In Generosity

Was he like flint
coming down to that kindling day
where the cleanest lambs were being gathered?

Doubtless like flint.
Yet for a beggar man's wild blind holler
he tarried along the way.

Misc.

Thumbs up for A Quiet Place.

It is such a Pro-Life film, and I love that so much.

More like this please.

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I am so looking forward to the mid-term election popcorn fest.

I am going to watch it on Fox and get pizza and popcorn.

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To hell with perogies that contain cottage cheese. So disgusting.

I love cottage cheese, but in perogies it just becomes this rubber rancid sort of thing.

That's fine because the cottage cheese ones are the most expensive.

I've been buying this local brand that uses simple ingredients.

My favourite perogy is just potato with onions. It can have dill as well - that's nice.

I don't care much for the cheddar cheese ones. Or the ones with bacon and potato.

The bacon just makes it taste like dog food.

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Stop it with the bacon. Bacon is nice, but it doesn't make everything better.

It's good by itself with eggs, on BLT, moderately with baked brussell sprouts (be obedient and eat your brussell sprouts!) and moderately on certain pizzas, but that's pretty much it.

Bacon on burgers is just dumb.

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Oh look, your own private apocalypse!

Huh, good for you!

Well did Christ speak when he said, "So if anyone tells you, 'There he is, out in the wilderness,' do not go out; or, 'Here he is, in the inner rooms,' do not believe it."

Just think about what "wilderness/desert" and "inner rooms" represent.

Just imagine.

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Oh, Popes come and go. It's about the office, not the man occupying the office.

Yeah, and this from the champions of the Domestic Church.

You call your homes the domestic church - a kind of sub-church, which is modeled on the Church.

And for some reason these heroes think Christ wants the family of his body, the church, to be addressed with,  "Ah, you see, Popes come and go!"

Right.

Moms and Dads, they come and go.

I respect your office as Dad, but unfortunately you are in error. I duly expect a Peter and Paul moment anytime soon.

Eat your brussell sprouts.

LOL.

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On one American apologist's twitter page I came across a meme that featured Roy Scheider from Jaws with the words, "We're going to need a bigger Dubia."

Right, "We're going to need a bigger doubts."

Okeeydoekeey then. Good luck with all that.

LOL.

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It is amazing the amount of relativism and gradualism over the course of the Hero's Three Letters (and probably counting). I guess when you deal in absolutes you're allowed to leave a mega slime trail and not have to address any of your shiftings?

Huh, imagine that.

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Amoris Laetitia contains no errors.

All the parts must be understood in the whole. Which is par for the course for anything. It's like trying to pick apart a Tarkovsky film. Your starting point of approach must be from the departure point of having taken it in its entirety.

But will the prophets of the inner rooms and the desert admit to their audiences that it was they themselves, and not the Pope, who was in error?

Don't count on it.

Escalation

After Jesus' body is scourged, the torture escalates in the crowning with thorns. Where before they ripped apart his flesh, they seek now to humiliate his dignity; their hatred is focused upon his head. The scourging of Christ's body escalates upwards to his head.

As those with proper liturgical formation, they provide Jesus' body with none but the finest cloth: a scarlet robe reserved for royalty. As those who preach about giving God our finest, they actually dress Jesus in the finest garment available. Nowhere else in scripture do you see Jesus dressed in royal garb. Only here.

These are the same people who have just scourged his body. They proceed to crown his head with thorns; they bind his head with a blindfold; they cover his head with spit; they beat his head with rods.

Of all the garments in their possession, they give to Jesus the one that is most fitting for who he is - the robe of royalty - and their worship of him is a mockery.

"Jesus Christ, therefore, appointed Peter to be that head of the Church; and He also determined that the authority instituted in perpetuity for the salvation of all should be inherited by His successors, in whom the same permanent authority of Peter himself should continue. And so He made that remarkable promise to Peter and to no one else: 'Thou are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church'" --Pope Leo XIII, Satis Cognitum

 "How can you celebrate the Holy Eucharist and pronounce his name in the Canon of the Mass?" --Cardinal Marc Ouellet

Huh, imagine that

Soon Again

Those books without bookends
are like falling over bean poles,
full of beans in their bloated
bound parchments shelved.

We are back to the scroll, and the wheel
turns the scroll. The screen is only for
folding time, more than any visual.
Soon again words will be spoken

and their paper will be the trance,
more than atomic weapons
these words will refute dominions
that no man made in advance.

Revisited Our Lady of Kaluga icon

Title: Our Lady of Kaluga

Medium: Egg tempera on wood

Size: 8in x 10in

We could take care of that for you

Perhaps the most God-fearing person I know is a tough old Jewish lady whose many hedges I trim and prune on her acreage. A great wall going around the front yard and into the back, around fifteen feet high that takes days just for one side, cylinders down the snaking driveway, separate huge boxes, outer parameters with lengths of solid wall, backyard boxwood, all the individual specimens, etc. She likes things squeaky clean and I'm OCD OCO(rder) so things work out great between us.

She's the kind of lady you can picture coming out of her house in a bathrobe and carrying a shotgun for any intruders. She speaks her mind no matter who you are, and it's upfront and somewhat loud, somewhat boisterous, and, I don't know how to say it, she gets it out there, especially if there is something she sees that is wrong. She's the kind that bureaucrats cannot stand.

Though I've always liked her, I remember the time when I grew especially fond. A number of years ago, somewhere around late September, I was working away on the boxwood (the majority are cedar) and it was getting toward evening when she came hurrying out and spoke with emphatic energy.

"You gotta go! You gotta get all the equipment up and get out of here!" And then she said it was - I can't remember what Jewish day it was - it was a big one. At the time it was quite hot and I welcomed the sudden command to quit for the day and go home. If I'm working on a Friday I make sure to pack up before sunset.

But the way she expressed it - this urgency that had to do with something greater than any of us, or any thing. Why did I feel such joy under that fiery and fierce injunction to pack up?

We never talk religion though.

Another time my fondness for her grew - let's call her D. - was when she told me about some of her family coming up to visit her from the US, I think her niece. She had her boyfriend along (cohabiting), and they were assuming they were to share a room at night, when D. said to them, point blank, "Not under my roof you won't!"

I wish I could describe the way D. said it - "Not under my roof you won't!" I laugh about that when I remember it.

Just last week we got to talking about the Hell's Angels and the CIA (D. was explaining to me how the Hell's Angels originated after the Second World War), and in the conversation she told me how she worked as an accountant for a mill at the age of eighteen doing payrolls for an exceedingly large number of workers in a very short period of time.

There was a man who worked there, and D. went on about how nice of a man he was: he was the nicest man she had ever met.

One day she started complaining to this incredibly nice man about her boss, and the nice man said to her, "Would you like him taken care of?" To which D. - quite shocked - said, "What?"

And he said, "I can get him taken out for you" as he went on to explain in his nice manner about how he belonged to a group that existed precisely for doing such things - that is, killing people. He wasn't kidding.

D. of course emphatically told him NO, and as shocked as she was by this, what shocked her even more was the way this man broached the subject. He talked about it like someone might talk pleasantly about the wine tour they were looking forward to on the weekend, or about the local coffee shop whose lemon squares come highly recommended.

Long story short, I started thinking about that story today; and that there are many, many very nice doctors.

Some of the nicest doctors you could ever meet.

Running Man

The messenger goes out because he is sent by one in authority, and he runs because the message is urgent. He does not stroll in pomp like one of the king's dignitaries, and he doesn't mete out his message to other runners in order to shirk off the duty from his own hands and feet.

The angels that are messengers do not need to run, because they are like lightning in obedience to God who they perpetually adore. But we as messengers are runners for a greater reason than that we are obeying authority: we run because of love - love personified.

The messenger of old who delayed would have faced severe penalties, the more severe in proportion to the urgency and gravity of the message being sent. This holds true, but the good news we bear, while not cancelling the gravity, outweighs the gravity in our being and bearing, as victims of mercy; the messenger of the Gospel is running because he himself has been set afire and has been set free. He cannot not run. The goodness and mercy of God is infinitely greater than all sin.

An urgency that has not the spirit of this joy - the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life - should be aligned with the work of those who tie up heavy burdens and lay them on the shoulders of others, making them twice the children of hell that they themselves are.

If running with the message is the context in which we realize our own salvation, then what is foundational is not a padding out, but a sweating out. The first connotation of running in this instance is not the motion of running per se, but what is shed in order to be able to run. Running is easier when you don't take an extra cloak; running is hard to near impossible when, for example, you drag an entire seamstress shop behind you so that you need two serving boys to take up the slack.

Each one of us is supposed to take up the position of the Crafty Steward. Perhaps the main thing to take from the parable of the Crafty Steward - or the Dishonest Steward - is Christ's bold underlining of the provisional nature of the steward's circumstances: this is our own circumstance.

He is thinking on his feet, and calling up the king's subjects in order to make a radical reduction in what they owe. Note that the steward's alleviation of his coming poverty is not by way of accumulating wealth, but is tied with alleviating other people's debts, even though he has, practically speaking, already lost his position, and has no more actual legal hand, or authoritative say, in the wealth of the king's subjects. You can't get any shrewder than that.

He is thinking about himself, and yet his worldly self-consideration has the animation of one fully recognizing the poverty of his situation in trying to alleviate it looking forward. He doesn't seek to repurpose other people's goods towards either himself or the king. Rather he repurposes his position, knowing he is as good as dead, in order to be received into people's homes once he gets fired.

The king praises the dishonest steward. The steward was bad to begin with, but now he has gone and with audacity used his position to gain favour, which creates a further loss to the wealth of the king, for he has called the subjects up to reduce their debts to the king - but the king praises him! What do you think Christ is doing there? Just adding a little detail to the story? Good grief!

If the shrewd dealings of a rascal such as the dishonest steward earns the praise of the very king who has called him up, then what of those who are not mere subjects having their debts reduced, nor stewards going to the dock, but subjects and stewards completely forgiven and washed clean in the dock of mercy and made the King's adopted children?

Christ here is showing us BOLDLY that the way we deal with our present circumstances - which is to say, the way we put ourselves into a position of divestment - not only reflects how we receive the eternal things of God, but is the way he has willed for us to receive and proliferate the kingdom of God. And Jesus consummated this way, outside of the parable, by his own practice on this earth, so the repurposing of our positions has an immense security in the One who has made himself the first and perfect model of that urgent divestment.

"To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often." --John Henry Cardinal Newman

"For the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light." --Luke 16:8

There is a kind of vast stupidity in trying to fortify your own foundations. Who are you to do such a thing? Can you who are human add one minute to your lifespan? God who is himself the foundation has gone down to the wood of the cross, which no one could have foreseen. In the eyes of those who were most edified, who were most secured, who were most knowledgeable and learned in tradition, the children of Abraham, this was the complete opposite of foundational.

And if that is the foundation of the Church, then what in the world could you possibly know for certain about where the Church needs to go? That is not a subject upon which you are to "edify" your salvation, let alone the salvation of others. And this is the problem of the absolutist-fundamentalist. The absolutist presumes to be faithful in the greater things first, foregoing the smaller things. Indeed, he actually thinks he can be faithful in the greater things by relativizing the smaller things. The absolutist is merely a relativist that relativizes the matter that Christ is forming.

If you look at the directionality of the phrasing in Christ's parable, everything points in the way of faithfulness in small things first leading to faithfulness in greater things - not the other way around. For there is no other way around.

But the result of the absolutist, in effect, is that he ends up turning the smaller things into monoliths as the means of manifesting his "faithfulness" in great things. In order to serve his delusion of being faithful in great things, he makes the small things insurmountable, blocking the way to the sanctuary. He ends up in the position of a micro-manager, which is the very image of the phony good steward, calling up the king's subjects and telling them in great minutia and gravitas how they are to go about managing their funds in order to reduce their debts to the king, as though the king was interested in nickle and diming.

He lays it upon others and allows none of the harrow to lay into his own self. He has no capacity for repurposing his position - for he has absolutized it. Not only does he distort his own mission; in doing so he distorts the nature of the King. And wonder of wonders, the absolutist even ends up distorting the seriousness of sin! He does so because he doesn't really believe in God's outgoing mercy, which would like to percolate and spring up in all kinds of small avenues; he thinks such things relativize the greater things of God. The channels for the springs are clogged.

And now they come to the point of stoning the Vicar of Christ, Pope Francis. Some of the more moderates of them try still to hedge around wholesale stoning by talking about respecting "the office of Peter" etc. and all kinds of weird talk that they never talked about before when Benedict was Pope, about how it's not just one Pope, etc. Any way they can to abstract the here-and-now present concrete personhood of that office as willed by Jesus Christ in one particular man who has particular things that Christ wants us to learn and know, and moreover to be in union with in order to learn and know - not just intellectually, but in the practical will, begun with a heart of flesh. Are you docile to the King's message because you love his messenger? Or are you contentious with the message because you have abstracted the King's messenger?

Redwoods

What were these two seedlings in 2009:

Redwood - Giant Sequoia

Redwood - Dawn Redwood

Are now these:

Redwood - Giant Sequoia

Redwood - Dawn Redwood

If they had been in ground they would be a lot bigger at this point, but I've kept them going in pots, and I don't fertilize. Only occasionally with fish/kelp stuff, plus I mix in new soil when putting in bigger pots.

I know the parent of the dawn redwood, and while I know the grove from which the giant sequoia came, I do not know the individual parent. But they are both from seed from the same park/forest.

I have meditated sometimes in the evening about where I would plant the trees, going over all the places that I know of where I could plant them and they would escape the hundreds of ways that people would kill them. This is the kind of thing you have to think about carefully, going over and over very deliberately in your mind - meditating like one of the Australian Aborigines traveling their forest paths in fine detail while sitting stock still.

I figure maybe I'll donate them to the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver to be kept as bonsai specimens, or one of the Buddhist temples that do bonsai - as an act of ecumenical outreach?

That's probably the best option.

Least accessible to the intellect

It is the most essential thing, and it never gets taught by any of the thousands of professional artists in youtube tutorials, or anywhere on the high-information web: everything must begin with you fully identifying with your subject, or identifying with the object.

One might say that because identification with your subject is something that cannot be taught, or because it is something like a mustard seed, it doesn't bear mention, but that is ridiculous. Not mentioning it is to impoverish everything you have to teach.

There is a mysterious work - a beautiful making - in which identification can start by way of the gaze, but the fullness of identification does not end with the gaze; or identification can begin wholly interiorly, and gain its fullness in the gaze.

Nonetheless, everything hangs upon the thin invisible thread of the human gaze.

It is weakness allowing for completion.

You don't have that, you don't have anything.