Alan Jacobs writes about the diaconal charism rooted in the call of the first deacons:
So we see here the very common injustice that arises from people preferring members of their own cultural group to “others,” not realizing, or not accepting, that such distinctions are erased when one enters the Body of Christ. And when I consider what happened to David French in his family, I think: Every church needs deacons to do precisely what the first deacons did — that is, to give comfort and support to the people of God justly, that is, with no regard to differences in culture or race or politics, because, as Peter says a little later in Acts, “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34).
The key - the indifference he writes about - is, I think to be found to have its roots in another constituent part of diaconal spirituality, which is self-emptying (kenosis). I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last few days, especially as I worked through spiritual reading suggested by my director and others over the last few years. Many of the books have been written by priests, and a few of them assume that the reader is also a priest. And so the advice and guidance in the book make perfect sense for a priest, but maybe not exactly for a deacon who is also married and holds a secular job.
This is not to say that the advice is misplaced, or that the reading can’t bear tremendous fruit. It does prompt the question of whether (and in what ways) the spiritual life of a deacon differs from priestly, monastic, or episcopal spirituality. Of course we should pray frequently and heroically, striving for a certain amount of consistent contemplative prayer. I also have a household to run, children to raise, and performance reviews to begin at work. Full acknowledging that priests have wall-to-wall schedules and endless demands of their own, it’s also fair to point out that the particular demands of married and family life are objectively different. It makes a sort of sense that the spiritual practices in support of them are also different, but I guess I’m not entirely sure how yet.
This could be just me overthinking again, though. Like the proverbial bee sampling from every flower along the way, I’ve fruitfully pulled bits and pieces from nearly all of the traditions I’ve studied. Maybe there isn’t one and, like everyone else, we have to sort out spirituality on our own. Feels like it might be worth a book or two, though.
OCIA team meeting tonight. It was good to get the band together to debrief last year and hash out the coming round. I’ll be alternating between the English and Spanish sessions so I can continue working on language skills and hopefully run some interference for our Spanish-speaking catechist who has been flying solo up until now.
Finished S2 of House of the Dragon last night. Afraid I have to join the chorus of “meh,” though I suppose this means S3 will be a real barn-burner (so to speak).
You dolphins and all water creatures, bless the Lord.
The weather at the beach turned out perfect, so the grandbabies ran completely amok, and of the three things I had planned - read, drink, work on papers - I only made any progress with two of them and you can probably guess which ones. Stendahl is a lot of fun so far. The painting is one of the ceiling panels in the chapter room of St. Meinrad Archabbey. This was apparently part of the original cloister and not originally open to the public. It’s still in use whenever the community meets in chapter for general monastery business or to elect a new abbot. The other panels are birds of the air, beasts wild and tame, hosts of the Lord, and so on. Moving from one end of the room to the other, you retrace The Song of the Three Holy Children.
The weather is not looking great for the upcoming beach weekend, but I’ve got an iPad full of sources to annotate and no concrete plans for much of anything else. For fun, Stendahl and a fair amount of liquor. Also unplugging from all the socials. RSS feeds and text alone.
Enjoying a bit of liminal time between classes and coursework. Next week we’re hunkered down for a week of Homiletics and I’m going to use some of my time at St. Meinrad (hopefully) peeking at sources for my fall papers. A few thoughts came to me during a recent run and I think I’ve got a good approach for them. Grabbed onto another good angle last night, so the percolating phase of paper-writing is well underway. The rest of the month is shaping up to be busy with weekend trips here and there and August will be here before we know it. I already ordered the books for the upcoming Moral Theology class when our next (and final) year begins next month. Definitely looking forward to reading more for leisure when this is all done.
On the nightstand: a collection of Carson McCullers short stories which I picked up last year at the unclaimed baggage place in Scottsboro, AL for $5. I haven’t read any of her stuff since college and had forgotten how good her stuff is. On deck is Stendahl’s The Red and the Black.
Onscreen: Just finished up S3 of The Bear. Working through The Gentlemen, which is fun so far.
Currently reading: Collected Stories of Carson McCullers by Carson McCullers 📚
Currently reading: Oedipus the King ; Oedipus at Colonus ; Antigone by Sophocles 📚
“Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take out their anger on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them.”
— René Girard
Deep in Girard again, and I’ve been thinking about ways the Internet accelerates or intensifies mimetic crises and their attendant scapegoating. First, groups obviously can (and do) form a hell of a lot faster, but without the “thickness” of embodied relationships, I suspect this means they’re more brittle. We can sort ourselves - or have ourselves sorted - much more easily, and the engagement models and algorithms of social media are going to guarantee an intensification of desire which means an acceleration towards crisis all the quicker. The release valve - scapegoat - will also be identified all the faster, but instead of relying on physical differences, the group has no choice to but seek performative aberrations or deviations from some tightly defined orthodoxy. The disembodied nature of online relationships has to give way to text and pictures, and at this point in time, most everyone has accumulated oodles of both.
At the same time, the anonymity, or perception of it removes one more obstacle to the scapegoat mechanism - the friction of “the first stone.” The cost to call out the scapegoat has dropped to near nothing, but the cost of an in-grouper to stand idly by has soared tremendously, so pile-ons happen faster and spread wider - past the in-group and into adjacent groups and clusters. It’s come up on at least one podcast I listen to (Blocked and Reported) that perhaps Twitter’s general decline has attenuated the pile-on tendencies a bit since many folks have migrated to other platforms. Getting data for something like that would be tough. It feels plausible, but it could also be that the cancel- and callout-culture zeitgeist has shifted. The mechanisms for them are still very much at work, though perhaps on a more diffuse scale. Neither desire nor the mimesis and conflict it causes will be going away any time soon
Currently reading: All Desire Is a Desire for Being by René Girard 📚
Was on a vocations panel for high-schoolers last night with our pastor, 2 Dominican sisters, and a pair of newlyweds.
Question: do you watch movies and what kind?
Father: there’s a TV in the rectory but we don’t watch it much. I might go to a friends to watch soccer.
Sisters: we don’t watch much TV, occasional movies
Couple: Only stuff like The Chosen
Me: We watch an absolute dogpile of movies and discuss/fight over them forever. There are factions.
Currently reading: An Introduction to Philosophy by Jacques Maritain 📚
Currently reading: Time for God by Jacques Philippe 📚
The rooster is the last survivor of our chicken-keeping days and since there are no more hens to watch, he just hangs out with the dog all day. She doesn’t seem to mind.
Today I repaired an appliance, got a haircut, and watched the grandsons. We grilled hot dogs and sweet corn and, having swam all day, they’ll leave here exhausted. We will also be exhausted, but the good kind. Tomorrow I’m slated to serve at two masses. Praise God from whom all blessings flow!
