Elderberry cuttings are coming along nicely

Currently reading: John Cassian, The institutes by John Cassian 📚

Tonight’s tasting selections…

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Phil 4:8

Today is the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle. That verse from the Letter to the Philippians spoke deeply to me during the long run-up before my eventual return to the Church about twenty years ago. I had it pinned to my cubicle wall at work and eventually took St. Paul's name for my Confirmation at the Easter Vigil. I can't say I identified much with Saul. I had no faith to speak of, never mind feeling strongly enough about anything to actively fight against others. The Damascus road, though, is a different matter.

I, too, can point to a particular moment and place where the presence of God was made plain and demanded a response. I learned about strength perfected in weakness, and the more excellent way. Saint Paul has haunted my spiritual life since then - sometimes in clarity, other times as something of an enigma, seen in a mirror darkly.

I've been thinking a bit about the HBO series The Leftovers recently, probably because part of the soundtrack came up in a Spotify playlist I use when I'm working. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. Beneath the weird-fiction/sci-fi/supernatural elements of the premise is a profound meditation on grief in response to inexplicable, massive loss. The Departure, as it's called in the show, stands in for any number of similar events: Sandy Hook, 9/11, and so on. People seem to either love the show or hate it, and my feelings ought to be apparent.

It occurred to me this morning, though, that if Damon Lindelof were making The Leftovers today, he'd need to account for the large numbers of Departure-deniers: the ones running around claiming that those who lost loved ones were crisis actors, and that the Departed were all somehow involved in a plot masterminded by...someone. In-show, there'd have to be a persistent dismissal of the whole thing as fake and frankly I think this group would be more evident (and pernicious) than The Guilty Remnant, a nihilistic cult that forms in the post-event period.

I never understood the QAnon stuff. For me, big conspiracies tend to assume a level of competence that's usually not in evidence, and when actual conspiracies do come to light, things tend to change pretty quickly - hearings are held, arrests made, and so on. The bigger the secret and the bigger the crowd involved, the less likely everyone's going to keep their mouths shut. I mean, let's set aside the actual substance of the Q theory, which is too much to go into here, and focus solely on its first principle.

Compartmentalization works. No one has a full picture, and those who do have it are few and far between, making it unlikely that they could leak and remain hidden for very long. People get caught relaying secrets all the time, and some of these ought to know best how to do it. Moreover, they're passed things along to one or maybe two people, not broadcast them to the world on the Internet. They're caught all the same. The idea that these disclosures proceed from some highly-placed government source - and continue to do so over time without identification or arrest and prosecution, well, it just doesn't fly, sorry.

For a long time it smelled an awful lot like Gnosticism to me. Certainly it has a lot in common: deliverance via secret knowledge, unavailable to all but the initiates. Or perhaps I'm making too much of one and selling short the other. In either case, QAnon occupied a peculiar spot in people's lives. What will take its place now?

I'm thinking especially for the people who, having gone all-in with it, are now finding themselves disillusioned. Some of them have sundered ties with families and friends, finding comfort with their fellow-travelers online and occasionally in-person. They sought to explain the world and everything in it, and now what? Prophecies failing to deliver, goalposts moved, just be a little more patient. When you have trusted in something completely, and it fails just as completely, it feels very much like the earth has dropped away from your feet: disorienting and terrifying. Things that made sense before are now turned inside-out. Everything has to be re-interrogated, and perhaps without much help from others. If you're lucky, you have support around you while you figure things out. If not, maybe you go grabbing for the next available thing that looks solid.

What I hope and pray for is that they find an easy return and an open door. I could never take it very seriously - I know too many people who work in government. But I recognize that many people did (and still do). And having walked down a long (and weird) road, the best thing we might be able to do is make sure that the return path is as clear as possible. I also think of the families that have been divided over this, by the very real losses they feel over someone who has taken this path, and pray for their healing and restoration.

May the ones who are leaving this - or have already left - and now find themselves struggling encounter patience and charity, instead of the laughter and derision they might fear.  We could do a lot worse than offer a way off the island to which some of our neighbors and loved ones have collectively paddled out.  

Strive to preserve your heart in peace and let no event of this world disturb it. Reflect that all must come to an end. Keep spiritually tranquil in a loving attentiveness to God and when it is necessary to speak, let it be with the same calm and peace.

— St. John of the Cross

Currently reading: Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton 📚

On deck: The Holy Week volume of Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth and Cassian’s Institutes. It’s beginning to feel a lot like Lent.

A list of text-heavy sites I visit regularly:

• Text-only NPR
• Drudge
  
• Readspike news aggregator
• Christian Science Monitor Text Edition
• CNN's 'Lite' page
• AP News
• MetaFilter
• HackerNews
• RISKS-L
  
• The Rule of St. Benedict
• Universalis
• wttr.in

The National Weather Service has text-only forecast pages, like this one, which you can adjust for your own area. You can go deep into their weather nerd stuff, too.

There are also some great lectionary resources. The Dominican House of Studies in DC had some wonderful patristic resources online but had to take them down because of copyright concerns. They helpfully point to places like this one, though. Here's the Catena Aurea as well.

A reminder: social media is not the Internet, and you can use the latter without the former pretty effectively. I wonder how long before a sort of 'primitive/retro Internet' movement takes root and spreads among the younger crowd - text-heavy, low-latency, self-curated/owned, free of the exquisitely-tuned engagement and telemetry.

Sometimes I get nostalgic and revert back to pure-text in as many places as I can. Linux makes this a little bit easier. Only the email bit was a little tricky to perfect. Here is the list of apps:

• elinks for text-only browsing
• newsboat for RSS
• neomutt for email (I use a commercial email provider and a tool called offlineimap to transfer mail)
  
• weechat, principally for IRC, but it also has plugins for Slack and Jabber.
  

If you're wondering how much of the web is useful without graphics, javascript and all the rest, the answer is: a lot more than you'd think. Many sites have "lite" versions for bandwidth constrained users. Other sites render pretty well, but to be sure, places like Amazon still need a modern browser.

Now I'm off to see if there's a way to update micro.blog with vim, vscode, or atom...

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are...

- W.H. Auden

I've started The Moviegoer, and am enjoying it so far. Fulfilled in Christ turned out to be more of a reference book than something you'd read straight through. The introductory materials were good and I'm sure I'll be reaching for it a lot in the future.

The light outside is changing as the days lengthen, which is nice. The season has been mild so far, but we usually don't get our coldest days until about now. The seed catalogs came a couple of weeks ago (on the solstice, if you can believe it) and we sketched out some timelines for starting some seeds, which we've never done before. Our last-frost date is in mid-April, so there's still some time for planning and repairs of a couple of the raised beds.

I added Rod Dreher back to my RSS list and today he referenced this excellent open letter to the QAnon crowd:

The Deep State you worry about is mostly made up; a fiction, a lie, a product of active imaginations, grifter manipulations, and the internet. I’m telling you this now because storming the Capitol building has drawn the attention of the real Deep State — the national security bureaucracy — and it’s important you understand what that means.

You attacked America. Maybe you think it was justified — as a response to a stolen election, or a cabal of child-trafficking pedophiles, or whatever — but it was still a violent attack on the United States. No matter how you describe it, that’s how the real Deep State is going to treat it.

The impact of that will make everything else feel like a LARP.

Is it just me, or is half the fun of a new book finding the next things to read in the footnotes?

Our family prayers at day's end have developed into the following routine, which I am calling here A Little Office of Evening Prayers, because it's short and suitable for little ones. It's basically a single decade of the rosary with some extra stuff added to the end. Feel free to adapt for your own use. Enjoy!

Leader: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Response: Amen

Leader: O God, come to my assistance
Response: Lord, make haste to help me.

Leader: Glory be to the Father…
Response: As it was in the beginning…

All: Apostle's Creed

Three Hail Marys offered for the following (shifting each night to the next one in line):

1. An increase in faith, hope, and charity
2. The intentions of the Holy Father
3. The intentions of our bishop
4. The intentions of our pastor and his vicars
5. The people of our parish

Leader: Tonight's mystery is ________.

Pray one decade of the rosary, every person present taking one of the Hail Marys.

Concluding prayers:

All: O my Jesus, forgive us our sins. Save us from the fires of Hell. Lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy. Amen.

All: O God, whose only begotten son, by his life, death, and resurrection has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life, grant, we beseech thee that by meditating on these mysteries of the most holy rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we may imitate what they contain, and obtain what they promise, through this same Christ, our Lord, Amen.

All: Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray. And do, thou, O prince of the heavenly host, cast into Hell Satan and all the evil spirits who roam about the world seeking the ruin of souls.

All: Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God's love commits me here, ever this day be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen.

Sing the Salve Regina

Family Litany: each person in turn names a saint until it wraps around back to me and I add one or two more. When everyone is present (including our son-in-law), the list looks something like the following:

Saint Rose of Lima, pray for us.
Saint Anne, pray for us.
Saint Marianne Cope, pray for us.
Saint Ignatius of Loyola, pray for us.
Saint George, pray for us.
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, pray for us.
Saint Cecilia, pray for us.
Saint John Bosco, pray for us.
Saint Dymphna, pray for us.
Saint Arnaud, pray for us.
Saint Damian, pray for us.
The Fourteen Holy Helpers, pray for us.
Saint Edmund the Martyr, pray for us.
Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Leader: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Response: Amen

Leader: now everyone go to bed.
Response: (various)

Finished up Romano Guardini's Learning the Virtues. Father Schmitz referenced it in Made for Love, so into the to-read list it went. I like it, and would recommend it to anyone looking to make progress in the spiritual life, particularly if you're a person who (like me) occasionally gets stuck doing examinations of conscience. Quick-reference cards are useful to a point, but if you (like me) run through a list that closely tracks against the Decalogue, you may come up short in the end. I mean, I didn't commit murder last month or any of these other egregious things so I must be in pretty good shape, right? Probably not.

Was I a peacemaker? Did I hunger and thirst for righteousness? Did I show mercy when it was an option? Here are questions that defy a quick yes-or-no answer. When I got angry that one time and stewed for two days, why was that? Ah, sure looks like my pride had been rightfully stung. I had nearly forgotten it, and that one's an old reliable sort of sin for me. And so it goes.

In any case, books like this can be very useful and instructive. Fr. Guardini was a wonderful writer and a particular favorite of both Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis. I also highly recommend his book of meditations, The Lord. Wonderful stuff in there. Up next is to clear out the accumulating periodicals: The New Atlantis, among others.

Holiday vacation is over, so it's back to the normal schedule around here: early to bed, early to rise.

Yesterday I met with our bishop for the final step in my application process. It looks like I'll be in the next formation class. I am feeling very hooray and also yikes. Pray for me!

Happy New Year, everyone!

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.

All told, my vacation has been the holidays, which were good (and continuing as I write), an extended communications blackout thanks to the bomb on Christmas morning, a fair amount of ham radio tinkering, and a new game called Factorio, which I’ve needed to strictly ration.

I also just turned 50; the receiving line forms to the left please.

Thanks be to God, we are all well. I pray the same for you and yours.

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. How it’s managed to escape my attention all these years is beyond me. I have to credit W.H. Auden’s Cure for the Post-Christmas Blues by Jeff Reimer for piquing my curiosity, and I was mighty glad to see the oratorio included in an Auden collection I already owned but had only glanced through a few times since buying it. Serves me right I suppose.

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.

Calculating Christmas, by William Tighe

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. Such arguments are indispensable. But a politics of conversion requires more. Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one's soul. This turning is done through one's affirmation of one's worth — an affirmation fueled by the concern of others. A love ethic must be at the center of a politics of conversion.

— Cornel West, "Nihilism in Black America," Race Matters 📚

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,
longing for the first world, the ancient one...

Then, from His place of ambush, God leapt out.

That's from "Imaginary Career." Even in translation, Rilke turns a phrase. I also finished The Sign of Jonas, and I'm going to have to think about that one for awhile. Coming as it does at this time of my life - in these particular circumstances - it sheds a great deal of light on the contradictions of a vocation. What God wills against what you expect (or even desire). And this according to the You that stands apart! What he sought in Gethsemani was not what he found. Not at first, anyway. In the end he found it, but he had come so far in his understanding that he barely recognized the person who had begun the same book he was finishing. This book was recommended to me, I think because I had expressed an affinity for both Jonah and Thomas Merton. Certainly I'll be turning over contradiction for some time to come.

Lectio has been alternating between Isaiah and the Gospel reading for this Sunday, which marks the beginning of Advent. As I'm writing this, that would be Mark 13:33-37. The things that 'jump out' and stay with me from session to session continue to astonish me.

At first it was watch and pray. Surely we only watch when we are confident that the master will return? We wait in perfect expectation. And we pray in all things, at all times. Let prayer be unceasing, but not unconscious. A man once told me that he wasn't sure when he wasn't praying! That's what I want, how I want to be. David Steindl-Rast shows us that gratitude as a response to a gift is an act of profound love and prayer. It recognizes the gift, as gift, which means it also acknowledges the giver.

The next night it was what I say to you, I say to all.  All are to watch. No one is exempt! The invitation is universal. Could this also be read a bit differently? Those who hear have a solemn charge to show and tell. As He speaks to us, so He speaks to all - if we let Him. "The medium is the message." Did you know that McLuhan was Catholic? I only learned that a few years ago, to be honest.

Last night I stayed with whether in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning. I'm still pondering this one. These are nighttime and the liminal moments surrounding darkness, maybe when watchfulness is most difficult.

I'm not even sure if trying to capture these thoughts and responses is worthwhile - something seems to be lost between the heart, the head, and the keyboard.