I was surprised at how many listened to the State of the Union address and what a positive impact it had on the President’s numbers. I would not have bet on either. This campaign has been in my humble opinion looney and false so perhaps a little straight talk helped. Certainly there has been more right wing goals achieved under this president than under the last one. We are not in danger of losing our civil rights, we have lost them: due process and habeas corpus is practically gone if and when the government wants them gone. It took a ferocious anti-communist to open the door to Beijing. It is taking a liberalish lawyer to close down rights to due process.

Vulgarity is not a sin. If it were, the designers of so many holy cards would be on their way to perdition. Because Catholicism is such an old version of Christianity and there are so many Catholics, it is bound to be steeped in vulgarity. There is one bunch of “non-Catholics” who are notorious for not being vulgar…a typical parish might be The Church of Our Tasteful Redeemer. There are very few Catholic churches that could pass muster there and those that do exist often puzzle people who think they must have gotten into an Episcopalian parish…that is until they took up a second collection.

Cuss words are back in the news. More confusion. The original objection to “cuss” words had nothing to do with vulgarity. It was taking God’s name, his Holy Name, in vain. That is serious and worthy of attention. But mere vulgarity? Mostly what we consider vulgar has to do with anglo-saxon words, perfectly good words that happen not to be French. Our anglo-saxon ancestors or their rough celtic cousins out in the fields and barn yards saw and stepped in things that the noblesse types that conquered England never saw or stepped in.

People who do not like ango-saxon vocab especially in movies look to me a priest for support…such language is “immoral.” Not really. Just vulgar. My father was a sailor in World War II and I had two uncles either marines or serving with marines. Nobody I was related to dared to keep a parrot in the house.

Tags: cussing, vulgarity

This Sunday Jesus calls four who drop everything to follow him. Very dramatic. They become disciples then  apostles…only after, of course, deserting Jesus on Good Friday.

Here is Newman’s famous meditation on mission. Everything serves. Trust.

 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 never may 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, He 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 naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling.

 Therefore I will trust Him. Whatever, wherever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end, which is quite beyond us. He does nothing in vain; He may prolong my life, He may shorten it; He knows what He is about. He may take my friends, He may throw me among strangers, He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide the future from me–still He knows what He is about.

0 my God, I give myself to Thee. I trust Thee wholly. Thou art wiser than I–more loving to me than I myself. Deign to fulfill Thy high purposes in me whatever they be; work in and through me. I am born to serve Thee, to be Thine, to be Thy instrument. Let me be Thy blind instrument. I ask not to see, I ask not to know–I ask simply to be used.

Tags: Jesus, Newman

A post in Salon.com about commentators and their favorite movies about elections. I checked it out because I wanted to see Pat Buchanan’s favorite. He did not really say anything about a movie but he ran through 1968 quickly since he was alive then and a participant. So I give him this post since he also says that 1968 was a permanent sundering and I believe that, experience it, and cannot see a remedy yet.

From Salon.com….Pat Buchanan, political commentator and former presidential advisor
The 1968 Nixon-Humphrey-Wallace campaign. I was with Richard Nixon from start to finish. The day we flew to New Hampshire, the Tet Offensive began. George Romney dropped out within weeks. McCarthy got 42% against LBJ, a write-in, and suddenly Bobby Kennedy was in. Two weeks later, LBJ gave up the presidency. Four days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated and riots broke out in 100 cities. Troops patrolling the capital. Then the takeover of Columbia campus by radicals led by Mark Rudd. Saw Robert Kennedy concede defeat at Benson Hotel in Portland. A week later, he was assassinated. Was in the Conrad Hilton at 1968 Democratic Convention watching the police attack demonstrators in Grant Park with Norman Mailer. There followed the Humphrey surge of October, the dead-head election, Nixon’s victory, and the White House. A year of tragedies that permanently sundered the nation. It was not entertainment. It was history.

Tags: 1968, Pat Buchanan, Salon.com

1964, I graduated from school. The civil rights speech President Kennedy made in Hawaii  and the engagement of the teachers at the University of Hawaii had been a call to action. I went off to South Carolina and the Oratory only after a serious inquiry about how it dealt with race. We had speakers in Hawaii who talked about segregated Catholic churches even though that was not required by law and segregated Catholic hospitals which were required…a Catholic nun in Louisiana died being shuttled around trying to find a hospital that would admit a black nun. The Oratory had an impeccable record on race. How this little backwoods community had been inspired to be so bold as to found an integrated school, take down the colored only signs in the back pews of the churches they were assigned, and to take part in the Woolworth sit ins, I do not know. It was a sane brave place to be in 1964 when South Carolina had closed its beaches (the Atlantic Ocean was segregated!) and  the YMCA would not accept blacks because of the fear of the swimming pool being contaminated. (The only pool in town by the way.)

In 1968 Martin Luther King who got the Nobel prize four years earlier was murdered. The birth control encyclical was issued, Catholic University where I was studying was torn apart, and the priests I worked with were suspended. 1968 is supposed to have made the more liberal Ratzinger more conservative. The year marked me too. It marked my generation of seminarians. I cannot think that the tragedies of that year have gone away. And I do not see a remedy yet.

Tags: 1968, Martin Luther King

Enough for books right now. Peter Malone MSC and Rose Pacetter FSP do great things with movies. I especially likre Rose’s work on a movie, loaded with German Expressioism about Edith Stein. They did put this material  in a BOOK, sorry, called Lights Camera…FAITH!

For ordinary time II Sunday, January 15th, rhey recommend Dead Poets   Society. 1989 (Seize the Day…Carpe Diem, though I did see a  boy with a tee shirt that said Carpe Noctem…clever…vampires??? Seize the night!)

The latin phrase was a motto of Robin Williams who plays a passionately poetic English teacher. This movie was popular in France. If you want to understand the impact of a teacher like John the Baptist, you get an idea from this.

For III Sunday January 22, 2012. Brother Sun and Sister Moon. Very romantic version of Francis and Claire of Assisi. 1972. Not my suggestion but they see Francis as the one who can invite and receive disciples in the Gospel tradition.

Sunday IV, January 29, 2012. The gospel is an exorcism and a fierce assertion of Jesus the restorer. Of course the movie is the 1973 classic that scared the pants off of even agnostics, the Exorcist. It is more than just a horror show. There are genuinely deep issues in this movie and it is certainly well made. The devil has better things to do than possess teenagers, but the adults in the movie are really the focus.

Sunday v, February 5, 2012. Patch Adams. Robin Wiliams again in a 1998 as a medical student trying out of the box approaches to medicine. Someday dies. Is he at fault ? The gospel is about healing.

Sunday VI, February 12, 2012. Another healing. This time a leper. The movie chosen is Molokai, the story of Father Damien.

He was was the leper priest who isolated himself in a 19th century leper colony on a small peninsula of Molokai, in the Hawaiian chain. Cut off from the top of the island by a long dangerous trail, the Royal government and some church help comes from time to time. He is not a plaster saint. He was young, a great carpenter, full of energy and rather gruff. Gradually his own life and death melds with the lepers.It has some great actors like Max von Sydow but it was not a commercial movie. Good enough though.

Tags: Mass, movies

When the party (the Democrat party) sends me something so I can sound off, I describe myself as a “pro-life, liberal Democrat”. There is an excellent editorial in America Magazine, http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=13206

The editorial is about changing the strategy of the pro-life movement. One strategy that could be dropped is labeling everyone who is against criminalizing abortion as being pro-abortion. In one crude blog, the expression is acctually “pro-abort”. This is nasty and untrue. In my opinion, if you want to promote abortions go for criminalization and label people pro-abortion who believe this is the wrong way to go about stopping or slowing down abortions.

The editorial has some very extensive and expensive ways to provide alternatives. Until we do that, I think we are ineffective as all people are when they do not put their money  where their mouth is.

Paul Goodman! I was planning on posting about movies…too much already about books and then Roger Ebert reviews a documentary on Paul Goodman…and then I find back in the fall so did the NY Times..

http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/movies/paul-goodman-changed-my-life-directed-by-jonathan-lee-review.html

I promise I will learn again how to make these links. But Ebert loved Goodman when he was an undergraduate and gives a great review …just punch in Ebert Paul Goodman into your search engine…there he will be. I was happy enough to email Ebert with my little Sontag Goodman story…

Tags: Ebert, Paul Goodman, Sontag

…by books I should say, or, perhaps better, by experiences that some authors might have helped me with and thereby created more of a back bone for me. That sounds like an old school subtitle. But here goes, not for the sake of just the past but for the future. If a student reads this maybe I could be used as example of late bloomer.

I shall just go down the stack (forever stacking books while I read and re-read them). It is a stack of related material but in no particular order because I do not have one yet…

Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam. When I first got to Wesleyan I ran into a little trouble from a Catholic student who had graduated the spring before and who had been a leader. I wrote about evolution and this made the former student nervous. Our international students he said could not handle this. Imagine, years at Wesleyan and more years as Catholics and they could not handle this. There were some Protestant students from evangelical denominations who certainly were resistant but I could not see supporting their evasion sine the students would soon enough be out in the world and science and religion were having a bad time in some circles where the newly minted graduates would be at play. Besides evangelicals confronting science there also was a need for the secularists to confront a dogmatic stance that caricatured religion (creationists being their best allies). Robinson does a great job on confronting secularist dogmas and I will proceed more this year unraveling her tight prose.

The other thing she does is rescue John Calvin. I had a super Calvinist friend at Oxford, a Texas evangelical. He was also proficient in German and a theology student. He cringed at the englishing pronunication of German thinkers.I teased him by going out of my way to say  bahnhoffer, and cant for Bonhoeffer and Kant. I nailed him one day in the midst of a diatribe about this englishing when I said “but you don’t say Jean Cauvin”. He tried to frenchify his Calvin after that but it seemed a lost cause. Then Lo! comes Robinson who rescues Jean Cauvin from his englished John Calvin. She captures the original, affirming, Augustinian foundations of Cauvin and over turns the presumption of people who got their idea of Calvinism from reading the Scarlet Letter.

I wished that I had read Robinson 1998/2005 before I came to Wesleyan because she does a great job on Calvin, science, dogmatic rationalism, Bonhoeffer, and …psalm 8…all very practical things for Wesleyan life.

Then …there is Bonhoeffer’s Creation and Fall and Temptation. Brilliant work on the Genesis stories…in 120 pages.It is ecology, politics, economics, and ethics…that would have been well applied to Wall Street. I got away from the book and its diagnosis while I concentrated on the Cost of Discipleship. Too bad. The book I am being well fed by… Darwin’s Pious Wish…Conor Cunningham hits it stride when it adds this book to an exposition of Adam (Robinson’s specialty too.)

Then there is the collection of essays called Radical Orthodoxy (Shades of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy) a programatic in your face, confrontation of shallowness that has been aided and abetted by some theologians and philosopher. I find the summary of the program very helpful and I will blog on that soon enough. It is a kind of 12 step program for the addiction to a life as one dimension. Conor Cunningham figures in these essays collected by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward.

Following up Norman Russell, a former Oratorian in London, translates Christos Yannaras Variations on the Song of Songs. How intense is the erotic when it is grounded in the infinite! The body that some Christians fear and believe degraded shines through and then breaks open, empties, and fulfills us as body, as transfigured. We reread the “fall” in the light of Eastern Christian thought exalting a creation that was made through Christ, for Christ, in Christ.

The divinisation that is central to developing a full range of possibilities comes into play with Maximus the Confessor in the Paulist series Classics of Western Spirituality. Jaroslav Pelikan helps introduce this volume (Norman Russell, cited above will write a nice thick volume on Maximus and will add to von Balthazar’s ground breaking study.) Where is Maximos when the chaplaincy needs him? My fault for not pushing  him more…

Simone Weil’s Notebooks about believing in God…she is an atheist in that she does not believe the God she could think of exists, but she is a lover of God who does not think her love is an illusion. John Chapman’s Spiritual Letters is a classic and reminds me of a real phenomena spirituality must confront: the fear of abandonment by God…easy enough as our ideas of God mature and we think our new experience is infidelity on our part and chastisement and justice on the part of God.

The Russian Orthodox Russian, French, American theologian Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World, insists that the bread and wine transformed at liturgy is our condition too…everything, in fact, is made for transformation.

At the bottom of this heap and for no reason is Rowan Williams’s Why Study the Past? The urgency to deal with God dealing with the Church in its unfinished business is addressed by the busy, besieged, scholar and pastor Archbishop of Canterbury. I should share my reflections of the notes and high lights of this book because it challenges the life around me both in university and parish.

These two poems, one by Yeats and the other by Emily Dickinson, shake with sadness, the gamble with despair that a light must overcome…

WB Yeats: To a Child dancing in the Wind

Dance there upon the shore;

What need have you to care

For wind or water’s roar?

And tumble out your hair

That the salt drops have wet;

Being young you have not  known

The fool’s triumph, nor yet

Love lost as soon as won,

Nor the best labourer dead

And all the sheaves to bind.

What need have you to dread

The monstrous crying of wind?

And then this by ED

This World is not Conclusion.

A Species stands beyond–

But positive, as Sound–

It beckons, and it baffles–

Philosophy–don’t know–

And through a Riddle, at the last–

Sagacity, must go–

To guess it, puzzles scholars–

To gain it, Men have borne

Contempt of Generations

And Crucifixion, show–

Faith slips–and laughs, and rallies–

Blushes, if any see –

Plucks at a twig of Evidence–

And asks a Vane, the way–

Much Gesture–from the Pulpit–

Strong Hallelujahs roll–

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth

That nibbles at the soul—