dcn. jquinby's scribbles

I’m not quite a quarter of the way through Rebecca West’s monumental travelogue of pre-World War II Yugoslavia. It’s wonderful stuff, and there’s seems to be a quotable passage on just about every page. I started it while on a trip, which seemed appropriate. Christopher Hitchens wrote the forward this edition, and while I usually skip long introductions, this one was very much worth reading and I’m glad I stuck through it. It’s easy to forget what a formidable writer he was.

Things have been very busy around here lately - lots and lots of things happening to fall on the onset of summer. Retreating into book and study has been a blessed relief. The vegetable garden is off to a good start and I hope to do a little antenna construction in another couple of weeks when (ho, ho) things calm down a bit. Not sure what book(s) will be going into the on-deck circle.

I heard an interesting review the other day of the late Tony Horwitz’s Spying on the South, and may add that. Just seems like a travelogue sort of season. I’m also pursuing catechetical certification from our diocese, by way of completing a series of online training modules. I recently completed the first lesson of the first module and can now use homoosious correctly in a sentence.

Speaking of mysteries, I’ve been in pursuit of a minor one concerning some utility lines which cross our property. We live on about 5 acres of land and there are a couple of old poles carrying lines on to (and off of) the property into parts unknown. Vines are beginning to completely consume one pole and I was a little hesitant about cutting them myself, owing to a profound respect for high voltage. My wife suggested we ask the local power company to take care of it so we called them and they sent a man out. He looked at the poles and declared two things. First, the lines were almost certainly not carrying power. Second, they did not belong to our local utility. I called our county planning office, and they sent me to the register of deeds, who in turn suggested I come by to look through property records. Someone along the line would have granted an easement to someone else for the poles and I’d need to find the transaction by hand.

On a whim (well not quite a whim - the local utility guy suggested it), I contacted the TVA and they responded nearly immediately. The easement was theirs, and they moreover sent me an image of a document dating from 1920 showing the transaction, signed by the person who owned all this land at the time. Now I’m conflicted. On the one hand, I am tempted to petition the TVA to abandon the easement, or the piece of it that crosses my yard at the very least. On the other hand, disappearing back into obscurity also has its appeal and the last thing I want to do is stir up some big institutional machine into deciding that, hey, this easement is actually pretty cool and we were just thinking about re-energizing everything along there. In any case, a couple of semi-abandoned poles have some interesting HAM RADIO potential, as long as no one’s going to throw a switch at some point in the future.

From a place of profound respect, Rabbi Jacob Neusner tells the story of an encounter with Jesus, of hearing the Sermon on the Mount, and turning over these new teachings on the Torah in his mind. In his book, A Rabbi Talks With Jesus, Neusner explores the places where the teachings of Christ shed brilliant light on the Law of Moses and carefully considers those things where, in the context of the Law, the two part ways. The terms are set very clearly at the outset: in no way is this a polemic against Christianity, and less still should it be read as Jewish proselytizing (if in fact there could be such a thing).

A few impressions, then, having completed it and in no particular order:

I thought the Rabbi makes an excellent case for his final conclusion - that in the context of the Torah, the Sermon on the Mount would have been insufficient for him to turn away from everything to follow Him. They part on friendly terms after several conversations and much meditation on the part of the listener. The imagined encounter brought to life the larger numbers of people in the crowds who heard Him teaching - many must have struggled similarly. And yet, even so, many did, in fact, choose to follow, even as the words of Jesus are made all the more radical some places than I might have appreciated prior to this book. Chief among these, Neusner points out, is the cosmic shift between the teachings of the Torah, which concern all of eternal Israel, and deeply personal nature of an encounter with Christ, who speaks principally to the individual. Where the Rabbi sees this as a departure from the eternal law and thus ultimately irreconcilable with the notion of Israel as a nation, a Christian sees the Word made flesh precisely to encounter humanity individually and concretely.

In the book, Neusner consults with a contemporary master of the Torah to answer the question “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”. The master responds with an answer which traces through the prophets, from Moses to Habakkuk, who finally comes to rest on But the righteous shall live through his faith.

“So,” the master says, “is this what the sage, Jesus, had to say?”
I: “Not exactly, but close.”
He: “What did he leave out?”
I: “Nothing.”
He: “Then what did he add?”
I: “Himself.”
He: “Oh.”
I: “‘But the righteous shall live by his faith.’ And what is that? ‘It has been told you, man, what is good, and what the Lord demands from you, only to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly before God.'”
He: “Would Jesus agree?”
I: “I think so.”
He: “Then why so troubled this evening?”
I: “Because I really believe there is a difference between ‘You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy and ‘If you would be perfect, go, sell all you have and come, follow me.'”
He: “I guess then it really depends on who the ‘me’ is.”

I came across references to this book in Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI and recommend it to anyone who is at all interested in Christianity, Judaism, the places where they two intersect, and most importantly, the places where they must remain separate. This is a great book, and very much worth a read.

A certain philosopher asked St. Anthony: Father, how can you be so happy when you are deprived of the consolation of books? Anthony replied: My book, O philosopher, is the nature of created things, and any time I want to read the words of God, the book is before me.

Another:

Abbot Lot came to Abbot Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and according as I am able, I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: Why not be totally changed into fire?

Both from The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century, Thomas Merton (Trans.)

Having pruned my Twitter list back to what I consider the bare essentials (namely: friends, other hams, a few religion writers, and local groups/organizations/entities), I’ve been rediscovering the joy of RSS feeds. I was a hardcore Google Reader user until its unfortunate demise, then switched to Feedly. At some point I stopped using it, but my account was still there, so I purged and rebuilt all the feeds and now check it about twice a day for news updates and all the goings-on. It was a nice surprise that most of my favorite sites still offer RSS feeds, though it occasionally took a little bit of right-click+view-source to find them. Only two sites remain - Garden & Gun and The Nashville Scene but I haven’t given up yet.

We had a perfectly lovely Easter weekend, and managed to make all of the liturgies of the Triduum: Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil. I was privileged to sponsor a young woman who was confirmed and received her first Holy Communion. It was wonderful to see such a large cohort, both candidates and catechumens, received into the Church. Being involved with RCIA has been a blessing these past few months such that I’ve decided to pursue catechetical certification in our diocese. There’s an option for online learning that would fit well with my schedule and I’m pretty sure I could complete it well under the three allotted years.

I picked up Mysterium Paschale again over the weekend to revisit von Balthasar’s exploration of Holy Saturday.

The more eloquently the Gospels describe the passion of the living Jesus, his death and burial, the more striking is their entirely understandable silence when it comes to the time in between his placing in the grave and the event of the Resurrection. We are grateful to them for this. Death calls for this silence, not only by reason of the mourning of the survivors but, even more, because of what we know of the dwelling and condition of the dead. When we ascribe to the dead forms of activity that are new and yet prolong those of earth, we are not simply expressing our perplexity. We are also defending ourselves against a stronger conviction which tells us that death is not a partial event. It is a happening which affects the whole person, though not necessarily to the point of obliterating the human subject altogether. It is a situation which signifies in the first place the abandonment of all spontaneous activity and so a passivity, a state in which, perhaps, the vital activity now brought to its end is mysteriously summed up.

It is in death, as the introduction to this book points out, that we find Christ’s most radical solidarity with us. Even so, it feels like Holy Saturday almost gets lost in the shuffle. One moment we’re celebrating the institution of the Eucharist on Holy Thursday. The next night we’re revisiting His Passion and venerating the wood of the cross. Saturday comes and all eyes look to the west and the setting sun which marks the beginning of the Easter Vigil. We might pause on Saturday morning to feel the stillness of the earth in the pause between pauses. Everything holds its breath waiting for death itself to start working backwards, as Aslan explained to the children.

On the strength of Alan Jacobs' recommendation, I’m adding Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West to the book pile. He mentioned it again recently in a blog post, too.

Finally, a random nit: I wish authors would provide translations of foreign-language quotes in the footnotes. But, comes the response, the intended audience of this book will certainly be fluent in patristic Greek. But since the author already knows what it means, why not throw a crib into the notes? And if not the author, then perhaps the editor? Google Translate isn’t bad most of the time but I’m damned if I even get the gist of an eis hadou katiēi, sunkatelthe, gnōthi kai ta ekeise tou Christou mystēria, which is auto-translated as “if he walks in a bowl, he is conscious, knowing, and consuming the mysteries of Christ.”

“If he walks in a bowl” has me scratching my head a bit for sure.

Twitter has pretty much been my only social media presence for some time now, though I consume way more than I contribute. I tend to follow three groups of accounts:

1. Friends (including other hams) and people/organizations that are locally rooted in my city, county, and state. This is my main feed and numbers about 200 different accounts.
2. A list of news organizations called “breaking,” which I usually turn on when Something Big is going on.
3. A list of religion writers/leaders from across the spectrum: Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim.

I used to have a list strictly dedicated to industry-related things but got tired of the infighting and ego-stroking. I dropped Facebook some time ago. I do have an Instagram account, but only follow family members. So, to be fair, it’s not like a had a large social footprint to start with. Even so, laying Twitter aside for several weeks has had an interesting effect. Without putting too fine a point on it: I can think longer and more clearly about things. I dipped back into the religion list for a little while the other day and couldn’t shut it down fast enough and, mind you, it’s not as though there’s much in the way of acrimony. It’s just so much. So after Lent, I’ve decided to pare back my usage to my main timeline and boot the other lists. If Something Big happens, I will certainly find out about it via other means. My account will remain private and I’ll probably continue using it in something of a read-only mode. The two exceptions will be severe weather spotting (our local NWS office monitors for a particular hashtag) and PM’ing my brother. That’s about it.

This post at GetReligion really drove the point home for me, and not because I’m a pastor. I am not. I’ve concluded that while, yes, social media has done some good things it is on balance not a net good for us. Not personally, not at a community level. And certainly not as a media with an underlying profit motive that requires constant engagement via the constant stimulation of primal urges. Tmatt goes into more detail in his weekly column, which is also well worth reading

Don’t get me wrong. I love the Internet, mostly because it’s still possible for me to use it the way I always have - as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. It’s still imminently possible to research, learn, and communicate with tools that let me control what I’m seeing and how much I share. It takes some work, to be sure, and it ought not, but this is the way it is for now.

So books: still on Jesus of Nazareth. Finished up The Culture Code, which was a little better than I expected. Not sure what I’ll go to next. Itching for some fiction, but not sure what.

The Office of Readings today included a portion of a homily by Origen on Leviticus. At Mass yesterday, the Gospel for the second scrutiny was read: the story of the man born blind. Eyes, seeing, and light are - not surprisingly - taking center stage as we build up to Easter. Eyes have been on my mind lately quite a bit as well: I’m dealing with a pernicious and annoying problem in one eye that has sorely tested my wherewithal for patient suffering.

There is a deeper meaning in the fact that the high priest sprinkles the blood towards the east. Atonement comes to you from the east. From the east comes the one whose name is Dayspring, he who is mediator between God and men. You are invited then to look always to the east: it is there that the sun of righteousness rises for you, it is there that the light is always being born for you. You are never to walk in darkness; the great and final day is not to enfold you in darkness. Do not let the night and mist of ignorance steal upon you. So that you may always enjoy the light of knowledge, keep always in the daylight of faith, hold fast always to the light of love and peace.

Added to my reading stack: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, thanks to slowly growing interest in Lisp. I’ve also been looking at Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation and working through a few tutorials. I am not likely to make a mid-career change to Lisp developer, but I am thoroughly enjoying thinking about computers and programs a bit differently. Quite a bit differently, actually. Just as a purely mental exercise it’s been worth the effort so far. If I could just get used to emacs keybindings now…

In other, semi-related tech news: I tweaked my at-home Linux setup to use the i3 tiling window manager. So far so good. Having to break a few habits related to xfce’s workspace switching, but otherwise I think it’s going well. Some radio apps aren’t particularly well-suited to tiling, or I haven’t figured out how to make them so. There’s always float mode, I suppose.

Jesus of Nazareth, a personal meditation by Pope Benedict XVI on the person of Christ, focuses on the portion of Jesus' public life from His baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration. The little book is dense, which ought to come as no surprise given Benedict’s extensive academic background. I say this to say that it’s slow going.

Proceeding through the Sermon on the Mount, the Holy Father offered this meditation on the second Beatitude:

Let us go back to the second Beatitude: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Mt 5:4). Is it good to mourn and declare mourning blessed? There are two kinds of mourning. The first is the kind that has lost hope, that has become mistrustful of love and truth, and that therefore eats away and destroys man from within. But there is also the mourning occasioned by a shattering encounter with the truth, which leads man to undergo conversion and to resist evil. This mourning heals, because it teaches man to hope and to love again. Judas is an example of the first kind of mourning: Struck with horror at his own fall, he no longer dares to hope and hangs himself in despair. Peter is an example of the second kind: Struck by the Lord’s gaze, he bursts into healing tears that plow up the soil of his soul. He begins anew and is himself renewed.

Some time ago, I was talking to a priest about confession, and one of the things that I told him was that I was having a bit of trouble with the examination of conscience forms that you find online in various places. They generally follow the Ten Commandments, and frankly I found myself having a difficult time finding myself in them. On the other hand, I couldn’t for a moment believe that I’d spent the weeks since my last confession in a state of complete perfection. Oh sure, there was the usual collection of venial sins, but what could I go to re-frame self-examination? He suggested that I begin looking to the Beatitudes. This turned out to be really good advice, for where the Decalogue is pretty cut-and-dried (“Do not kill,” even allowing for all of those things that stop short of actual murder but nevertheless gravely harm the spirit of another), the Beatitudes force the reader to put himself into the place of, for example, a peacemaker.

What would the blessed peacemaker look like? How would he react in this particular situation, or how would he respond conflicts large and small? And, then: was this me? Did I live this out? What action, stillness, word, or silence did I omit, thus falling short? We first have to dare to imagine what the blessed look like. Well not entirely imagine - the example stands before us in the person of Christ. We have to imagine a hunger and thirst for righteousness, see ourselves hungering and thirsting for the righteousness of the kingdom and all that entails. Then and only then are we animated to act and speak, or more importantly, remain still and silent. With God’s grace, we will be the peacemakers, poor in spirit, and meek He described.

Jesus of Nazareth extensively quotes Jacob Neusner’s A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, which will probably wind up on my to-read list shortly. It seems to have been favorably reviewed by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and looks to be an excellent follow-on to Sacks and Soloveitchik.

A friend of mine loaned me a copy of Peter Kreeft’s Symbol or Sustance: A Dialogue on the Eucharist which posits an imaginary dialogue between C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Billy Graham, discussing the Real Presence from their respective traditions. I’m always a little suspicious of imaginary dialogues from real people, but I thought Kreeft did a good job preserving the individual voices without sliding into wish-fulfillment. Kreeft, a Catholic, deeply respects the integrity of the three positions. As he states in the introduction, this is the only way it could work without turning one or more of the characters into caricatures. The book contains a few occasions of Lewis and Tolkien reading from their notes and papers, including this bit from Lewis' The Weight of Glory:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, marry, snub, and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean we are perpetually solemn. We must play. But out merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously — no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner — no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat — the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

Today will be a double-post sort of day. I came across a section in Jesus of Nazareth on the second Beatitude and want to spend some more time ruminating on it.

I’m laying the Nouwen collection aside for awhile. He’s a good writer, but I’m starting to feel like this anthology could be retitled Henri Nouwen and the Nth Voyage of Self-Discovery. Maybe it was too much Nouwen at once. Our pastor made a reference to Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth during his homily last Sunday, and I happened across it in a used-bookstore the next day. Recognizing Divine Providence in action, I snatched it up for $4. So far so good. I will probably also pick up the two follow-ons, which cover the infancy narratives and the events of Holy Week respectively.

Yesterday was the seventh anniversary of my brother’s death. I think about him often, and he was especially on my mind in the days leading up to yesterday. Lots of things went on yesterday: loved ones struggling with decisions, the daily madness of a family of eleven, really big moments at work. In the midst of it all, the veil between us thinned somewhat. We prayed for him, and trust that he does so for us.

Today’s Office of Readings included a homily from St. John Chrystostom, bishop:

Our spirit should be quick to reach out toward God, not only when it is engaged in meditation; at other times also, when it is carrying out its duties, caring for the needy, performing works of charity, giving generously in the service of others, our spirit should long for God and call him to mind, so that these works may be seasoned with the salt of God’s love, and so make a palatable offering to the Lord of the universe. Throughout the whole of our lives we may enjoy the benefit that comes from prayer if we devote a great deal of time to it.
Prayer is the light of the spirit, true knowledge of God, mediating between God and man.

Henri Nouwen writes a great deal about prayer. I’m making my way through a collection of eight of his books. I thought The Genesee Diary was wonderful and I recommend it to anyone who’s curious about either Nouwen or the ins and outs of life in a Trappist monastery. The homily above finds loud echoes in the Little Way of St. Therese: do small things with great love, and you turn them into prayer. The larger Nouwen collection is also good, though substantial parts of the books so far seem to be written for an audience of priests and those who form them. I just started ¡Gracias! - another diary, this time of his time in South America.

For Lent, I’ve left all social media behind. Wherever possible, I’m trying to leave the graphical Internet behind as well. I did this last year, too, and found the text-only web lends itself to a couple of good things. First, it’s a heck of a lot faster. I already filter our surfing with a pi-hole and run uBlock Origin in all of my browsers as an extra layer. But limiting the web to text-only browsers completely…well, speed is on a whole new level. There’s no javascript support, so most of the websites you’re likely to use won’t work quite right, or even render at all. Even so, I’ve found lightweight or text-only versions of just about everything I need: weather, news, research, and so on. I can read my mail with mutt, and there’s even a CLI twitter client which works pretty well, though I’m not using it. I do have to emerge from 1989 for work, though, but otherwise my main setup is retro-tacular. I already use vim for all of my editing needs, and irc is just as textual as it’s ever been. Emojis work even in the terminal.

In addition to being faster, I find it much easier to walk away from, which is important, since another Lenten focus for me has been to spend less free time in front of screens and more engaged in study, prayer, and family time. The online world is a constant visual assault. Strip everything back to elemental text and you really get a feel for just how bad it is.

Finally, it’s a nice bit of nostalgia. Folks my age and older still have the pre-Internet world in their living memory, and the early days looked just like this. So I’ll allow that maybe this is just a lot of old-geezer-wheezing. But…it really is faster and easier to leave. I mean, I’m not even kidding: I’ve seen one or two articles proposing the resurrection of gopher, and if you don’t know what that means, then it’s probably time. The sooner the better, I say.