Last few books of 2020 are arriving today: Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Merton on contemplative prayer, and Fr. Devin Roza’s Fulfilled in Christ, which explores typology in the sacraments. For Christmas I also received the third volume of Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth, and will be saving it for Lent. To fill the gaps I’ve been dipping back into Joseph Conrad. At some point in the past, I shelled out a few bucks for his complete works on the Kindle so he’s something of a go-to: The Shadow-Line, which was pretty good and The Rover, which I’ve just started.

Somewhere in these unending wastes of delirium is a lost child, speaking of Long Ago in the language of wounds. To-morrow, perhaps, he will come to himself in Heaven. But here Grief turns her silence, neither in this direction, nor in that, nor for any reason. And her coldness now is on earth forever. — Auden, For the Time Being I have been reading and re-reading For the Time Being all throughout this past Advent.

A beautiful run on a mild late-December morning, with the echoes of this morning’s Office of the Holy Innocents in my head. Thinking about a dear relative who passed yesterday after a long fight with cancer. Looking ahead gratefully to my 51st year on earth. Illum oportet crescere, me autem minui. Ut in omnibus glorificetur Deus.

Quite a temperature drop over 24 hours…

Currently reading: Learning the Virtues: That Lead You to God by Romano Guardini 📚

twitter.com Commonweal Magazine (@commonwealmag) Tweeted: On this day, in 1968, Thomas Merton died tragically and prematurely. One of the most influential mystics of the 20th century, Merton was also a prolific Commonweal contributor. Here, we’ve compiled some of his most lasting spiritual writings: t.co/9n4v9sqRl…

Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25th because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival. Almost no one minds, except for a few groups on the fringes of American Evangelicalism, who seem to think that this makes Christmas itself a pagan festival. But it is perhaps interesting to know that the choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’ birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.

Like alcoholism and drug addiction, nihilism is a disease of the soul. It can never be completely cured, and there is always the possibility of relapse. But there is always a chance of conversion — a chance for people to believe that there is a hope for the future and a meaning to struggle. This chance rests neither on an agreement about what justice consists of nor on an analysis of how racism, sexism, or class subordination operate.

Currently reading: Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI 📚. So short I’ll have to pace it at 1 chapter/week to stretch it through Advent.

Incoming books: Race Matters by Cornel West Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives by Pope Benedict XVI Learning the Virtues by Romano Guardini I finished the Rilke collection the other night. On the whole, I liked it - particularly The Duino Elegies. Much of it was gorgeous opaque, but then: And now in vast, cold, empty space, alone. Yet hidden deep within the the grown-up heart,

Race day!

The Last Children of Down Syndrome by Sarah Zhang. I’m a subscriber and try to hold off on reading the cover stories until I have the magazine in hand, but I broke that rule this time. The introduction of a choice reshapes the terrain on which we all stand. To opt out of testing is to become someone who chose to opt out. To test and end a pregnancy because of Down syndrome is to become someone who chose not to have a child with a disability.

Just finished (in near-record time) both Building A Bridge by Father James Martin, SJ and Made for Love by Father Mike Schmitz. Both explore the same subject: LGBTQ+ people and their place in the Church. I thought the books complemented each other very well - Building A Bridge sets the stage very nicely, opening the way to a dialogue based on respect, compassion, and sensitivity. It is thoroughly pastoral in its focus.

The mint has grown back so I guess it’s mojitos in November. The cold will be here for good at some point but until then…

Very sad to read that Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks passed away over the weekend. His Erasmus speech several years ago set me on a reading project which continues to this day. I very much liked his Essays on Ethics, and anticipate returning to it often in the future. Requiem æternam dona ei, et lux perpetua luceat ei.

It’s 75 here today so we’re barbecuing and hanging around outside. Winter will get here when it gets here but for now…

Sunny window nap

From The Sign of Jonas, a diary Thomas Merton kept during the first few years after making his perpetual vows at Gethsemani: The way You have laid open before me is an easy way, compared with the hard way of my own will which leads back to Egypt, and to bricks without straw. If You allow people to praise me, I shall not worry. If You let them blame me, I shall worry even less, but be glad.

Currently reading: Compensating the Sales Force, Third Edition: A Practical Guide to Designing Winning Sales Reward Programs by Cichelli, David 📚 Here is a very rare post that touches ever-so-briefly on work. I don’t do a ton of business-related reading. When I do, it’s usually because some book is making the rounds in the C-suite of my employer and reading what they’re reading has been helpful in my role, which is nominally manager but perhaps more accurately described as contextualizer-in-chief.

Still working through David Steindl-Rast’s book on gratitude and prayer. I’ll have more to write when I’m done. It’s been wonderful so far. He frequently quotes Rainer Maria Rilke, who has been on my radar for some time now. I ordered a collection of Rilke’s poetry which was delivered earlier today. Then I’ll maybe alternate that with Merton’s The Sign of Jonas. Hopefully Rilke and Merton will serve to more than offset some work-related reading that’s coming my way on the design of sales compensation plans.

Currently reading: Gratefulness, The Heart of Prayer: An Approach to Life in Fullness by Steindl-Rast, David 📚 This was just recently recommended to me, along with Thomas Merton’s The Sign of Jonas, by a deacon with whom I met recently as part of the discernment/application process. He also recommended deeper/further exploration of contemplative prayer, so I’ve begun regular lectio again. I’ve tried lectio on and off over the years but after our conversation on prayers and praying, I’m really going to try to make it stick this time.

Timothy Keller, writing in the NYT a few weeks ago: So Christians are pushed toward two main options. One is to withdraw and try to be apolitical. The second is to assimilate and fully adopt one party’s whole package in order to have your place at the table. Neither of these options is valid. In the Good Samaritan parable told in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus points us to a man risking his life to give material help to someone of a different race and religion.

Low blow, Amazon. Low blow. Holiday wishbook? Chock full of toys?

Pickling and fermenting

No. 70, from an extended meditation on the parable of The Good Samaritan, the Holy Father writes: It is remarkable how the various characters in the story change, once confronted by the painful sight of the poor man on the roadside. The distinctions between Judean and Samaritan, priest and merchant, fade into insignificance. Now there are only two kinds of people: those who care for someone who is hurting and those who pass by; those who bend down to help and those who look the other way and hurry off.

Running haunt

Abba Joseph on friendship, and in particular, the “silent treatment” in the Sixteenth Conference: But what sort of thing is it that we sometimes think that we are patient because, when we are aroused, we disdain to respond but mock our irritated brothers by a bitter silence or by a derisory movement or gesture in such a way that we provoke them to anger more by our taciturn behavior than we would have been able to incite them by passionate abuse, in this respect considering ourselves utterly blameless before God, since we have voiced nothing that could brand or condemn us according to the judgement of human beings?

N.B.: this post contains nothing but amateur radio nerding, so consider yourself forewarned. This past weekend was the CQ WW RTTY DX contest, which is one of the few contests that I try to do every year. I don’t take it terribly seriously - if I can make 100 or so contacts over the course of a casual weekend’s worth of operating, I’ll take them. I enjoy working RTTY, and the big contests are about the only time I get a chance.

O God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me. Every hour of the Divine Office begins with this verse from Psalm 69. It’s safe to say that we have St. Benedict to thank for that - Chapter 18 of the Rule lays out the plan for monastic Psalmody and it leads right off with these words: Each of the day hours begins with the verse, God, come to my assistance; Lord, make haste to help me.

The full trailer for Dune has finally dropped.

Waxing gibbous cat

Two briskets rubbed down and ready for the smoker tomorrow. Mesquite at the ready. Weather looking good. All systems go.

We just found a baby snapping turtle on our back patio. This was a surprise, since there aren’t any rivers or lakes within small-turtle-schlepping distance. Maybe he was dropped by a bird. He’s safe in a bucket and will be trundled to the river a few miles away.

Still chewing on discernment, and found this great essay by Sister Benedicta Ward which was very, very helpful. Discernment, as I originally thought, is closely related to prudence, though it would seem to be immediately prior to it. If prudence helps us to make the right decision, at the right time, and for the right reasons, discernment serves to first seek out the will of God. We can only do this if we escape the trap of mistaking our own will for His; this in turn requires first emptying the self.

Maxfield Parrish evening

Have you ever read something so carefully that it comes back to you while you’re sleeping? This is happening now with Cassian. I take this to be a good thing, and have been ruminating on the following bits from the first two Conferences so far: First, as I posted the other day, our disciplines, plans, vigils, and other actions should (indeed, must) take second place to the law of charity.

St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church, Eureka Springs, Arkansas

Approaching wall cloud, NW Arkansas

From the first Conference of John Cassian, In a meeting with Abba Moses, the Abba says …If perchance we are unable to carry out some strict obligation of ours because we are prevented by some good and necessary business, we should not fall into sadness or anger or indignation, which we would have intended to drive out by doing what we omitted. For what is gained by fasting is less than what is spent on anger, and the fruit that is obtained from reading is not so great as the loss that is incurred by contempt of one’s brother.

Have you ever seen a pawpaw tree? Now you have. Pawpaws are a fruit tree native to North America and were fairly well-known a generation or so ago. The fruit doesn’t keep for long after it’s picked, so they’ve never been much of a commercial crop. I’ve heard that pawpaws sometimes show up at farmer’s markets. We planted this one a couple of years ago and it seems to be doing pretty well - it’s nearly as tall as I am.

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

I have since finished Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome. They were great. Love in the Ruins is an interesting product of its time - an end-of-the-world novel written in 1971 that’s set somewhere in the imagined 1980s. It holds up pretty well to be honest, with a sort of semi-dark hilarity that’s definitely reminiscent of contemporary movies and TV shows - think MAS*H (the movie). The political predictions alone will make it worth revisiting.

So I migrated over from github’s pages, which meant I had all of my old markdown posts stored locally. I had asked the micro.blog support folks about migration awhile back and was directed to a nifty little import script which used nodejs. But lo, in the meanwhile, an import button had showed up! I still needed to insert the date into the frontmatter. My old posts had the date pre-pended to the filename (ie, 2020-01-08-some-title-here.

Cicada

I just finished Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own, which traces the respective biographies of Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy into a beautiful and engaging story of a particular moment in American Catholicism. Merton and Day’s stories I already knew, having read The Seven Storey Mountain and The Long Loneliness some time ago. O’Connor I knew from studying Southern Lit in college and working my way through her complete short stories, collected letters (Habit of Being, published posthumously), and Wise Blood.

I recently ‘attended’ an online symposium marking the fifth anniversary of Pope Francis' Laudato Si. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but I enjoyed the discussion and would definitely watch more of that sort of thing in the future. Zoom-fatigue notwithstanding, registration and attendance were basically frictionless. I watched it on the back porch. It doesn’t get a whole lot easier than that. One of the speakers was author Paul Elie, and somehow his book The Life You Save May Be Your Own came up.

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

Picked up Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, her narrative history of 14th century France (and England), framed around the life and times of Enguerrand de Coucy. You’d think a departure from plague-related material would be more in order, but no. It was hoped by some that the Black Death would occasion greater piety and a return to moral decency by some of the time. Alas, it was not necessarily to be.

I want to use this post to develop some thoughts I’ve had recently on what the monastic traditions - specifically The Rule of St. Benedict - have to teach us about living in community, and how they might help us a bit during this time of quarantine. Saint Benedict wrote his Rule in the sixth century, intending to lay down something of a constitution for monks living in community under the authority of an abbot.

The silence of God is elusive and inaccessible. But the person who prays knows that God hears him in the same way that he understood the last words of Christ on the Cross. Mankind speaks, and God responds by his silence. — Cardinal Robert Sarah I’ve finished The Power of Silence and it’s given me a lot to think about. Although few are called to the Carthusian silence which inspired the book, Cardinal Sarah nevertheless calls attention the need for some silence - especially interior - in order that we may better encounter Christ.

Am about halfway through Robert Cardinal Sarah’s The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise. The book is set in a sort of dialogue between Cardinal Sarah and Nicolas Diat, inspired by a visit the Cardinal made to Grande Chartreuse, the motherhouse of the Carthusian Order. This place, and the men who live there, can be seen in the wonderful documentary Into Great Silence. The filmmaker proposed the movie to the monks in 1984, and they asked for time to consider it.

I finished Nault’s The Noonday Devil last night. Really good stuff, and I’ll almost certainly be returning to it in the future, and the sections on the various remedies for acedia, in particular. When you see something described and then named, and then you look around and realize “oh so that’s what that is”, you feel struck first by surprise and then by, well, sheepishness. They knew what they were about fourteen centuries ago.

The retreat was good. As usual, I went expecting one thing and left with something different. The conferences were interesting, in no small part because priest who led them was something like six-foot-six, friendly, personable, and full of stories. There were numerous opportunities for prayer, Mass, Adoration, and the like. Plenty of silence, and the sisters who manage the retreat house do a wonderful job of keeping the retreatants fat and happy.

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