As We See It Happening

St Athansius
St. Athanasius

A 7 Quick Takes Post as hosted at This Ain’t the Lyceum

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 It is right that creation should exist as he has made it and as we see it happening, because this is his will, which no one would deny. For if the movement of the universe were irrational, and the world rolled on in random fashion, one would be justified in disbelieving what we say. But if the world is founded on reason, wisdom and science, and is filled with orderly beauty, then it must owe its origin and order to none other than the Word of God. St. Athanasius

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I’ve been spending some time at the company I retired from, helping out on various and sundry projects.  It’s been fun, in it’s own way, but has taken time away from retirement and recreation.  While I’ve enjoyed being there, I’m quite happy to be more or less back to my normal routine, and back to blogging.

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Timothy, of the excellent Catholic Bibles blog, has taken on the challenge of using only one Bible, not one translation but one edition, for reading and prayer for 2015.  I think that’s a wonderful idea because it’s a demonstration of the Benedictine spirit of stability, something I struggle with daily.  I have a hard enough time sticking with one book to read through to it’s completion, much less one Bible translation, for more than a few days.

As far as Bibles go, I tend to read a passage in, say, the RSV version, and something makes me wonder how that passage might read in the NABRE version, and so I’m off.  I just learned about this experiment a few days ago and I’m tempted to try myself but I know I would fail within a week.  Besides, it’s already a week into the New Year, so it’s too late.  It will be interesting to see how Timothy does with his experiment and if he can last all year.

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There was an interesting piece by Anthony Esolen on the Crisis magazine website about last week, basically, the disappearance of Catholic culture.  One thing he talked about, something that might not seem very significant, is calendars that stores used to give out back in the day.  He writes,

 “I could recall the calendars that my grandmother got from De Rosa’s grocery store. They were Catholic calendars, with Sundays and holy days of obligation in red, names of the saints in black for their feast days, the emblem of a fish for each Friday and the weekdays of Lent, and the mysterious Latin word “Feria” for weekdays without a saint and outside of the great octaves. It was time, sanctified; to be replaced by time, blank.”

Growing up in Detroit, I remember those calendars being given out by stores and I knew, even as a Protestant, that most of the symbols and such used by the calendar makers, were there for Catholics.  I was impressed by that, us Protestants got no such special treatment and I, admittedly only vaguely, understood those symbols represented something important.  I think the absence of even something so small has had a tremendous role in diminishing the faith of Catholics over the years.  The sad thing is that Catholics don’t even know they should be missing these things.

He also offers an interesting explanation of how all this came about: “Intellectuals are the great image-smashers. Sometimes, when they fall victim to the virus of pride, they scorn anything that cannot be reduced to propositions comprehensible to their capacious three-gallon intellects. And things of the body resist that reduction. The Babe in the manger is not a theological proposition.”  In a way, the faith is far too simple for what Spiro Agnew once called “pointy headed intellectuals.”  It is frustrating.

The article is HERE.

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Sometimes I look around at this world we all now live in and I wonder if there hasn’t been a crazy pill introduced into the water supply of every nation in the West, especially in those used by those in intellectual circles.  Here’s just one example from an article in First Things last week about the latest trend in studying English:

 “At Stanford, literary scholar and marxist critic Franco Moretti proposes a radical plan for English departments: less reading, more computing. With an ocean of texts yet to be studied, literary-historians must, Moretti argues, adopt the methods of quantitative history, geography, and evolutionary theory.”

REALLY?  Can you explain to me why anyone with any sense would want to apply quantitative history study to The Brothers Karamazov?   The trend is called “post literacy”, I kid you not.  Surely, some time soon, the adults in the room are going to wake up and say ENOUGH.  Won’t they?

The article is here, and worth a read.  I think.

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I’ve made a great discovery over the last month or so, a quite useful little app that was promoted on some web site or other called “Pocket”.  With this app you can save copies of articles you stumble across but don’t have time to read, or that you’d just like to keep in a safe place for future reference.  I know, the whole world knows about Pocket, but it was a wondrous discovery for me, so I’m sharing it.

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This is a bit of a warning, there’s going to be a post next week that will be longer than any post I’ve done here so far; I just wanted to provide some brief explanation of what I hope I’m doing with it.

Simply put, I read Fr. James Schall’s book, Another Sort of Learning, again this January, as I have done every January for the last three or four years.  This year, I decided to write about it.  That’s not quite true, I began to draft a post about it roughly eighteen months ago and just never finished it.  Now I have and you’ll get to read it.  One of the best things about Another Sort of Learning, is that it has list upon list of really good books that one should read, some of them even appear on my Classic Catholic’s Reading List.  The result of all this is that I’ve set myself the goal of reading one of the books on Fr. Schall’s lists each month this year and writing about it here.  There, you’ve been warned.

Monday with Merton

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“Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

Monday with Merton

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“To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us – and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him.

Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.”
― Thomas Merton

Let’s Quarrel

This is a 7 Quick Takes post now hosted at the The Ain’t The Lyceum Blog.

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“There were two old men who had lived together for many years, and they never quarreled. Now one of them said: ‘Let us try to quarrel just once like other people do. And the other replied: “I don’t know how quarrel happens.’ Then the first said: ‘Look, I put a brick between us, and I say, “This is mine” and you say: “No, it is mine”, and after that, a quarrel begins.’ So they placed a brick between them, and one of them said: ‘This is mine’, and the other said: ‘No—it is mine.’ And he replied: ‘Indeed – it is all yours, so take it away with you.’ And they went away unable to fight with each other.” Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

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I learned something on Christmas Eve, at Mass.  Perhaps I should say I re-learned a hard truth – be careful what you pray for, you might get it. In this case, my desire for better, really good, music with the weekly Sunday Liturgy. Well, at the Cathedral for Christmas Eve Mass, I got it. They had about a half an hour of organ recital before the Mass and it was quite good, a generous portion of Bach’s fugues and other classical pieces; I was in seventh heaven. Then they had a girl, I don’t think she could have been in her mid-twenties, who sounded pretty close to being a professional opera singer, sing an Ave Maria and a couple of classic Christmas carols. She had a beautiful voice. I immediately began wishing every Mass could be accompanied with music like that; it truly was one of the most beautiful Masses I’ve been too. Adding to it, Fr. David, a priest with a fine Irish tenor voice, chanted the entire Mass, beginning to end

Afterward though, the next morning it dawned on me: the music was so beautiful that I was completely distracted, to the point I remember very little else besides the music; I was completely oblivious to everything else going on. That isn’t a good thing and it set me wondering if this wasn’t a case of far too much of a good thing; I didn’t go to church on a very cold Christmas Eve night to listen to a concert, I went to offer worship to the baby Jesus. Even in the best of circumstances, my ADD makes concentration on things right in front of me difficult, this was an ADD overload to a lover of classical music. I’m embarrassed, I should have known better than to get sucked into it.

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imageI start the New Year with a cold, not a serious one, but enough of one to make concentration difficult, and writing this post even more difficult. The cold comes from going to Mass on Christmas Eve, I’m quite sure of it; people insist on going out in public when they are sick and, therefore, spread their contagion far and wide. In my case, it was the fellow sitting in front on me, coughing and sneezing his way through the liturgy that did me in. I really wish people would stay home when they are sick.

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The weather has been COLD here in Colorado this week. Just before Christmas we had temperatures in the 40s and 50s. On Tuesday, the high was something like 8º, the low -12º and a wind chill of something -23º. At least we should get into the 30s next week and we should be able to get out a little more. I’m getting cabin fever

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Word Press, the hosting service I use for the blog published a year end wrap up of statistics thereby putting the meagerness of this effort into full perspective. Among the interesting facts: I had 2,200 visitors/page views during the year and I learned that, if my blog were a cable car, it would take 37 trips to fill it up. Interesting way of putting it. A little more interesting, the blog had visitors from 51 countries in 2014. It’s odd how such a little thing can be so far reaching. I thank all of you who stopped by here in 2014 and especially those who have become followers of the blog. It is much appreciated.

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I saw an interesting article on the Crisis website earlier this week about the Sign of Peace in the liturgy and it’s placement therein. The headline asked the question – Move or Remove? Since I’m sure that the contagion of this cold of mine was confirmed during that little exercise, my immediate answer to the question was REMOVE. However, the right answer, according to the author was, move. I can understand his thinking, have the sign of peace where it is now completely changes the tenor of the moments just before and just after it occurs. It should come just before the presentation of the gifts, or perhaps even earlier. It’s an interesting article that you’ll find HERE.

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And finally, I have made my choice for a 2015 wall calendar to hang over my desk. It’s the beautiful calendar from Our Lady of Clear Creek Monastery. Normally, this is a big decision and I try to choose from several possibilities but this year, since it’s the only one I received in the mail, it made the choice easy. Please support the monks of Clear Creek with a donation this year if at all possible.

And that’s all that I have the energy to write about; please pray for a quick recovery for me from this blasted cold.

Merton on Monday

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“In order to find God in ourselves, we must stop looking at ourselves, stop checking and verifying ourselves in the mirror of our own futility, and be content to be in Him and to do whatever He wills, according to our limitations, judging our acts not in the light of our own illusions, but in the light of His reality which is all around us in the things and people we live with.” – from “No Man is an Island

Occupying One House

“The Church, having received this preaching and this faith, although she is disseminated throughout the whole world, yet guarded it, as if she occupied but one house. She likewise believes these things just as if she had but one soul and one and the same heart and harmoniously she proclaims them and teaches them and hands them down, as if she possessed but one mouth. For, while the languages of the world are diverse, nevertheless, the authority of the Tradition is one and the same.”
—St. Irenaeus
Against Heresies 1, 10, 2, c. AD 190

Occupying One House

I’ve been thinking about faith and the Church lately, I tend to do that a lot around Christmas time. It’s been especially important this year because of all the hubbub over Pope Francis rather unpredictable activities over the past year, especially the bungled Extraordinary Synod in October. The result of all this is that I’m reminding myself once again that my faith isn’t in the pope, he is human and can make mistakes. Rather, my faith is in the person of Jesus, whom I know about through occupying the one house St. Irenaeus wrote about all those years ago. It is the Church, the one house, that has custody of the preaching and faith that has been handed down to her and she has faithfully guarded. True, there have been momentary blips in time, I think we’re experiencing one now, where things seem dismal, but looking over the entire history of the Church, she has never wavered from the truth that, “the authority of the Tradition is one and the same,” it cannot change. I believe we can trust this to be true because, looking back from the beginning, despite detours along the way, the Tradition handed on by the Church has not changed.

Occupying One House

imageI’ve only just begun reading Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine for the first time. I think, from the little I’ve read so far, this is what Newman is saying. He starts right off with the statement that the Christian religion is a historical fact. He means, I believe, that there is written record of the faith going back to the time of Christ and that the teachings of the Church have been written about since that time and those writings still exist. One common argument made by non-Catholics is that, somehow, at some time, the belief and practices of the very early Church were adulterated, changed and diluted and the practices of the Church today bear no relationship to them. They constantly long to return to the “first century church.”

I’ve long thought that, if you’re going to make that argument, you need to be able to document who made the changes, what changes were made, and when they were made. There is enough of a written record that exists to do so. Yet, it isn’t commonly done because it can’t be, the record doesn’t support that claim; those who make those kinds of arguments are forced to ignore history. It’s especially interesting that Newman looks at history and not the Church Fathers because individual fathers can be contradictory of each other and some even seem to support teachings we now recognized as heresies; the lived out Tradition of the Church holds the key. Newman, I think, is taking the longer view that history offers; he makes that explicit in a famous quote:

“It is melancholy to say it, but the chief, perhaps the only English writer who has any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian, is the unbeliever Gibbon. To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.”

Occupying One House

In this Christmas season, we look back at the birth of the Child in Bethlehem, we celebrate a historical event in Salvation History. But it’s important also to look forward in our own lives and the life of the world and do our best to remain faithful stewards of the faith. That is the best way to ensure we continue to live out the reality of occupying the one house of faith in Jesus Christ.

Merry Christmas

Nativity
 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

A Christmas Carol Poem by G. K. Chesterton

Monday with Merton

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“To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us – and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him.
Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.”