Surge, et illuminare, Jerusalem: quia gloria Domini super te orta est!
“I don’t know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the 20th century can be at all if it is not grounded on this experience that you are having right now of unbelief. This may be the case always and not just in the 20th century. Peter said, Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief. It is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.”
-Flannery O’Connor, via the BHT
“Any Christian critique of empire worth its salt must be able to do more than lob shots at the chicanery of the Bush administration. Amid the uproar of exultation surrounding Barack Obama’s inauguration Christians need to remember what it might mean to be true critics of empire. As Andrew Bacevich notes in his superb book, American Empire, the imperial pretension of the American national project are not in any way reducibile to partisan differences within the American political apparatus. The differences between republicans and democrats, between Bush and Obama, as real as they might be are ultimately only differences of degrees.
“If America was an empire yesterday it remains one today despite the Obama administration’s proclamations of hope and seismic change. For my part I think Obama will be a welcome change to Bush, but that hardly changes the fundamental posture that Christians must take in regard to their view of American imperial pretensions. What is needed now, in a post-Bush America is the kind of vigilance that refuses to assume that that empire has ceased to be a theological problem for Christians in America. We will almost certainly see a lapse in the rush of anti-empire publications in the next few years. For far too many ‘progressive’ Christians being anti-empire just means being anti-Bush. What is needed now, in light of the (false) hope of the newly inaugurated Obama presidency is ongoing critique of the problems of American empire. So that is my plea. Let us not be seduced. We lived in an empire yesterday. We live in an empire today. There are just as many idols to be unmasked today as there were yesterday. Let’s not get lax about it just because Bush is gone.”
-From the blog Inhabitatio Dei
Prayers would be much appreciated for the soul of my great-grandmother, Doris. She reposed in Christ earlier this afternoon.
Also if you could remember in prayer a friend of mine, Michelle, who has recently found out that both of her parents have very serious forms of cancer. She is my age — 24 — and she found out about her father’s cancer only a few months after her mother’s. As you can imagine, this is very difficult for her.
“This is the strength of Roman Catholicism, and the key to both its obdurate persistence and its transcendent suppleness. This is why Roman Catholicism continues to do the intellectual heavy lifting in every major public policy debate taking place today (be it war in Iraq, environmental stewardship, abortion, the limits of government, the ethics of science, what have you). It is a credible, contrarian, counter-cultural voice that resonates with all the gravitas of its ancient mission. But that gravitas originates in no small part not from the historic battles it has won, but rather from those it has survived. It is those very temporal battles it pursued and won which now hang like millstones around the Church’s neck, and for which historic apologies have been demanded and given. Genuine Christian triumph is a counter-intuitive thing, and often judged centuries after the fact. That is why many of the battles it appears to be losing now will vindicate the uncompromised witness it bore in the long run. And this is why Catholics should be wary of attempts to mix the substance of our religion with ideology and political contingency. We are called to use our own gifts of reason and conscience to parse the seemingly reasonable answers to ephemeral public policy conundrums with a careful eye. The human heart does not change, and it is to that unchanging heart that the faith must continue to speak.”
Blogger Lee Hamilton, in an essay titled Misgivings. Thanks to blogger Arturo Vasquez for recommending this article.
Baptism Of Christ by Verrocchio, 1472
January 11 is the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord this year (it is a movable feast). The story is told in Matthew 3:13-17:
Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. John tried to prevent him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and yet you are coming to me?” Jesus said to him in reply, “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he allowed him. After Jesus was baptized, he came up from the water and behold, the heavens were opened (for him), and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove (and) coming upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
From His Holiness Pope John Paul II, in his Angelus address for January 9, 2005:
“Today we are celebrating the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus. According to the Evangelists, this event marks the beginning of his Messianic ministry. Christ’s mission thus begun would be fulfilled in the Paschal Mystery in which, through his death and Resurrection, he was to take away the sin of the world (cf. Jn 1: 29)…
“May Mary Most Holy help all who through Baptism are reborn ‘from water and the Spirit’ to make their lives a constant gift of themselves to God in the daily practice of the commandment of love, thereby exercising the common priesthood that belongs to every baptized person.”
If you are interested in my less-formal commentary on life etc., feel free to check out my new personal blog.
This blog will continue to function (indeed, it will probably be updated more frequently), and I hope, will continue to show the beauty of Christian tradition.
“We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already underway. The work of dying well is, in largest part, the work of living well. Most of us are at ease in discussing what makes for a good life, but we typically become tongue-tied and nervous when the discussion turns to a good death. As children of a culture radically, even religiously, devoted to youth and health, many find it incomprehensible, indeed offensive, that the word ‘good’ should in any way be associated with death. Death, it is thought, is an unmitigated evil, the very antithesis of all that is good…
“But then our wisdom is shattered, not by a sudden awareness of the generality but by the singularity of a death—by the death of someone we love with a love inseparable from life. Or it is shattered by the imminent prospect of our own dying…. It is death in the singular that shatters all we thought we knew about death. It is death in the singular that turns the problem of death into the catastrophe of death…
“We are told: don’t ask, don’t wonder, about what you cannot know for sure. But the most important things of everyday life we cannot know for sure. We cannot know them beyond all possibility of their turning out to be false. We order our loves and loyalties, we invest our years with meaning and our death with hope, not knowing for sure, beyond all reasonable doubt, whether we might not have gotten it wrong. What we need is a philosophy that enables us to speak truly, if not clearly, a wisdom that does not eliminate but comprehends our doubt…“
-Father Richard John Neuhaus, may he now rest in peace, from his 2000 article Born Toward Dying. In it, he discusses his 1993 near-death experience with colon cancer, and his subsequent supernatural experience: two angels appeared to him while he was lying on his hospital bed, telling him, “Everything is ready now.” As he says, “It happened—as surely, as simply, as undeniably as it happened that I tied my shoelaces this morning. I could as well deny the one as deny the other, and were I to deny either I would surely be mad.” Read the whole thing.
Fr. Neuhaus, convert, scholar, and priest, will be missed by the Church he served well. I myself have read his columns in First Things with some frustration, especially when he wrote of politics; but like Christopher Hitchens, his piercing wit could be so infuriatingly right about things. Truly I say: he will be missed.
Adoration of the Magi (1496) by Filippino Lippi
Today is the Feast of the Epiphany in the Gregorian Calendar. In Western Christianity, it usually refers to the Visitation of the Magi; however, it has also referred to the Baptism of Christ, the Wedding at Cana (Christ’s first Miracle), and even the Nativity. The feast is, generally speaking, all about the revelation that Jesus is God made Man, which is evidenced in each of these parts of His life.
This feast also marks the end of the Christmas season. I think it therefore appropriate to pay a visit to our old friend W.H. Auden, specifically his For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. For the Time Being was written in the winter of 1941-2, and as its name suggests, it is all about the Christmas season: it begins with “Advent” and ends with a reflection on the end of the Christmas season. The poem appears in Auden’s Collected Poems at 40 pages long, so there is no surprise that there is no reproduction of it on the Internet (and doubtless it would violate a copyright). But, since it is so fitting for the Epiphany, I present you with the last few lines of For the Time Being, with an acknowledgement to the sadly-defunct blog Meanderings Along the Narrow Way, for showing me this poem in the first place.
Well, so that is that.
Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes -
Some have got broken – and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week -
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted – quite unsuccessfully -
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;
“Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.”
They will come, all right, don’t worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God’s Will will be done,
That, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.
IV
CHORUS
He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.
He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.
He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.
or: something worth posting about that’s not Christianity-related
Bon Iver (sounds like, and derived from, French bon hiver — “good winter”) is, like Iron & Wine, just one man: Justin Vernon. His only album, For Emma, Forever Ago was released in 2007, and has a rather interesting history: while alone in his father’s Wisconsin cabin and sick with mononucleosis, he recorded all the vocals and instrumentals for the album himself, by recording over and over several times.
The result is beautiful. The album is almost entirely on YouTube: check out especially the songs Lump Sum and Flume. I can’t stop listening to it; do yourself a favor, and check it out.
Ave Maria, plainchant, from the Llibre Vermell de Montserrat.
