Not knowing the solution can and will reverberate back to no longer knowing the problem, or seeing it; even to positively misconstruing the problem in the name of truth, and thus bringing forth untruth.

Another Observation (not having to do with graphite)

One of the things I love so much about Pope Francis is how the insecurities, lack of faith, doubts, fears, lack of trust, misplaced ideologies masquerading as the faith, intellectualized substitutions for true religion, heady and preemptive categorical approaches to life that completely disregard the paramount importance of Divine Mercy (Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand!), etc. all come to the light and are revealed, left and right. And through no other instrumentation than peoples' own, though they make flailing efforts at projecting it onto the Pope through social media. Tremors run through the epicenter and Super Catholics think this must, hence, equate their true center - when the true center lies out in the existential peripheries. :)

It is good because it is healthy for these things to come out and not to grow like mold in the damp darkness (oh, the things that grow in our darkness of which we are unaware!). Very good for these things to be tested and for people to chuck them and know their true nature; to be clearer, more rooted; to know their absolute dependence on Christ.

But also, like with the revelation of sin, it is exposed as so much nothingness. So it is with the blogosphere: its hopped-up super critics who seem to have nothing better to do are really just making their thesis statements in the well-lit room of one idea, over information that has already passed multiple times through the Roman Rumour Mill before arriving through yet several more hands into their mouse-clicking laps.

So much of it is just a bunch of empty, hypocritical humbuggery.

And all you have to do is make a little incision and the whole thing deflates in a burst like that dessicated turkey in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.

It's kind of lame actually.

Chow.

A book about Pope Francis. I liked the subtitle.

Just Discovered

Graphite makes paper curl. Charcoal does not.

The things you suddenly notice for the first time.

Referring just to regular paper. Obviously does not apply to thicker.

Chow chow for now.

The Mess

"And the past is about to happen." --T.S. Eliot, The Family Reunion


The Church is the only institution that penetrates deeper into history with each successive year and, as such, sort of breaks apart the human conception of calendar: root tip and bud tip share a proximate extension. The Church neither dons nor doffs. The life of the Church infiltrates, excavates, transpires. She sets a table in the midst of our foes. The life of the Church makes peace out of conflict and brings life out of desolation; and it is the only institution that does this one person at a time.

The notion of ending an old year and beginning a new one, with its concomitant new year's resolutions, well-intentioned but ultimately self-centered and always tinged with the sadness of man-made effort, is kind of facsimile to the Church that gives us the deep renewal of Epiphany in the dregs of winter; the miraculous star in the depths of darkness; the Child under the star who is worth more than all the stars; that brings us to a present in which is all of the past, and submerges us in a past that is entirely present; that frees us from our sins, not as some time-distant acquisition of new habits, but in a moment, sacramentally procured, after which you are completely and totally free of them, washed of them; that makes us children of God.

And yet there's another sense in which the Church is not only like the oak, neither donning or doffing in the season of other trees, but is like the baobab that the Africans call the upside-down tree, that looks like a tree that was thrust top down into the earth, with its naked roots sprawling in the air. For we are the Church of Pentecost, of the Holy Spirit. There are indeed even varieties of trees that go beyond looking like they have their roots in the air, and actually grow aerial roots in order to breathe air in water-logged regions. The Church is founded from above and is in fact not the Church without the Holy Spirit. So the Church is not the Church simply because she is old or even the oldest, but also because she is new and the newest. People talk of new year's resolutions with an intention to change, but these changes are nothing when you consider how Peter and the other Apostles were changed in a substantively different way, and changed forever beyond any human understanding, at the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

One of the things I love so much about Pope Francis is that we see the nods toward the Catholic Charismatic Renewal given by his two predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, gain to a certain head in this present papacy. The gap between "fear of the authorities" and "I will give you a mouth and wisdom which all your opposers shall not be able to reply to or resist" seems to be bridging. And Francis ever talks about "newness" (which the blogging authorities register according to the hermeneutic of suspicion) and "going out", of not being "closed in", of a healthy "messiness" that is open to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, that renews an encounter with the Lord Jesus and doesn't develop "spiritual Alzheimer's".

The testing  of anything "charismatic" and pentecostal is warranted in these deceptive times, but we do well to realize that when this becomes persistent, automatic and preemptive; when it becomes suspicious, derisive and disdaining, then it begins to smack of the Protestant error that says the giving of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles with the decree to bind and loose ended with their deaths, and that it was given only for that time to get done what needed to get done. Now, we know that what the Apostles were given by Jesus and the Holy Spirit is passed down to the end of all time, from bishop to priest. But the Consoler given to the Apostles that made them go out into the streets proclaiming the Gospel, accompanied by various gifts, or charisms, is something that can happen like the wind, on any of us.

The suspicion of this - automatic, preemptive and disdaining (like those saying the apostles were drunk on new wine) - could be said to be done by those who seek to "tame the Holy Spirit". But Jesus said we must be born from above. He said the Holy Spirit is like the wind that blows and from where it came and where it goes no man knows: certainly a nightmare for those with a worldly attachment to accumulative knowledge.

The hermeneutic of suspicion begins to look like Protestantism. This Protestantism is truly Protestant and not that of the "denominations", for they have centuries and decades of entrenched belief they are either born into, or acquire out of ignorance of Catholic teaching, but also because it is simply no longer of that which knew no other "Christianity" than the Catholic Church yet still rebelled and rejected her, while Super Catholics of the Blogisterium know better, but they rebel; they protest. This form breathes by help of a second lung, Anti-papism.

Remember that God was born in the veritable mess of history, and more, was born in obscurity and poverty. As our pastor reminded us on Christmas Day, this manger we call "the seat of learning". At this time of Christmas we do well to learn at the seat of learning, the manger. And remember our Mother who was the first to ponder in her heart at this seat of learning. Remember the Wise Men: they didn't stay at home blogging about what they knew. They did not know about the virginal birth. They did not know about the Immaculate Conception. They did not know the word "Incarnation". They left their homes, and traveled far, exposed to the elements and to robbers; and they came to the seat of learning.

In a sense we today perhaps know more than they did (in terms of knowing Revelation, of theology) but are we wise like they?

I think not.

Wisdom is the first and highest fruit of the Holy Spirit. And it is given from above. Consider the self-emptying of God in the Incarnation. As Pope Francis said, "he became nothing for us" - and He went even further in instituting the Eucharist. Doesn't this give us a huge security in divesting ourselves? Can anyone of us ever match God in His self-emptying, in forgetting self, in renewing our charity, in renewing our sight of our neighbour, in finding joy in life and in simple things? We've been freed beyond anything we could ever imagine.

We have these days to go to the manger, the seat of learning.

Thoughts at night

Every time we receive holy communion in a state of grace we are invited to be formed a little bit more into a cradle and a cross.

In order that the cross of Christ be formed in us, to have the courage for this, he comes to us in a cradle, rests in us, and resting in us forms in us his cross.

It is a source of never-ending delight to ponder that all theology is book-ended by the unutterable simplicity of the cradle and the cross - the cave and the tomb.

He asks of us in a silent moment for a silent collaboration. He asks us to forget criticisms, dramas, the high stakes that our self-referential formulas demand, to forget even the judging of ourselves; and to bring perfect love into a moment, which can only be his love.

We can only have charity when it is his cross alive in us, living in our death. Cradle becomes cross. Cross becomes cradle.

A Christmas Story - Part 2

The elves of the North Pole are some of the most serious creatures to go about on two legs. The fact that they take everything so lightly tends to hide from the ambitious their deep connection to reality. Moreover, the elves have a constant, positive care for everyone and everything around them, but to the self-centered they appear as complete sycophant idiots.

Thus Bert, chief secretary and messenger of all Santa's messengers (there being fourteen of them), who seemed somewhat frivolous and terse with Harrie Pawter's cagey disappointment, called a tryst with Coswald, Codger, Lodger, Roger, Patton and Flabby. He approached each of them individually in the Supper Hall the night in which Pawter smashed a toy; for though no elf but Pawter knew of the smashing of the toy (after which he promptly cleaned up the pieces and secreted them away), Bert did catch that unmistakable whiff of...directness - he had no other word - and that particular lack of twinkle-twangle.

But who is an elf to judge, one might ask. Who is even Santa to judge? Bert was not judging Pawter, not suspecting any dark  motives. Only he set about as any elf would: not to expose (for they know not how) but to prevail upon the charm of twinkle-twangle, and putting it where it ought to be. This was the purpose of the tryst he wished to hold with the elves to whom he gave notice in the Supper Hall.

Being not at all direct in their ministrations, the seven of them actually held the meeting three weeks later.

"Harrie is such a worker!" began Bert to the other six. "Wouldn't you agree, Codger?"

They were seated in Bert's living quarters - a modest space of squat, rounded arches and rounded corners: the interior, like most of the elves' homes, had no sharp, hard edges. Windows were rounded, yet not perfectly circle; the walls and the aforementioned rounded corners were not plumb; the low roof flowed like a wave.

Codger said, "A terrific worker is Harrie Pawter!" The others couldn't help also answering in the affirmative. "In the shop for flying toys, under my administration of worker-cum-inspiration, we could not imagine how it would be without him! Yet, there are moments in which he seems to get away, so to speak, from the inspiration that flows out to one's other fellow workers - you know the inspiration I refer to; and I wonder if maybe I'm not giving enough...inspiration - that maybe he's just a bigger hole to fill, if you catch me..."

"He does seem direct, but what could he be with more twinkle-twangle!" said Flabby in a burst of sincerity.

Roger joined him with, "And more: think of the ideas that would happen in only Santa-knows-where of all the workshops!"

Coswald snickered with delight. Patton chuckled. They had such hopes for Harrie the Elf. In the firelight they hatched a plan that, to be honest, was really no plan in the sense of being manipulative - no hatching to bring about Harrie. They just started admiring Harrie Pawter, more so in fact than in any other time. So they decided to bake him a big cake; a towering cake of many steps leading to a pinnacle with some kind of surprise on the top and a surprise inside the cake - many surprises, of all kinds of sweet jellies and creamy textures and rummy fruits, and they would bring this cake to Harrie's house and blow a trumpet at his window and dance around the cake when Harrie opened the door!

They did this the very next night. They spent all day baking the cake. They brought it to Harrie's house, blew a trumpet, and there was nothing. Pawter was not in any of the workshops that day. He was not in any of the streets. They blew the trumpet and shouted his name and the smell of the cake flowed through the window they opened. But there was nothing. So they opened the door. They went into every room. They looked under every object. They looked into every closet. No one was home.

Harrie Pawter had vanished from the North Pole.


End Part 2.

A Christmas Story - Part 1

Santa Claus was drunk in his jacuzzi, brandishing a great bottle of fragrant liquor that came from Elf C-sector 3 of the the North Pole distillery, while bellowing his loud "Merry Christmas everybody!" as practice for the coming festive season. Mrs. Claus was in the jacuzzi with him. It had been a hard day of work and the elves for the time being were not to disturb him with updates of the ongoing duties.

"Ho! Ho! Ho! Maaaaaahhhrryy Chrishmush everybody!"

The bottle caught the edge of the tiled jacuzzi with a sharp clink as he swung his arms out in gesticulation.

"That almost broke, honey. Now, now, I must say, that was the best one yet. The jolly gusto is ever with you."

Santa took another long, deep swig from the bottle by way of self-congratulation.

"Ho! Ho! Ho! Maaaaaaaaaaaaahhhrry Chrishmish evvvreeybodeeeiii...."

"Oh deary, you'll do just fine. The night-sky will reverberate and snow the wondrous crystals in response."

The bottle went as vertical as the pole marking the North Pole, and the liquor went down his gullet like dishwater down a sink when the stopper is pulled.

"Ho! Ho! Ho! Maaaauuuuiiiiiii Quishmish evweeebodiiieeee...."

"Should we roll in the snow?"

"Nah, nah...oh sweety pull the bell now."

Mrs. Claus reached for a rope lever just behind her and within seconds a pert elf came through a hidden door without a handle.

"Oh, the cinnamon has come in a swirling burst of twinkle-twangle!" said the elf excitedly.

"Good! Good!" said Santa as he threw the empty booze bottle away into the distance of the snow where it dashed into crystalline pieces of never-cutting glass. These pieces became one with the frost and the ice, for the frost and the ice were something of the glass that held the booze of the North Pole. The elf began sniffing the air with delight.

"Ah!" he said, "That's the lemon-guava with the secret spice #5!"

"Yes, it is--er, it was", said Santa, and started laughing. "Bert, now tell me, how has Ernie come along on those chocolate coffee beans?"

 "He's all done. He's ahead of schedule. The aroma from the coffee roaster went down three shops and the D-Sector 8 elves came up with a new and brilliant idea for train connector tracks."

"Yes, I thought it would do something like that", said Santa with a sly, knowing grin. This sent Bert into a fine fickle of happiness, such that he gathered himself up and gave vent to a question that he had been hesitant to keeping plying Santa Claus with, but which nonetheless had been growing in him to ask.

"Now come, Santa! I keep wanting to put the question to you; what elves are going to be at the sleigh launching; what elves will ride with you? The time has come certainly to decide. There's Bob and Hank and Roger. Pawter they say has performed some marvelous feats in the past years of the workshops, and his name seems to come up quite a bit in the talk of elves when they start whispering about who gets to go this year - among a host of others of course: there is Tom, Poppy, Giles and..."

"Pawter eh? Harrie? Harrie Pawter? No..." Santa fell to deep thought. "No, no, not him. I'll take George for sure, but not Harrie. Roger, yes. Tom, yes..."

He heaved himself out of the jacuzzi and grabbed a towel from a peg, wrapping himself. "Codger, yes. Runty, yes. Jimminy, yes. Cricket, yes. Filbert, yes..."

Bert's face fell. He realized that Santa was not really answering his question but was just rattling off names of elves for no particular reason. Santa stopped, turned with a smile on Bert and said, "Come Bert, let us call the elves to supper time!"

No sign anymore was there of drunken stupor. Or perhaps one just couldn't tell whether Santa was drunk or not, for he was always so merry. But that was also the way of liquor in the North Pole under the Santa-Elf distillation process: you could drink and drink and get really smashing drunk without either loss of sense or the repercussions that one gets from heavy drinking. Isn't that wonderful?


Down several candy cane poles from Santa's house, Bert came to the shop for flying toys - Elf B-Sector 2. Coming up the pathway he could hear the merry din from within. On opening the door a host of elves were fully engaged in something like an orchestration or dance, each elf looking to his own business, but all woven together by parts of toys that went flying from one end of the workshop to the other, one hand to the other, in a continuous flow that was hypnotic to behold.

There were two dozen elves here at work. Bert, who was one of Santa's messengers, rang a special bell. All the elves knew what the sound meant: suppertime!

"There is only 6 months more until Christmas Eve, as you all I'm sure know," exclaimed Bert. "Codger, are we up to speed?"

"We are ahead of schedule", answered Codger with glee. Being ahead of schedule was fairly regular in the North Pole. Though being ahead of schedule was ever treated as though it was a pleasant surprise.

"Dandy!" Bert said, clapping his little hands. "It's to the Supper Hall! Wash up!"

Rounds of cheering went up as the elves began bustling out of the shop, in groups or pairs. Bert cast a glance to one in the exiting crowd that was approaching him. "Hi ya Harrie! Delightful evening isn't it?" said Bert, giving him a wink.

"Bert, Bert, what did Santa say?"

Pawter had a directness about him that tended to set him apart from the other elves. He could rattle out more toys in less time than anyone, and yet - and this was a frustration to him - somehow time in the North Pole favoured the efficiency of no one particular elf. Being ahead of schedule happened like the falling of snow, and it was ever surprising as a burst of twinkle-twangle.

"Come now, am I to ride?"

"My Harrie, it's my special pleasure to tell you that Santa..."

Here Pawter's face blushed and grinned with the bliss of something long hoped for and sought after being eminently satisfied.

"...that Santa has given you the noble task of feeding the reindeer before the sleigh launch!"

Pawter audibly choked. "What! Er, the - reindeer...feeding? Do I go with Santa's ride?"

"Other elves, as yet to be confirmed, will ride with Santa. You, Harrie, will feed the reindeer for their journey."

"I am out of the ranks of those yet to be confirmed?"

"Yes."

Bert, perceiving Pawter's obvious disappointment, added, "But so am I, 'out of the ranks' as you put it, though I see no reason to see it that way. And so are a great number of other elves, speeding Santa along his way! Suppertime!" Bert gave him a great smile, turned and left for the Supper Hall.

Harrie Pawter remained, stunned, alone, in the empty shop. He glowered into space. His face grew more strangled with an awful look by every second. His hand reached for a toy airplane that had just been completed.

There in the shop of flying toys something happened that had never happened in the whole history of the North Pole, neither by accident, and certainly never on purpose: an elf broke a toy. Pawter threw the airplane down to the hard floor with a furious violence. The toy smashed into flying pieces in every direction.

"Damn him! Damn him! Damn the man! DAMN HIM TO HELL!!!"


End part 1.

Walk

I read that you can make booze from lichen and that it used to be a popular drink in certain places.

Youtube Comments

You know they're not worth reading...unless they are comments for some classical piece of music.

Concerning Rachmaninoff's Symphony no. 2:

Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu:

Rachmaninov!! Rachmaninov!! Rachmaninov!!
All the suffering and torment of this Sisyphean farce we term life is worth it, if even for a moment, one can behold perfection! Half seductive melancholy, half incandesent bliss.

mrsbrown andhercat:

Yes dear, it's very nice isn't it? My hubby plays this on the banjo, but it's not the same.

LOL!

Child of Light

None of us can know ourselves by ourselves in any ultimate sense. One of the things I love so much about Kurosawa's Rashomon is how it gets this across. We cannot face the truth of ourselves: when a group of individuals are somehow incriminated with each other, and each individual is questioned by a judge as to what happened and their behaviour, what we get is a variety of fabrications according to each person, neither of them telling even a remotely similar story. It becomes thought-provoking to reflect during this film that any of the characters may not be lying simply to cover up criminal involvement, but that they may actually be innocent: they still cannot tell the truth of the event for that would involve them facing the truth of themselves; and this mysterious event, whatever it may be, demands the revelation of some part of their being they have not faced, and cannot.

I wonder how much people enjoy it - that is, the refinement, the finality, the intricate weaving that we give to our problems, articulating them to ourselves and to others. It can become a rotten luxury by which people avoid facing the ordinary duties of life - and consequently themselves. They render themselves perfectly incapacitated; a hermetic state in which every single little doo-dad gets spiritualized to infinite proportions. They think their problems (as they've articulated and woven them) make them special.

Our problems (and/or sins) do not make us special. The only thing that makes us special is how dearly we are loved by God. He created us after all. And He redeemed us. And strangely, when we begin to accept this and submit to it, we discover how blind we have been to our actual wounds - the source of our problems. Only then can we truly leave off of them, without having avoided them or having indulged in them; when our wounds are disposed in the wounds of Christ - for Christ takes up all the space - we actually see our wounds for the first. Strange, but true.

At the end of Kurosawa's film I remember how the two men are utterly stumped at the endless onion layers the storytellers/liars continually put up; lost at sea, as it were, in contemplating the nature of the human soul, and they hear a baby crying nearby and one of them, the priest, goes and picks up the baby and begins tending the baby.

Some people think the ending is hokey, but it's not.

It is the answer. The answer and the way to face the truth of ourselves.

In the midst of all complexities, where we sit, there is a Baby, crying out to us.

They should show Rashomon on tv as a Christmas movie.

West Coast Haiku

Vines push down a house.
Inside a sea's hollow wave,
a man on a board.

My feet are burning for the salt of the south
that sweeps in groaning water over sand
and heat is broken never, nor any drouth
dries the fertile, oceanic land.

My bones complain of winter over much
and blood is slow against this miser cold;
but fiercer burns against this hutch
the want for beach's eye-hurt out of wold.

Take away yule log, take the fir tree;
take the artificial pine scents and the bling.
Nothing are these but cabin fever to me
in this want for a driftwood door that swings

by some beach ghost's hand: on the offing
is fish, is shrimp, is salt and wine
and all the hazards of that realm
may come and dine.

In the dead days of the autumn sun,
the birds sail like horse-back skeletons.
Dreams are dreamt that matter as much
as leaves that fall in the ground's wet clutch.
Upon this autumn ground, turned over,
what will count is how bare we touched
to bared bones of earth, our soul's sower,
even though it bring unnoticed, dusty clover.

InterHobbit

"I almost wonder if we are all so jaded that we confuse emotion with sentimentality, story structure with cloying cleverness, and virtue with unreality. A good film, we have convinced ourselves, must be gritty and nihilistic." --Michael Rennier, reviewing Interstellar

Amen. I have not seen Interstellar, but now I want to. Because, for one, I keep hearing people moan and whine about its length. LOL. Whenever I hear someone complain about a film being almost three hours long - and meandering or what-have-you to boot - my ears prick up excitedly.

It's film. A film should take its time. My favourite film is Tarkovsky's Stalker. Whenever I look up a movie that seems promising and I read that the film is something like a meagre one and a half hours long, I say, "What, are you kidding me?"

I think I might go see Interstellar - instead of the third Hobbit. If I lost all caring about the Peter Jackson franchise at the first Hobbit installment, my hatred/indifference was hardened beyond anything I could have ever imagined at the second installation.

Isn't it amazing though? When The Fellowship of the Ring first came out, or The Return of the King, remember how it felt to many like some Catholic Cultural thing was ramping up?

And now? People are forced to go see that monstrous deformity that can only be summed up by saying, "What Sauron did to the Elves, Peter Jackson did to The Hobbit (and also to TLOTR)", either just to see how bad it is, or in some vain and unfounded hope that it might redeem itself.

I mean, who would have seen it coming? LOL.

Quarters

What will cross it – coyote, owl, deer?
A figure in the just sprung mist
stride across in silence? Will you only
see a row of stones beleaguered by
grass years, greeting coyote, owl, deer?

What will cross it when you are not there?
Off with thoughts to the dimming meadow, where
it may be void, and sit and let your bones
be numbered – while the moon slings over
from the east, like a streetlamp in the trees.

Off, off – mark the loneliness, where the shrouds
of evening fall into the meadow,
or you’ll be made to mark it mid the crowds.

Downward from above

"Nay, Bennet, never. Nay, not he," said the priest. "There cometh never any rising, Bennet, from below--so all judicious chroniclers concord in their opinion; but rebellion travelleth ever downward from above; and when Dick, Tom, and Harry take them to their bills, look ever narrowly to see what lord is profited thereby." --Sir Oliver in The Black Arrow, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Picture of a bill. Long handled.

Contrition

You were not meant to feed there -
not meant to be your trough!
Alas, the bit of peanut butter
brought you hence, with every feather.
What horror to see your tail-fan's art
jutting thence - in place of vermin - pinned.

In this month of the Holy Souls
we give prayer's fire
in the year's winding-sheets.

Like blood's response, sunset appears.
The streams that run into the valley's heart
begin to seize.

Like the rose taper
in the penitential wreath,
shouldered with the purple;

quiet as breath nocturnal
from an infant warmed with milk,
hope is patient, silent,

strongest where worlds of growth have ceased.

These are guavas

Hot diggity damn they had them. Yes! I just went in for a potato, an onion and some mushrooms for steak and there they were, and I hadn't seen them for about half a year, and I said, "No, I'm mistaking lemons for guavas - er, wait a minute!" Booyah! The last time they had them I bought a goodly amount, thinking they would certainly have more when I came back - but the next time the guavas were all gone, all out, and they convinced me to buy those horrid "apple guavas" - yuck! But not too bad with some salt and pepper. These guys though - oh my favourite! Now, my "range", my experience of the world's many fruits is not exactly...well, I'm not Bill Pullman; but still, yeah, guavas and chilean guava (which I grow) are on the top of the list. Did you know Bill Pullman is an absolute fruit maniac? Yes, I've seen that documentary. I thought it was pretty good. Except for the stupid parts. I kind of wished the entire documentary had been about Bill Pullman and his orchards and fruit travels. Oh well. Oh and the first film has been taken of the black devil fish! Did you know what transpires when they mate? Holy crap.

Time is not money. And money is not time.

Money passes through time. So what. It is intrinsically connected with time because we ourselves operate in time. So what. We schedule all sorts of things according to time in addition to work hours. So what. The notion itself of a "work hour" is as much an abstract product of our minds as money, all the way down to our measurements of minutes and seconds and milliseconds. So what. We produce calendars of linear sequences and cycles which in themselves are not time, and which are not even us dividing time, or making sense of time, or categorizing time; rather, they are the representations of the projected stamp of our activities taking on the assumption of time as reflected in the rotation of the spheres. That's what the yearly calendar is: representing time within time. And this is perfectly natural, beautiful and not at all a fiction. Even Heaven itself respects it. It is vitally connected with the real. So what. When one says "money is time" or "time is money" one is not saying anything. But one is indeed compounding the fiction so desperately feared and consequently exacerbated by those trying to pop it. For just as we accrete a calendar as a human representation, of time as time receiving and being shaped by our respective activities going forward as a means of mirroring back to ourselves a stability to our activities (which because it has to do with real time is not at all fictional) so we accrete representation to wealth. So what.

All what any of this proves is that we were made for order and not chaos. Or more truthfully, that order was and is intrinsic in our creation, in our being made. And creation is hierarchical.

The difference between the two is this: whereas the formulation of a calendar is concerned with what is to come, being worked into our present, or our present going forward in anticipation of what is to come, after which we cast away our old calendars with their boxes all crossed off or our digital calendars are instantly replaced with the new one, and we say, "the best laid plans of mice and men", the formulation of money in its proper and most natural sense is concerned with what has already been completed, which then extends a stable proximity for the beginning of another activity going forward. The activities in the case of money are transactions.

Money only and ever comes into existence through a transaction of some kind. The way money circulates from party to party and from hand to hand is like to the way money comes into existence. The way money comes into existence can either be good or it can be evil. For the sound issuance of money, one can say it no simpler than this: the parties involved in a transaction must have completed the transaction both in terms of no one coming away from it deprived of what was agreed upon, but also nothing added on and extended from that transaction afterwards, which is projected onto the transaction beforehand. Which could generally be called speculation and derivatives, and for that matter, fractional reserve lending and government bonds (which are two sides of the same - ahem - coin). Nothing added on and nothing subtracted from: this is what constitutes the completion of a transaction - and thus the evidencing of wealth.

Money is not accreted to a commodity, or the production of a commodity, or the potential for the production of a commodity; rather, money is accreted to any number of future transactions as evidence of a prior transaction completed.

It is when we get away from this completion beforehand that we encounter economic woe. Derivatives, speculation, fractional reserve lending and government bonds (all of which are connected): these are at the heart of our economic problems.

In other words...usury. The making of money from money. But today it is specialized: usury is not today just a practice done by shady loan sharks. It lies at the very heart, or fountainhead if you will, of the issuance of money - the way money comes into existence. It has poisoned the well.

 "Rapacious usury has increased the evil which, more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different form but in the same way, practiced by avaricious and grasping men." --Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum

And it is an argument about what constitutes the well that people are actually arguing about.

People are obsessed with the attempt to make money into something so full proof and so permanently real, so obsessed with making it de facto before it is de jure (when it is the other way around) that they are willing to render the priceless things of man into commodities in order to support this historically novel hysteria of theirs - this obnoxious hammering upon some absolute qualified conception of money, like it will part the Red Sea.

It never occurs to any of these people, these blind objectivists, that when they are talking about what money is - and then conceptualizing a healthy economy from the definition - that what they are actually talking about is governance. It would not occur to them in a thousand years.


Time-stamped:

Hell is Universalism

"On the other hand, despite the protests of those who imagine a world without absolutes, the knowledge of the existence of hell has moved more men to repentance than many good sermons. The mere thought of an everlasting abyss of sorrow and suffering has been enough for some to deny an hour’s pleasure in lieu of an eternity of pain. Hell exists as the last teacher, the final signpost to save sinners from a horrific plunge from their Creator. Since every human soul is eternal, when we leave this earthly plane, we live on. But it is here that we must choose where we will live forever." --Mark Mallett, Hell is for Real

Imbibing Universalism is like drinking a bucket of insipid snot that coats and clings around every grace and gift and mercy that gives life.

Its final end is not the eradication of the fear of hell, but the dwindling of the immensity, the watering down of the intensity, and the trampling down of the unfathomable mercy of God's inviting love.

Universalism is a pig squealing about how God's sanctuary should be his trough and then tramples and gorges God's flesh by saying His love is a failure for pointing out and warning of the butcher, Satan, and his eternal hell.

Flat-liners

Beyond this, Thorn also believes that contraception is flat-lining the way men interact with women.

"There is estrogen in the water now. Male fertility has dropped by 50 percent after the pill was introduced, around the world.”

Thorn referred to various studies done on monkeys, which have shown that males are more interested in females who were not contracepting.

She believes that this study applies to humans as well. The way a woman’s body works naturally engages the male, causing him to be more interested and connected, she observed. However, a woman who is chemically altering her body’s natural flux will not engage a male in the same way.

“But we aren't told these things,” she said.

Read full article here.

This should be interesting to watch

Judging

Never ever think that you have someone pegged. The "ever" qualifier in that statement cannot be overdone, because you simply never have anyone pegged - far from it.

It makes me queasy to see the ease with which the orthodox and the conservative brush away the injunctions about not judging people (paired with the edification to listen) - the immediate classification they give to this warning as fuzzy liberal relativism. Is it a good sign when the immediate reaction to "do not judge" is to classify the phrase "do not judge" as fuzzy liberal relativism? It is ironic, that is for sure.

But it is a very real warning and it concerns a grave danger, connected with the gravest sin, pride. Is that something to be taken lightly? Is it a waste of time to contemplate the dangers - personal dangers - of the gravest of sins and its intrinsic occasions? Do you think the Devil is stupid?

Do not think you have someone figured out, or pegged, or that you know where that person is coming from. Are you anyone's creator? It seems to me the creator of people knows people best, and that you and me know only a fragment about the people we judge, and those fragments are intertwined with ourselves, making it even more a blind judgement - and out of the entire narrative of that person's life, you are acquainted with...what exactly?

A person is "a unique and unrepeatable creation". A mystery - an unpeggable mystery.

Not only are you judging someone, you are judging history like you were the God of history. A person claims to be vigorous and intelligent with a strenuous demand for clarity, but there is too often a huge and winding slime trail of lazy-assed, presumed-upon, crusty, half-formed and malformed conceptions and assumptions that precede their super orthodox stand-offs, which, interestingly, often lean toward the flippant.

The dangers of pride: the phrase probably sounds very quaint and old fashioned to some or to many. Who hears sermons about pride? About how it's the corruption of the highest, which means it is the worst corruption and the most poisonous, the most far-reaching, and the most undetectable. Anyone often hear a sermon about this?

One touchstone of pride, one of the foremost telltale signs, is a form of pegging other people. The forms are varied as people are. It is not just making gross mischaracterizations about someone. The injunction to not judge people is not simply a refraining from - as in, well, okay, I won't judge people, check, check, check, now let's get on with it. For not judging people only and ever rests upon the positive commandment to love your neighbour as yourself. So at the heart of this judging, this pegging of other people, is a spiritual deletion of a person's image - that person who is made in the image of God. It is more painful in a manner than physical violence. For this judging does not necessarily constitute looking at a person with a conclusive judgement. It also, and today more often, includes not looking at people at all; so that our sound arguments become conclusive categorizations of people - as in, they become the pinnacle or summation of our regard for our neighbour.

It is precisely in our love for neighbour that we see what they are doing wrong, and in that context speak about it, and do what prudence and courage demand and inspire. We cannot make arguments while neglecting love of neighbour, for even our sound arguments will become dirty.

I'm as guilty as anyone. This post only proves it.

*

From the Father Brown story, The Miracle of Moon Crescent, by G.K. Chesterton:

Fenner laughed and then looked puzzled. 'I don't understand one thing,' he said. 'If it was Wilson, how did Wynd come to have a man like that on such intimate terms? How did he come to be killed by a man he'd seen every day for years? He was famous as being a judge of men.'

Father Brown thumped his umbrella on the ground with an emphasis he rarely showed.

'Yes,' he said, almost fiercely; 'that was how he came to be killed. He was killed for just that. He was killed for being a judge of men.'

They all stared at him, but he went on, almost as if they were not there.

'What is any man that he should be a judge of men?' he demanded. 'These three were the tramps that once stood before him and were dismissed rapidly right and left to one place or another; as if for them there were no cloak of courtesy, no stages of intimacy, no free-will in friendship. And twenty years has not exhausted the indignation born of that unfathomable insult in that moment when he dared to know them at a glance.'

Milkshake V

A New Generation

Would you have life patented
if it meant the end of wickedness,
suffering, poverty and distress?
No one believes in the world to come;
this manifests in every portion.
Wits, body, will, genitals,
transacted as commodities:
each person owns himself
and no one is his own;
sycophants and psychopaths,
knowing all facets down to bone;
what you do with yourself is up to you
and everything you do,
decided before you.

"We do not belong to anyone" they say,
"and so to the devil in chains."

Year by Year

Good to post Annum per Annum by Arvo Pärt on this day.


"...in this work there is a reflection of the idea that year in and year out the ancient rites of the church are celebrated in the same places."

O God, who year by year renews the day of the consecration of this Your Holy Temple, and ever bring us again in safety to the holy mysteries, hear the prayers of Your people, and grant that whoever enters this temple to seek blessings may rejoice to obtain all that he seeks. Through our Lord…

Don't be stupid

One of the stupidest things a person can do - and I mean stupidest as in S - T - U - P - I - D, as in there are a hundred other stupid things one could begin with that would look smart beside it - one of the stupidest things a person can do is attempt to "gauge" where the Holy Father stands by who he "demotes" and who he "promotes". It's stupid on so many levels as to be perfectly blind. Not only for what it positively is (the stupidity of presuming an infallible scale of veracity in deciding what makes a promotion a promotion and what makes a demotion a demotion and what makes a position too worthy for such and such a character), but for what it necessarily negates. And what it necessarily negates is that whole, you know, Catholic thing. (Not definitively Catholic thing, but what is assumed in being Catholic thing.) Like, hello creeping Protestantism.

Yet this is what we see the majors and the p.h.d.'s and the widely-read Catholic writers doing. It's amazing. It makes those who should know better into blind guides (like LifeSiteNews). People flock to their favourite oracle Fr. Zuhlsdorf where he drops little nuggets of his seemingly let-slip thoughts for his readers to pick up and they hold on to them like the pearl of great price; with a few off-handed-seeming musing words of his in red he can hold them in throes of sudden despair. It's a sickening disgrace.

How about objectively trusting the Holy Father? He's not there for you to "give him the benefit of the doubt". It's amazing how the know-it-alls are being confounded in their conceit left and right as they attempt to decode Bergoglio.

“I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
for although you have hidden these things
from the wise and the learned
you have revealed them to little ones.
Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will.
All things have been handed over to me by my Father.
No one knows the Son except the Father,
and no one knows the Father except the Son
and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.”

I mean, I'm just really trying to figure out this puzzling Bergoglio! He's such an enigma!

“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,
for I am meek and humble of heart;
and you will find rest for yourselves.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” --Mt 11:25-30

Anyhow, if a Catholic convert starts casting aspersions on the Holy Father, attempting to illuminate his past as cardinal, bishop, priest and seminarian and earlier as a means of determining what sort of pope we have, then is one allowed to cast aspersions on their former Protestantism as tainting them with a subtly entrenched anti-papist bent?

Whether that writer is a former Lutheran, Anglican, Baptist or otherwise, as one reads their words online is one allowed to say, "Well, no matter how many Catholic t's you cross and Catholic i's you dot, that yeast sure knows how to assimilate it all and come through in the end; for strong and stubborn is the leaven of Protestantism indeed!"

Is one allowed? Don't answer that. LOL.

I need to imbed new code in my template to figure this one out.

My computer crashed! An enigma within an enigma!

Aphorism IV

There's a daring in waiting.

Beatus Vir

Here's another whopper by Henryk Gorecki. It is entitled Beatus Vir:

Opus 38, subtitled Psalm for baritone, large mixed chorus and grand orchestra, is a musical psalm setting written by Henryk Mikołaj Górecki in 1979 . The text is drawn from several psalms (143:1,6-10; 31:16; 88:2; 67:7; 34:9) and the title is from the last of these: "Blest is the man that trusteth in Him". The work was premiered on June 9, 1979 in Kraków, Poland with Baritone Jerzy Mechlinski and the Kraków Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by the composer. --Wikipedia

It was commissioned by Pope Saint John Paul the Great when he was a Cardinal. It was to commemorate the 900th anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Stanislaw.

I find it a powerful piece of music.

This is a cabbage

January King.

And to show it is a nicely packed cabbage: