Frost, Ice, and Cold

Lauds, which I'm reading intermittently at Universalis, is back the the canticle in Daniel 3. For some reason, I'm always particularly struck by the line, "Bless the Lord, dew and frost; ice and cold, bless the Lord." I'm not sure why. There's something I like about the image of even everything freezing and cold joining in blessing the Lord.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 10:59 AM

All the Church's Riches

Check out Karen Knapp's post on this subject. She also has a nice post on the martyrs, confessors, and innocents of WWII.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 10:46 AM

Mute Troubadour

Cool, Mute Troubadour has found me, and has a neat, and simple, comment on God's kingdom, "A spiritual truth of Matthew 13:44-46: God's Kingdom requires our complete investment in it. So very simple; and therein is its difficulty, and its necessity."

I also like Mute Troubadour's recent remarks on "Christian" as a marketing moniker. Now, there is some wonderful writing, music, and art out there, which can only be called Christian, and which isn't at all like the insipid drawing described of the apostle Paul. But is it what comes to people's minds when they hear the marketing word "Christian"? Does "Christian" mean "safe," or does it mean Dostoevsky?

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 10:36 AM

Just when I'm getting discouraged at the level of division in the Catholic Church

Peter Nixon points out that apparently George Weigel is also a fan of John Allen's writing in the National Catholic Reporter. I think it's cool that these two men, while differing on many things, can still appreciate each other. Actually, though I like reading the National Catholic Reporter for its progressive views, I also like reading John Allen partly for the same reasons George Weigel does: because of his sense of fair play and because he doesn't, really, follow a progressive party line, but rather, as George Weigel puts it, "has challenged 'progressive Catholic' shibboleths more than once - even if he challenges them rather gently." Sometimes, when I'm upset at something coming out of the Vatican, I'll check out John Allen's Word from Rome, and hear a reason why, perhaps, what is coming out of the Vatican at the moment makes more sense, and is less strangely skewed, than I might have thought from reading the secular press. I still wind up disagreeing with plenty that the Pope and the Curia have to say, but I disagree with a better understanding of what they are about.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 10:27 AM

Communion and Community

Dappled Things has had some interesting discussion of whether communion and community are different concepts or not. Today, Father Jim posts from his mailbox on the topic. The line which caught my eye was "If we see God only as we receive Him in communion, then we will likely not see Him in our neighbor." Not long ago, in Commonweal Magazine, there was an issue on Dorothy Day, in which one of the articles expounded the view that "Dorothy Day was a material girl." I can't seem to link to this article directly, but it's the lead article in the May 3rd issue, which you can find in the online archives. Anyway, I found it a beautiful exposition of the Catholic sacramental imagination; the idea that God is manifested in the ordinary, material world. When a devotion to the sacraments flows into a devotion to God in the rest of your life, toward other people in ordinary acts (as with Dorothy Day, who daily both received the Eucharist and worked with those who were poor and disenfranchised), then it makes a kind of sense. When the belief in God's presence in the bread and wine at the altar doesn't carry over into any real sense of community outside of that rite, then it is harder for someone looking from outside to believe that anything real has happened at that altar. If we don't see God in our neighbor, do we really see God at all?

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 10:13 AM

Hope springs eternal

Jody also writes about his encounter with a "bareback" mailing list which wants to promote the idea that antimicrobial lube is the solution to AIDS (because lube is more fun than condoms?). Hope springs eternal, I guess, that there is a way to avoid AIDS which won't interfere with anything one actually wants to do. Antimicrobial lube sounds to me (as, apparently, also to Jody) like a way to create drug-resistant strains of the virus. But it's certainly not the first time I've encountered denial about AIDS. There was, for example, the magazine one roommate of mine brought home, back before I was married, with the article explaining how HIV had nothing to do with AIDS, and somehow the whole disease was (as best I could make out the author's line of argument) a matter of negative thinking, which you could cure yourself from by thinking more positively. It would be convenient if the world worked that way. In the real world, though, the person interviewed in the article who claimed to have "cured" himself died not long afterward of AIDS.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 9:59 AM

Don't Drink the Water

Jody points to an article indicating that there may not, after all, be any particular scientific evidence for the admonition to drink 8 8-ounce glasses of water a day. Yes! Finally, something I am doing turns out to be healthy after all. Drinking all of that water has always been one of the healthy habits I've found most difficult to follow; I can never remember to drink all that much, when I get busy with something, and I never do feel all that thirsty.

Joel, on the other hand, has found that drinking large amounts of water really does help him feel healthier; it helps his asthma.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 9:44 AM

My first cat

Crazy Tracy begins a new weekly Pawprints feature at DykeWrite with a photo of Cassiopea's first cat. My own first cat, of whom I no longer have any photos, was named Samson. I got him when I was in first grade, from my parents' friends Fran and Alp (who were also responsible for later supplying my family with our wonderful dog, Arriety, who was rescued after being cast away by a previous heartless owner). Samson's father was a Manx, and his mother was a calico. His size must have come from his mother, for he was not at all a big cat. He was orange tabby, with a short, stubby tail. He was also aptly named, for he was as tough and aggressive a character as that Old Testament hero who, at the moment of his death, pulled the pillars of the house down around him, taking his enemies with him. My mother says that Samson was a cat you said sir to. He stayed in the kitchen, where he would pounce on the feet of any approaching family member. He was not particularly intimidated by our dog, a Newfoundland. Unfortunately, one day Samson disappeared, probably having encountered some accident outdoors. Whatever it was, I expect he met it with all the fierceness that a small cat can muster.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 9:05 AM

From the spam mailbox

You know those invitations to launder money for some deposed African dictator? I've just received a new mutation, an invitation from "Mr. Ibramovic J." to launder money on behalf of Slobodan Milosevic. The money is supposed to be lodged, "in Spain ... in one of the private security firms, out of people's imagination." (Impressive, the ability those private security firms have to hide money even from people's imagination.) I wonder which deposed dictator I will be asked to launder money for next.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 8:44 AM

Quaker Queries

Quakers have a custom, each month, of reading a set of advices and queries, which we reflect on as a way of examining ourselves and our Meeting. In my own Meeting, Orange County Friends Meeting, these queries are read during Meeting for Worship on the first Sunday of the month, and we discuss them after Meeting for Worship. This month's advices and queries are on simplicity. Here they are in full.

Simplicity

Life is meant to be lived from a Center, a divine Center... a life of unhurried peace and power. It is simple. It is serene. It takes no time, but it occupies all our time.

Thomas Kelley, Testament of Devotion, 1941

A life centered in God will be directed toward keeping communication with God open and unencumbered. Simplicity is best achieved through a right ordering of priorities, maintaining humility of spirit, avoiding self-indulgence, resisting the accumulation of unnecessary possessions, and avoiding over-busy lives.

Elise Boulding writes in My Part in the Quaker Adventure, "Simplicity, beauty, and happiness go together if they are a byproduct of a concern for something more important than ourselves."

Do I center my life in an awareness of God's presence so that all things take their rightful place?

Do I live simply, and promote the right sharing of the world's bounty?

Do I keep my life uncluttered with things and activities, avoiding commitments beyond my strength and light?

How do I maintain simplicity, moderation, and honesty in my speech, my manner of living, and my daily work?

Do I recognize when I have enough?

Is the life of our Meeting so ordered that it helps us to simplify our lives?

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 7:05 AM

Thomas Merton, on William Blake

"... priests in black gowns who were going their rounds binding with briars my joys and desires." William Blake

How incapable I was of understanding anything like the ideals of William Blake! How could I possibly realize that his rebellion, for all its strange heterodoxies, was fundamentally the rebellion of the saints. It was the rebellion of the lover of the living God, the rebellion of one whose desire of God was so intense and irresistable that it condemned, with all its might, all the hypocrisy and petty sensuality and skepticism and materialism which cold and trivial minds set up as unpassable barriers between God and the souls of men.

The priests that he saw going their rounds in black gowns - he knew no Catholics at the time, and had probably never even seen a Catholic priest - were symbols, in his mind, of the weak, compromising, pharisaic piety of those whose god was nothing but an objectification of their own narrow and conventional desires and hypocritical fears.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 7:05 AM

Shares and Fishes

I had another long piece written about John McGuinness's Shares and Fishes piece, which Mike Hardy and I liked, and several bloggers didn't like. But I realize, now that I'm done writing it, that I'm not happy with what I've written. So I'll just comment more briefly. Disputations has an excellent exposition of the problems of the "miracle of sharing" reading of the loaves and fishes story, and (never having bought that reading myself) I have no quarrel with any of his points. Like Mike, I appreciated John's post because I was troubled by the level of anger expressed in Rod Dreher's original account, toward a priest who may, for all I know, be a fine priest who reads one miracle story in a way I would disagree with. More generally, I'm worried about the way in which people in the Catholic Church who share a deep concern about the current scandals are drawing up sides over the matter of "root causes," so I sympathized with John's comment that:

The current scandals were not caused by Marty Haugen music, processional banners, gender-inclusive language, celibacy, the all-male priesthood, standing during the Eucharistic prayer, nuns not wearing full habits, incense, Latin masses, light penances, or denying the Eucharist to re-married divorcees.

Actually, I do think some of the things on his list are important, and worth arguing over. Maybe even some of them do, after all, in some way feed the current scandals. David Morrison of Sed Contra raises a valid point when he says that

Second, people wonder HOW this happened. How is it that men sworn to the love of God could jump the tracks so badly? I myself have longed to sit a couple of bishops down in a room for a frank, no lawyers, not for publication talk just so I could get a better understanding. I want to ask them, what were you thinking? Do you believe the Gospel? Do you even believe in God? How remotely does what you did square with your responsibility as a one of Christ's apostles?

Indeed, I've been wondering the same things myself, as I'm sure all of us have, and sometimes, in the course of my wondering, I ask myself whether any of the usual suspects that John lists may have played a role. Celibacy, for instance. I don't for one minute believe that celibacy caused the abuse of kids, or could ever push a normal person into such action. But yes, when I see this kind of incomprehensible coverup on the part of bishops, I start wondering if, for some, there may be something askew about the way celibacy is actually being lived, so that people are showing less than normal human sympathy, rather than being freed to love more. And I do wince at the thought of priests who have left to be married being treated worse than priests who have actually abused kids. Light penances, for another. Of course I don't believe (how could anyone believe?) that light penances caused the scandals. After all, as a Quaker married to a lapsed Catholic, I don't myself even come from a church which has penances. But when a horrendous sin and crime is treated as simply an illness (to be repeatedly treated before a return to ministry, as if it were a recurrence of something like malaria), I can well see why that kind of horrible false mercy can seem connected with leniency in the Church in general. So I can see why the scandals intensify everyone's already existing beliefs about what is wrong with the Church. But should everyone's wrong-headed position on one or another of these issues that John listed be treated as being on the wrong side of a war?

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 7:24 AM

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

I mentioned to Joel about the Happy Endings article being referenced in Blogs4God, and he reminded me that I forgot to credit him for any of it. So, here is the credit: almost half the proposed happy endings were his idea.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 6:52 AM

Cat Rescue

Karen of Pulp Friction remembers the kittenhood of her cat, who was rescued as a small kitten, and Meaghan talks about her experience rescuing cats. For about a week, I once took part in the rescue of a not yet weaned kitten. I was working at a company flexible enough to let me bring the kitten to work for a while, and Joel was not, so most of the kitten care fell to me. Which meant that all of my break time at work seemed to be spent mixing formula and feeding the kitten. She did, however, make it up to me with her tiny purr, and I learned how mother cats can tolerate that kneading motion cats make with their claws to show their affection (in a small kitten, that kneading isn't such a problem, because their claws do not prick very hard). After a week, we found her a permanent home with a neighbor.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 6:51 AM

Cool, Eve Tushnet's back

with lots of stuff on her trip to England and on shark jumping.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 7:53 AM

Miracle of Loaves and Fishes at Other Blogs

OK, this was funny, but I think I'm with Mike Hardy that this piece is the best one I've seen so far in the loaves and fishes controversy.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 7:45 AM

Miraculous Loaves and Fishes

"Miracle of multiplication" or "miracle of sharing"? Did Jesus miraculously produce large quantities of bread from small ones, or did the people present all produce the bread that they already had among them, when they saw Jesus bless and begin to distribute the loaves and fishes? I can't say I buy the "miracle of sharing" reading, but I can't say that I find it anathema, either. I see no reason why all of the miracles described in the New Testament should be required to violate the laws of physics. The stilling of the storm which follows the miracle of the loaves and fishes, for example, may have involved the same meteorological factors that calm any storm (the walking on water is of course another matter). Moreover, the gospel story is about the effect Jesus has on people's lives, as well as about the signs he displays. It matters that he teaches with authority, that people are inspired to follow when he asks.

The reason that, in the end, I don't buy the "miracle of sharing" explanation is simply that this particular account doesn't read, to me, as if that was the author's point, not in any of the gospels. John, in particular, seems at some pains to interpret the miracle as a prefiguring of the Eucharist, and a "miracle of sharing" would be an odd reading of the significance of the Eucharist.

But what of the larger questions of miracles? Does it make sense to believe in the sort of miracles which violate the laws of nature? This is a larger question than I'm prepared to take on in this one post, so I'll simply say that my own answer is yes. And, though I do understand that people have reasons to believe otherwise, there is one form of reasoning against miracles that bugs me no end. That's the form that, rather than saying why we oughtn't to believe in miracles, simply takes it for granted that we modern people don't believe in them, because we are, after all, ever so much better informed than the ancients, who, I suppose, didn't yet realize that loaves of bread generally don't multiply, that virgins don't normally give birth, and that people don't normally rise from the dead. We are, indeed, better informed about many things than the ancients - evolution springs to mind. In many of the ordinary workings of the world, that can be understood by science, we are much better informed than the apostles. But as to the question of whether someone can rise from the dead after three days in the grave, we're in the same place that people always were.

Need something violate the laws of nature to properly be called a miracle? Some years ago, I sat in a small Bible study in which this question came up. Did we believe in miracles? Yes, one woman said, for she had experienced one. As she was going through a bitter divorce, her husband had taken her daughter out of state, and out of contact with her, she didn't know where. It took her a year to find her daughter again. Having her daughter back was her miracle. "I don't think that's a miracle," said a man in the Bible study. But the woman was firm, "That's because she's not your daughter."

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 7:35 AM

I thought I would have been geekier than this

I am 33% Geek

You probably work in computers, or a history deptartment at a college. You never really fit in with the "normal" crowd. But you have friends, and this is a good thing.

Take the Geek Test at fuali.com

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 7:21 AM

Quiz time
OK, here is where Joel and I completely differ:

I am 12% Tortured Artist

I should be happy. I have a normal life. I have no artistic ability and I am not cursed with the realiztion that everyone is an idiot, because I am one.

Take the Tortured Artist Test at fuali.com

And here is where we nevertheless manage to be alike:

Somewhat of a loner, you prefer to remain hidden

in the background, quietly observing others. Still, this doesn't mean

you aren't a force to be reckoned with - heaven help

anyone who rubs you the wrong way!

Actually, I like Joel's fast food better.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 7:08 AM