HAUNTED BY THE HOLY GHOST

...maybe you're asking the wrong questions?

"What is man, that thou art mindful of him?""

Is there anything more "God-like" than being mindful of another?

If you can change someone else's life by a single word, a deed, a glance...or by walking with them for a few moments as they travel through the valley of shadow... then you have done  more than than most men have done in a whole lifetime.

Nothing, and no one is more important than the one who is standing right in front of you...or as Fr. Stephen says:

"No where been commanded to change the world or to save civilization"...

"C.S. Lewis, in his The Abolition of Man, wrote of “men without chests,” describing a certain breed of modern man which had jettison his heart, having substituted false science and a devalued subjectivity for the eternal verities that had once linked human beings together in a common culture.

He wrote his work in the immediate years following World War II. Nothing in our educational system has reversed the trends of which he complained. We have not regained our chests – not as a culture.

However, we have no where been commanded to change the world or to save civilization.

 These are things that are measured on a much larger stage of history and longer period
than a single life.
It is not the diagnosis of our disease that is so important as it is the medicine of our healing.

The heart which must again fill our chests is not some missing part of Western Civilization
but the heart of flesh that is our inheritance in Christ.

It is an imperishable healing that alone can give us what we lack."

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h/t to father stephen

What Is Man – That Thou Art Mindful of Him?

safeguarding

We Have Seen...

from today's post at  Glory to God for All Things by fatherstephen:

"All theology finds its proper root in this true knowledge of God.

 It should never be mere speculation based on a rational system of thought –
but rather the unfolding of the mystery made known to us in the risen Christ.
The hunger for this true knowledge of God is the very core of the Christian life:

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.”

The safeguarding of saving knowledge (true participation in the life of God) is the purpose of all doctrine. Every dogmatic statement of the Church has as its sole purpose the safeguarding of true participation in the life of God. Dogma is not an argument over ideas, but a statement that guards the Apostolic witness (which is living and true)."

And wait for me at the end of these my twisting paths, for it is Thee that I love and none other.

At the End of These My Twisting Paths

Lord, thou knowest this heart of mine.
Thou knowest the clashings that at sundry hours rage therein.
Thou knowest my contradictions,
pulled this way and that, I am torn within my breast.
Thou knowest the things that give me life
and the things that wound me unto death,
all that is my joy and all that that is my sorrow Thou knowest,
the strength that is mine,
and the weariness that on certain days is more than I can bear.

Lord, thou knowest my life.
Thou knowest its heights and its depths,
the welling up of loves and the loathings that follow,
fidelity and infidelity,
seasons of flourishing and seasons of crisis,
my brightnesses and my darker moments.

All this, O Lord,
and all that is this life of mine Thou knowest,
thou who searchest the heart and its secret places.

But above all this,
Thou art the Son of Man who one day didst take Thy rest beside the well,
weak Thou wast, and worn, and thirsty,
in the garden held fast in the grip of fear,
and on the tree forsaken.

Come thou, my peace.
Come thou, my sweetness.
Come thou, my consolation.
Come thou my pardon and my love.

Come, rebuild the brokenness within.
Come, redress my fragile shelter.
Come, restore my hope.
Be thou to me one little flame in so vast a night.
And wait for me at the end of these my twisting paths,
for it is Thee that I love and none other.

h/t
From Father Mark at  Vultus Christi

"Didyme wrote this prayer. I took the liberty of translating it from the French. It is every sinner's psalm. The last two lines are extraordinary."

*Didyme/ a Postulant Prémontré in Belgium/his blog (All In French): "La beauté du Seigneur"

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Of Walls, Crosses, Regrets, Icons, Flesh and Blood, but mostly Flesh and Blood

"....Everyone is carrying the pain around, along with the hope and grace that does, indeed, glimmer, even faintly. 
It is maybe not so sensitive and might actually be an act of self-orption to simply dump all of our own pain on anyone who happens to walk by  - we can't do that, for in indiscriminately pouring out our souls we are revealing an indifference to what others are prepared to hear.

Crosses, we call them.             


Everyone is carrying a cross.


Heavy crosses.

Perhaps part of the Christian life involves recognizing that reality at the core of every person's life and a delicate balance of being careful not to add to the burden, but to be open, at the same time, to allowing Christ to work through us, if he chooses, to help them bear it...for just a little while. "

Amy Welborn
Teusday, March 3, 2009 Post  BRAVEHEART?

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photos by:Gabriela Camerotti

...the only thing you can’t get is red ink.’

Recalling a recent quote I heard after while reading yet another lament for our "lost freedom", as if we really knew the first thing about freedom:

And this one was written in 1996

   " In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by the censors, he tells his friends: ‘Let’s establish a code: if a letter you get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it’s true; if it’s written in red ink, it’s false.’ After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: ‘Everything is wonderful here: the shops are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, cinemas show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair — the only thing you can’t get is red ink.’

    Of the joke, Zizek writes:

    One starts by agreeing that one has all the freedoms one wants — then one merely adds that the only thing missing is the ‘red ink’: we ‘feel free’ because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict — ‘war on terror’, ‘democracy and freedom’, ‘human rights’, and so on — are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. In this precise sense, our ‘freedoms’ themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom."

From the film, Zizek!

no more political posts.  I used up my quota for the next 5 years.

PLAINCHANT...it is direct as the words of a child to its father, plain and simple as the evening prayer of an innocent soul

 

Let Dom Johner Be Your Advent Narrator

Dom Johnerby way of Jeffrey Tucker at NLM by way of Aristotle Esguerra at Cantemus Domino....

I don't know how he manages this, but Aristotle Esguerra at Cantemus Domino, who always seems to be ahead of the game, is posting the magnificent commentaries by Dom Dominic Johner, who wrote his encyclopedic treatment of the proper chants in the 1920s, proper by proper. Aristotle is posting them in clean HTML.

It is great experience to both read and sing these pieces from the Gregorian repertoire. The hardcopy of the book is here. I recall the first time I discovered this resource and realizing what a kick comes from singing music in our own parish that has been sung for 1000 years, and enjoying reading a learned monk's reflections on the same pieces of music. He will nearly always enlightened you, and there is a special sense of something that comes when you notice something that he didn't, which happens from time to time. It is excellent work to make all these available in short pieces week by week.

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I have grown to love the Gregorian Chant that is part of our Western Rite Divine Liturgy.  At first, on the surface, it seems to have very little in common with the Eastern Rite Orthodox Divine Liturgies I have attended. 
Time, attentiveness  and letting go of the former expectations of what Worship and Liturgy should "do", I have stopped "using" Liturgy as a way of "approaching  God", an old habit from former days, and instead first seeking to through regular personal prayer to seek Union with Christ as a preparation to join with the Whole Church through the Liturgy and watch, wait, pray for God in His infinite Mercy to approach us.
And as with all things Holy, in Paradox God never fails to bend down the Heavens to touch Earth and at the same time raise us up His earthly creation to meet Heaven.

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from the Introduction of The Chants of the Vatican Gradual

'"Liturgy, however, directs all things to God and is governed by reverence for God. The goal of plain chant, therefore, must primarily be the glorification of God and not the reaction it has on man's ideas and sentiments. Hence it depicts reverential worship of the majesty of God, wonderment over His beauty, amazement over His divine deeds for us, trustful hope in Him whose impenetrable Wisdom guides all things—and then again a fervent, even joyful, gratitude for His love.

"Plain chant, therefore, knows no exuberance of sentiment, no predominance of mood in the face of quiet and serene reasoning. For this it is altogether too intimately connected with its text.

"It is prayer devoid of external manifestation and false pathos; it is direct as the words of a child to its father, plain and simple as the evening prayer of an innocent soul."

Liturgical prayer and chant differ greatly from private devotion. Liturgy, according to its very name, presupposes a fellowship of spirit.

This naturally demands a restraint of the purely personal element and a renunciation of those traits which correspond to the inclinations and experiences of the individual.'"

Taken from The Chants of the Vatican Gradual by Dom Dominic Johner, translated from the German by Monks of St. John’s Abbey. St. John’s Abbey Press, Collegeville, Minnesota, 1940. A PDF scan of this book may be downloaded for free from the website of the Church Music Association of America.

He also included audio recordings of the chants (in Latin) courtesy of St. Benedict’s Monastery, Sao Paolo, Brazil.

Why have the words abandoned me?

A loss for words

A loss for words drifts
through my mind like
a lazy river guided
by the contours of my mind.
Silence spreads, fills
my entire being
Why have the words abandoned
me? Why do they not
come when I call?

Poetry by: LLB , H/T to the laughing linden branch

Photo:Touchesdellafels

WHY DON'T I LISTEN TO MY WORLDLY WISE DAUGHTERS MORE OFTEN.....

Mom.....

Winning an argument (or thinking you have won an argument) on the internet is like winning a medal in the "special olympics"......it may make you feel good, but....

Sorry guys

THIS PLACE IS NOT AS ABANDONED AS IT LOOKS

STANZAS,  by nikaa.

Another photo from my favorite photographer and friend, niika, who inspires me to keep my camera ready and loaded in case I  ever get out of this room/house again.

November in my soul has also been inspiring with his  wordless, but strong reentry into blogdom through photography.

If you look carefully, you may notice my "Winter Reading" changes every few days....I am reading, but not able to write much right now...which begs the question of  the sanity of the decision to register for the writing workshop at "The Glen" again this year?

Again, much is riding on another new medication; not so much "if" it will work (it has a long,track record of success)  but rather  "if you can survive taking it" it will work. 

Why is so much of so-called "modern medicine, more akin to  Medieval Trial by Ordeal?

Obviously, my reading has been, a bit too heavily weighted in  soteriology.

Funny/ ironic-I have read more Luther since becoming Orthodox than I ever read in all my years as a Lutheran.

A New Blog added to my list of Orthodox writers worth reading; EARL DONALD THE BEWILDERED, authored a someone I first encountered in the com boxes at THE OCHLOPHOBIST and other top notch Orthodox blogs.  His prose are thick with metaphors and poetic, but his thinking and ideas are refreshing transparent.  Check it out.  His name is  Maxim (makes me think of "Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again...The first line from one of my favorite books—Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca),

...Probably because both, Ken Follett's " The Key to Rebecca" and Michael Ondaatje's  'The English Patient', have passed through my Winter Reading list.  Until recently, I  never knew that Count Laszlo Almasy, the English Patient, was based on a real life historic character.

note to self:any advice you give to your children, is usually advice you need to give to yourself.

Writing;

Some say it's a gift, an obsession, a craft, a symptom of narcissism, a waste of time, and even a curse (the last one is about the only one we can all agree on).

Whatever it is, it's not freely chosen. Only other writers will understand that.

This doesn't violate "free will". We can not write, but there are consequences.

People ask "if you don't write, what's the worst that can happen? Will all those words just build up in your head and explode one day?

The answer is "Yes"

I have had to wipe down the walls more than once.

And we won't talk about having to lock the characters in your novel, or short story in a trunk, or try to kill them off so they will quit bothering you.

And being struck with the perfect metaphor for that poem you have been working on for years, and all you have to recored it is a dollar bill and the stub of an eyeliner pencil.

Both of my children have the same curse, gift, need to write. And having a few years, and a bit more experience, I tried to give some advice the other day....and later realized, I still have not taken it to my own heart. So I am writing it here as advice to myself, to refer back to, Whenever I start getting crazy about things like writing, art, and wanting to leave something worthwhile behind when I leave this earth.

Or if I  start entertaining delusions that there is someone out there who won't make it through the day with out some bit of wisdom I have to impart.

Or I am afraid that If my memory lapses are the beginning of something more serious, and I feel frantic because I may not get to say everything that I want to say, and it may all disappear one day.

 

Concerning life,  experience, writing and being stalked by words, stories, and novel characters...

If you have the curse, you know exactly what I mean when I say stalked. These things will wake you from a dead sleep, if they let you sleep, make so much racket in your head and don't stop unless you give them some attention, and just when you think you have them domesticated, they spring up when your back it turned, red in tooth and claw.

If you don't have the curse.....we forgive you if you just think we are all just plain nuts...because we are.

You have to stop sweating it, thinking there is an expiration date on anything you have to say, no matter how urgent is seems.

Just guessing:
I predict that before you are clear enough to write about these things, though the thought of this breaks my heart, it will be at least #8 on the list of things you never thought you would survive. I think the two of you (all my children) know it, too.
But don't think about that now; live in that joy, that is sometimes called "bight sorrow", and keep learning to Be...especially now that you have done all that hard work to figure out what happiness isn't, and whether happiness is or isn't the color of the day, Joy always is in season, though it has it's own colors.
People spend lifetimes and don't learn what you know already: The difference between happiness and joy.
You may curse the teachers of these lessons, but you will be the ones who will see visions, dream the dreams, possess the only true Light that can banish darkness forever; And it may not be the one people always want, you have The Answer to sustain you in a world that is becoming a sea, a maelstrom of questions. I don't envy the complicated lives you will have to navigate, but I do envy the Joy I see in you; that is until I realize, and you all remind me just by Being, that it is there for me, too. And it always will be.
Don't judge me by the way things seem; things are not always the way they seem;
Know that I know the way things really are; the way things appear, as a good Thomist would put it, are accidents and don't always reflect what they really are; I have Everything that is needful, and always will; things may not always appear that way, but that is the way things have always have been, the way they are, and the way they always will be.

Remind me, and have faith, even if I don't.
And I and others will do the same for you.

We have to be each other's memorys sometimes.
We have to believe, have faith for each other, too, at times.

I want to take the pressure off you, and Sarah if she's got this same urgency about words and stories; this feeling that you have to write, have to help others by telling your story, right now.
I know how that feels...but I am relieved I haven't said all I meant to say yet...there would have been a lot of words to eat.
I used to worry about time, too; It was going way too fast.
Time is funny; you always have more than you think you have, because you have forever.
And if you don't have time to tell your story, if it is a Story that needs to be told, it will be...maybe not by you, but it will be told.

Write...I know it's your lifeblood.
And maybe you or others will use that to tell your Story.
But stop feeling responsible for The Story, that Answer you have, the thing you think might help others, will only get better, stronger, more believable with time, just as it always has...like the book and movie you read and watched when you were younger...you are part of The Never-Ending Story.

I am going to be Bill Maher (only better read, better looking,better at telling a joke, and slightly better behaved in public;-ok maybe we are on the same plain when it comes to "playing well with others").
For one day I get to make up a "New Rule"-

No one gets to write about anything unless they have outlived their own version of their "survival tale" at least 3 times over.

Let's pretend we're Lutheran for a minute, or longer if that's the way thing's turn out:
What does this Mean?

It means: if you haven't been through at least 3 more things worse than the initial "worst thing" that ever happened to you that threw you into a tailspin, and you are still crawling out of the mud (or off the bathroom floor), brushing yourself(or your teeth) off, go back and sit down with your family for the next meal, determined to get it right this time, but not knowing for sure if you ever will; believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is possible, but not probable, and it stopped being about the odds a long time ago; in the face of it all, you have chosen to survive over being a "survivor of ________"; when the quantity of falls and resurrections amaze you more than the quality of your falls- how far down you fell, or how far back you climbed each time, has become the measure of the meaning of life; if you have gotten this far...take a look around you...and describe what you see; why is it that you are still standing, still breathing, when so many others aren't?
I guarantee that one of the things you will see; and this is where waiting to see what it is that remains solid under your stumbling feet, that you are surrounded by people, seen and unseen, who have pulled you up at least some of those times against your will, against all hope, and they are still beside you, ready to do it yet again.
.
...then I think it is safe for you to speak, safe from giving false hope, of having others build on shifting sands that you have not fully tested yourself; then you have something worth saying...if you still want to say anything, if words still have any meaning; The profound thing hoped to say so long ago, is so simple, it's almost not worth saying again; but you should say it anyway, though the meaning will only be discovered in the living of it; ...Thank you; Glory to God for all things.

photo:don't look back in anger

by missHanna

photo:And that's me, enslaved by the books

by AnnuskA Hjärta

Cesario's been reading your blog. Quick write something..

I am working on three writing projects right now, plus reading several books.
Most of the writing isn't fit to print, so you get to hear about what I am reading (get ready for long quotes, Hero, but trust me, these are not boring...).

And there is a quiz at the end, so pay attention.

Cesario, do English major's still read Graham Greene?
Or do they just watch the movie versions like everyone else?
If you have seen Jordan's 1993 version of "The End of the Affair", you need to read the book.  He makes  "minor" changes to the plot and characters, but minor to some, are major mutilation to others.

The film's only major stumble is in allowing Bendrix's final wooing of Sarah to succeed, at least temporarily. In the novel, he chases her from one place to another, making impassioned pleas on behalf of his own (sexual) desire; but he is unable to break her resolve. In the film, the two former lovers return to Bendrix's apartment, have sex, and begin to glimpse a rather more conventional form of happiness as they plan a life together. This imagined happiness ultimately slips from their grasp; but the film's audience may see this as divine revenge against Sarah for breaking her promise, rather than (as the novel has it) a direct consequence of Bendrix's self-absorbed pursuit. In the film, Sarah emerges as a person of weaker character--a woman so desperate for a virile man than she is willing to cash in her passionate relationship with God. Consequently, her quasi-miraculous interventions are much less credible.

David S. Cunningham, Movie Review, Christian Century
                           

So read the book.
I thought you might find this part interesting.  Sarah is contemplating materialism (not the consumer type, the incarnational type), and how it makes  love possible.

From Sarah's Journal......

It was very hot today and it dripped with rain.  So I went into the dark church at the corner of Park Road to sit down for a while.  Henry was home and I didn't want to see him.  I try to remember to be kind at breakfast, kind at lunch when he's home, kind at dinner and sometimes I forget and he's kind  back.  Two people being kind to each other for a lifetime. 

When I came in and sat down and looked round I realized it was a Roman church, full of plaster statues and bad art, realistic art.  I hated the statues, the crucifix, all the emphasis on the human body.  I was trying to escape from the human body and all it needed.  I thought I could believe in some kind of God that bore no relation to ourselves, something vague, amorphous, cosmic, to which I had promised something and which had given me something in return-stretching out of the vague into the concrete human life, like a powerful vapour moving among the chairs and walls.  One day I too would become part of that vapour-I would escape myself for ever.

And then I came into that dark church in Park Road and saw the bodies standing around me on all the altars-the hideous plaster statues with their complacent faces, and I remembered that they believed in the resurrection of the body, the body I wanted destroyed for ever.  I had done so much injury with this body.  How could I want to preserve any of it for eternity and suddenly I remembered a phrase of Richard's-about human beings inventing doctrines to satisfy their desires, and I thought how wrong he is.
If I were to invent a doctrine it would be that the body was never born again, and it rotted with last year's vermin.  It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another.  Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag,  but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another?
If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there.  Well, the pendulum swung today and I thought, instead of my own body, of Maurice's.  I thought of certain lines life had put on his face at personal as a line of his writing; I thought of a new scar on his shoulder that wouldn't have been there if once he hadn't tried to protect another man's body from a falling wall.  He didn't tell me why he was in hospital those three days;  Henry told me.  That scar was part of his character as much as his jealousy.  And so I thought, do I want that body to be vapour (mine yes, but his?),  and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity. But could my vapour love that scar?  Then I began to want my body that I hated, but only because it could love that scar.  We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds?  Love extends itself all the time, so that we can even love with our senseless nails;  we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve...

And of course on the altar there was a body too-such a familiar body with all the parts of a body, even the parts the loin-cloth concealed.  I remembered one in a Spanish church I had visited with Henry, where the blood ran down in scarlet paint from the eyes and the hands.  It had sickened me.  Henry wanted me to admire the twelfth century pillars, but I was sick and wanted to get out into the open air.  I though, these people love cruelty.  A vapour couldn't shock you with blood and cries.
When I came out into the plaza I said to Henry, "I can't bear all these painted wounds."  Henry was very reasonable-he's always reasonable.  He said, "Of course it's a very materialistic faith.  A lot of magic..."
"Is magic materialistic?  I asked.
"Yes, Eye of newt and toe of frog, finger of birth strangle babe.  You can't have anything more materialistic than that.  In the Mass they still believe in transubstantiation."

The End of the Affair
by Graham Greene

And if you think the 1955 version might be better, think again.  Here is an excerpt from the a article by Vaar Aragon.  He is not as diplomatic  as Mr. Cunningham,  and I am sure with a name like Vaar,  he has his reasons  for not being to fond of "Slavic Communists  with a hazy grasp of the English  Language."

   The 1955 film adaptation is widely - and somewhat excessively - despised by critics.  Its interpretation of the book’s events are crude and often sentimental.  A good example is the very end.  Maurice comes to the Mileses’ house, and finds that Sarah has died. 
He goes home and receives her last letter to him (posted during her illness) in the mail.  It describes her religious convictions in detail, and invites him to follow her.  He promises to do so, and the end credits roll. 
I think much of the film’s awkwardness can be blamed on its director, Edward Dmytryk.  It’s hard to believe that he, a Slavic Communist with a somewhat hazy grasp of the English language, could have had much sympathy with this odd love story driven mostly by dialogue and dialectic theology. 
The censors also bear some of the blame.  In the book, Maurice and Sarah use expletives, sleep together, and address God in quasi-blasphemous terms.  Needless to say, very little of that is found in the movie, and as a result it falls rather flat.
                                           

The Quiz:  What heresies of Christolgy is Sarah flirting (sorry, no pun intended) with here in this diary entry?

Leave your guess answer in the comments.

I know, I know. Jacques Barzun, Multiple Choice, and what I said before....forget it. Do the quiz.

click below for your choices

It's worth your time

A recommended link to a VANITY FAIR Story this month from Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments by Wilfred McCoy

Ignore most of the comments that were left at Touchstone; as usual, people forget that being human is about relationships, not politics, and missed the most important lessons here.  At most, the comments are irrelevant and at worst, unkind, bordering on hubris, wondering how they missed the part they and Arthur Miller all belong to the same species: Human.
Your time is better spent reading the whole story at VANITY FAIR, and skipping MC. commentors, who prove why Christ admonishes us against judging others: none of us stand a chance in the inhumane smugness that lies at the heart of each one of us. 
If they have been in similar situations as Miller and acted more nobly, then good for them.  If their only experience with raising a mentally disabled child is watching a lifetime movie of the week, their words would be better put to use in asking for forgiveness for us all

“...It would be easy to judge Arthur Miller harshly, and some do. For them, he was a hypocrite, a weak and narcissistic man who used the press and the power of his celebrity to perpetuate a cruel lie. But Miller's behavior also raises more complicated questions about the relationship between his life and his art. A writer, used to being in control of narratives, Miller excised a central character who didn't fit the plot of his life as he wanted it to be. Whether he was motivated by shame, selfishness, or fear—or, more likely, all three—Miller's failure to tackle the truth created a hole in the heart of his story. What that cost him as a writer is hard to say now, but he never wrote anything approaching greatness after Daniel's birth. One wonders if, in his relationship with Daniel, Miller was sitting on his greatest unwritten play...”

from: VANITY FAIR Reporter Suzanna Andrews September, 2007

Arthur Miller's Missing Act
For all the public drama of Arthur Miller's career—his celebrated plays (including Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, his social activism—one character was absent: the Down-syndrome child he deleted from his life.