What is it then to be stable? It seems to me that it may be described in the following terms: You will find stability at the moment when you discover that God is everywhere, that you do not need to seek Him elsewhere, that He is here, and if you do not find Him here it is useless to go and search for him elsewhere because it is not Him that is absent from us, it is we who are absent from Him…It is important to recognize that it is useless to seek God somewhere else. If you cannot find Him here, you will not find Him anywhere else. This is important because it is only at the moment that you recognize this that you can truly find the fullness of the Kingdom of God in all its richness within you; that God is present in every situation and every place, that you will be able to say: ‘So then I shall stay where I am.’
— Metropolitan Anthony Bloom

Last night at RCIA, the catechumens and candidates learned about the mystical body of Christ and the communion of saints. I’m not sure how many of them understood it. I’m not sure how many of us do, either, to be honest. The discussion on saints was a little easier and some of the teachers and volunteers were asked to share their particular patrons. I talked briefly about Saint Benedict and how his Rule, though originally written to organize a monastery, contains deep wisdom for anyone seeking to live in community with others. Outside the confines of a monastery, adapted for life in The World, the Rule teaches us to encounter Christ here, now, in this particular place and with these people: a family, a neighborhood, an office, a parish.

The Benedictine motto ora et labora comes quickly to mind, maybe especially so for bookish folks. Work/study and prayer - what else does anyone need? Maybe it’s all any of use can do to work and pray within the confines of an all-too-crazy daily schedule. The demands on our attention are constant and unrelenting, and we seem to do our damnedest to keep it that way. The idea of carefully proscribed life within a monastic enclosure…well, what’s not to love about that? But you can’t flee from humanity into a monastery - Thomas Merton wrote that you only find humanity there again, perhaps writ larger for the smallness of the space.

Bookwise: I’m nearly done with Essays on Ethics and just ordered a couple of books by Henri Nouwen, one of which I’ll try to save for an upcoming retreat.

Stability, as the Rule describes it, is fundamental. It is something much more profound than not running away from the place in which we find ourselves. It means not running away from oneself. This does not involve some soul searching, self-indulgent introspection. It means acceptance: acceptance of the totality of each man and woman as a whole person involving body, mind and spirit, each part worth of respect, each part calling for due attention. Benedictine emphasis on stability is not some piece of abstract idealism: it is typically realistic.
— Esther de Waal, Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict

What does it mean to meet someone where they are? For me it means that I must first understand where they are and how they got there. It means listening a great deal and quieting down, immediately, any initial responses, defenses, or reactions. It is respecting the inviolate dignity of those before me and the paths they’ve traveled, maybe, even a little, dying to the self a bit in order to imagine as fully as possible the world through other eyes. Dying to self may sound a bit over-the-top, but it seems apt. The voice within that rises in response must be stilled. The knee-jerk reaction that runs toward a joke or making light must be stopped dead in its tracks. All of that must be put aside.

This also means that a lot must be forgotten. Not everything, but enough to see the Church with the same large, bold lines that are seen by anyone outside from a distance. All of the beautiful filigree work, the rococo decoration, and staggering detail must be laid aside for a bit, in order that we might sit beside the newcomer and see, as through new eyes again, the broad shapes and rooflines. We want to run the seeker right into the center of it all to join us in the dazzling beauty. Such is our joy! And we will, by degrees. Let’s meet them outside, in the courtyard and rest on the bench for awhile.

There will be questions I can’t predict and obstacles I left behind years ago. Let me recover humility, and perhaps some memory of my own struggles. Yes, this was a thing for me too. Here is the map I was given. It was hard, but here I am.

There is a time to state facts plainly, and a time to lead carefully and patiently. Years ago, we were in a museum and came upon a painting by Picasso. Like a lot of his work, it was full of strong angles and weird shapes. We might have walked passed it after a glance. God bless whoever wrote the descriptive texts and explanations. They took the time to step through the various elements of the painting, the context, the subjects. All of a sudden, it was obvious. We bought a print of it and have enjoyed it for years. This is a simple example, but I think it makes the case. Cubism may not be for everyone. Much of it is not for me, at any rate. A careful, patient explanation, however, made the difference between momentary confusion followed by dismissal and an encounter with something beautiful and original.

Do to no one what you yourself dislike. Give to the hungry some of your bread, and to the naked some of your clothing. Seek counsel from every wise man. At all times bless the Lord God, and ask him to make all your paths straight and to grant success to all your endeavors and plans.
– Tobit 4:15a, 16a, 18a, 19, Morning Prayer, Wed. of Week 1

So recently I took a deep dive into the OT and found myself consulting one Jewish source after another in an attempt to better understand the text and its meaning. One thing led to another and I ended up starting Essays on Ethics: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. I’ve been a fan of his for some time, ever since hearing a lecture he gave in New York several years back on the subject of creative minorities.

I’m about 2/3 of the way through the book, and I’m reading it straight through. The chapters, though, are meant to be read as companion pieces to the weekly readings of the Torah, or parsha. Here’s a bit from the various first piece, on Bereshit, “In the beginning,” Genesis 1:1-6:8:

What exactly is being said in the first chapter of the Torah? The first thing to note is that it is not a standalone utterance, an account without a context. It is in fact a polemic, a protest, against a certain way of understanding the universe. In all ancient myth the world was explained in terms of battles of the gods in their struggle for dominance. The Torah dismisses this way of thinking totally and utterly. God speaks and the universe comes into being. This, according to the great nineteenth-century sociologist Max Weber, was the end of myth and the birth of Western rationalism…The universe that God made and that we inhabit is not about power or dominance but about tov and ra, good and evil. For the first time, religion was ethicised. God cares about justice, compassion, faithfulness, loving-kindness, the dignity of the individual, and the sanctity of life.

The parsha are explored with a particular focus on the ethical dimensions: what is going on here, what is revealed about God, and what do we do now, and so on. There is wisdom here for anyone. Highly recommended.

Go, now, attack Amalek, and put under the ban everything he has. Do not spare him; kill men and women, children and infants, oxen and sheep, camels and donkeys.

1 Samuel 15:3

What are we to make of this? Samuel has conveyed a message of the Lord to Saul: place Amalek (the people) under the ban, which amounts to total annihilation. Amalek has been a mortal enemy of Israel from the time of the Exodus, and God has sworn to deal with them once and for all.

Saul’s failure to complete this task - saving the best of the spoils in order that they may be offered as sacrifice to God - removes him from God’s favor, ultimately setting the stage for the anointing of David as king. This verse came up in a recent adult study class in church, and we’ve been reading and studying it since. This post is meant to summarize my readings and help put my thoughts into some semblance of order.

The USCCB’s online bible has this footnote for ban which reads:

…this terminology mandates that all traces of the Amalekites (people, cities, animals, etc.) be exterminated. No plunder could be seized for personal use. In the light of Dt 20:16–18, this injunction would eliminate any tendency toward syncretism. The focus of this chapter is that Saul fails to execute this order.

The Catholic Study Bible notes:

The interpretation of God’s will here attributed to Samuel is in keeping with the abhorrent practices of blood revenge prevalent among pastoral seminomadic people such as the Hebrews had recently been. The slaughter of the innocent has never been in conformity with the will of God.

Compare with the Flood, or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. In those cases, though, the effects are through the direct action of God Himself. In this case, it’s people taking up the sword. We’re horrified and rightfully so.

I want to approach this text with a couple of things in mind. First, I desire for my reading to be consonant with the Catholic approach to the scriptures. Secondly, the difficulty of this verse presents a stumbling block for many, and it’s important to be able to give an answer of some kind that meets the person where they are while maintaining fidelity to the text. That is, without whitewashing or hand-waving.

I have done a good bit of research on Amalek, Saul, this ban, and the challenges associated with it from a variety of sources: Catholic, Protestant and Jewish. The study, I think, has been fruitful and moved me to dig even deeper into the Old Testament.

First, is it even historically accurate? The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies alleges that wholesale exterminations as described in ancient texts probably never happened quite as described.

The genocidal campaigns claimed for the early Israelites, however, were largely fictional: the intrinsic improbability and internal inconsistencies of the account in Joshua and its incompatibility with the stories of Judges leave little doubt about this. Much of the biblical ideology of the ban was fact formulated later, in the seventh century BC, yet it was neither unique nor entirely a later literary invention.

And to be sure, the Amalekites pop up again several times in the OT. 1 and 2 Samuel were likely written between the 6th and 5th centuries BC. David was born around 1000 BC, so at a minimum we’re looking at a few centuries between the events described and the final versions of the text. Even if portions of 1 Samuel were written by Samuel, the New Jerome Biblical Commentary suggests evidence of heavy redaction after the fact. On the other hand, maybe it happened exactly as described. There’s no real reason to take the text at anything other than face value, except that it feels shockingly horrible. Moreover, we can’t even impute the failure of Saul to tenderheartedness or moral objection - later in 1 Samuel 22 we read that he had an entire city of priests killed for assisting David - “men, women, children, infants, and oxen, donkeys and sheep.” (1 Sam 22:11-19)

Questioning the absolute veracity of these accounts may seem to open the door to questioning the authority of anything else in the OT, but I’m not sure that necessarily follows. Dei Verbum is clear (emphasis mine):

…attention should be given, among other things, to “literary forms.” For truth is set forth and expressed differently in texts which are variously historical, prophetic, poetic, or of other forms of discourse. The interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture. For the correct understanding of what the sacred author wanted to assert, due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking and narrating which prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the patterns men normally employed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another. But, since Holy Scripture must be read and interpreted in the sacred spirit in which it was written, no less serious attention must be given to the content and unity of the whole of Scripture if the meaning of the sacred texts is to be correctly worked out.

So maybe it’s not history as we understand history today: a careful presentation of facts designed to convey, as accurately as possible, the events described. It doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable to me that a set of stories about how a people came to be would be subject to a bit of dramatic embellishment over time, particularly in the context of David’s ascendancy to the throne. I hasten to add at this point that this is most certainly not the position I have found in the rabbinic commentaries I’ve looked at. Amalek represented nothing less than the complete annihilation of the people of Israel, stretching all the way back to the Exodus and threads of which continue into the modern age. At least one of the commandments given to Jews regarding Amalek is observed in the festival of Purim, remembering “what Amalek did to the Israelites.”

Even so, this text seems to have occasioned a fair amount of discussion, much of it devolving to the source of morality - in the act itself, or in the command?

Avi Sagi writes:

The question of whether moral obligations can be see as contingent on God’s command is an ancient one. Philosophical tradition tends to credit Plato, in the Eurthyphro with it’s first formulation. Current philosophical discourse usually presents the question in terms of the following dilemma: Is an act right (or wrong) because God commands it (or forbids it), or does God command (or forbid) an act because it is right (or wrong)? According to the first option - that an act is right or wrong because God commands or forbids it - moral obligations have no independent status and are conditioned by a divine command, which determines the moral value of an act. This approach, which in modern philosophy is referred to as “divine command morality,” is deeply rooted in Christian tradition and in contemporary philosophical thought. According to the second option - that God commands or forbids an act because it is right or wrong - God’s command does not determine the moral value of an act. Rather, God commands or forbids certain acts because of their intrinsic positive or negative value.

Later, in a summary of three major schools of thought opposite the position of strict realism:

The realistic approach suggests that the punishment was justified in light of Amalek’s wickedness. The various trends grouped under the rubric of the symbolic approach endorse a different view. The metaphysical trend intensifies the Amalekite evil and transforms it into the demonic foundation of existence. The conceptual trend expands the concrete dimensions of the story and turns it into a contest between ideas, whereas the psychological trend sees the story as a symbol of the existential human drama, a struggle against the evil inside us. All these trends agree on a characterization of Amalek as identical with evil and thus justify total war against it.

However, Maimonides found an interesting synthesis:

…Maimonides relied on two assumptions. First, that Amalek was punished because of a real event that took place in the past, and that this punishment was not meant as revenge; rather, its purpose was to prevent the occurrence of similar acts in the future. Second, he assumed that the Torah the biblical text as well as the rabbinic literature which refers to it make up a coherent legal system. If the Torah contains a general guideline forbidding the punishment of children for the sins of their fathers, then this instruction must also apply to Amalek. Resting on these two assumptions, Bornstein concluded that if the Amalekites no longer behaved like Amalekites, and, moreover, clearly expressed this through their readiness to adopt the basic norms of the seven Noachic commandments, as well as to pay tribute and enter into servitude, it would be wrong to kill them.

Finally:

The first premise of the moral trend is that the text must be interpreted coherently; neither the exegete nor the halakhist look at the text as an isolated unit, divorced from the broader context of the Torah and the rabbinic tradition. Moreover, if the basic assumption is that the Torah conveys the word of a good God, then a moral reading of the canonical text is not only a theoretical option but a religious obligation.

The moral approach is preferred by its supporters on the grounds that a literal reading may at times cast doubts on the notion that God is a good God. Advocates of the literal trend take issue precisely with this point. Although they accept that the text is usually read within a broader context, they do not believe that this context including an assumption of God’s goodness can be used to change the text’s clear meaning. The context might be useful in instances of textual ambiguity, they argue, but the punishment of Amalek is an explicit command and, therefore, we must assume that it is also morally correct.

As Christians, we read the OT with the knowledge of the Incarnate Christ and everything that happens with and through His passion, cross and resurrection. These graces come from the Holy Spirit, and would not have been available (or even comprehensible) to a reader contemporary with Saul. It’s impossible to separate the OT from the NT, as they effectively form one single history of our salvation. We read the OT for the story of the covenants that we might understand more deeply their fulfillment in Christ. Neither can stand alone.

The Catechism (emphases mine):

107 The inspired books teach the truth. “Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.”

[…]

109 In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm, and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words.

110 In order to discover the sacred authors' intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current. “For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression."

111 But since Sacred Scripture is inspired, there is another and no less important principle of correct interpretation, without which Scripture would remain a dead letter. “Sacred Scripture must be read and interpreted in the light of the same Spirit by whom it was written."

[…]

115 According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.

Approaching scripture through the four senses, I come up with the following takeaways, starting with the position that this story is told, for our benefit and in this way for a particular reason, and probably not for the same reason that the writer intended for the original audience 1,500 years ago.

Literal: an order was given which flies in the face of everything we hold as Christians, but are we carrying modern sensibilities to a Bronze age semi-nomadic people? Certainly this seems to directly contradict the commandments against killing. Why was Amalek singled out for such a thing, whether it happened as described or not? If this was an error of interpretation on the part of Samuel, how was there no correction issued at some point? Or does the order - however it was carried out - simply play a part in the larger story of Saul vis-à-vis David? Certainly Amalek reappears later on in Scripture (1 Chron 18:11). In context, 1 and 2 Samuel tell the story of 2 kinds of king, a prophet, and God’s plan for his chosen people.

Allegorical: The struggle against evil in the world is very real. God intends to carry the people of the promise safely onward through history in order to form and prepare the nation from which the Savior will come in the fullness of time. Stephen Clark writes in The Old Testament in the Light of the New:

…The command to destroy the Amalekites is a special case in the history of the Israelite monarchy and has occasioned much discussion…the incident is probably a matter of spiritual warfare, warfare with Satanic forces, not just human warfare that we have considered in discussing the challenge of the Canaanites in the land. The Amalekites were a people who tried to destroy God’s people while they were being redeemed by God and were being provided for by him in the wilderness. (Ex 17:8-16; Deut 25:17-19). Their attack was therefore more directly on God himself than most later attacks and was perhaps the paradigm example of other nations attacking God by attacking his people….

The Amalekites could be considered typological of those who seek to wipe out God’s people and God’s rule in the world, and God’s response was typological of his commitment to destroy the kingdom of Satan. God’s command for how to deal with the matter was likely in many respects beyond the comprehension of his servants, but therefore all the more needed to be strictly obeyed.

Moral: “for our instruction” (Rom 15:4), Saul was not a man after God’s own heart. He lacked the inward disposition toward God’s will and instead substituted his own, preferring the externals of sacrifice, and probably insincerely at that. The lesson here for us is clear.

Anagogical: we are destined to be people after His heart, if only we turn from our idols here on earth. Our sin must also be completely put to death, in all of its shapes and forms. We will not be able to do it, not alone anyway.

Final thoughts I believe consonant with a Catholic understanding:

Whether this happened as described, as history, we cannot know precisely. These texts were completed at some remove from actual events. Nevertheless, the story is here, in scripture, “for our instruction.” What is this instruction? It certainly has nothing to do with genocide, or arbitrary killing - look at the totality of scripture, and especially the fulfillment of the Law in the person of Christ. Nothing could be further from any rational reading of the scriptures or sacred tradition.

What is God saying to us, today, through this text, even as we are conscious of the vast distance in time and space between the author and listener?

What was God asking of Saul? Obedience. Was he? Clearly not. Compare with Abraham, who obeyed and whose hand was stayed by the Lord. Who is to know what would have happened had Saul obeyed as instructed.

First, Amalek represents a type of sin and evil; we too must be ready to annihilate sin completely (though, like Saul, we will not be successful). Unlike Saul, we should strive properly order our disposition towards God’s will, even - and especially - when we don’t understand.

Second, these sayings are hard, and it is right that we struggle with them. Jews have likewise struggled with them for a long, long time. As Catholics we must take a multi-layered approach to scripture. This is borne out in the CCC, Dei Verbum, and in the Magisterium of Holy Church.

Third, we must acknowledge that some (all?) of this understanding comes as part of the gift and graces of faith, and that hard sayings are stumbling blocks.

Finally, without deep study, we will not be “prepared to give a reason” (1 Pt 3:15) We must continually read scripture in its totality, not in bits and pieces, isolated from context. We must also be sure that we are in harmony with the teachings of the Church, though which God continues to sanctify the world and save souls.

Sources:

• 1 Samuel 15:3, USCCB
• Dei Verbum
• Catechism of the Catholic Church
• Saul and the Amalekite Genocide, Pastor Steve McAlpine
• Did God Command Genocide?, Msgr. Charles Pope
• Hard Sayings of the Old Testament, Jimmy Akin
• EWTN Forum: Saul and Amalekites, Fr. John Echert
• Who Was Amalek and the Amalekites, Boruch Altein
• Does Torah Promote Genocide?, Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
• Torah and Genocide FAQ, Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
• Ancient Jewish History: The Amalekites , Jewish Virtual Library
• The Catholic Study Bible
• The Old Testament in the Light of the New, Stephen B. Clark
• Reading the Old Testament, Lawrence Boadt, C.S.P.
• The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. Raymond Brown, S.J.
• The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses
• Sagi, Avi. “The Punishment of Amalek in Jewish Tradition: Coping with the Moral Problem.” The Harvard Theological Review, vol. 87, no. 3, 1994, pp. 323–346., www.jstor.org/stable/1509808.

We recently finished The Leftovers, and I’ve been deep in thought about it. A few thoughts follow, along with spoilers if you’ve not seen it.

I thought the show was a gorgeous and profound meditation on loss and our attempts to find meaning in the aftermath of loss. The shows doesn’t pull any punches. I felt the same sort of gnawing, existential dread that I found while reading Children of Men - the sense that while things have taken on a semblance of normalcy, the slow-motion collapse that was underway continually broke through any attempt to move beyond it.

I really wanted to see the character’s occupations fleshed out a little more. We got to see Laurie at her counselor’s practice; I wanted Kevin to do more Cop Stuff. I mean, he was the chief of police. Maybe I’ve seen too many procedural shows, but it might have been interesting to see him apply some investigative experience to the things he was witnessing. Ditto for Matt Jamison. As one of the only deeply faithful characters, we only get to see him in vestments once. I hoped for a scene of him conducting a worship service of some kind.

I liked that a lot of the show is left to the viewer’s interpretation - was this or that event supernatural? A coincidence? Part of this or that character’s madness? The show doesn’t say, so we’re free to read into (or out of) as we like. With the characters, we spend a lot of time trying to suss out what, exactly, the Sudden Departure really was. The mysterious act of a silent God? Freakish act of nature? Aliens? I’m not spoiling anything here if I tell you that no explanation is given, ever. If you’re looking for an answer, you won’t get one. You will get a conclusion though - the show winds up with a finale that is as fine as anything I’ve seen in a television show.

The performances are simply astonishingly good, it’s beautifully shot, and explores the sorts of Big Ideas that I tend to look for in books and movies. I’m glad it wound up well, but I miss following the characters as they looked for answers. The show was large on God - biblical symbols can be found all over the place: baptism, white doves, character names, and so on. All of it Old Testament, though. Very few references to Christ except some offhand comments and one very powerful dialogue in the final season. I’m not sure what to make of this, except that perhaps there’s more to mine in the way of cataclysms and mystery in the OT than the NT. Job figures prominently, for reasons that will become apparent as you watch.

In other news: have been digging deeply into some OT research of my own, thanks to a discussion in an adult study group last Sunday: 1 Samuel 15:3, to be precise - placing the Amelekites under the ban, i.e., total extermination. I believe I’ve come to an understanding and want to dig a bit further before I write it up here.

For while all things were in quiet silence, and the night was in the midst of her course, Thy almighty word leapt down from heaven from thy royal throne
Wisdom 18:14-15

We are still in the octave of Christmas; tomorrow is the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. A couple of nights ago, we watched Shadowlands, a movie about and C.S. Lewis and Joy Gresham, played by Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger. It put me in a mood to read more Lewis, and by happy coincidence, our oldest son was sorting though books he had used this past school year, and so Till We Have Faces and The Weight of Glory both ended up on my nightstand.

I did not know (or had forgotten, if I’d heard) the gist of Till We Have Faces, so I was effectively walking into it blind. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and want to follow it up at some point with Apuleius' Metamorphoses. I’ve always liked the reimagining-of-an-old-story type of novel, especially when it’s done well. I can hardly think of anyone else more suited to retelling a story of gods and losses than Lewis. On the heels of it, The Weight of Glory, a collection of papers and speeches on various subjects feels like a visit to the classroom after finishing the novel. I forget how utterly quotable Lewis is, even though I follow a daily-Lewis-quote twitterbot.

Something about his writing re-ignites some part of my imagination and brings it to bear on matters of faith. The closest I can come by way of a description is that it feels a bit like waking up, with a sudden realization “of course! it must be so!” The world suddenly seems…thicker than it was before. Maybe “re-enchanted” is a better word. The brittle, sterile pieces of daily modern life give way, just for a moment, to a golden sunlight just beyond. It all feels utterly familiar - a homecoming of sorts.

I think we do well to keep this bit of our imaginations active, and maybe at this time of the year most of all - the short days give way to early twilights and the lower sun shines in an odd way (to me), especially in the woods. Everything is dead, but the ground and tree trunks are covered in moss and brilliant green in the late afternoon. I only seem to see it in the dead of winter, usually when it’s bitter cold and wet-but-not-frozen. It’s very much like receiving an invitation to a party that’s some weeks away. This too shall pass and all will be well - winter will end, and here’s a tiny reminder of it.

This Christmas has been a good one so far: no one sick, quite a bit of the family around, generally agreeable weather (though wet). I always look forward to the blue volume of the breviary, the one for Advent/Christmas. It has some of my favorite texts, that quote from the book of Wisdom above chief among them, said at Vespers on the 26th.

On deck for reading: Peter Kreeft’s Heaven and Vatican II: The Essential Texts as edited by Fr. Norman Tanner, SJ. I would like to look into Henri Nouwen’s work as well, but have no idea where to start. In searching for the more formal and flowery version of that scripture above, I came across For Days and Years by H.L. Sidney Lear in the Google Books archive: scriptural readings, meditations, and hymns for each day of the year. The one for today, December the 31st, is too good not to share:

God is our Last End as well as our First Cause. God possessed, our own God, that is creation’s home, our last end, there only is our rest. Another day is gone, another week is passed, another year is told. Blessed be God, then, we are nearer to the end. It comes swiftly, it comes slowly too. Come it must, and then it will all be but a dream to look back upon. But there are stern things to pass through, and to the getting well through them there goes more than we can say. One thing we know, that personal love of God is the only thing which reaches God at last.
— F.W. Faber

Nearly done with the Hannah Arendt anthology and I’ve liked it enough to maybe go back and read a couple of her books in full, probably The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem.

I’m well under way in Newman’s essay on the development of Christian doctrine. I’m finding this an easier read than A Grammar of Assent. I’d probably recommend this along with his Apologia to anyone who wanted to get acquainted with him. A little background reading which situates him properly would also have been useful to me, but I followed my usual path of taking side-trips into Wikipedia along the way instead.

I had to do a bit of business traveling recently and took along Esther de Waal’s Seeking God, which is a wonderful little book on Benedictine spirituality and especially how it can apply to those of us firmly outside the monastery or convent. I leaned on it heavily during my travels, especially the bits on stability. The idea of stability might seem at odds with travel, but no:

For stability says there must be no evasion; instead attend to the real, to the real necessity however uncomfortable that might be. Stability brings us from a feeling of alienation, perhaps from the escape into fantasy and daydreaming, into the state of reality. It will not allow us to evade the inner truth of whatever it is we have to do, however dreary and boring and apparently unfruitful that may seem. It involves listening (something which the vow of obedience has illuminated) to the particular demands of whatever this task and this moment in time is asking; no more and no less.

More:

What is it then to be stable? It seems to me that it may be described in the following terms: You will find stability at the moment when you discover God is everywhere, that you do not need to seek Him elsewhere, that He is here, and if you do not find Him here it is useless to go and search for Him elsewhere because it is not Him who is absent from us, it is we who are absent from Him…It is important to recognize that is is useless to see God somewhere else. If you cannot find Him here you will not find Him anywhere else. If you recognize this that you can truly find the fullness of the Kingdom of God in all is richness within you; that God is present in every situation and every place, that you will be able to say “So then I shall stay where I am”
— Metropolitan Anthony Bloom

So: Aquinas for making sense of the world and Benedict for living in it, with others, wherever we happen to be.

The stuff I read falls into the following categories:

Theology, Philosophy, Religion, and History

By far the largest bucket. Books tend to lead from one to the next, sometimes because I see a reference in a footnote or hear someone on a podcast mention something in passing related to something I’m reading. An author or work might come up over and over and if I’m not familiar with the person or the book, there’s a good chance it’ll get added to my queue. This is the stuff usually covered here in the blog. First Things is a frequent go-to for titles, though usually in the context of the articles rather than the book reviews. These are the Serious Books.

Deliberately work-related

Books squarely in the realm of Business writing. My least favorite genre, and usually something I only visit once every few years. Tom Peters, Clayton Christensen, and Geoffrey Moore are who you’re likely to find here. I’m not much for the corporate book du jour (e.g. Who Moved My Cheese and the like). It has to have real currency in the industry or be something that everyone at HQ is passing around, knowledge of which I hope will help me read the corporate tea leaves.

Things tangential to work but formative

Usually, but not always, technical material. Could be something like Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows or Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil. I get a couple of pubs from ACM; they’d fall into this category too (Communications and Transactions on Internet Technology). Getting to Yes by Fisher and Ury are another example.

Everything else

Big-idea scifi or historical fiction (think Jeff VanderMeer, Frank Herbert, and Patick O’Brian), nature writing (Henry Beston, Wendell Berry, and Anne Dillard). The Atlantic. Current stuff circulating in the nerd/Catholic blogosphere.

Online stuff and Podcasts

All over the map, but I reliably visit the following at least once a day/listen semi-regularly: Arts and Letters Daily, Longreads, Hacker News, Get Religion, 99% Invisible, odds and ends from the ARRL.

I’m about halfway through Newman’s An Essay in Aid of a Grammer of Assent, and I am about ready to call it quits. It’s…dense. I love Newman’s writing, but this is far enough beyond me that I’m quite OK laying it aside for the time being. I’ll wrap up his sermons (I think I’m the last one or two) and continue to use the little book of daily meditations, which are gorgeous.

If you would like to wade deeply into Newman’s magnum opus on the philosophy of religious believe, by all means: dive in. You can get it for free at Project Gutenberg.

As for what’s next: I’ve been wanting to get acquainted with Hannah Arendt’s writing, and found The Portable Hannah Arendt, which looks like it will fit the bill right nicely.

I joined our parish’s RCIA team this year and will be delivering my first topic - The Church - in a couple of weeks. I had already signed up to teach about the liturgical year a bit later on, and have that lesson all set and ready to go.

One of the books I used for background material is With Christ Through The Year: The Liturgical Year in Words and Symbols by Fr. Bernard Strasser, OSB. This little book is out of print, as far as I can tell, but I managed to get a used copy from Amazon awhile back. It looks to have once lived in a Jesuit college library.

It’s a wonderful old little book, and I’ve found myself going back to it every so often as the year passes. Here’s a bit from the general introduction:

But the Church year is not primarily a commemoration of the history of our redemption, a recalling of the past. Nor is it a mere anticipation of the joys of our future life in eternity. Rather, the liturgical year is the opportune present. It is the day on which, as our Lord says, we are to work out our salvation (John 9:4), the grace-laden present which alone to belongs to us since the past is irrevocably gone and the future quite uncertain.

The sanctification of time is something really want to highlight during the lesson. There is nothing ordinary about Ordinary Time at all, really. The days proceed to and from Sunday. The year proceeds to and from Easter. Writ large, the calendar recapitulates the history of salvation and our patient wait for the Lord to return in glory. Examined closely, and you’ll find the days (and even hours) tied one to another, pointing and re-pointing to Christ through the Scriptures and feasts. God created the world to show forth and communicate his glory. That his creatures should share in his truth, goodness and beauty - this is the glory for which God created them CCC, 319. The cosmos exists in time; so time should also show forth the glory of the Creator.

Strasser:

Faithful co-operation with the mind and spirit of the liturgical year will acquaint us more familiarly, too, with the life, works, suffering, and death of Christ, and this help us to center our life more completely in His and so live in closer conformity with His divine ideals. Our Christ-life, ever growing more perfect under the beneficent influence of each liturgical year, will help us to achieve even within ourselves the primary purpose of the Church, that is, the glory of God and the sanctification of souls.

More Newman:

…yet a Faith, which generously apprehends Eternal Truth, though at times it degenerates into superstition, is far better than that cold, sceptical, critical tone of mind, which has no inward sense of an overruling, ever-present Providence, no desire to approach its God, but sits at home waiting for the fearful clearness of His visible coming, whom it might seek and find in due measure amid the twilight of the present world.

That’s from the 11th sermon in this collection, preached on January 13, 1839. These can be pretty dense reading, and to be sure, these were originally written to be read aloud to a (packed) congregation. Keeping in mind that they were delivered in the period before his conversion - and I generously allow that this simply be the benefit of hindsight - a sense of his mind has been coming through his arguments and assertions.

The last sermon in this collection, “The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine,” was only months away from his final sermon at St. Mary’s. His conversion was still a couple of years away. A scarlet thread in his writing shows up now and again, a brilliant mind contending with itself in the matter of Truth: how it is to be known, and what we are to do once we know it.

I was speaking with my pastor the other day and the conversation turned to Newman. He gave me a small book of meditations on his writing. They’re short, and very well suited to daily devotional reading. These small gems leave behind, thankfully, the arena of intellectual disputation and reflect a simple, lively joy:

God has created me to do him some definite service; he has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission - I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. Somehow I am necessary for his purposes, as necessary in my place as an archangel in his - if, indeed, I fail, God can raise another, as he could make the stones children of Abraham.

Yet I have a part in this great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for nought. I shall do good. I shall do his work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, though not intending it, if I do but keep his commandments and serve him in my calling.

I’m working my way through Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford by John Henry Newman, which is exactly what it sounds like it is. I liked this bit about Faith and Reason, as delivered on Epiphany of 1839.

…to take a parallel case, a judge can be called the origin, as well as the justifier, of the innocence or truth of those who are brought before him. A judge does not make men honest, but acquits and vindicates them: in like manner, Reason need not be the origin of Faith, as Faith exists in the very persons believing, though it does test and verify it. This, then, is one confusion, which must be cleared up in this question,— the assumption that Reason must be the inward principle of action in religious inquiries or conduct in the case of this or that individual, because, like a spectator, it acknowledges and concurs in what goes on;— the mistake of a critical for a creative power.

The whole thing is very much worth reading. This part in the conclusion is particularly resonant:

Half the controversies in the world are verbal ones; and could they be brought to a plain issue, they would be brought to a prompt termination. Parties engaged in them would then perceive, either that in substance they agreed together, or that their difference was one of first principles. This is the great object to be aimed at in the present age, though confessedly a very arduous one. We need not dispute, we need not prove,— we need but define. At all events, let us, if we can, do this first of all; and then see who are left for us to dispute with, what is left for us to prove. Controversy, at least in this age, does not lie between the hosts of heaven, Michael and his Angels on the one side, and the powers of evil on the other; but it is a sort of night battle, where each fights for himself, and friend and foe stand together. When men understand each other’s meaning, they see, for the most part, that controversy is either superfluous or hopeless.

I very much liked reading Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and was eager to read more. This sermon was delivered at the height of his influence at Oxford and at (or near) the beginning of his doubts regarding Anglican theology and authority. Ultimately he would convert to Catholicism, be ordained a priest, and later elevated to Cardinal.

Finished Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Mysterium Paschale. Much of it was beyond me; I can’t pretend otherwise. Chapter 4 (“Going to the Dead: Holy Saturday”) is something I will probably return to in Lent. I also found this bit from Chapter 2 worth highlighting and saving:

Philosophy can speak of the Cross in many tongues; when it is not the ‘Word of the Cross’ (1 Corinthians 1,18), issuing from faith in Jesus Christ, it knows too much or too little. Too much: because it makes bold with words and concepts at a point where the Word of God is silent, suffers and dies, in order to reveal what no philosophy can know, except through faith, namely, God’s ever greater Trinitarian love; and in order, also, to vanquish what no philosophy can make an end of, human dying so that the human totality may be restored in God. Too little, because philosophy does not measure that abyss into which the Word sinks down, and, having no inkling of it, closes the hiatus, or deliberately festoons the appalling thing with garlands…

Either philosophy misconceives man, failing, in Gnostic or Platonic guise, to take with full seriousness his earthly existence, settling him elsewhere, in heaven, in the pure realm of spirit or sacrificing his unique personality to nature or evolution. Or, alternatively, philosophy forms man so exactly in God’s image and likeness that God descends to man’s image and likeness, since man in in his suffering and overcoming of suffering shows himself God’s superior….

If philosophy is not willing to content itself with, either, speaking abstractly of being, or with thinking concretely of the earthly and worldly (and no further), then it must at once empty itself in order to ‘know nothing…except Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (1 Corinthians 2, 2). Then it may, starting out from this source, go on to ‘impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification’ (ibid., 2, 7). This proclamation, however, rises up over a deeper silence and darker abyss than pure philosophy can know.

And this is just a small taste. von Balthasar conducts a deep meditation on the triduum, setting the table with the Incarnation and the section just quoted on the folly of the Cross before proceeding to a careful study of His going to the Cross, to the Dead, and to the Father, each in turn.

It feels like Holy Saturday gets a bit of the short end sometimes. Between the agony of Good Friday and the ecstasy of Easter Sunday, though, there is a time of silence and this, too, is full of deep meaning. What does it mean, that very-God and very-Man lay in a tomb? If no one can come to the Father, except through the Son, and the Son lies beneath the ground, is the Way closed, however briefly?

Not even for a moment. In the Liturgy of Hours for Holy Saturday, the Office of Readings quotes an ancient homily:

Today a great silence reigns on earth, a great silence and a great stillness. A great silence because the King is asleep. the earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began…He has gone to search for Adam, our first father, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow Adam in his bonds and Eve, captive with him - He who is both their God and the son of Eve…“I am your God, who for your sake have become your son…I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead.”

As the Catechism (no. 634, from whence I hustled that homily excerpt) teaches, the Descent brings the Gospel message of salvation to complete fulfillment. Reaching backward in time, Christ’s redemptive work is now spread to people of all times and places, even to the beginning.

Speaking of the Catechism: I’ve volunteered to assist in our parish’s RCIA program. The class was introduced to the CCC last night. I remember the first time I saw one, at the outset of my own RCIA experience. I remember thinking it was really heavy and, leaving through it, sort of confusing at first glance. Our teacher, though, hammered this home right quick: there are no secrets in Catholic teaching. Everything that we are bound to believe as Catholics is right here in this book. If it’s not in there, I am not bound to believe it. Everything in there is fully annotated, footnoted and cross reference with Scripture, Patristics, Conciliar documents - in short, the depositum fidei. If you have a question, you can find not only the answer, but the vast body of work and thought that led to it. So many rabbit-holes. Hooray for the Magisterium!

Speaking of rabbit-holes: I’m working my way through a collection of Newman’s sermons on faith and reason. I’ll finish the book because I love Newman, but the it’s one of those I-bound-a-public-domain-text-and-sold-it-on-Amazon books. Crappy typesetting and so on. If you’re going to sell it, add some value, man. Clean it up or throw in some footnotes. Getting to the Newman book means I have nothing in the on-deck circle, something I need to remedy post-haste.

Radio-wise: this summer I was able to get the vertical antenna site, installed, and tuned. Seems to be doing pretty well - I’ve made my first JA contacts and hope to add to my DXCC pile this winter when there’s less yard work to do. Hopefully the bands will improve a bit, too. Made my first attempt to capture some NOAA GOES imagery last week but it was a bust. Like all satellite-related things, the best passes seem to either happen right in the middle of times when I have Other Stuff To Do or when it’s raining.

Lots going on around here. I’ve whittled away my social media activities to nearly nothing. Twitter was the last to go, painful as it was. I reserve the right to come back at some point, but for now, I need to focus more deeply on substantially fewer things. to that end, the bulk of my online experience has reverted to text-only. This means console clients like alpine and elinks for email and web usage, and I’ve recently started using newsbeuter to follow a number of RSS feeds related to work.

I still bounce into full browsers occasionally - mostly to check a few headlines, access Outlook for work, or manage local Raspberry Pis on my local network. One runs pi-hole, pivpn and a chrony/NTP server; the other runs a ZumSpot, a UHF hotspot for accessing D-STAR reflectors. If none of that means anything to you, suffice to say that it’s for ham radio stuff.

The text only stuff started as an experiment during Lent this year, and I was surprised to see that I lost very little in the way of general productivity, and on the whole, found myself able to generally focus a lot better on things without a constant visual assault of graphics, movement, and other tricks meant to capture attention.

So: deeper into books, study, prayer. More time on RF tinkering. I’ll update when I can.

When I was a boy, there were only a few ways to learn something. You had to ask someone else - a grownup, usually - and maybe they knew the answer. If they didn’t know the answer, they might tell you to go look it up. Most houses, as far as I can recall, had a dictionary. A few had full sets of encyclopedias. My own grandparents gave us a set that they found at a flea market somewhere. They were old, and I remember spending hours going from one article to the next, following one SEE ALSO section after another.

You could use the school library, of course, and as you got older, the local public library with its card catalog. There were archives of old newspapers, microfiche, and collections of weird old trade journals and periodicals.

Mass media was a handful of TV stations - the three major networks, one PBS station, and maybe a couple of UHF channels that showed old movies and off-brand cartoons. I don’t remember listening to the radio much as a kid. We lived near big cities (Chicago and later Atlanta), so there were two newspapers available. I remember the Tribune and the Sun-Times, and later on the Atlanta Journal and Constitution as separate papers in competition.

If you had questions that couldn’t be answered by your immediate circle of adults - parents and grandparents, teachers, or maybe your friend’s parents, you had to expend a fair amount of effort to find the answers. The one book at the library that talked about whatever it was you were interested in was pretty much the final word on the matter. The point is that it took some work, and so the gaining of knowledge was a two-fold reward. First, you learned something new, which is reward itself. Second, you achieved this as the result of self-directed effort. You had to want to know something, and then go through some bit of effort to find an answer. The gaps were filled by your imagination.

Maybe this is just a memory viewed through then lens of childhood, but the world seemed to be a large, strange and impenetrably mysterious place. Distant events reached us via the distorted word-of-mouth railroad of neighborhood kids. Our imaginations filled in the rest, probably to our detriment. In living memory, I can recall several pretty scary events. I remember watching the nightly news when Chicago’s most famous serial killer was caught. The deadliest air crash in US history happened as we were leaving school. I can remember everyone looking at the smoke plumes, clearly visible from the parking lot. I asked a teacher if we should call someone. She told me that it they firemen were probably already there taking care of it. We hid in the halls once for an honest-to-God tornado once. The City wasn’t really visible but for the glow of it at night towards the east. It sort of loomed there in my imagination: hopelessly huge and the place where my father went every day to find the bad guys. He’d come and go on a train, wearing a gun under his suit coat.

The summer sky was lit up with what we called heat lightning and I can remember at least one electrical storm. My bedroom window look towards a radio tower. One night my father woke me up so I could see the St. Elmo’s Fire going up and down the guy wires of the tower. I had never seen anything like that before and haven’t since, either. But if I couldn’t find it in one of the Little Golden Guides that I used to make sense of the world, it remained a mystery to me. One of my friends - his dad was into ham radio. He used to occasionally show us stuff in his shack. Once he referred to noise in the ionosphere. I remember walking home that day and looking up, half-expecting to see some dim thing moving around high in the sky, barely visible. Clouds, or something. I was becoming aware of the liminal nature of things, though I didn’t know it at the time. There was a world just beyond what I could see, touch, or know. It was larger than I could imagine, mysterious, and more than a little unsettling.

It’s taken me over forty years to recognize these moments as way-stations along a long path of preparation. Other hints came later - some subtle, others not so much.

When I was a boy, there were only a few ways to learn something. You had to ask someone else - a grownup, usually - and maybe they knew the answer. If they didn’t know the answer, they might tell you to go look it up. Most houses, as far as I can recall, had a dictionary. A few had full sets of encyclopedias. My own grandparents gave us a set that they found at a flea market somewhere. They were old, and I remember spending hours going from one article to the next, following one SEE ALSO section after another.

You could use the school library, of course, and as you got older, the local public library with its card catalog. There were archives of old newspapers, microfiche, and collections of weird old trade journals and periodicals.

Mass media was a handful of TV stations - the three major networks, one PBS station, and maybe a couple of UHF channels that showed old movies and off-brand cartoons. I don’t remember listening to the radio much as a kid. We lived near big cities (Chicago and later Atlanta), so there were two newspapers available. I remember the Tribune and the Sun-Times, and later on the Atlanta Journal and Constitution as separate papers in competition.

If you had questions that couldn’t be answered by your immediate circle of adults - parents and grandparents, teachers, or maybe your friend’s parents, you had to expend a fair amount of effort to find the answers. The one book at the library that talked about whatever it was you were interested in was pretty much the final word on the matter. The point is that it took some work, and so the gaining of knowledge was a two-fold reward. First, you learned something new, which is reward itself. Second, you achieved this as the result of self-directed effort. You had to want to know something, and then go through some bit of effort to find an answer. The gaps were filled by your imagination.

Maybe this is just a memory viewed through then lens of childhood, but the world seemed to be a large, strange and impenetrably mysterious place. Distant events reached us via the distorted word-of-mouth railroad of neighborhood kids. Our imaginations filled in the rest, probably to our detriment. In living memory, I can recall several pretty scary events. I remember watching the nightly news when Chicago’s most famous serial killer was caught. The deadliest air crash in US history happened as we were leaving school. I can remember everyone looking at the smoke plumes, clearly visible from the parking lot. I asked a teacher if we should call someone. She told me that it they firemen were probably already there taking care of it. We hid in the halls once for an honest-to-God tornado once. The City wasn’t really visible but for the glow of it at night towards the east. It sort of loomed there in my imagination: hopelessly huge and the place where my father went every day to find the bad guys. He’d come and go on a train, wearing a gun under his suit coat.

The summer sky was lit up with what we called heat lightning and I can remember at least one electrical storm. My bedroom window look towards a radio tower. One night my father woke me up so I could see the St. Elmo’s Fire going up and down the guy wires of the tower. I had never seen anything like that before and haven’t since, either. But if I couldn’t find it in one of the Little Golden Guides that I used to make sense of the world, it remained a mystery to me. One of my friends - his dad was into ham radio. He used to occasionally show us stuff in his shack. Once he referred to noise in the ionosphere. I remember walking home that day and looking up, half-expecting to see some dim thing moving around high in the sky, barely visible. Clouds, or something. I was becoming aware of the liminal nature of things, though I didn’t know it at the time. There was a world just beyond what I could see, touch, or know. It was larger than I could imagine, mysterious, and more than a little unsettling.

It’s taken me over forty years to recognize these moments as way-stations along a long path of preparation. Other hints came later - some subtle, others not so much.

Radio stuff went on hold for a bit while I rebuilt the workstation I use to drive all of my apps. A comedy of errors resulted in me physically knocking the thing over which clobbered the hard drive and that was that. Even so, I was able to pull most everything off before it gave up the ghost entirely. A new HDD has been installed and everything is right as rain. I’ve been exploring OLIVIA a bit. It’s a fun mode, and a nice change from the FT8 grind.

I have been extensively playing around with Arduino stuff in the meanwhile, and have added a WINC 1500 WiFi shield to the 2560. Along with a BME280 sensor which returns temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure, the thing works as a pretty nice little remote weather station. The only two things I would add are an anemometer and a wind vane. The vane, I think, will be relatively straightforward and use a 360-degree potentiometer. For counting the RPMs of an anemometer, I’ve been looking at reed switches and Hall effect sensors and keeping my eyes out for a suitable bearing. Then I need to enclose the whole thing, figure out power and siting, and land on a sink for the data (local? cloud? APRS-IS?).

Started some preliminary planning for the spring garden: tomatoes, squash, flowers, garlic. Also putting feelers out for bees as we slowly approach spring. Looking forward to rebooting the apiary after last summer’s dismal end.

Reading: Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Cardinal Newman.

Then came old Ianuary, wrapped well
In many weeds to keep the cold away;
— Spenser

We are settling back into normal routines after the Christmas season, having put all the decorations away on the 6th and, for the most part, returned to normal work and school schedules. For me, this means:

1. up early/shower/shave
2. get coffee started
3. tend to animals (dog, cat, chicken)
4. Lauds + coffee
5. read news

Spending a lot of time recently digging into Arduino-related stuff. I received a 2560 starter kit for Christmas, and it includes a whole pile of different sensors, servos, and other doodads plus a CD full of (very) basic projects that use them all.

It includes a 2560, of course. Our original board, an Uno, continues to drive our WS2811 LEDs, but Christmas is over and our Stranger Things-inspired message wall has been dismantled. The parts have been claimed by one of my daughters and turned into something of an art-lamp-thing which will almost certainly disappear into their bedroom shortly. I’m enormously OK with this and have strongly encouraged her to look into the tutorials and other materials at Adafruit to learn more.

Not too much on the radio front to report. I received my WAS Mixed certificate in the mail and have duly framed it and hung it up in the office. I will probably turn my attention to some band or mode endorsements next. One thing I definitely want to do is put the new antenna analyzer to work on a fan dipole, but I’m waiting on better weather. Otherwise, I’ve been trying out some of the other digital modes, OLIVIA chief among them. The FT8 areas are getting really crowded, and while I’m not the most rag-chewiest guy on the bands, grinding for contacts ain’t the most exciting way for me to operate.

Still reading Ratzinger’s book on the liturgy. Not sure where I want to go next. Maybe something math-related. Gardening catalogs are starting to show up in the mail. The lengthening days have me thinking about bees again, and restarting the apiary in the spring after last summer’s total loss.

So we had a lovely still stomach bug sweep through the household in 3 waves. First it came for the littles, but they got over pretty quickly as the littles often do. Then it came for the basically everyone else, leaving only my oldest son and I standing. Then I got it. Now he has it, so it’s been something of a clean sweep. Two blessings at work here. First, it goes nearly as quickly as it arrives, so you get 24 hours of misery and then recovery begins. The second blessing is that it’ll clear out by Christmas, so we’re not waiting around for the final shoe to drop on anyone else getting sick. Will be glad to get this completely behind us.

In the meanwhile…let’s see. I logged the last couple of contacts I needed to qualify for Worked All States and have dutifully sent in my application and money. ARRL seems to have accepted everything so now I’m just waiting for it to show up in the mail. I may go hunting for some band endorsements, but the Triple Play has me eyeballing CW again so I’ve dusted off a few of the “Learn Morse Code” apps I was using awhile back and started playing with them again. According to LoTW, I’ve got 44 confirmed DXCC entities, so that’d be another one to start working on.

Reading: The Spirit of the Liturgy by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI. Also re-reading Farenheit 451 for the first time since high school. Also the usual stack of magazines.

This past weekend I passed the Amateur Extra license exam, the final level of the three licenses for US amateur radio operators. I can now operate with full privileges on all bands allotted to US amateurs. Realistically, this gives me access to some portions of the bands that are reserved for Extra-class license holders and useful DX windows. I’ll be interested to see what the contest activity is like in these slots during the next on-air shindig. I can also apply for one of those Extra-only vanity callsigns, but the process looks like a giant pain and I really like the one I was issued. Incrementally, it’s not a giant leap in capabilities, but I just couldn’t stand the idea of there being an additional test out there. If nothing else, I could go on to become a volunteer examiner and help in proctoring future exams in the area.

I recently also completed a little Arduino project here at home - a replication of the Christmas light prop used during the first season of Stranger Things. If you know anything about the show, you know what I’m talking about. The lights are iconic for fans, and several DIY projects popped up online for making your own. I had wanted to do something Arduino-related, and this seemed as good a reason as any to get started by way of an actual application. In the process, I got to learn a bit about the Arduino’s programming language and addressable LEDs. It’s finished, and hanging on the wall as part of our Christmas decorations. I’m already thinking ahead to post-holiday re-tasking. There’s a handful of weather station projects that look pretty promising, as well as an AX.25 shield. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? We’ll see.

The new antenna setup is still doing yeoman work. One day on 15m, I logged FT8 contacts with the Falkland Islands, a DXpedition in the Galapagos, and my fist two Australia and New Zealand stations. During the daytime, no less. There was a 10m contest this weekend, but every time I’ve spun the dial, it’s been as dead as a doornail. That’s life.

I’m almost done with a re-read of After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre. Any extract, I think, will do a disservice to the book. It really is good and deserves carefully reading, and probably more than one. I do like this observation he makes on friendship:

‘Friendship’ has become for the most part the name of a type of emotional state rather than of a type of social and political relationship. E.M. Forester once remarked that if it came to a choice between betraying his country or betraying his friend, he hoped that he would have the courage to betray his country. In an Aristotelian perspective, anyone who can formulate such a contrast has no country, has no polis, he is a citizen of nowhere, an internal exile wherever he lives. Indeed from an Aristotelian point of view a modern liberal democratic society can appear only as a collection of citizens of nowhere who have banded together for their common protection. They possess at best that inferior form of friendship which is founded on mutual advantage. that they lack the bond of friendship is of course bound up with the self-avowed moral pluralism of such liberal societies. They have abandoned the moral unity of Aristotelianism, whether in its ancient or medieval forms.

Later on, he reiterates what Aristotle means by friendship:

Aristotle, probably responding to Plato’s discussion of friendship in the Lysis, distinguishes three kinds of friendship: that which derives from mutual utility, that which derives from mutual pleasure, and that which derives from a shared concerns for goods which are the goods of both and therefore exclusively of neither.

We live on a great piece of property with an unfortunate shape: wedge-shaped, with the fat end on the road and the house situated on the tip at the rear. This means we have a nice, expansive front yard and enough physical space for things like chickens and my poor excuse of an apiary. The one thing for which we’re not well-situated is an antenna. We’re bounded in the back of the property by power lines (and close neighbors), and it’s highly unlikely I could sell a tower in the middle of the front yard to my wife. There aren’t too many trees close to the house, which is blessing inasmuch as I don’t have to clean the gutters but it also limits my longwire antenna options.

Even so, I’ve been having a decent amount of luck with the end-fed antenna. I’ve had it sloping out of a 2nd-story window and down to a tree, in a semi-vertical configuration with the far end up in an ornamental magnolia tree, and finally in a gradual sloper from a rear corner of the house to the closest tree of consequence, a honey-locust in the very back of the yard. Copious amounts of paracord and a halyard helped me get it a decent height above ground, though nowhere near the best-practice heights. It occurred to me that if the antenna were longer, the end of it would at least be closer to the top of the tree, which might be useful. Turns out that 124.5 feet - which is an ideal length for a random wire - is just the trick.

So I ordered a bunch of Flex-weave from HRO and spent yesterday measuring and soldering. By the way: Flex-weave is a colossal pain in the ass to strip. A little tip from me to you. I had to bring an Xacto knife to bear. Anyway, I reconfigured the halyard a bit and got the whole thing up into the air. Seems to be working, too. The LDG was able to tune it for 160m, and I made a few FT8 contacts there for the first time. Worked a little DX this morning into Europe, too. It seems to really like 40m and 15m. Works decently on 80m, too. May give SSB a run later if I have some time and conditions are decent. As it is, I’m splitting time between eyeballing my inbox for 12th hour work problems and keeping watch on the smoker, which has tomorrow’s turkey in it.

I must have read the following quote — or something very much like it — before, because I have been noodling quite a bit on the three-way relationship of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem for a couple of weeks now. I dug around on Google to see where it might have come from and the cited collection of essays turned up. Memories, man. How do they work?

But what really gave the message its wide intellectual scope was Benedict’s way of calling to mind the foundations of European culture, not only as a Christian legacy, but as the fruitful synthesis of the pre-Christian inheritance as well: “The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome — from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical Greeks, and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgement of the inviolable dignity of every human person, it has established criteria of law: it is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in our history.”

Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome: they form together an overarching standard of human rationality. And it was Christianity, in fact, that made possible the creative interplay and mutual fructification of these three sources of reason: belief in God, philosophy and science, and law — and Europe grew out of this synthesis. This Europe was also the ancestral root of the secular state, and, although not immediately and directly, of the modern culture of human rights as well.

— Martin Rhonheimer, “Benedict XVI’s Address to the Bundestag from the Perspective of Legal Ethics and Democracy Theory,” Pope Benedict XVI’s Legal Thought: A Dialogue on the Foundation of Law

What prompted the noodling? Under cover of darkness, a so-called identitarian movement courageously put up some posters and stickers on a local college campus. They seem very much into European identity, though as far as I can tell, they go no further than the Rome bits. Forget about Athens. And Jerusalem? No one has time for any that. We want the Europe that looks like Skyrim. Scratch a bit of the shiny paint off, and what you find is the same old props and affectations of what used to be called “The Uptown Klan,” — the ‘Citizen’s Councils’ of the mid-to-late 1950s. There’s nothing really new here beyond social-media-driven amplification. I’d hazard a guess that some flirt with the edges of this stuff because it prompts an immediate rise out of others: internet lulz culture breaking into meatspace.

The new packaging certainly invites a closer look — community building! civic engagement! The marketing has gotten better for sure. Gone are the grotesque caricatures faded from several generations of photocopying and furtively distributed by hand. There’s a modern website, nifty photos, and all the other accoutrements of a respectable online presence. Replace the text and it might just as well be a VC firm or Bay-area startup.

Polished though it may be, the group’s racist foundation becomes evidently fairly quickly. Moreover, the group declares itself wholly secular, which neatly avoids any requirement to contend with even a third-grade understanding of the Gospels, to say nothing of sustained engagement with a transcending anthropology. In short, I’ve probably burned more calories on this than it’s worth. In light of Christian duty, however, I’ll note the following. It ought to be self-evident, but maybe not, so here we go again:

To reject another human being, or seek to divide the human family, is to deny the inherent dignity of the other as made in the image and likeness of God. It also dismisses out of hand our Lord’s prayer for unity and His direct teaching on the limits of charity (spoiler: there aren’t any). That individuals have unique gifts, talents, and weaknesses is evident on its face, but as I’ve stated previously — the human body is a perfect symbol of an invisible, immortal reality. Separate the two and you’re left not a person, but a mere object, in which case a trip down the materialist cul-de-sac is a foregone conclusion.

This path leads nowhere but to sin and death. Pray for the conversion of those who are on it.

The 2017 CQ WW DX SSB contest was a few weeks ago. On the last afternoon of the contest period, I started scanning bands and looked for interesting big-gun stations that were getting bored. With my current setup - janky antenna and nothing in the way of an amplifier - I figured it might be worthwhile giving digital modes a rest for a few hours. And hey, what do you know? I was able to log phone contacts with Bonaire, Jamaica, Italy, Cape Verde, and a few others. That the massive antenna systems on the far-end were doing lion’s share of work, no question. Still pretty nifty. I submitted my log for the hell of it and wound up with a whopping 494 points. Not at the bottom of any of the lists, so I’ve got that going for me. The aforementioned giant contest stations and dedicated single operators logged scores in the millions, by way of some relative comparisons.

Not long after the contest, I made a voice contact with CO8LY on 17m, a ham in Cuba that I’ve actually logged before on other bands with digital modes. It was nice to hear his voice. Finally got the Azores in my book, too. My antenna is now running to a tree out back, thanks to quite a bit of rope+paracord setup as a halyard and a wrist-rocket slingshot to get the whole thing started. Quite the Wile E. Coyote afternoon, I don’t mind saying. The current configuration is something of a proof-of-concept, and while the system’s still not at an ideal height, it sure feels like I’m getting out a little better.

Confirmation bias? Or effective way? shrug The longer term plan is to switch out the 54' wire with one just about 125', which should put the far end closer to the top of the tree and get it higher still. I’d love to give a doublet or G5RV a try, but the vertical portions of either would wind up dangling down in the middle of the backyard, and there’s no point in tempting the dog or kids with something like that. Long term, some sort of vertical is probably in my future, but I still want to wring everything I can out of what I’ve got.

Switching gears to theology: parts of JP2’s TOB that I’m still sort of getting my head around - well some of many, anyhow:

• Man only comes into the fullness of self-knowledge through community
• The second creation account in Genesis shows Man understanding what he is not (by encountering the animals) and what he finally is (through his encounter with Eve).
• The other is simultaneously different (at an obvious somatic level) and the same (in shared humanity)
• Man only knows the other through the giving in totality of himself as a gift to the Other.
• As a gift, the physical embodiment of Man is the visible and perfect symbol of the invisible reality, namely, that he is also Spirit, much the same way that any physical gift that we give to someone is an outward sign of something else.
• In receipt by the Other as a gift, Man comes to know himself as a gift. There must be a giver, a thing given, and a receiver. The gift must be given and received in its totality, not under terms or rejected, in right relationship.
• Absent this anthropological understanding, the physical body becomes a thing to be treated like any other material object, used, possessed, discarded.

I can’t recommend Prof. Mary Stanford’s 3-part podcast, Theology of the Body 101, highly enough. It only seems to be available via iTunes, unfortunately. It’s engaging and quick (I could have listened to 2-3 more hours' worth of the material as she presents it). Our parish’s confirmation preparation group (of which I’m a part) is doing double-duty with a series of TOB evenings for the confirmandi and their parents. This is probably the sort of material we all ought to be listening to by way of an introduction to the main ideas.

The Signalink arrived and is performing great. Good signal reports, zero ALC, very precise control over outputs. I can warble and drone with confidence. In other radio news: have moved the end-fed into something of a vertical/sloper situation using the one good tree that’s near the house. It seems to be working pretty well this way. I’m working DX from Alaska well into South America and have logged quite a few contacts in Europe, too. All using FT8 or PSK31 running 10-15 watts at most. Most of the heavy lifting, I am sure, is on the far end. Even so it feels like my success rate has gone up and bodes well for a more permanent vertical antenna setup at some point in the future. For now, this is getting the job done.

The weather should be good for the half-marathon this weekend. I think I’m ready. Everything feels pretty good and I’ll spend the week doing some carb-loading.

Theology of the Body continues apace, as does my studying for the Amateur Extra exam.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been training for a half-marathon which takes place in mid-October. The training plan I’m using is 12 weeks long. As of today, I’m halfway through week 8. Several early AM runs are scheduled during the week, sandwiched in between rest days on Mondays and Fridays. I do the long runs on Saturday and cycling on Sunday for cross-training. Most of my running has been on a local greenway system. It’s beautifully wooded, following the local river, and generally has a decent number of other folks running, walking or biking.

My goal is to finish strong, so I’m not likely to be breaking any speed records. My long runs are well over an hour at this point, with walking breaks for water and occasional chewy gummy runner snack things. My next long run is 10 miles and it was high time to add music to the routine.

Herewith my workout playlist. Healthy amount of 80s and 90s pop on there. Some of the more recent stuff comes courtesy of having teens and pre-teens in the house. For better or worse, this lets me keep track of the latest hot hits. You could probably take a pretty good guess at my age from the list below.

1. Hey Ya! – Radio Mix, OutKast
2. Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now), C+C Music Factory
3. Call Me, Blondie
4. I’m Still Standing, Elton John
5. Black Betty, Ram Jam
6. Hungry Like The Wolf – 2009 Remix, Duran Duran
7. Cradle of Love, Billy Idol
8. I Ran, Flock of Seagulls
9. Pump It, The Black Eyed Peas
10. Pumped Up Kicks, Foster The People
11. Sonnentanz – Sun Don’t Shine, Klankarussell & Will Heard
12. You Spin Me Round (Like a Record), Dead Or Alive
13. Tainted Love, Soft Cell
14. She Drives Me Crazy, Fine Young Cannibals
15. Walking On Sunshine, Katrina & The Waves
16. Beds Are Burning – Remastered, Midnight Oil
17. Smooth Criminal, Alien Ant Farm
18. Land of Confusion, Disturbed
19. Girls On Film, Duran Duran
20. Turning Japanese, The Vapors
21. Waka Waka (This Time For Africa), Shakira/Freshlyground
22. I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles, The Proclaimers
23. Tarzan Boy, Baltimora
24. Mexican Radio, Wall Of Voodoo
25. She Sells Sanctuary, The Cure
26. Higher Ground, Red Hot Chili Peppers
27. Wild Wild West, The Escape Club
28. Rebel Yell, Billy Idol
29. Enjoy The Silence, Depeche Mode
30. Message In A Bottle, The Police
31. Psycho Killer, Talking Heads
32. A View To A Kill, Duran Duran
33. Uma Thurman, Fall Out Boy
34. Thrift Shop (feat. Wanz), Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
35. Bad Moon Rising, Credence Clearwater Revival
36. Suffragette City, David Bowie
37. Paint It, Black, The Rolling Stones
38. Weapon Of Choice, Fatboy Slim
39. The Rockafeller Skank, Fatboy Slim
40. Bad Romance, Lady Gaga
41. The Power (7” Version), SNAP!
42. Sandstorm, Darude
43. Come Out And Play, The Offspring
44. Can You Dig It (Iron Man 3 Main Theme), Brian Taylor
45. Main Theme (from Superman), John Williams
46. I’m Shipping Up To Boston, Dropkick Murphys
47. Derezzed, Daft Punk
48. Rio, Duran Duran
49. Mama Said Knock You Out, LL Cool J
50. Jai Ho, A. R. Rahman
51. Mundian To Bach Ke, Panjabi MC
52. How To Be A Millionaire, ABC
53. 100% Pure Love, Crystal Waters
54. Turn Down For What, DJ Snake & Lil Jon
55. Animals, Maroon 5
56. Crazy, Gnarls Barkley
57. Forever Man, Eric Clapton
58. Dirty Laundry, Don Henley
59. Higher Love, Steve Winwood
60. What is Love, Haddaway
61. Crazy, Seal
62. Groove Is In The Heart, Deee-Lite
63. Unbelievable, EMF
64. Jump Around, House of Pain
65. Things That Make You Go Hmm, C+C Music Factory
66. Pretty Fly (For A White Guy), The Offspring
67. Pause, Run DMC
68. Mortal Kombat Theme, Utah Saints
69. The Sign, Ace of Base
70. Finally, CeCe Peniston
71. Two Princes, Spin Doctors
72. Cotton Eye Joe, Rednex
73. Ready To Go, Republica