A Christmas Carol - GK Chesterton

The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world,
But here is all aright.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's breast
His hair was like a star.
(O stern and cunning are the kings,
But here the true hearts are.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's heart,
His hair was like a fire.
(O weary, weary is the world,
But here the world's desire.)

The Christ-child stood on Mary's knee,
His hair was like a crown,
And all the flowers looked up at Him,
And all the stars looked down.

Merry Christmas!

Happy Thanksgiving, Gooble Gobble!

From The Onion:

“Dear brothers and sisters, it is my deepest joy today to present the life and witness of this humble bird to the Church and welcome him to cluck and cackle among the saints in God’s Kingdom of Heaven,” Pope Francis recited in accordance with the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, invoking the name of God three times before inscribing the newly beatified bird, named St. Gobbler, in the catalogue of saints. “Like those who came before, this pure and simple bird lived a life in consecration of Christ the Lord, his gentle gobbles spreading goodness and grace throughout Applewood Farms. May this noble and dignified bird forever bear witness to the Glory of God on earth and shine light in the hearts of the faithful on this most holy day.” Vatican sources say the ceremony was far less controversial than last year’s posthumous canonization of St. Wattle, a 23-pound wild turkey who was burned alive as a heretic in 1690."

To which the communion of saints responded,

Your Face in the Depths of This Heart (Cinq Grandes Odes)

Paul Claudel

Mercy is not a lifeless gift of something we already have too much of, it is a passion like a knowledge. 
It is a discovery like the knowledge of your face in the depths of this heart which you have made. 
If all your stars are necessary to me, how much more all my brothers?
...Behold the outside world where lies our laic duty, 
Without scorn of one's fellow man, with love of one's fellow man, 
Observing the Ten Commandments better than one sees I knew how to, 
Saying my prayers morning and night and giving each person his due. 

Pope Francis embraces Vicino Riva, a man
 with a tumorous disease, at Nov. 6 Wed. audience

H/T Artur Rosman

I'll Have What I'm Having!

Oh, this is just hilarious.

That Strange Word Which Means Its Opposite

Cambridge, January 2001
by Sally Thomas

Seagulls surf the wet
Updrafts over roofs
 A hundred miles inland. 

Every weather's a weather
 Of gulls, a scream against
The bottle-blue or cloud-

 Mottled sky, the one
Constant besides rain
 Spittling the window: 

These birds who revel in being
 Blown off-course. If
They had any idea,

 That is, where they meant
To go in the first place.


 I was never a believer

In resolutions. What's resolve 
 But another word for wish? 
Ask the fisherman's wife

 How far she got on wishes. 
Would I resolve, say, to let
 A third child choose

Itself? What can I 
 Say I wish for? Just now
My two already-wished-for

 Children, resolved into flesh,
Gallop down the hall,
 Speaking in whinnies. 

I wrench the door open 
 And shout, Inside feet! 
What are inside feet? 

 They'd be justified in asking. 
We have the same feet
 Wherever we go. Instead

They say, Okay. They wait
 for the door to close. Gallop
gallop, neigh neigh. Does control

 End at conception? Or
Only our belief in it? 


 The rain's tsunami threatens

To wash the whole country
 Into its inhospitable
Hinterland, the sea. 

 We inhabit a culture of rain,
Learn to speak its commonplaces: 
 Wellieboots, waterproofs-as if

We needed to prove water's
 Existence. We think in a language
At once ours and not ours. 

 At breakfast, our son holds up
A spoon. What's the English
 Word for this? He won’t believe

That spoon could possibly be the answer. 


 Where does it come from, this desire
To shape-shift, to be, say, 

 A horse for the afternoon? 
Perhaps some memory
 Persists, of pre-life, 

Or not pre-life, but life
 Before it's named, flesh and blood, 
Yes, and also possibility. 
 Perhaps children remember 
Without knowing
 The call that makes them 

Step so fluidly out
 Of their bodies, though
They never entirely

 Leave-the body
Goes with them
 Through locked gates, 

Across snowy pastures
 Their hooves leave unprinted. 


Empty branches tap

 The leaded chapel window: 
Stainless daylight, white
 Walls, the unprompted

Revelation of the world
 Not watching us at prayer-
At the motions of prayer, our lips

 Moving over words
Which like our own names
 Begin to lose sense

When we overhear ourselves
 Whispering them-not watching
But with us, cold, 

 Immaculate, clear. 



We never imagined having 
 To say, Take your feet

Off the celery. Don't lick me. 
 The corkscrew is not a toy. 
What did we expect? 

 Amnesia, entropy
Extend their present-tense
 Mercies to our children who are

Not whatever we dreamed:  
 Vague, two-dimensional
Composites of our childhood

 Photographs. Quiet. Able
To play the piano. Sew. 
 Finish what they begin. 

Absolve us of ourselves. 


 After church, a friend
Offers her baby. She
 Drinks her coffee, grateful
For a minute, two hands free. 
 The baby snuffles, exhales

Warmly into my neck,
 And I think, Oh, 
It didn't hurt so much. 

 And other lies, as if I thought
Nothing of having hands
 Open to take the weight

Of a child who won't wake me
 From an hour's sleep. This
Can pass for a decision. 

 My translation of a word
Like goal. Or sane. 
 I could fit a travel cot

Between my bed and desk-
 Anything's possible. Or if
Impossible, still possibly worth doing. 


 Cot:  what the baby
Sleeps in. Crib:  what
 The manger becomes when surrounded

By plaster statuettes wearing painted
 Looks of reverence or weariness-never
Surprise, though you would think

 Someone might have been surprised. 


In bed, in the borrowed
 Time before the alarm,  

We hold each other, hoping 
 Maybe this time it won't 
Happen, the day will hang

 Back shyly at its own
Threshold. Even now
 The sky is paling, a white

Sliver between the curtains. 
 Eleven years married, are we
Any closer to knowing

 What we want? Our wedding
Vows told us precious
  Little. Not what to

Expect, only to cleave, 
 That strange word which means
Its opposite. I close

 My eyes. This could be
A stranger's body my hands

 Move across, mapping again
Desire's universal, alien terrain. 


 O for the wings-but where
Would I go? Where are you not? 

 All of you, husband, children, 
Calling my name, calling me
 Back from myself, back into

Myself. Erasable
 Only by death. This
Must be what it means,

 One flesh. I carry
Your voices in the pocket
 Of my ear. We speak

Of making vows, lovemaking, 
 As if such things didn't exist
Until we think. 

 And they occur to us. 


Morning wind hurls itself 
 Against the house, forces rain
In through the absence

 Of caulking. In watery daylight
Beached raindrops glint
 Like jellyfish along
The windowsill. Outside, 
 Birds are still free-falling
Like leaves across the housetops, 

 Blown away but never out of the sky.

St. Joseph's Abbey, Covington, Louisiana

Walker with Mary "Bunt" Townsend Percy

Before leaving, I snuck inside the empty church at St. Joseph's Abbey to pray and ended up wandering around, checking out the art and architecture. 

St. Catherine of Sienna

St. Cecilia

St. Mary Magdalene

Mary with Christ, flanked by the angel Gabriel and John the Baptist, winged I forget why

All the paintings in the church were by Dom Gregory de Wit, a
Dutch monk I'd heard of before. I'd hoped to swing by Sacred Heart
in Baton Rouge just to see his work, and turns out I didn't have to.

SS. Benedict and Scholastica

Update sidenote: Almost forgot, on the way home I got lost in New Orleans and happened to pass by this house as they were setting up for the outside shot.

Deux: Percy once said something to the effect that the average American is extraordinarily kind and surprisingly dumb. Well, having gotten myself into being nearly stranded about twenty miles to Beaumont with no gas, a frozen debit account and a dead phone (and still making it back in time for lunch with the folks, though I'd promised them breakfast), I can vouch. Thank goodness for the kindness of strangers.

Frau, You're So Groovy

I want you to know.

RIP Lou Reed

"That [strange] land of tolerable flowers"

A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra

BY RICHARD WILBUR

for Dore and Adja

Under the bronze crown

Too big for the head of the stone cherub whose feet   

      A serpent has begun to eat,

Sweet water brims a cockle and braids down

            Past spattered mosses, breaks

On the tipped edge of a second shell, and fills   

      The massive third below. It spills

In threads then from the scalloped rim, and makes

            A scrim or summery tent

For a faun-ménage and their familiar goose.   

      Happy in all that ragged, loose

Collapse of water, its effortless descent

            And flatteries of spray,

The stocky god upholds the shell with ease,

      Watching, about his shaggy knees,

The goatish innocence of his babes at play;

            His fauness all the while

Leans forward, slightly, into a clambering mesh   

      Of water-lights, her sparkling flesh

In a saecular ecstasy, her blinded smile

            Bent on the sand floor

Of the trefoil pool, where ripple-shadows come

      And go in swift reticulum,

More addling to the eye than wine, and more

            Interminable to thought

Than pleasure’s calculus. Yet since this all   

      Is pleasure, flash, and waterfall,   

Must it not be too simple? Are we not

            More intricately expressed

In the plain fountains that Maderna set

      Before St. Peter’s—the main jet   

Struggling aloft until it seems at rest

            In the act of rising, until   

The very wish of water is reversed,

      That heaviness borne up to burst   

In a clear, high, cavorting head, to fill

            With blaze, and then in gauze   

Delays, in a gnatlike shimmering, in a fine

      Illumined version of itself, decline,

And patter on the stones its own applause?

            If that is what men are

Or should be, if those water-saints display   

      The pattern of our aretê,

What of these showered fauns in their bizarre,

            Spangled, and plunging house?

They are at rest in fulness of desire

      For what is given, they do not tire

Of the smart of the sun, the pleasant water-douse

            And riddled pool below,

Reproving our disgust and our ennui   

      With humble insatiety.

Francis, perhaps, who lay in sister snow

            Before the wealthy gate

Freezing and praising, might have seen in this   

      No trifle, but a shade of bliss—

That land of tolerable flowers, that state

            As near and far as grass

Where eyes become the sunlight, and the hand   

      Is worthy of water: the dreamt land

Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass.

h/t Simcha Fisher

Shakey Graves - Word of Mouth / Bully's Lament

Down There By the Plane

Left: Heather King
Right:  Me, in sheer delight

King Krule - Out Getting Ribs

Friday Link Roundup - 9/6/13

Starting a new feature around here called the Friday Link Roundup, to be a sampler of my daily bread for the week.

Let's begin.

1. Excorcist Amorth: "Those who want war in Syria are instruments of the devil." (Spanish)

Rough translation excerpt:

'The Lord is a God of peace, wants peace, wants love between men, desires solidarity and support, so the rich help the poor. And Satan is the one who wants death and war,' he said.

In relation to the day of fasting, prayer and vigil called by Pope Francis for peace in Syria and the world on Saturday, September 7, the exorcist said without a doubt, 'annoy the devil, and not only him.' 'I prefer not to name names,' he added.

My family will be participating in the day of prayer and fasting for peace in Syria, called by the Pope for the whole Church, that he refers to. If you're interested in participating too, Artur Rosman at Cosmos The In Lost has the quick & dirty on the Pope's call and prayer for peace in Syria, and Catholic rules of fasting.

Sidenote: ACI Prensa is run by the spiritual family belonging to the Sodalits, an order of consecrated laymen that several of my friends from college joined.


2. Those who have ears: one of my brother's bands, Low Times, just released an album of demos. Check 'em out, they're a rip-roaring good time.

This is actually the second album featuring the same demos, remixed and with some interludes and a few new songs, so I'm not sure if they're technically still kosher demos. Doesn't matter - they're worth as many hears as your ears can take.

3. Miley Cyrus, eh. But this is worth reading:

What everyone saw Miley doing on Sunday night was what I did almost every night from the age of 18 to 33. I added the Grey Goose when I was 28 and that was like a match to gasoline. ...

You wanna help Miley Cyrus? Go down to the closest Jr. High to you and start mentoring the students there. Chances are that they don’t have role models that aren’t on TV and their parents would appreciate the help.

 
4. On a related note:

There is no one who simply reacts, without also making choices.  There is no one who simply makes choices, without reacting to other people.  It’s almost as if we’re all in this together.

5. MS3TK meets Dark Dungeons

Heh! Who doesn't love a good Jack Chick joke?

Mike: Crimony! Doesn’t this girl have a home?
Crow: [In a girl's voice] I can’t mom, I’m trying to role-play all by myself.
Tract: … I’m fighting the Zombie …
Mike: Because it’s the only one.
Tom: Dibs on the zombie

6. Heather King: PEACE IN OUR PERSONAL LIVES

Peace in our relationships within ourselves, with our family, friends and neighbors, is the start of peace in the world.

It's in large part because I got sober that I have such great hope--more than hope, personal knowledge--that people can change. Because my own heart changed. And make no mistake about it, when your heart starts to change you have to do a whole unbelievable ton of ongoing work to help the change along. You have to make your life's work helping the change along. You have to ask a whole lot of people for help when you don't want to ask at all. You have to be willing to be humbled again and again, to feel awkward, to risk, to fail, to stretch, to suffer, to walk in darkness. To pray ceaselessly. To come face-to-face with your terrible wounds, your terrible selfishness, your terrible fear, your endless, absurd limitations. It is precisely because I am so damaged, so weak, so unbelievably easily triggered and prone to violence myself that I need the Sacraments.

I could never get along with some abstract ideal of peace. I need Christ, nailed to the Cross, to know that goodness, truth, beauty and peace have a price. I need his Body and Blood to even think of being willing to pay it.

7. GK Chesterton, "A Word"

The breaking of the girths of gold, the needs that creep and swell.
The strengthening hope, the dazing light, the deafening evangel,
Through kingdoms dead and empires damned, through changes without cease,
With earthquake, chaos, born and fed, rose,--and the word was "Peace."

_________

That's all folks!

A Blip of Reality

...in the Joseph Bottum controversy, from Calah Alexander:

Our society is obviously not properly ordered. It’s so far from being properly ordered, in fact, that I doubt Aquinas or Aristotle would even believe such a society could exist. Nearly half of us were raised in broken homes. More than half of us, if we get married, will get divorced. A single parent home is as common as a dual-parent home. Sex is everywhere, on magazine covers at the grocery store, on the internet, on TV. Nothing is sacred. Furthermore, nature, insofar as it exists in modern city and suburban life, is manicured and transplanted and sprayed with pesticides. Most of us don’t even know what the created Earth looks like. How can we honestly expect anyone, even Christians raised in Christian homes, to really understand natural law and the way it is ordered toward the good when the only “common” that we’ve ever known is such a warped and manipulated image of creation? I’d argue that our understanding of natural law is primarily through the use of speculative reason now. Nature has become unrecognizable, and so it has been relegated to the realm of theory.

All this is not to say that I think we should all immediately go gay and get married. All this is not to say that I actively support the legalization of gay civil marriage. All this is not to say that I reject the teachings of the Church in any way. There is truth in the Church, and wisdom beyond measure. She has been entrusted to safeguard the teachings of God himself. Even the teachings I don’t understand (of which there are plenty), I still submit to. That’s what it means to be a Catholic.

I just also happen to agree with Joseph Bottum, that the fight over gay civil marriage is not the good fight we should be fighting.

This exactly. And the run-up to this excerpt about Aquinas' understanding of natural law is a welcome correction to a common misreckoning. Catholics have an incarnational faith and we're called to robustly live out the truth we encounter in our experience. Discerning the natural law isn't meant to be a process severed from our own or anyone else's lived experience, but you wouldn't know that from typical anti-gay marriage propaganda.

[W]e try as far as possible to impose the burden of the whole onto each individual, to squeeze as much as possible into the narrow confines of the individual. This cannot be done, and as a result the content becomes abstract and theoretical, no longer touching our lives, let alone shaping them. In practice, all we do is taste and try a little of this and a little of that, at random. This explains the increasing evident flatness, the insipid and forced character of the individual Christian life, the worrying preponderance of programs and requirements. There is no longer any participation at the root level; everything has to be done and intended deliberately, everything has to be justified, discussed and decided upon. No wonder that nowadays the pedagogic element--not in the purest sense, but strongly tending toward propaganda--predominates in religious matters, imitating the successful methods of secular advertising, with its gimmicks, slogans and clichés, its mass-distribution from some central office. The individual's personal significance has become tiny. (Ida Gorres)

At the very least there's room in the Church for discussion and debate. I remember reading something from Pope John XXXIII along the lines that it's healthy for the Church to host disagreement. Wish I could find that quote, but it was something along the lines of clashing iron bars making a spark.

This, keeping in mind that Bottum (heh) isn't saying that gay marriage is really A-OK and Catholic understanding of sexuality is lacking. He's just saying that our priorities have long been out of order in the public sphere. And I would add that to focus 99% of our collective voice in opposition to something that is much more complex, intimate, psychologically and spiritually challenging, than the propaganda used against it admits - that's a folly almost as foolish as not talking about the substance of marriage at all.

Make sure to read the rest of Calah's post here.

THE PANTAGRUEL: On Weiner

Hi folks. I'm back, briefly, with a few thoughts on Weinergate.

He's limping in the polls. The fact that's he's still in the race at all is sort of a miracle, and he's gonna have to clamp down pretty hard if he expects to really go the distance. Probably won't be able to stick it out much longer, but he's been squeezing by somehow. (Sort of a slap in the face to Thompson and de Blasio, if you ask me).

He's got his wife working the damage control shtick, but I bet she's pretty tired and wishes he would just withdraw.

With these Carlos Danger tweets, he's got a whole 'nother mess on his hands. It's gonna take more than a few squares of toilet paper to cle- 

OH FINE, ALRIGHT.

Today In Corn: "Beautiful but false in a deadly way"

What is this I don't even.

"Corn survival guide" from Target's Facebook page
h/t Simcha Fisher

Personalist Poetry - Zagajewski and Cairns

The Beauty Created by Others
Adam Zagajewski

Only in the beauty created
by others is there consolation,
in the music of others and in others’ poems. 
Only others save us,
even though solitude tastes like 
opium. The others are not hell,
if you see them early, with their 
foreheads pure, cleansed by dreams. 
That is why I wonder what 
word should be used, “he” or “you.” Every “he” 
is a betrayal of a certain “you” 
but in return someone else’s poem 
offers the fidelity of a sober dialogue.

H/T Rosman at Cosmos The In Lost


The Entrance of Sin
Scott Cairns

Yes, there was a tree, and upon it, among the                         The man said, "The
wax leaves, an order of fruit which hung plen-                          woman You put at my
tifully, glazed with dew of a given morning.                               side--she gave me of the
And there had been some talk off and on--                              tree, and I ate."
nothing specific--about forgoing the inclina-                                        --Genesis 3.12
tion to eat of it. But sin had very little to do
with this or with any outright prohibition.

For sin had made its entrance long before the
serpent spoke, long before the woman and the
man had set their teeth to the pale, stringy
flesh, which was, it turns out, also quite with-
out flavor. Rather, sin had come in the midst of
an evening stroll, when the woman had
reached to take the man's hand and he with-
held it.

In this way, the beginning of our trouble came
to the garden almost without notice. And in
later days, as the man and the woman wan-
dered idly about their paradise, as they contin-
ued to enjoy the sensual pleasures of food and
drink and spirited coupling, even as they sat
marveling at the approach of evening and the
more lush approach of sleep, they found within
themselves a developing habit of resistance.

One supposes that, even then, this new taste
for turning away might have been overcome,
but that is assuming the two had found the
result unpleasant. The beginning of loss was
this: every time some manner of beauty was
offered and declined, the subsequent isolation
each conceived was irresistible.

H/T Elizabeth Duffy here and here.

Bone Jam - JEFF the Brotherhood

Things are gettin' kinda dim around here. Time to lighten the moods, dudes.

I wish I could summon pizza.

Man of Steel

Three things.

This:

(source)

this:

from "Crucifixion" by artist Daniel Mitsui
Man of Steel? 

and this:

Signposts in a Strange Dream

"A friend from Yale who hadn’t been in touch since graduation looked him up after envisioning a suicide attempt; the phone in Murphy’s Fargo home rang just as the local retired farmer, hunting enthusiast and poet loaded his double-barreled shotgun. Instead of ending his life, a two-hour conversation led him to relinquish the gun. 

... 

"After his conversion, Murphy still hadn’t completely resolved his past, he said, including sexual abuse by an altar boy at age 6 and by an almost-ordained Jesuit priest he met in college at age 18. He also had lingering questions about his homosexuality and the church. 

But four weeks after he heard the booming voice, he found peace. 

It came by way of a dream about Pope John Paul II, he said. 

“I walked him down to the waterfront, and he said vespers and heard my confession, but mainly he heard me bitching about the Catholic attitude toward gays,” Murphy said. “At the conclusion of the dream, all he said was, ‘Te Dominus amat’… He didn’t say, ‘Ego te absolvo,’ ‘I forgive you,’ but simply, ‘God loves you.’" 

"The next morning, Murphy turned on the radio and heard the bells from St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome alerting the world that the pope had died."

Full story here (requires subscription)

H/T Dappled Things

Cross-lashed

A chapel, not a church:
just a clearing in the wood
of aspen, pine and birch,
where a rude altar stood

pegged by a boy's hands;
behind it a birchwood cross
cross-lashed, but neither stands.
They are gone under the moss.

When I quit Wilderness Camp
I rose up from my knees
and left the altar lamp
burning in the trees.

Summits would loom above
the stony trails I trod.
Sex led me to love;
love bound me to God.


Agápē
The night you died, I dreamed you came to camp
to hear confession from an Eagle scout
tortured by forty years of sin and doubt.
You whispered Vespers by a hissing lamp

Handlers, allowing you to hike with me,
followed us to the Bad Axe waterfront
down a firebreak this camper used to hunt.
Through all I said you suffered silently.

I blamed the authors of my unbelief:
St. Paul, who would have deemed my love obscene,
the Jesuit who raped me as a teen,
the altar boy when I was six, the grief

of a child chucked from Eden, left for dead
by Peter's Church and all the choirs above.
In a thick Polish accent choked with love,
Te Dominus amat was all you said.

--Timothy Murphy

Writer's Block -- UPDATED

Writing and bourbon go together like a doctor's appointment and a day planner. 

Niles and Ichabod Crane. 

OJ Simpson and Robert Higgins. 

. . . help me out here.

Ain't A Ghost

"The word boredom did not enter the language until the eighteenth century*. No one knows its etymology. One guess is that bore may derive from the French verb bourrer, to stuff.

Question: Why was there no such word before the eighteenth century? 

... 

"Is it because the self first had the means of understanding itself through myth, albeit incorrectly, later understood itself through religion as a creature of God, and now has the means of understanding the Cosmos through positive science but not itself because the self cannot be grasped by positive science, and that therefore the self can perceive itself only as a ghost in the machine? How else can a ghost feel otherwise toward a machine than bored?"

 (Walker Percy, Lost In the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book)

There's too much of everything
     books, stars, flowers.
How can one flower be precious

     in a bed of thousands?
How can a book count
     in a library of millions?
The universe is a junkyard

     burnt out meteors, busted up stars

     planetary cast offs, throwaway galaxies

     born and buried in an instant

     repeating, repeating

Yet something remains
     the dream of fewness
     one woman, one man.

(Untitled, The Thomas Merton Poems, J.S. Porter. Moonstone Press, 1998)

Dying

Adam and Eve laid death 
at the roots of the Tree of Life 
Adam donned a hard hat 
and the motto, "Safety First," 
while Eve snuck off 
to the Cinema Paradiso 
every afternoon for repeat 
bargain matinee viewings of 
the Bergman film in black & white-- 
that famous chess game with death. 

"The Grim Reaper" became little 
Cain and Abel's favorite 
Saturday morning cartoon 
when they moved out to the suburbs 
and could afford cable TV 
now that Adam had landed 
a sweet promotion to 
a management level position. 

A little death goes a long way-- 
the sterile hospital smell, 
the clinical distance, 
the rubber gloves, 
the pain, 
the indignity of various 
procedures, the cancer 
with its claws inside you, 
your life stretched out and nailed down 
like a man on a cross 

You regret the fear, the caution 
that cut you off from things. 
But then you see and smell 
and taste and feel 
the substance of your life. 
And your mind, Lazarus-like, 
shakes off its shroud and walks 
in the wonder of it all.

Adam and Eve wake up
from their long sleep.
Drudgery and repetition turn the corner
and learn to be a funeral march
Dixieland style down Bourbon St.
to the gardens of the dead
where these bones lie waiting to be
refashioned for a new
and never ending dance.

(House of Words, J. Potter. Korrektiv Press, 2010)

*that was when people realized that they didn't have Mario Kart.

NOTHING Else To Do