Making sense

I was just thinking about that Gospel passage about the sower going out to sow. As you remember, there are many different encumbrances that the seeds faced which limited or prevented their flourishing. Some fell on rocky ground, some grew up quickly but then failed to maintain themselves, some fell on ground but became choked up by thorns. Think of the cares and the anxieties of this life. For me, these are a big issue - they define my life a lot for various reasons, none of which are absolutely necessary but nonetheless effective at making me anxious and enclosed, tightened up or retreating, pursuing hare-brained ideas without taking the time to think slowly, concerned about my image with others (also a good thing, but within a balance of prudence and reflection on how it plays in with other responsibilities). I prefer not to enter into a biological narrative or a life experience narrative or even a narrative in which I begin to reflect not only on my own condition but on everyone who is in a ripe position to experience anxiety because of lack of material security. Because while all of these are important, none of them are necessary - and all are culturally integrated ways of looking at oneself in the anxieties of life. Before I thought I understood the value of individual narratives of sorrow as a way of making wider conclusions which could apply to whole demographics of people. I was thinking of my problems in terms of myself as possessing characteristics that could belong to different groups of people, defined in some way or other or largely by level of income and family history of education, things like that. I am not saying I entirely reject the value of that but I have since come to wonder about population-izing things, I use that word because of Foucault but the idea is based also a little in my newfound concern at corporation-izing "movements". I was very pragmatically motivated before… after this summer I am not so sure even about my own enthusiasms for taking one issue theoretically and campaigning for it - even for my own practical ideas as for theoretical concepts. How can you universalize something like "human dignity"? How can this become a banner? I don’t know how you can do it except by living it - and this not only relationally in the interactions of relationships (not undefined by power interplay, for this is an ideal, necessary to guide but unnecessary because impossible to achieve fully, but at least striving towards that as an aim structurally and most of the time by enabling the most grassroots governing possible) but also in being able to be critical and not simply following a predetermined curriculum, a predetermined language, predetermined answers to carefully hoarded questions. It makes a kind of education and articulation possible, an advancement of an organization - the pursuit and gaining of certain ideas or aims; a certain life that the organization takes on and a certain entrance into powerful arenas. But what about all that it precludes in the name of those specified aims? Every kind of aim precludes other possibilities in focusing on achieving certain lines. But an organization that advances an incredibly broad theoretic ideal like "humanity" or "advancement of humankind" or "human dignity" opens itself up to many more ironies as its pursuits and aims are in fact actually specialized and particularly motivated. The specialization and practicalization is not a source of irony in itself but only in the fact that the aim is avowedly universal, because some highly disciplined aims actually require in a way the suppression and not merely the omission of others in order to achieve certain goals. Anyway, this is not to identify any particular organization but to identify some issues which must in some form face a corporate endeavor. Moving towards religion as an alternative does not escape these issues but an individual could insert oneself more comfortably in this kind of organization - not so much necessarily on account of cognitive agreement or comfort, but insofar as something is willingly lived together to such an extent that there are friends sharing in common. I do not know whether a primarily business model based on the 20th and 21s century professional workforce makes friendship possible in this way because when efficiency and professionalism are the aims, there is a kind of ethic that goes with that. First a kind of uniformity is required - for example, in the definition of the working hours of the working day and in the working space - in the physical presence at a station occupied in immediate proximity by many others (which does not necessarily increase efficiency - it coordinates behaviors of many so that each becomes quantifiable and measurable against each other - it enables a mutual surveillance not only of supervisors but also of the coworkers with regard to each other). Anyway, this is getting off the point. It is my task as a philosopher to be critical; in a way it testifies also to my sense of privilege, independence, and suspicion which can be critiqued itself.
I have become more and more interested in religion as time progressed and was trying to build up a case according to which religion in a way does not have these problems - but it is possible for anyone to use religion in this sense; not only possible, but practically happening everywhere. But religion also makes other things possible in that it does claim allegiance in a way that a corporate life cannot, in that it is tied with family, culture, history, grand narratives which many of us cannot give up because personal narratives are deeply and even healthily interwoven with these - because it also binds us with one another - I avoid mention of God because I am supposed to be skeptic which makes me a good philosopher or maybe a sociologist but a bad theologian perhaps. No other organization can lay claim to the same kind of passionate attraction and investment that religion does. And despite the manifest ways in which people use religion badly - to gain power over others, to restrict themselves, to close off, to close up, or in extreme cases to justify violence, these come as the necessary and perhaps most common exceptions - where the excpetions rule rather than the rule but the rule is still there and still incredibly attractive and the source of much heroism and manifest though fewer examples. And perhaps not so few - perhaps religion works not only in the restricted cases of saints but for all human beings. These "heroes" are only such because they are so human and not because they do not have the same weaknesses, anxieties, and failures that we do.
Okay I don’t know how I got there. My intention was to begin with "anxiety" and reflect on its capacity to choke out the kind of invitation which I see manifested by Christ in the gospel and I ended up with a different argument in favour of religion which I recognized was also possible to be present in religion; the difference which religion offers me is something that I claim has the property of being able to draw passionate attraction and investment. It is not only a grand narrative - because organizations also have this. I would hesitate to say that it is only the assurance of divine aid and comfort. I would hesitate to say that it is "God" because this explains nothing to others and not really anything to myself. Something which I think it does make possible (not that I am saying it is essentially mind you) is a different way of life. It is the difference between the friendship that I have with people I have been going to Mass with for six months and the people I work with professionally. Some organizations approximate this kind of closeness and similarity more than others - I had a wonderful sense of this early this year.
While there is nothing more I hate than self-gift; I am gaining a way of articulating my issues through hearing a Giddens’ use of the term "pure relationship" as a modern romantic construct - because I think that pleasure is a better way to go both as a centre of the self (understood either essentially or as the necessary accompaniment of something more substantial) and as a way of approaching others I think I am sympathetic to what I think other people who claim this term are trying to make it work - there is a desire perhaps especially in young people that no criticism or cynicism can obscure (which actually perhaps is the root of criticism and cynicism) to be happy - to be actualized by throwing oneself fully. This desire to devote can be used very problematically by becoming ideologues or servants of ideologies - at worst, manifested in the suicide bomber, it may be moderated and modulated in a number of ways through what Taylor calls something like the glorification of small things which he traces to the Protestant reformation (in this case Therese of Lisieux would be an excellent Protestant) or maybe it can be used in a healthy way. But it seems to be impossible to articulate this without articulating who God is, which would make me have to become a theologian or maybe a hagiographer or a preacher. And maybe I am not being post Kantian or post modern in delimiting myself thus, there is something of a via negativa which is present even in theology and in some mystics - not that I like the term "mystics" or am aligning myself with such, its just that we don’t have to be restricted to describing ourselves in our historical context but can point to other necessary twists towards this approach and partially because I think we are not wholly determined by the historical progression in our thought - in a way it seems impossible because of the discourses that come through parents, especially through the mass media, etc. but there are other texts which we have access to perhaps even before being wholly colored by the hermeneutics of our own age. There is something not only of the universal which comes through the particular, but also even a genuine dialogue and influence with other particulars - I think particularly of Augustine here - and some people claim that he is the source of psychologizing and Luther and postmodernism and all kinds of modern things so maybe they would think he is a bad example; and that we are really all contained within a Christian unfolding, whether you think of religious posture, event, or of figures of Augustine or Paul or Christ. But within this matrix - Christian if you will - there is something of cross-referentiality - I do think there is something in texts that though we often interpret with the lenses that come to us through culture and other more cognitive formations something comes through - not only of universality, but also of ‘tradtion’ - of other ways of understanding. Religion, even redefined in what some call a post-social as well as we can call post-Protestant and post-modern terms, retains other things - I could have fun tracing the strains of religion in my relatives - the different ethnicities, practices, even rites. Because even reading our age is creating something and to some extent inventing something - where there are so many potential influences and cross-influences it takes a kind of genius to identify a thread and pursue a track; very useful, but I think all the particular movements are rooted in various manifestations - causally and historically related - of universal things that pop up in very different articulations with different motivations and consequences.
And one of these things that does come out universally is this parable of the sower going out to sow and being choked by anxieties and cares or pursuit of things or excessive sanguinism. And the two men who influenced Augustine and catalyzed his own internal dialogue that precipitated his experience in the garden together with the game interpreted as injunction to "Take and read" - the two men who asked themselves why wore themselves out in devoting themselves to an earthly governor when they could serve a different king - I often wondered about the very many motivations that come into entering religious life, and in waiting for some kind of manifestation of a "pure intention" kind of like the "pure relationship" that Giddens speaks about, that there is no such thing. That these kind of decisions enter into our lives that are marked not by predilect virtue, but by Paul who was on his way to Damascus to round up more Christians to persecute, by Augustine - the passionate intellectual and rhetorician who moved from the intense fashionable religions of his time and who spent some time running away from his mother to submit to her influence in abandoning the woman he loved and preparing for an approved marriage, by Francis, the carefree youth who retained a near-comic literalism as the poet-lover of his Saviour, by Clare, the runaway teen. The more serene initial beginnings of Dominic and Thomas, by comparison, are marked with later oddities - the imprisonment of Aquinas by his family, the many varied stories accompanying Dominic’s travels. Teresa of Avila is an interesting story - I have never got very far in her autobiography however. At any rate, these people were not hit upon by pure intentions - while Paul was blithely oblivious to any kind of Christian example, Augustine was influenced by the stories and the deliberations of the people of his time (and exploited these stories for others by the technique of a narrative confession - and you see it still works as a way for me to intertwine my own narrative with these people).

Office of Readings

I don't have much time to comment but they are great.
Reading
Romans 8:28-39 ©
We know that by turning everything to their good God co-operates with all those who love him, with all those that he has called according to his purpose. They are the ones he chose specially long ago and intended to become true images of his Son, so that his Son might be the eldest of many brothers. He called those he intended for this; those he called he justified, and with those he justified he shared his glory.
After saying this, what can we add? With God on our side who can be against us? Since God did not spare his own Son, but gave him up to benefit us all, we may be certain, after such a gift, that he will not refuse anything he can give. Could anyone accuse those that God has chosen? When God acquits, could anyone condemn? Could Christ Jesus? No! He not only died for us – he rose from the dead, and there at God’s right hand he stands and pleads for us.
Nothing therefore can come between us and the love of Christ, even if we are troubled or worried, or being persecuted, or lacking food or clothes, or being threatened or even attacked. As scripture promised: For your sake we are being massacred daily, and reckoned as sheep for the slaughter. These are the trials through which we triumph, by the power of him who loved us.
For I am certain of this: neither death nor life, no angel, no prince, nothing that exists, nothing still to come, not any power, or height or depth, nor any created thing, can ever come between us and the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Reading
St Bonaventure
With you is the source of life
Take thought now, redeemed man, and consider how great and worthy is he who hangs on the cross for you. His death brings the dead to life, but at his passing heaven and earth are plunged into mourning and hard rocks are split asunder.
It was a divine decree that permitted one of the soldiers to open his sacred side with a lance. This was done so that the Church might be formed from the side of Christ as he slept the sleep of death on the cross, and so that the Scripture might be fulfilled: ‘They shall look on him whom they pierced’. The blood and water which poured out at that moment were the price of our salvation. Flowing from the secret abyss of our Lord’s heart as from a fountain, this stream gave the sacraments of the Church the power to confer the life of grace, while for those already living in Christ it became a spring of living water welling up to life everlasting.
Arise, then, beloved of Christ! Imitate the dove ‘that nests in a hole in the cliff’, keeping watch at the entrance ‘like the sparrow that finds a home’. There like the turtledove hide your little ones, the fruit of your chaste love. Press your lips to the fountain, ‘draw water from the wells of your Saviour; for this is the spring flowing out of the middle of paradise, dividing into four rivers’, inundating devout hearts, watering the whole earth and making it fertile.
Run with eager desire to this source of life and light, all you who are vowed to God’s service. Come, whoever you may be, and cry out to him with all the strength of your heart. “O indescribable beauty of the most high God and purest radiance of eternal light! Life that gives all life, light that is the source of every other light, preserving in everlasting splendour the myriad flames that have shone before the throne of your divinity from the dawn of time! Eternal and inaccessible fountain, clear and sweet stream flowing from a hidden spring, unseen by mortal eye! None can fathom your depths nor survey your boundaries, none can measure your breadth, nothing can sully your purity. From you flows ‘the river which gladdens the city of God’ and makes us cry out with joy and thanksgiving in hymns of praise to you, for we know by our own experience that ‘with you is the source of life, and in your light we see light’.

"Everything is grace"

These simple words from Therese of Lisieux really capture the first reading today from Paul.

Do not forget: thin sowing means thin reaping; the more you sow, the more you reap. Each one should give what he has decided in his own mind, not grudgingly or because he is made to, for God loves a cheerful giver. And there is no limit to the blessings which God can send you – he will make sure that you will always have all you need for yourselves in every possible circumstance, and still have something to spare for all sorts of good works. As scripture says: He was free in almsgiving, and gave to the poor: his good deeds will never be forgotten.

The one who provides seed for the sower and bread for food will provide you with all the seed you want and make the harvest of your good deeds a larger one, and, made richer in every way, you will be able to do all the generous things which, through us, are the cause of thanksgiving to God.

It is not hard to be unselfish; that is, it is not hard to have generous impulses, to follow them. It is the easiest thing in the world to be generous when we feel secure with ourselves, with our resources (the question is, when do we really feel secure about them?). Maybe we may not be consistent and virtuous about it, in the sense of fulfilling justice as well as going beyond it; maybe the impulse to generosity may just help us to bridge the gap once in a while. But this reading does not speak to the need for generosity from abundance. Nor does it necessary implore generosity from need, "giving until it hurts". Rather it advocates something else.


This encourages the timid who are not sure what to do. It encourages what the Gospel also says; "Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing." It balances out the gospel, by providing the assurances which Christ gives elsewhere. In the gospel today he assures us of the intimacy with God our Father, of a friendship, of one to whom we address ourselves and our love in loving our brothers and sisters in Christ. In a way, it is a step beyond what St. Paul urges here; not in the sense of "beyond" that we do not need the first "step" or can pass beyond it, but that we both need the confidence of the riches of God which we draw on blindly, not knowing the measure. The not knowing the measure is always in our advantage, but we do not know that "Blessed are they who have not seen, and have believed". In all this, the readings and the Gospels are not urging the impulse to generosity, for that can come from self-confidence; nor is it necessarily encouraging public acts for status (or today, for networking's sake); it is giving in the first the relationship with God of drawing on his infinite largesse and his mercy, and the relationship which we are raised to in the second of being generous like God; just as he has made himself poor to be like us; so we who are poor act in the faith of possessing his riches to be like him, so that we may be "perfect as our heavenly father is perfect", so that while "silver and gold we have none, what we have, we give you."
What does this mean, though? What does this mean when I cross the street and there is a man here in New York City picking up his lunch out of a garbage can? I walk by and am saddened but don't know what to do. It resolves me for something but I don't know what. I am frustrated but I don't know what to do; i hesitate about taking responsibility.
It is so easy to get lost in details. Here in NY I find that. I find grace in the middle of it; struggling to finish my thesis, struggling to do well, wanting everything to be done yesterday (because sometimes it should have been done yesterday). I find grace in the confessional, which I hesitated about going to becuase I didn't want it to be just an emotional thing; which was a good thing because I took that moment to reflect and then I knew I really wanted to go in. It happens in the little speech which the priest gives me behind the grille about we're not having to do it alone, about God is willing to give us all the grace (and then this being the message of the readings at Mass after).
In a way, we are always already ready to be absolved of our infinite responsibility, merely for the sake of asking. This is what it means to be a child of God. The pressure of the moral law is that we ask gravely but get nothing done. The freedom of religion is that we recognize not only our limitations, but our sins, weep over them and start again with God's grace. I know I am learning valuable things right now. I know I am here for a reason. But sometimes I get so tired of this. I want to be happy and to be with God; I want to have that freedom, I want to be like Christ. But this is where it is like a real relationship where I must depend on God to carry out this part of the relationship, the part about getting closer and maintaining the ties and bringing superabundance - even if I am not capable of mirroring or of disposing myself in the way that I think is ideal for this. It's like a marriage; one person picks up the slack when another is busy working on a thesis or something. I feel pain because I want more; perhaps I would never want so much if I had it immediately. God has a lot more wisdom than I could even imagine or dream of; he will not leave me lacking.
God is here in New York; God is here when I have less time to pray, but I cannot abandon prayer, not because he needs it but because I need him; sometimes this will mean different things in my life.
I really miss hanging out with my Dominicans. I miss being able to pray with them. There are Dominicans here but I have not really come to know them yet.
I am still working on my thesis; I was fretting on and off about it and getting more stressed especially because it is hard to share space with so many people! I would go to a library or another place only I don't have a laptop battery anymore and got to stick near an outlet. But grace does not extend only to the most general things; it extends to this thesis - God will make sure that I have what I need, "Oh you of little faith, why did you doubt?" I even have many signs of this; the fact that it works out that I get all of next week off, which is highly unusual in an internship.
I just want to say that I am sad. One of the things about living in a space shared with everyone and with the public at the same time is that there is no room for downtime - and there's not even a chapel. Every place is fair game for everyone; it gets comical. But there are loopholes - it is more comforting however to complain when you are sad because when you are sad it seems like a big thing and its cathartic to express it as big as you can. Maybe that's why tragedies are always so over the top if they are meant for catharsis; I still don't know how that works with tragedies, they always make me more tense; but I guess if you see how the worst possible worlds can happen, you go back to your life thinking, "Well, what I've got is really very manageable, after all."
It's funny - I am thinking about sadness, and I can find any number f reasons that I am sad - I think I wander around a few of them here. But it could be as simple as that one thing that I am anxious about my thesis, which if it were not there, I would be able to work with the other things. Or maybe not. I don't know.
But in this kind of passion, there is something very sensitive that kind of needs to be avoided. It is hard to rationalize with a sad person; which is why I think Job's "friends" are not successful, which is why I think I like Aquinas' paproach to remedies. It is not only about not-manipulating or not-doing violence to the subject, or not teaching the subject to run away from sorrow in a way that will make the subject worse because it can't simply be cut off like that, it is also simply because if you start to work at that level, you can get an outpouring of philosophy that none of it is quite to the point. And then you'd be better off getting the person an icecream. But there's a point where you've been using the ice-cream (or baths, or walks, or music, or whatever you please) and it has been working for a month and that's why you've managed very well, but sometimes that is not so appropriate because it refuses to work along that logic. This is when "dispersion" really helps, and I am dispersing by being engaged with my whole self now because I see it as something important. Before I was dispersing practically without my consent, as I wiped tears off my face all throughout church and tried to appear collected. "Tears, sighs, and even by words". It is not just about doing what is appropriate to sadness, about rectitude, although there is something in this, and I think not only on the basis of the subject's sense of doing something right or apropos, but on a "convenience" that happens before that level, that it is appropriate, that it is natural, to release the hold that "something" or many things have slowly been gaining on you. And it can be a more intellectual sense of one's appropriateness, or it may be a more intuitive sense that is intelligence in a much faster way. Maybe passion is not to be perceived as an intermediate way of being towards intellectual appetition or apprehension, but is a way of speaking about the fastest way of being intelligent or desiring; maybe reflection is not so much different in kind as our other ways of relating but cheifly in terms of time. It does regard the same thing; one part is faster and looks at things as objects, as "beings to be reckoned with", the other part allows some distance becuase it is at a slower speed. And in that case, every passion would be a perfection of relationship - the only thing is that we can be mistaken with our passions, that we need the slowness to balance things out. But not always. If it is a democracy, it is like the difference between the population and academia. At its worst the first can be scary, it can create mobs - at its worst the second can be so detached from reality that they cease to have real meaning. But usually it is not like that; usually there is sense in and reflection in academia and we live as both. Anyway, this is not much to the purpose.
My thesis can only be a propadeutic. But I think it can be a good one; the trick is to be open while being accurate - to shape the puzzle such that the missing pieces would fit perfectly, that you can see the missing pieces already from the way the content is structured. I feel that is the way I am living m

Happy Feastday!

It's Corpus Christi!! Happy Feastday everyone!
I am working on my thesis and it is coming along (thank God!)

For the present, I am still underground.

The virtues and vices of old people in the late middle ages

Authors: M Goodich

The medieval perception of old age was based on the classical theory of the four humors, which balanced the vices of senescence with its virtues. The introduction of Aristotle to the West in the thirteenth century, combined with the translation of Arabic medical works, encouraged scientific discussion of the aging process. The Christian tradition stressed the opportunities for spiritual perfection which aging brings. As a result, a broader portrait of aging emerged, embodying both physical and emotional factors.

International journal of aging & human development. 01/02/199002/1990; 30(2):119-27.
ISSN: 0091-4150

Great article

http://eapi.admu.edu.ph/eapr004/mcvey.htm

Happy Feastday!!

Reading
1 Corinthians 2:1-16 ©
As for me, brothers, when I came to you, it was not with any show of oratory or philosophy, but simply to tell you what God had guaranteed. During my stay with you, the only knowledge I claimed to have was about Jesus, and only about him as the crucified Christ. Far from relying on any power of my own, I came among you in great ‘fear and trembling’ and in my speeches and the sermons that I gave, there were none of the arguments that belong to philosophy; only a demonstration of the power of the Spirit. And I did this so that your faith should not depend on human philosophy but on the power of God.
But still we have a wisdom to offer those who have reached maturity: not a philosophy of our age, it is true, still less of the masters of our age, which are coming to their end. The hidden wisdom of God which we teach in our mysteries is the wisdom that God predestined to be for our glory before the ages began. It is a wisdom that none of the masters of this age have ever known, or they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory; we teach what scripture calls: the things that no eye has seen and no ear has heard, things beyond the mind of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him.
These are the very things that God has revealed to us through the Spirit, for the Spirit reaches the depths of everything, even the depths of God. After all, the depths of a man can only be known by his own spirit, not by any other man, and in the same way the depths of God can only be known by the Spirit of God. Now instead of the spirit of the world, we have received the Spirit that comes from God, to teach us to understand the gifts that he has given us. Therefore we teach, not in the way in which philosophy is taught, but in the way that the Spirit teaches us: we teach spiritual things spiritually. An unspiritual person is one who does not accept anything of the Spirit of God: he sees it all as nonsense; it is beyond his understanding because it can only be understood by means of the Spirit. A spiritual man, on the other hand, is able to judge the value of everything, and his own value is not to be judged by other men. As scripture says: Who can know the mind of the Lord, so who can teach him? But we are those who have the mind of Christ.
Reading
A letter by St Athanasius
Light, radiance and grace are in the Trinity and from the Trinity
It will not be out of place to consider the ancient tradition, teaching and faith of the Catholic Church, which was revealed by the Lord, proclaimed by the apostles and guarded by the fathers. For upon this faith the Church is built, and if anyone were to lapse from it, he would no longer be a Christian either in fact or in name.
We acknowledge the Trinity, holy and perfect, to consist of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In this Trinity there is no intrusion of any alien element or of anything from outside, nor is the Trinity a blend of creative and created being. It is a wholly creative and energising reality, self-consistent and undivided in its active power, for the Father makes all things through the Word and in the Holy Spirit, and in this way the unity of the holy Trinity is preserved. Accordingly, in the Church, one God is preached, one God who is above all things and through all things and in all things. God is above all things as Father, for he is principle and source; he is through all things through the Word; and he is in all things in the Holy Spirit.
Writing to the Corinthians about spiritual matters, Paul traces all reality back to one God, the Father, saying: Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of service but the same Lord; and there are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspires them all in everyone.
Even the gifts that the Spirit dispenses to individuals are given by the Father through the Word. For all that belongs to the Father belongs also to the Son, and so the graces given by the Son in the Spirit are true gifts of the Father. Similarly, when the Spirit dwells in us, the Word who bestows the Spirit is in us too, and the Father is present in the Word. This is the meaning of the text: My Father and I will come to him and make our home with him. For where the light is, there also is the radiance; and where the radiance is, there too are its power and its resplendent grace.
This is also Paul’s teaching in his second letter to the Corinthians: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. For grace and the gift of the Trinity are given by the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. Just as grace is given from the Father through the Son, so there could be no communication of the gift to us except in the Holy Spirit. But when we share in the Spirit, we possess the love of the Father, the grace of the Son and the fellowship of the Spirit himself.
Off to work on my thesis!! Buon giorno!!!

Office of readings

As I am getting more into the schedule of things around here, I find I am gaining time to pray. This morning I read the Office of Readings.
Reading
Job 40:1-14,42:1-6 ©
The Lord turned to Job, and he said:
Is Shaddai’s opponent willing to give in?
Has God’s critic thought up an answer?
Job replied to the Lord:
My words have been frivolous: what can I reply?
I had better lay my finger on my lips.
I have spoken once... I will not speak again;
more than once... I will add nothing.
The Lord gave Job his answer from the heart of the tempest. He said:
Brace yourself like a fighter,
now it is my turn to ask questions and yours to inform me.
Do you really want to reverse my judgement,
and put me in the wrong to put yourself in the right?
Has your arm the strength of God’s,
can your voice thunder as loud?
If so, assume your dignity, your state,
robe yourself in majesty and splendour.
Let the spate of your anger flow free;
humiliate the haughty at a glance!
Cast one look at the proud and bring them low,
strike down the wicked where they stand.
Bury the lot of them in the ground,
shut them, silent-faced, in the dungeon.
I myself will be the first to acknowledge
that your own right hand can assure your triumph.
This was the answer Job gave to the Lord:
I know that you are all-powerful:
what you conceive, you can perform.
I am the man who obscured your designs
with my empty-headed words.
I have been holding forth on matters I cannot understand,
on marvels beyond me and my knowledge.
Listen, I have more to say,
now it is my turn to ask questions and yours to inform me.
I knew you then only by hearsay;
but now, having seen you with my own eyes,
I retract all I have said,
and in dust and ashes I repent.
I love this passage from Job. When I was younger, if I read this passage, I would have likely thought that Job was being "put in his place" and submitted in a humbled, non-questioning way. Which might make sense, but I would have misunderstood the subjective and relational context of Job and God who speaks - I would have thought that he made himself small out of being corrected. But that is because I was fearful myself. The same words are better understood in an affectionate relationship: God speaks to Job familiarly, as a friend. To me, at least, in the very human way that God speaks, the speaker is able to take lightly, almost humorously, the infinity of God with the human character of Job - juxtaposing Job with it. It seems that this recollection seems to reconfigure Job's understanding - not because of the kind of recollections themselves (for Job's friends have been saying the same things but in much more long-winded terms) - but because it is God who addresses him; the speeches of the others were inadequate because there is not the answer "from God" which Job desired, but God addressing Job was enough - "Let us look on your face, O Lord, and we shall be satisfied." And we have Christ "You say to me Lord, Lord because you have seen, blessed are those who have not seen and have believed."
Reading
A letter by St Boniface
The careful shepherd watches over Christ's flock
In her voyage across the ocean of this world, the Church is like a great ship being pounded by the waves of life’s different stresses. Our duty is not to abandon ship but to keep her on her course.
The ancient fathers showed us how we should carry out this duty: Clement, Cornelius and many others in the city of Rome, Cyprian at Carthage, Athanasius at Alexandria. They all lived under emperors who were pagans; they all steered Christ’s ship – or rather his most dear spouse, the Church. This they did by teaching and defending her, by their labours and sufferings, even to the shedding of blood.
I am terrified when I think of all this. Fear and trembling came upon me and the darkness of my sins almost covered me. I would gladly give up the task of guiding the Church which I have accepted if I could find such an action warranted by the example of the fathers or by holy Scripture.
Since this is the case, and since the truth can be assaulted but never defeated or falsified, with our tired mind let us turn to the words of Solomon: Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not rely on your own prudence. Think on him in all your ways, and he will guide your steps. In another place he says: The name of the Lord is an impregnable tower. The just man seeks refuge in it and he will be saved.
Let us stand fast in what is right and prepare our souls for trial. Let us wait upon God’s strengthening aid and say to him: O Lord, you have been our refuge in all generations.
Let us trust in him who has placed this burden upon us. What we ourselves cannot bear let us bear with the help of Christ. For he is all-powerful and he tells us: My yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Let us continue the fight on the day of the Lord. The days of anguish and of tribulation have overtaken us; if God so wills, let us die for the holy laws of our fathers, so that we may deserve to obtain an eternal inheritance with them.
Let us be neither dogs that do not bark nor silent onlookers nor paid servants who run away before the wolf. Instead let us be careful shepherds watching over Christ’s flock. Let us preach the whole of God’s plan to the powerful and to the humble, to rich and to poor, to men of every rank and age, as far as God gives us the strength, in season and out of season, as Saint Gregory writes in his book of Pastoral Instruction.

Hello!

I'm still here. I am in NY but don't have a lot of time to write about it. All my spare time is devoted to my thesis (and that is little enough). So hello/goodbye. Let us pray for each other and for all, especially for a friend of mine and his family; their mother has just died.

Hypomnema

Well, what do you know? I found this on Wikipedia while I was searching for the right text to find of Foucault's before I head out to the New York Public Library today. Interesting!
Hypomnema (Greek. υπομνημα, plural υπομνηματα, hypomnemata), also spelled hupomnema, is a Greek word with several translations into English: a reminder, a note, a public record, a commentary, a draft, a copy, and other variations on those terms[1].
Michel Foucault uses the word in the sense of "note", but his translators use the word "notebook", which is anachronistic (see codex and wax tablet). Concerning Seneca's discipline of self-knowledge, Foucault writes: "In this period there was a culture of what could be called personal writing: taking notes on the reading, conversations, and reflections that one hears or engages in oneself; keeping kinds of notebooks on important subjects (what the Greeks call 'hupomnemata'), which must be reread from time to time so as to reactualize their contents."[2] In an excerpt from an Interview with Michel Foucault in The Foucault Reader, he says: "As personal as they were, the hypomnemata must nevertheless not be taken for intimate diaries or for those accounts of spiritual experience (temptations, struggles, falls, and victories) which can be found in later Christian literature. [...] [T]heir objective is not to bring the arcana conscientiae to light, the confession of which—be it oral or written—has a purifying value."
Plato's theory of anamnesis recognized the new status of writing as a device of artificial memory, and he developed the hypomnesic principles for his students to follow in the Academy. The hypomnemata constituted a material memory of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering these as an accumulated treasure for rereading and later meditation. They also formed a raw material for the writing of more systematic treatises in which were given arguments and means by which to struggle against some defect (such as anger, envy, gossip, flattery) or to overcome some difficult circumstance (a mourning, an exile, downfall, disgrace

Ingenious!

http://improveverywhere.com/2009/03/18/subway-art-gallery-opening/

Nice blog

Too bad there are only a few posts on it.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/weave128/architecture/