Conduct survey how busy Wendy's drive-thru 11:59 pm Ash Wednesday.

Hap - A September Song (revised)

The black dilation of the burdened
sunflowers, garners squirrels,
twitchy-high on the rich platters.

Straight of stalk was matched by surge
inch a day in summer: the quiet
bee grains moved, light as light,

now bend, as ball and chain, the stems
to the ransack, omega thieves' din,
leaf pelt and pith rip - like acorn rain;

like pitiable salmon, having spawned,
wavering thrash in mangy scale suits,
dancing the shallows with their epilogue.

If frisky gold opened on the bees and fire
manes flickered in the breeze, they went on
continuing, unchanging yellow sunflower,

and they were never strung like bows
to shoot, no spiders gauzed their prostration,
this autumn sky would bear down cruel,

those eyes sufficiently beamed and self-ruled
to never die: what heart stab if their leaves
never frayed, nor their poles strain seed down

in fall, inch a day.

There was a kind of "no-brainer" that hit me the other day. And isn't that the way with no-brainers? We don't think about them. Anyways, this no-brainer that a priest said to me was that sin eats away one's resolve.

It got me thinking about resolve as a fruit of the free will. And that got me thinking about how free will is an end in itself. It is the one distinguishing attribute of our being, as rational creatures. As one's being is an end in itself, one's free will is an end in itself. It is precious in God's eyes. You will not cease to have free will in eternity. Those who behold the face of God will be incapable of choosing to be apart from him, not because they lost their free will, but because they will be so incorporated in love.

Resolve is not forcing yourself into being strong-willed. That's more than likely just setting yourself up for a fall. It is more a relinquishment from choosing something that will harm your free will. The commands of God have as their end the keeping of your free will intact. The end of sin, the result of doing whatever, whenever, and however as you please, is the enslavement of your free will. Hence, sin eats away one's resolve.

To know in every moment that at any moment you can fall - that is something worthy.

*

That got me wondering about fundamentalism. I wonder if fundmentalists in their heart of hearts abhor free will? It's like the devil has come up to them (as an angel of light) and obsessed their minds with this notion that if things were just like so, and if things were just like this and just like that, then people will all be properly ordered. In other words, if we only just disallow for that minor nuisance of free will, we can bring about the Great Restoration.

That's Saruman for you.

*

"...with the measure you use it will be measured back to you."

Easy to understand. Easier to forget.

In other words, it's one of those no-brainers.

The most powerful thing in The Lord of the Rings is the mysterious providence by which mercy - exercised by Frodo and Samwise towards Gollum - works to the success of their mission, which otherwise would have been a catastrophe, rather than the Euchatastrophe it turned out to be.

Not that Frodo and Sam (or Bilbo for that matter) were fully aware of what they were doing by exercising mercy, as though they had it all figured out beforehand. Indeed, the form which their decisive mercy takes is mere pity. That's part of the messiness of mercy, and the refusal to dominate and manipulate someone's free will.

Think about how Sam, right there at the summit of Mount Doom has Gollum at the point of his sword, just after Gollum has attacked them again and full well proven his treachery: he's an absolute threat to their mission at its most vulnerable stage: all sense points to stabbing Gollum - even if to incapacitate him - in order that Frodo can bring the ring to its destruction.

When they exercised mercy, it was measured back. Mercy - and we are in a time of great mercy - really and truly is the working of your salvation. It's no joke.

*

Consider how you came to be in the Vine. You go back far enough down the long branching line of people, you are bound to come across some nearly broken off branch where the sap still flowed through an inch width of intact cambium, by which the sap eventually flowed to you.

"Do not judge lest you be judged."

That's for your stance towards everyone - but good grief, to have to be warned against it concerning the Vicar of Christ! How much more radical will the measure be measured back to you when your judgement involves the Holy Father!

Stone by stone, brick by brick, word by word, you are building up and fortifying the tower of your own condemnation.

You are in that tower, and that tower will fall in on you, and not on anyone else.

Go and learn the meaning of mercy.

I've been reading The Lord of the Rings again, and last night I finished the chapter Treebeard. I was pondering so much about it, as is my wont with every chapter, and this morning at Mass the first words from the first reading were, "Remember this, my dear brothers: everyone should be quick to listen but slow to speak and slow to human anger..." I immediately thought of the Ents, thinking to myself, huh, isn't that uncanny - and then lo, I heard the Gospel reading about the blind man being healed by Jesus, who says he can see people walking around like trees!

It was just so great. That's called providence my friends.

I also love how Jesus in that instance employed a kind of gradualism in healing the man. Also that he used the elements of the earth - dirt - pointing to the first creation while instituting the sacramental lifting up of matter in the new creation - the redemption of mankind.

The entire premise of taxation is protection. It's a public transaction that's supposed to regulate and honour the man-made social instrument called money.

The man-made social instrument called money is totally transactional from beginning to end: it does not come into existence without a transaction, it does not move from party to party without a transaction, it does not sit in your bank account without a transaction. When you put your money in the bank you are not putting it into a safety deposit box; you are making a transaction. And even when there is a "crash" or a "bail out" - that too is a transaction, a transfer of wealth, ones in which one party forces the other party into being an absolute liability, when they themselves are the ones liable for the crisis.

If everything is privatized then taxes are nothing but theft, and our system of government nothing but plutocracy, and the people you vote for nothing but lapdogs to anonymous rich people.

The protection that is taxation must itself be protected. It is protected (and honoured) by government initiating the adventure of evidencing public wealth (infrastructure, health care, public bank, etc.) in resistance to private entities seeking to define wealth to their own benefit (fractional reserve lending, gold standard, rent/insurance economy, etc.)

People refer to those rich people as the go-getters, the ones who work hard, etc. That's not the case at all. They are merely people who have done the trick of defining wealth to their own benefit.