.’ Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature – or more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge’s phrase, for unity in variety. Each in its own way looks for likenesses under the variety of human experience.
And isn’t this also what religion strives for, or should? Isn't unity in variety the goal of life in the Gospel Order? Certainly all the extant mystical traditions seek union with God, or the Godhead, Ground-of-all-Being, the All-in-All, however one wants to name it. What was the purpose of the Eleusinian Mysteries, so far as we know, but the identification of the initiate with Demeter-Kore? What is the search in physics for a Unified Field Theory but a search for Beauty? What does a Friends' meeting for business seek but a beautiful solution to the problem at hand?
Shinto is right and our aesthetic sense should be our guide, so long as we recognize that true beauty is neither skin deep nor in the eye of the beholder, but at the very core of life. I think that Jesus must have been unspeakably beautiful on Mount Tabor, and that Western Christianity went wrong when it made the Resurrection the central mystery of the faith and minimzed the importance of the Transfiguration. I think, too, that silent waiting is the best way to let the Light Within illuminate all the beauty that still exists around us.
I came across some years ago in my study of the religion of Shinto some passages from the main priest of the Tsubaki sect which speak, I think, to the Light Within:
The Spirit of Great Nature may be a flower, may be the beauty of the mountains, the pure snow, the soft rains or the gentle breeze. Kannagara means being in communion with these forms of beauty and so with the highest level of experiences of life. When people respond to the silent and provocative beauty of the natural order, they are aware of kannagara. When they respond in life in a similar way, by following ways "according to the kami," they are expressing kannagara in their lives. They are living according to the natural flow of the universe and will benefit and develop by so doing. To be fully alive is to have an aesthetic perception of life because a major part of the world's goodness lies in its often unspeakable beauty.
And,
This is why Shinto is associated with sacred spaces, originally places of either striking natural beauty, or places that had an atmosphere that could strike awe in the heart of the observer. Shinto has no need of formalized systems of ethics which instruct people how to behave. People who are trying to express kannagara will be living "according to the kami" and therefore will not require detailed regulations. If man were in need of detailed rules, claimed Motoori Norinaga, he would be little better than an animal that needs to be trained and retrained in order to behave properly. Humankind is surely beyond this type of morality. Beauty, Truth and Goodness are essentially related and when beauty is perceived, truth and goodness follow close behind.
Through participating in the spirit of kannagara, human beings, earth and heaven can achieve harmonious union. When their relationship is perfectly harmonious, the ideal universe comes into being.
The emphasis on sacred spaces and beauty struck a resonating chord in me. It took me a layer or two of time, but I finally was able to discover just what in my memory was sounding the note. In his essay “The Creative Mind” (Science and Human Values, 1956), Jacob Bronowski wrote:
When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought: beauty, he said, is ‘unity in variety.’ Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature – or more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge’s phrase, for unity in variety. Each in its own way looks for likenesses under the variety of human experience.
And isn’t this also what religion strives for, or should? Isn't unity in variety the goal of life in the Gospel Order? Certainly all the extant mystical traditions seek union with God, or the Godhead, Ground-of-all-Being, the All-in-All, however one wants to name it. What was the purpose of the Eleusinian Mysteries, so far as we know, but the identification of the initiate with Demeter-Kore? What is the search in physics for a Unified Field Theory but a search for Beauty? What does a Friends' meeting for business seek but a beautiful solution to the problem at hand?
Shinto is right and our aesthetic sense should be our guide, so long as we recognize that true beauty is neither skin deep nor in the eye of the beholder, but at the very core of life. I think that Jesus must have been unspeakably beautiful on Mount Tabor, and that Western Christianity went wrong when it made the Resurrection the central mystery of the faith and minimzed the importance of the Transfiguration. I think, too, that silent waiting is the best way to let the Light Within illuminate all the beauty that still exists around us.
21.5.08
Darkness is falling
ever faster.
I can see its progress now in the smallest things. Inocula satani that, rather than create resistances to disease, promote tacit acceptance of the Great Lie: nothing matters.
A week ago today, I watched a young boy die: not in real life, but on TV. I saw that a program about the Minoans was on PBS and decided to watch it. I am a sucker for Minoan studies, and have been since high school. I have never bought into the gylanic paradise fantasies promoted by the Gimbutas crowd - these utopian visions have routinely ignored the evidence of Minoan child sacrifice and cannibalism -but it is impossible to look at those vibrant frescoes and not feel the pulse of life thrumming in the air over the millennia; even the architectual lines of the temple complex at Knossos are uplifting. Just as I never pass up a Bruce Dern movie, I simply had to watch this show.
The show was a Secrets of the Dead episode making the case that the destruction of Minoan Crete by tsunami was the source of the Atlantis story: The tsunami itself was generated by a volcanic cataclysm some seventy miles away on the island of Thera (now Akrotiri). This theory has been around for years, but recent work on the debris fallout suggested that the Thera explosion makes Krakatoa look like an Earth fart, and this in turn prompted a fresh look at the Cretan coastline for tsunami evidence. It was found, I believe the case has been well made that the Middle Minoan period came to a watery end.
Secrets of the Dead is not a science lecture, however; it is an entertainment show. As such, it features reenactments of past events; in this case it used computer-generated imagery and actors to recreate the last moments of a Minoan village as the massive tidal wave swept over it. But it could not be satisifed with mere imagery, nor leave the viewers alone with their imaginations: It had to put real death on the screen. In the middle of this story of an ancient tragedy, the footage of a lone boy on a beach being swept to his death by the Indonesian tsumani was inserted.
I would like to believe that the trivialization of that boy's death was gratuitous, but I know that it is just one more inoculation against human dignity. It is the next step beyond violent video games, CSI cadavers, and the Swiss thanatoriums. The god of this world will not be satisfied until blood sports once again fill our arenas.
I can see its progress now in the smallest things. Inocula satani that, rather than create resistances to disease, promote tacit acceptance of the Great Lie: nothing matters.
A week ago today, I watched a young boy die: not in real life, but on TV. I saw that a program about the Minoans was on PBS and decided to watch it. I am a sucker for Minoan studies, and have been since high school. I have never bought into the gylanic paradise fantasies promoted by the Gimbutas crowd - these utopian visions have routinely ignored the evidence of Minoan child sacrifice and cannibalism -but it is impossible to look at those vibrant frescoes and not feel the pulse of life thrumming in the air over the millennia; even the architectual lines of the temple complex at Knossos are uplifting. Just as I never pass up a Bruce Dern movie, I simply had to watch this show.
The show was a Secrets of the Dead episode making the case that the destruction of Minoan Crete by tsunami was the source of the Atlantis story: The tsunami itself was generated by a volcanic cataclysm some seventy miles away on the island of Thera (now Akrotiri). This theory has been around for years, but recent work on the debris fallout suggested that the Thera explosion makes Krakatoa look like an Earth fart, and this in turn prompted a fresh look at the Cretan coastline for tsunami evidence. It was found, I believe the case has been well made that the Middle Minoan period came to a watery end.
Secrets of the Dead is not a science lecture, however; it is an entertainment show. As such, it features reenactments of past events; in this case it used computer-generated imagery and actors to recreate the last moments of a Minoan village as the massive tidal wave swept over it. But it could not be satisifed with mere imagery, nor leave the viewers alone with their imaginations: It had to put real death on the screen. In the middle of this story of an ancient tragedy, the footage of a lone boy on a beach being swept to his death by the Indonesian tsumani was inserted.
I would like to believe that the trivialization of that boy's death was gratuitous, but I know that it is just one more inoculation against human dignity. It is the next step beyond violent video games, CSI cadavers, and the Swiss thanatoriums. The god of this world will not be satisfied until blood sports once again fill our arenas.
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