Well, my head is still spinning from work, from the couple days' ache I always seem to get after getting the flu vaccine, from sleep deprivation, and from getting the last of the main applications all out. It's going to feel sweet just to settle back into regular writing with the dissertation.

But I do have to note that The Gathering Storm, the new volume of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, posthumously published with the aid of Brandon Sanderson working from the notes and outlines Jordan left along with those chapters he had completed, is absolutely out of this world. Several threads of the story have come to their climax, and even when there was enough foreshadowing to make for a reasonable guess as to the way some plot point or other was going to be resolved, it still was nevertheless edge-of-your-seat action and drama. Seven stars on a five-point scale. It's just too bad my brother can't keep up with the reading: now that Joe's a dad (Nate's first birthday was on Thursday) he only gets time for a bit to read here and there, and so he (slightly) ruefully said on Thursday that he was only up to chapter eight by the time I had finished the volume. But that just means to get to extend the pleasure of reading it for the first time, so I don't think there's anything wrong with that....

I meant to pass my volume on to Mike last night when we all gathered at Dan and Amy's to celebrate Amy's birthday and to enjoy the company of Bob, who was back in town for another dissertation sprint, but I left it on the shelf when I rushed out the door. Mike was dismayed, as he thought it wasn't going to be released for a little while longer, yet, and so I ended up being a tease in that he could have had it "early," if only I had remembered. So I owe him one, there.

Heh. I've been doing some side reading on the Crusades, as I mentioned a few days ago, and I was just googling a reference or two when I found a blog citing the recent publication of archivist Barbara Frale's recent 2009 book on the Knights Templar, The Templars: The Secret History Revealed. Frale is an historian in the employ of the dramatically-named Vatican Secret Archives, and appears to be a very accomplished medievalist. What caught my eye was this comment in the blog entry:

The brief foreword by Umberto Eco has the following priceless remarks: "No other subject has ever inspired more hacks from more countries throughout time than the Templars. . . The only way to determine if a book on the Templars is serious is to check if it ends in 1314..."

Nice!

It's been a day of quiet decompression after my visit with the family and playing with my nieces and nephew. The biggest event of the day was having Erin Fitz trip across me reading by the fountain in the overcast dusk, and catching up with her a bit, mostly finding out what she's doing in Milwaukee instead of at Boston College, and her getting the latest on my dissertation research, which she is now more than capable of following. So that was a pleasant surprise. Other than that, picking up Jonathan Riley Smith's 2007 Bampton Lectures at Columbia University – The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam – was the most exciting thing to happen to me.

That said, I can only justify this entry by saying that this photograph I noticed on an AP story is slightly awesome:

Heh. I just opened an email from earlier this evening from my friend Kevin, who lives out in Jackson, Wyoming. Jackson, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is one of the most ridiculously gorgeous locations in the United States, and the wider valley under the Grand Teton Mountains – Jackson Hole – has become a favourite location for secluded houses for celebrities of various sorts. Warren Beatty idly waved to me in a "just between neighbours" sort of way out there the other year. That sort of thing. So I just got this note from Kev:

Too funny.

Just saw Harrison Ford at the cashier at Kmart ....

So it goes.

I got to spend Monday with Langers in Chicago, after some schedule-juggling. It turned out that he was having a weekend mini-reunion with his Notre Dame M.Div. classmates in Milwaukee, just as I was going to be out of town staying at my sister's. A few semi-frantic phone calls later, we figured out that I could come down to the Loop on the commuter train and meet him, as he was going to be taking the train back from Milwaukee to South Bend, where he had left his car. So, even though Mark missed his first train and arrived an hour late, he decided to stay an extra two hours in town and take the last South Shore Line train back to the Bend, giving us somewhere between four-and-a-half and five hours to spend together.

We hadn't actually seen one another since J.P.'s wedding in August of 2007, so I had my first surprise when I discovered that he had chopped off his massive pony-tail. Mark's hair has been long for almost forever. I used a shot of him and that hair for part of the interior art of Life and Other Impossibilities back in 2004. When I met Mark at Notre Dame in December 1994, he had that sort of medieval-ish "bowl" haircut one sees occasionally. This was even shorter. This hearkened back to a Mark I'd only heard about: the football player Mark, back in Pittsburg. I had seen this Mark only once: on a videotape of the Freeks on their world tour, eyes closed and dancing the midst of a village in India, oblivious to the perplexed stares of the villagers standing around watching him. I'd never met a Mark who looked like this before. It was that big a deal. He bust out laughing, being in truth the same Mark, as soon as he saw my face, and told me that he had been hiding the fact that he cut his hair (for job interviews over a year ago) in our phone conversations, just so that he could see that look on my face.

We walked down Madison Avenue toward Millennium Park, as the panhandlers around the bridge over the Chicago River provoked Mark into recalling the outrageously persistent panhandler who stalked us while we were having dinner outside at the Water Street Brewery, when Mark visited me in Milwaukee in July 2003. We got to talking a bit about what little we knew and liked of Chicago architecture, with me talking about how much had been lost or destroyed, as I had learned about in reading in Lost Chicago. This conversation featured great visual aids as we walked by the classic Chicago Building, the elegant base curves of the Chase Tower (which reminds me of the fictional S.T.A.R. Labs), and this afternoon in particular, we were both struck by the façade of St. Peter's Church as we came up under it. Mark noted approvingly that it was run by the Franciscans, and we ducked in briefly to see the interior as people were coming out from a weekday Mass. That sort of thing got us talking Ecclesiology for a brief but intense stretch, as I quickly outlined for him where my dissertation research had taken me. In the time that I've known him, Mark has grown into an able theological thinker, and I was gratified to hear him respond as strongly as he did to what I was doing.

Arriving at Millennium Park itself, I was curious to have a look-around. I had never actually been there, despite having been downtown on any number of occasions since the Park was completed about five years ago. We walked in straight to the Jay Pritzker Music Pavilion, where some percussionists were soundchecking, and I marveled at the sound quality from where we ended up standing, out in the center of the law. Mark was equally marveling when I tolk him that our mutual Notre Dame friend Jeanine was playing there during the summers with the Grant Park Symphony – information which had somehow eluded him. So we fondly talked about her – our co-conspirator back in April 1997 for "The Francis Sessions" – and what she had accomplished musically. Had we more time, we would have immediately tried to track her down or summon her.

We eyeballed Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate, like all good tourists, as we sat down in the plaza for a while, and so that Mark could scarf down a few hot dogs. This actually got us going in earnest for a bit on public art. The sculpture's ability to pull in a vision of much of the city (as well as the viewers) in its outer, convex surface really emphasized the nature of the piece as public art: as commentary on the city itself, or at least as pointing toward the city. The fact that it does so without metaphor or abstraction, but simply reflects the city itself, makes its functioning as public art perhaps as simple and direct as such a piece could theoretically be: all you see in it is the very city that you see all around you at that moment. This got us onto questions of Post-Modernity in art. I was initially dazzled when I was introduced in college to the idea of approaching a text not as a piece representing purely the author's intent, but with whatever you as the reader brought to it, to recognize that there is no single restraining, authoritarian narrative, but that a fabulous variety of narratives can be discovered in any piece. This excitement of mine lasted about five minutes. As with a lot of ideas, it has its point, but that if you absolutize it, it pretty much consumes all other possibilities. (Becoming a single restraining, authoritarian narrative, as it were.) I realized that this kind of perspectivism – of refusing even the possibility of narratives or meanings that transcend ourselves – had nowhere to go, although that ride to nowhere might seem fun in its capacity for self-indulgence. At the time, as an undergraduate, I just instinctively realized that I already knew everything that I already knew: what I was interested in was art that actually challenged me with some possibility, some insight into truths which I had not yet perceived. Art, physics, philosophy: all of them were only worthwhile if that possibility was out there. So, looking at Cloud Gate with Mark, I raised the possibility that perhaps it sucked as public art: was it just looking into a mirror? Was it perhaps the ultimate artistic, postmodern joke: that everyone looking at Cloud Gate simply, and literally, "saw what they wanted to see?" Possibly, but I opted away from quite such a cynical stance: the visual of the sculpture still was concrete and specific, even if it was grand in scale – it was still the city and the community, with one's self inevitably and necessarily in the midst of it.

We retired over to a Michigan Avenue coffeehouse for some liquid fuel for Mark and for a switch into chairs, people-watching with great pleasure and talking about the current states of our lives. I got to hear more (and to see his facial expressiveness, which I don't get in our occasional long phone calls) about his relationship with Shannon, his decision to put to rest his full-time musical work so that he could pursue that relationship, and his return to teaching Theology. He spoke of her artistic career, and her move from an internationally-prominent career to one more regional and settled, and happy to set outside of the New York-London gallery hustle. I talked about my vision of my time in Milwaukee, now that I am beginning to have a vision of it as a whole, seeing it as a distinct period in my life as it moves toward its close. When we got up again to walk back across the street and continue our stroll through the park, I got a bit of a surprise. Standing on the corner of Michigan and Washington, I was saying something to Mark when, somehow, in the midst of all the sound of the city, I thought I heard faintly behind me, "...ster Novak?" I turned around and hey! presto! There was Bryan Haney, bearded and years older than when I had last seen him, when he was a student of mine in Saint Joe's class of 2003. So we exchanged a bit of news, and he said something absurdly complimentary about my teaching. He talked about his work as a videographer and editor briefly, and I was so stunned by the randomness of it all that I completely forgot to ask about Long Distance Affair, his band whose gig invitations I've had to turn down for years because of, well, long distance. So a few stunned moments of lame conversation on my part later, Bryan merged back into the crowd, leaving Mark laughing at me for how easily I could be surprised.

We went strolling through the middle of The Taste of Chicago, and ended up in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Fountain, where we continued the conversation along the previous lines for about an hour, first looking at the Fountain itself, which had been barricaded off the last time we had each been in Grant Park, and then later over on the plaza stairs looking out over Lake Michigan. At that point I guided Mark over to the South Shore station, and we spent the last half-hour talking on those old wooden benches, which always give me an old-time train station feel whenever I see them. We found ourselves both pleased to note the wonderful gift we've found about these Notre Dame friendship: that in them we experience no loss of trust, intimacy or even familiarity, despite the gaps in time between our actual gatherings or encounters. I've had less occasion to see Mark than I have Erik, for example, but we can pick up just as we left off, and that's a treasure in this world.

An interesting little article about a book by a friend of John Paul II's. I'm not sure why there's any particular "controversy" here, or if that's being created or amplified by the writers in order to make their story more "news-worthy." I cannot imagine that anyone would too strongly want to say "they weren't really good friends" if she was invited to be at his deathbed. But whatever. Either way, any book that helps humanize a man like Karol Wojtyla and saves him from being turned into either a plastic version of a saint or just an ideological figurehead is, in my mind, a good thing.

Woman defends book on friendship with John Paul II
Jun 12, 7:56 AM (ET)

By MONIKA SCISLOWSKA and NICOLE WINFIELD

WARSAW, Poland (AP) - To him, she was "My Dear Dusia" and he signed his letters "Br" - short for brother.

She was one of a handful of people by his bedside when he died, and visited him in the hospital when he survived an assassination attempt.

In the cloistered universe of the Vatican, Pope John Paul II had a woman friend with whom he shared spiritual thoughts in a series of letters that spanned the decades. Now she is defending her recent book of correspondence with the pope against criticism from church officials that she "exaggerated" her friendship with the late pontiff and could delay his beatification.

Wanda Poltawska, 87, said her book - a collection of her religious meditations and John Paul's letters of spiritual guidance - was harmless to his saint-making process and she dismissed those who sought to minimize her friendship with the Polish-born John Paul.

( Read more... )

Bob just stopped me a while ago, while I was walking over to the Gesu for Pentecost Mass, hopping out of his car by the Jesuit Residence on Wisconsin Avenue to speak a few words and to say good-bye. Bob had been in town from Ann Arbor over the last week, doing dissertation research on Paul, and was supposed to be here for another week, with us having dinner plans for Friday and probably a chess-and-wine sunset series behind Joan of Arc, as we've now done a few times. But his young son Logan was getting a new bike, he said, and he just couldn't stand being away from his kids another week. He freely admitted, with a laugh, that this was the case in spite of how much he wants to get away from them in order to work on his dissertation when they're distracting him. So at least we had a good night on Saturday hanging out at the Lloyds', which I'll journal about later, since I need to get back to my own dissertation. We also had a few shorter "study break" sorts of conversations in the Library, too, and so at least I don't feel that I completely missed him. And he might come back late this summer with the whole family, which would be great: we haven't seen Carmen in maybe three years, certainly not since she completed her residency and became an attending physician, and I don't think any of us have met Logan or Renée, their still newish little girl.

On a much lesser note, I finally had to give up hope after two months of denial, that the last of three boxes of Thomas Merton books I bought on eBay would ever show up. So I deleted the following from my Library Thing account and will have to add them to the collection some other way. I can't be too annoyed, because I really got the other two boxes of books for a song, even if I average the money for these into the equation. But it still would have been cool to round out some parts of my library with such ease. The Literary Essays are usually harder to find at a cheaper used price, and I think Langers or some high school student of mine long since have added Thoughts on the East to their own library.

The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton
Introductions East and West: Foreign Prefaces of Thomas Merton
Thoughts on the East
The Springs of Contemplation: A Retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani
The New Man
Seasons of Celebration
The Living Bread
Seeds of Destruction
The Silent Life

What hit me hardest about this particular quotation was especially the last sentence, and how many people in our own country might agree with it. When I see the way in which our news media quality is going down – with newspapers folding, cutting serious staff sections like foreign correspondents in favour of infotainment or columnists whose primary skill is infotainment snarking, or with the last presidential administration planting news stories and television channels failing to check and report those sources – well, I get worried. When this last sentence sounds like current affairs, Left or Right, just as long as the right side "wins," then I get very worried.

I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war – never mind whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory.

– Adolf Hitler, secret military conference, August 22, 1939.
Quoted in William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, pp. 530, 593.

This morning over breakfast I idly turned on the television, which I tend to leave tuned to Turner Classic Movies. I got wrapped up in The Three Comrades, which I had heard of somewhere. It's really quite striking for a 1938 movie and some of sensibilities and censorship of film at that time. The screenplay turns out to be an F. Scott Fitzgerald effort, co-written with someone named Edward E. Paramore Jr., and adapted from the Erich Maria Remarque novel of the same name, with the protagonist's name changed in honour of the author. It's set in the 1920s, and so it strikes strong chords in my imagination with the free reading I've been doing in Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The final shot is somewhere between profound and Hollywood schmaltzy, indicating how anyone who loves inevitably marches through life accompanied by the ghosts of those they've lost.

My imagination and dreams have been a strange blend of that and my dissertation over the last several days: a disharmonious clash of the gracious blending of people's spiritual gifts from my writing on charisms, and a stomach-churning frustration at the unimpeded Nazi seizing of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938. I've been particularly struck, over and over, by the blatant murder of truth by the Nazis, and the difficulty that comes with trying to deal with anyone – whether on a personal or a political level – who has either no commitment to dealing truthfully, or, lacking that, who has no societal pressure upon them to be truthful. Hitler murdered truth as a stepping-stone to murdering people, and the thing that has been so stomach-churning was to see how repeatedly he could have been stopped if only people had had greater access to the truth of what was going on. It's particularly tragic to see how ably he was able to manipulate the people and governments of the West because of their desperate desire for peace after their horrific experiences of the First World War. That the desire for peace should have contributed so mightily to the violence of Nazi oppression and of the world's greatest war has to be one of the chief ironies of human history. It's brought home to me over the last few days just how dependent democracy's stability is upon a free press, and just how significant are the threats we've seen in our own day to that freedom, whether Bush administration manipulation of the press through faked news stories on the political Right, or whether by the dogmatic uniformity often characteristic of a press culture dominated by the political Left. And that's to say nothing of the decline of real reporting in favour of info-tainment and the substituting of stories about current movies, or Dancing With The Stars and American Idol results in place of real news. I'm tempted to favour a law – technical violation of the First Amendment or not – that would forbid television news from reporting on current movies and actors and such as though these were truly the responsibilities of a democratic nation.

So, in contrast to what I just said, back to the movie. (The above shouldn't be construed to mean that I don't think film and art isn't important: it's just that I don't think that it's a matter for the press – who do have more significant responsibilities to America, whether or not those are actually legal.) Watching a movie from the 1930s this morning, I'm struck by how much I wish I could talk to any of my grandparents right now: to ask about the sensibilities of film in their time. For lots of us, our vision of earlier times will largely come from movies. This, of course, isn't quite accurate, given that film reflects the politics and mores of their time and place. From film, one might think that swearing in the English language, for example, was invented by Clark Gable's "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." in Gone With The Wind, but really didn't catch on until the 1960s. I found myself wanting to ask one of my grandparents about what differences they were conscious of between the world of film and art back in the Thirties, and their lived reality. I suppose that some of this has been rattling around in my head since re-reading Thomas Merton's The Seven-Storey Mountain the other month, most of which was set in the 1930s, and which was significantly concerned with the arts, although this particular matter didn't come up. I can extrapolate some differences, but it's not the same as being able to ask someone who was there. And all my family that I might have asked are now dead. That's just one more variation of the tragedy of aging in generations: that there are always things we will have wished to have asked those older than us, that we never thought of at the time. Fr. Sullivan was 16 in 1938: perhaps I'll think to ask this as a sidebar when I next interview him.

A number of people have been asking me for recommendations regarding reading Thomas Merton since I started reading strongly in him back in November, and posting quite a bit based on that reading. While I hope I've shared some reasonable thoughts on that point, it struck me that something else I've recently found might be worth posting for those curious about such reading. I recently tripped across a copy of a sheet of paper from February 6, 1967, a bit less than two years before his death, where Merton himself sketched out a graph where he attempted to evaluate his own work. There are a number of titles in circulation now that are not covered here, as many collections of his work were put together after his death. There are also already-published titles he neglected to include, like The Secular Journal or the important poem Original Child Bomb, as well as immediately forthcoming works such as Mystics and Zen Masters, and Zen and the Birds of Appetite.

This list is a roughly chronological sketch of his published work as he knew it at that time. (I preserve his order, but add the original publication dates.) He ranked them according to seven grades, running the following range: AWFUL, VERY POOR, POOR, LESS GOOD, GOOD, BETTER, BEST, with none of his work earning a "BEST" rating in his own eyes. The general shape of his judgment mirrors that of most critical readers of his work. I can't figure out how to make a nifty graph on LiveJournal to copy his layout, so I'll just reproduce it as a straight list with his rank listed afterward.

Thirty Poems (1944, Poetry) – BETTER
A Man in the Divided Sea (1946, Poetry) – LESS GOOD
Figures for an Apocalypse (1948, Poetry) – POOR
Exile Ends In Glory (1948, Biography) – VERY POOR
The Seven Story Mountain (1948, Autobiography) – BETTER
Seeds of Contemplation (1948) – BETTER
The Waters of Siloe (1949) – GOOD
The Tears of the Blind Lions (1949, Poetry) – BETTER
What Are These Wounds? (1950, Biography) – AWFUL
The Ascent to Truth (1951) – LESS GOOD
The Sign of Jonas (1953, Journal) – BETTER
Bread in the Wilderness (1953) – LESS GOOD
The Last of the Fathers (1954, Biography) – LESS GOOD
No Man is an Island (1955) – GOOD
The Living Bread (1956) – LESS GOOD
The Strange Islands (1957, Poetry) – GOOD
The Silent Life (1957) – BETTER
The New Man (1961) – BETTER
Thoughts in Solitude (1958) – BETTER
Spiritual Direction and Meditation (1960) – LESS GOOD
The Wisdom of the Desert (1961) – BETTER
Disputed Questions (1960) – BETTER
New Seeds of Contemplation (1962) – BETTER
Life and Holiness (1963) – LESS GOOD
Seeds of Destruction (1964) – GOOD
The Way of Chuang Tzu (1965) – BETTER
Seasons of Celebration (1965) – GOOD
Raids on the Unspeakable (1966) – BETTER
Emblems of a Season of Fury (1963, Poetry) – BETTER
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966, Journal) – BETTER

Sunday at the Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum with Erynn was rather spectacular. It wasn't that either of us found him or even his period or style to be a new top-flight favourite, but simply that Erynn turned out to be a fabulous museum partner: that is, we moved at about the same speed through the exhibit and the conversation was just the right mix of really paying attention to the art and then tying it back to Everything Else. My theory is that you tend to have Fast Museum People who want to zoom through everything, eyeball it, and just get a sense of the whole, and that you have Slow Museum People, who want to look at everything, read the captions, stop and think about it as you go along, and even double back for second looks and comparisons. I knew that I was the latter, and that when I've been with the former that they find Slow Museum People to be excruciating. Erynn turned out to have pretty much the same pace and have as much to say, which makes for good company in something like this.

We headed down to the Museum in the early afternoon as she kept me alternately laughing and cringing with the story of her telling off Persistent Drunk Guy when she was out dancing the night before with friends, which, I suppose, sounded extra horrific to me just because guys generally don't have to deal with that kind of being hit-on. We stashed our coats and such in the locker room and took a few minutes to start merging into the crowd at the exhibition, with me probably being too worried about watching out whether she was going to be Fast Museum Person and get impatient with me. Once that became a non-issue, we found ourselves just getting into the paintings themselves, although I took a minute to enthuse when she mentioned that she would be taking an Art History course next semester. I mentioned both about how much that study had added to my own work, and also speculated that that more specific familiarity with the sweep of art history would give her a different eye behind the camera, empowering her in being attentive to aspects of people that you just cannot see unless you're more sensitive to how other people, elsewhere and elsewhen, have pictured people.

There seemed to be a mix of roughly chronological and thematic organizations to the whole exhibit, and it was some of his youthful stuff that got us first talking a little more intensely, where there was a bit of bawdy or moral themes. Allegory of the Five Senses got us picking up where our conversation had ended last week, on just starting to notice the different concepts of beauty in different cultures or times. Although the comments by the picture noted that this was a common motif for a moral lesson about indulging the senses, this particular painting didn't seem to be engaging in quite so stark or obvious a moralizing task. Similarly, Youth Embracing A Young Woman, with Lievens's young painter friend Rembrandt apparently acting as the male model for the work, also presented us with a similar picture of beauty and here, also, without any overt moral statement in the text. In fact, I thought there was a real tenderness in the Young Woman's hand-holding with the Youth that didn't make the picture necessarily seem one about the temptations of 17th century Dutch clubbing. We were also struck by how un-youthful these "youths" seemed to us, and that got us murmuring back and forth a bit about what might have been considered youth at the time, in contrast to our own time and culture's tendency to try to perpetuate youth, both for something useful like extended educational opportunities, but also for less attractive reasons, like the inevitably-doomed-to-fail cult of youth we have today.

Up until that point, it had been more the technical stuff that had been grabbing our attention: the way he captured like on metal, gems or buttons, or on the brocade of a rich piece of clothing, or perhaps the authentically diaphanous look to a woman's headscarf. We both got taken right back into that sort of thing and away from the question of youth or beauty by a large Still Life With Books that we both found oddly electrifying, with the both of us staring at the same corner and commenting on the same details: the light on the winecup, on the golden paten holding the bread, with its eucharistic themes. This was one of several Lievens paintings in the show that had formerly been attributed to Rembrandt, and it was strangely compelling for such an ordinary subject.

This was the best scan of the painting that I could find online, but most of these copies of the paintings don't do the delicate and precise uses of colour justice at all. In fact, in reading an Amazon review of the show's catalogue, that was one reviewer's complaint about the text: that the quality of the shots left much to be desired. This is particularly unfortunate in a show whose principle task is supposed to be the revival of the reputation of a painter who was unfairly diminished next to that of his friend and collaborator, Rembrandt. So we stood there peering at the detail work on this particular painting for a bit, while I kept an eye out for the attendants, who were awfully skittish about anyone who was getting too close to the paintings.

Another painting that caused us to pause and talk for a time was Samson and Delilah, which was near another Old Testament femme fatale in a painting of Bathsheba Receiving David's Letter, and which brought us back to the cultural concept of beauty. Too look at a 17th Century blonde, Dutch Bathsheba, well-fed and well-off in the vision of that culture was to reimagine the story in a way that I never had. This got us talking a bit, too, about re-conceiving the stories of the Bible in your own ethnic and cultural vision. You sometimes hear people giving paintings like this a lot of flack nowadays, reading back 20th century racism into older art at the sight of a blonde, blue-eyed Jesus, while at the same time glowing with approval should they observe a red-cloaked Masai warrior Jesus. The first is racism, the second, cultural appropriation. I find this more than a bit irritating in that it's simply bad history to export more recent history and to superimpose it upon the past, although I would be the first one to raise an eyebrow at that blonde, blue-eyed Jesus in a piece of art from our post-20th Century context. Now, particularly with contemporary concern to portray Jesus's historical and Jewish context accurately, and in light of Modern racism, such a European cultural appropriation of the Incarnation just simply has too many political hurdles to overcome, and would likely lose whatever honest artistic attempt might be being made into suspicion. So to look at this 17th Century Dutch appropriation and adaptation of an Old Testament story, innocent of at least our later Modern issues, was a bit of a mind-stretching moment. Erynn got to talking here about working on both sides of the camera, both in trying to take advantage of certain particular characteristics in someone, and having capitalized on her own look, which has been taken for virtually everything on the planet. I finally conceded some of the last, not having seen earlier how she could be taken to be Asian, for example, but seeing how, in presentation or context, she really had a distinct ability to look like our whole world. In light of Rembrandt posing for a number of paintings thus far, we got to talking about how a conscientious model can really be a collaborative artist working with a painter or a photographer, although she admitted that that was probably a minority concept among models in our contemporary modeling industry. I hadn't really thought of it in that way before. Knowing my own experiences in the recording studio, and what a creative process making a recording of a song is, and how it's an experience shared with the writer, the band, and the engineers and even the crew, gave me a window into imagining how much of the art we were surrounded by – and all the rest I'd ever seen – might have a creative part of so many other people's stories, beyond whoever's name was on the work.

We stepped into the next room and I was flabbergasted. This section was devoted to portraiture, and I could scarcely believe that these pieces were done by the same man whose work I had been examining up to this point. As we went on, we found in the commentary that this was something that had been noted about Lievens's work, and maybe even been a complaint: that there did not seem to be one particular style that was his. Instead, he adopted a variety of styles, depending upon his intent. The living realism of his portraits took me by surprise.



As we looked at these, Erynn and I talked some of the differences between "raw" photography and the ability to "Photoshop" pictures, debating quietly which of these two that the art of painting was more like, even with the obvious and more Photoshop-like control that a painter exercises over the execution of their image. Nevertheless, despite that control, there was still the need in painting to "capture" the person, to somehow bring together that combination of technique and vision that in some way makes the difference between a great portrait and just an ordinary picture of someone. She was just as much at a loss to try to explain that difference as I was, though I certainly can tell when I've captured something of that sort: more rare, precise and exciting as it is.

The next section of the exhibition had more pictures of a sacred or moral sort, illustrative instead of portraiture. Nothing here much grabbed my attention or imagination. The Lamentation of Christ was more interesting to me in simply layout and execution than really grabbing me for its ability to capture the mood after the crucifixion of Jesus. It nowhere near affected me as much as Michelangelo's Florentine Pietà that I saw with Erik in Florence in 2006, or as much as Michelangelo's St. Peter's Pietà. Somewhat more interesting was Lievens's Christ on the Cross, painted, if I recall correctly, in competition with a similar piece by Rembrandt for a commission. Erynn picked up on something Lievens was doing with the light in this piece that I hadn't noticed, drawing my attention to the light in the upper left of the painting. She speculated on this for a moment before asking me what I thought it might mean. Once she got my attention on it, I thought that it was more likely that this was a fairly standard convention for such a scene – that this was Lievens's attempt at symbolizing the presence of God The Father in the crucifixion: a light "from above" that was mirrored by the light around Jesus's head, as sort of a more naturalistic "halo" in the scene, where this light in both locations indicated the shared divinity of Father and Son. I compared it to that striking shot in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ where, after Jesus's death, the camera suddenly shifts to an angle unprecedented and surprising in the film, that "God's eye" view looking downward upon the scene of the crucifixion, where a first drop of rain falls, tear-like, from that viewpoint onto the scene below.

With this painting, as with many others throughout the exhibition, there was next to the Lievens piece a small print of a similar Rembrandt piece, often done in competition with one another over commissions, or simply just riffing off of one another's ideas. Unlike this Lievens crucifixion scene, where Jesus has already died and been stabbed in the side, Rembrandt's painting shows Jesus still with his eyes open, and his face animated by the pains of the Passion. Erynn put her finger on a commonality running through all these comparisons which I hadn't noticed: the Rembrandt pieces were all more animated. Their emotions and actions were all more overt, which might be a better way of saying what she was noticing than just to call them more "animated." Once they were placed side-by-side, she consistently found the Rembrandts less appealing because of their comparative lack of subtlety. There was a greater sense of "playing to the crowd" in them, of a drama slipping toward melodrama, and I found myself agreeing with her. I made the comparison to the difference between Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's novel itself (which, to my dismay, she had never read). Wherever Tolkien is subtle and builds tension or meaning slowly or delicately, Jackson is content to shout BOO! Some of those adaptation decisions might have to do with the limits and pacing of film compared to that of a novel, but oftentimes it's just a cheapening. I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to say that Rembrandt was consciously "pandering to the crowd," but once Erynn made her case, it became harder not to make such comparisons in favour of Lievens as we went along.

A little later we found ourselves sitting for some time in front of the nearly eight-foot high canvas of The Sacrifice of Issac. I think that this was another fairly recent discovery or identification as Lievens's work. I believe it sold in 1996 for just under $22,000, so it is strange to think of an Old Master that I could have conceivably purchased, though I have to wonder how I would arrange my living room around it had I done so. This small copy of the painting is the only online image that I could find that reasonably came close to the colours as we saw them sitting there, and to the crispness of the image. Larger images online were strangely dull, amounting to a horrible distortion of the painting. The first thing that we found ourselves commenting upon or drawn to was simply the colour of Abraham's robe: a rich burgundy that we both found attractive.

I razzed her briefly when she asked for a reminder of the story – "That was in one of the first lessons in my class!" – forgetting, for the moment, that that was true of my Intro course and not of the Theology Through The Centuries course she took with me last spring. Mercifully, however, she didn't pick up on that, either, as I moved on to the story itself, or otherwise I would have been very thoroughly double-razzed in retaliation. But once I refreshed her memory about the story of the so-called sacrifice of Isaac, since it never actually happened, we spun off from the story itself, getting all intertextual. I talked about the symmetry that Christians get from the story, of how Abraham's faith and willingness to even offer on the Mountains of Moriah his only son to the mysterious God who spoke to him would be answered in turn by God's offering of Jesus for humanity on those same mountains centuries later when the city of Jerusalem now occupied them. I also mentioned the seeming barbarousness of the Jewish story, of how that had been highlighted for me when I was an undergraduate, reading a short story included with Goodbye, Columbus in a collection by Phillip Roth, and the impact this vision of Abraham through secularizing Jewish-American eyes had on me, in the way that it brought to the fore the need to read the biblical text with sympathetic, historically-informed eyes, and not to subject it to my own contemporary prejudices. We stared into the painting, finding ourselves taken with the sharp, dynamic character of his face, and the surprising – virtually unprecedented, from what we had seen – splash of colour in this one, with rare blues as part of a rainbow sunset or sunrise on the horizon in the background, wondering if this could be an allusion to the covenant with Noah. Again we looked at a print of a parallel Rembrandt text, and Erynn firmed up her thesis in comparing the two.

We began to speed up a bit toward the end. My Mom and aunts and uncle had warned me the night before that the exhibition was a long one, and it was even longer than I had thought from looking ahead, as there was more rooms to it than I had been able to see from earlier vantage points. As we got toward the end, I asked her what had been the piece that had stood out or grabbed her the most. She got a thoughtful, weighing sort of look on her face and lead me back through the exhibit, musing on The Sacrifice of Isaac and Samson and Delilah briefly, but pretty quickly settling on, and leading me straight to the Still Life With Books. I was surprised, in seeing that her choice was such a technical-seeming one, while we were mostly surrounded by narrative and portraiture, but I certainly sympathized insofar as something in the work had leapt out at me, too. Naturally, she turned the question or challenge right back at me, as I knew she would, though I slightly dreaded it, because I wasn't sure how I was going to answer. As I said, I too had loved something about the Still Life With Books, but I went back deeper into the show, eyeballing some of the portraits, and thinking through a few of the ones we had especially talked about, but I settled on The Penitent Magdalene as my choice, though in way I'm not even sure if I chose correctly. But that one had had us stop for a while, as I was so struck by such a different take on Magdalene. With the long history of how Mary Magdalene had been conflated with other figures in the New Testament, particularly the unnamed penitent woman who anointed Jesus or the woman caught in adultery, Magdalene has gained an importance in the history of Christian art – and presumably in Christian devotion – that is quite distinct from her historical significance. I mentioned this to Erynn when we had originally looked at the painting, for which I could only find this tiny copy online, and spoke of the way she is usually portrayed in art, with something of the flamboyance of one flaunting her beauty, so as to identify the character with this conflated/fictional past. Oftentimes she's stunning (as she is in The Lamentation of Christ, which we saw just a little farther on, presuming that the dazzling blonde woman is supposed to be her), and I first brought up Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in this context, with its full use of this tradition of so treating Mary Magdalene, with Monica Bellucci cast in the role. What so struck me here was to see such a different version of this Magdalene: elderly, weathered, worn and poor – a sort of vision of her as one living a monastic discipline in later life. Here she is, as an image, unaffected and lacking the usual accoutrements of the temptress, utterly human, with a life no visibly different than anyone else's, other than that which we know to be hers by virtue of her story. It was a new vision of her, making me look at the story – both historical and otherwise – with new eyes and imagination, and that, I figured, made it in some ways the work that had hit me the hardest. It might be technically or visually one of the more unremarkable, but it certainly grabbed me as an exercise of the painter's spiritual imagination.

One thing we noticed in the last few rooms, even though we were moving at a faster pace was this portrait, identified as another self-portrait of Lievens, but here showing him in his 40s, less fleshy and youthful than the striking self-portrait that, in my set of portraits above, is the middle one in the bottom row of three, in glowing browns. Here is where Erynn and I made our significant contribution to art history, should anyone ever know of it: comparing this self-portrait to the one above (which we had in the brochures in our hands), we noticed that in this mid-life self-portrait, not only has Lievens lost some of the youthful roundness to his face, but he has also lost the deep brown of his eyes in his 20s, as in this portrait they were now a deep blue. So, the experts may have identified these two paintings as self-portraits by the painter, but Erynn and I spotted this oddity, exchanged a wry glance, and quietly concluded that something in that story has got to give.

We headed out the door as they were shutting the place down, laughing about some story one of us had told the other, and decided as we crossed the footbridge over to Wisconsin Avenue to go ahead and grab dinner. I made a few suggestions, and she opted for Hotel Metro, seeming to be most intrigued by my enthusiastic descriptions of the apple pie and cinnamon ice cream dessert I favour there, though neither of us ended up opting for that. I had never seen the place so quiet as it was, though I was usually there when there was a lot of resting there by the clubbing crowd on late nights and not at a little after 5pm on a Sunday. She grabbed some kind of gumbo they were offering with alligator, apparently, and slipped me a bite of that so that I could add another strange and odd item on my list of things eaten. I settled into a pork tenderloin, and took my time through that, declining dessert while she grabbed their tiramisu.

And so we just had a lot of random dinner conversation, starting with the discovery that she had no idea where we were. I have pretty much concluded that there's two kinds of people: people who get directions and always know where they are, and people who do not. My Mom is the former, and my Dad the latter, and mercifully I inherited my Mom's talent here. Erynn was the other sort, and so I was amazed by the fact that she was completely lost after we had walked all of one block of north of Wisconsin Avenue, which is the straight drag directly from campus to the Art Museum. That got us talking about personality traits, I think, about things like Meiers-Briggs exams in the such, and we discovered when she was talking about how much she had enjoyed some down time when her roommates were out of the apartment that we were both extroverts who needed a lot of time to themselves, and how it had been a bit of a surprise to even discover that that was a category that made sense. I had always thought of myself as an introvert until I first took the MB for a class and had my results explained to me. Her upcoming competition at the Duke Invitational got us talking about a variety of schools and the huge choice of picking just one: I think Duke had been one of the schools that had sent her recruitment letters for undergrad – along with Harvard, Notre Dame and other impressive names – and I talked about how I'd almost gone to Duke for my Master's, and then opted for Notre Dame, and why I wish she could have experienced what makes ND distinct, although I had to say I was happy to have met her at Marquette. It's utterly unpredictable, the chain of consequences, of meetings and friendships and opportunities that come from picking one school instead of another. And it's really almost beside the point to worry about that decision in that all of those particulars are utterly beyond our foresight and calculation. My sibs wouldn't have met their spouses had they not gone to the University of Illinois, either meeting there like Leslie and Jim, or having their lives start on a particular course, like Joe then meeting Daniele. All the kids – their sheer existence and chance for it – are consequent to that. So that sort of conversation is always a bit head-spinning. But that was the kind of thing that made the whole afternoon fun: the combination in conversation of her offering comments that completely made sense for her to say, from what I knew of her, and the completely surprising insights that took me unprepared and made me look at the art, or at a story, differently than I would have on my own. Good times.

Before bed: I've been reading today in the Preface to the Japanese edition of Thomas Merton's Thoughts In Solitude, and I found myself really working on this paragraph, which is a particularly rich one in what amounts to a brilliant brief meditation on solitude itself, and the interior integrity which it demonstrates in a human life.

Is it true to say that one goes into solitude to “get at the root of existence”? It would be better simply to say that in solitude one is at the root. He who is alone and conscious of what his solitude means, finds himself simply in the ground of life. He is “in Love.” He is in love with all, with everyone, with everything. He is not surprised at this, and he is able to live with disconcerting and unexciting reality which has no explanation. He lives, then, as a seed planted in the ground. As Christ said, the seed in the ground must die. To be as a seed in the ground of one’s life is to dissolve in that ground in order to become fruitful. One disappears into Love, in order to “be Love.” But this fruitfulness is beyond any planning and any understanding of man. To be “fruitful” in this sense, one must forget every idea of fruitfulness or productivity and merely be. One’s fruitfulness is at once an act of faith and an act of doubt: doubt of all that one has hitherto seen in oneself, and faith in what one cannot possibly imagine for oneself. The “doubt” dissolves our ego-identity. Faith gives us life in Christ, according to St. Paul’s word: “I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). To accept this is impossible unless one has profound hope in the incomprehensible fruitfulness that emerges from the dissolution of our ego in the ground of being and of Love. Such a hope is not the product of human reason, it is a secret gift of grace. It sustains us with divine and hidden aid. To accept our own dissolution would be inhuman if we did not at the same time accept the wholeness and completeness of everything in God’s Love. We accept our emptying because we realize that our very emptiness is fulfillment and plenitude. In our emptiness the One Word is clearly spoken. It says, “I will never let go of you or desert you” (Hebrews 13:5) for I am your God, I am Love.

– From the Preface to the Japanese Edition of Thoughts In Solitude published in March 1966

While this is without a doubt best read as part of the entire Preface, I am struck by the simple fact of how it is the opposite of this argument that is always presented to us as the wisdom of our world: that one can only be grounded or enlightened if they create in themselves a systemic doubt in God (who is assumed or preferred to be unreal), and a comprehensive faith in oneself. Despite its appearance and its boast, the result of such a programme is not only to isolate us from God. It also results in isolating us from the root of our true selves, and creating in its place an image of self that is incapable of offering back to us any fruit beyond the repeated and insistent assertion of its own triumphant independence.

Last week, as I was reading the relevant section in Michael Mott's authorized biography The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, I had the good luck to suddenly have an urge to look on eBay for a copy of the letters between Thomas Merton and Robert Lax published as A Catch of Anti-Letters. (And I note the coincidence that seraphimsigrist should just have happened to be writing about Robert Lax.) That lead me to someone who happened to be selling a trove of Merton material, most starting at a dollar or two. Last week she sold a few dozen books, of which I picked up 20 for $34, which normally would have been the price for merely two or three of the twenty, used. Several of these were rather rare. I lost two of the auctions I most wanted to win, because I didn't bid over $20 for the two rarest texts. But as far as building up my academic research library for Merton material, I was still outrageously lucky. This week she sold another couple dozen texts, most of which I picked up with no contest, bringing my total to 47 books all told, for which I would have paid some hundreds of dollars even with used or Amazon discounted prices. Like I said: lucky. I even bought five or six texts I already owned, if no one else was bidding on them at 99 cents – just to give away; although I think I remember that my long-lost copy of Thoughts on the East has been in Langers' possession, though by now that's been for so long that it's effectively his, leaving me needing a replacement. Anyway, even by the prices of Merton books on eBay, these were exceptional prices, with many difficult-to-find texts that this reader had collected over a few decades. So I'm doing the Academic's Dance of Joy.

On the other hand, I've had the bad luck of being unable to sleep for longer than an hour or two at a stretch all week, and am quite fuzzy in many respects, so a small part of my brain kept in reserve is hoping that this math isn't a delusion on my part because that would be bad.

Raids on the Unspeakable by Thomas Merton (1966)
The Waters of Siloe by Thomas Merton (1979)
The Ascent to Truth by Thomas Merton (1981)
The Sign of Jonas by Thomas Merton (1979)
Seeds of Destruction by Thomas Merton (1980)
Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice by Thomas Merton (1984)
The Nonviolent Alternative by Thomas Merton
New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton (1972)
Dialogues With Silence: Prayers & Drawings by Thomas Merton, edited by Jonathan Montaldo (2004)
Day of a Stranger by Thomas Merton (1981)
The Silent Life by Thomas Merton (1957)
The Living Bread by Thomas Merton (1980)
Seasons of Celebration: Meditations on the Cycle of Liturgical Feasts by Thomas Merton (1983)
The New Man by Thomas Merton (1999)
Praying the Psalms by Thomas Merton (1956)
Opening the Bible by Thomas Merton (1986)
Bread in the Wilderness by Thomas Merton (1986)
Life and Holiness by Thomas Merton (1995)
The Climate of Monastic Prayer by Thomas Merton (2005)
The Wisdom of the Desert by Thomas Merton (1970)
Thomas Merton on Saint Bernard by Thomas Merton (1980)
Woods, Shore, Desert: A Notebook, May 1968 by Thomas Merton, edited by Sarah Nestor (1983)
Thomas Merton in Alaska: The Alaskan Conferences, Journals and Letters (Prelude to the Asian Journal) by Thomas Merton (1989)
The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton by Thomas Merton (1973)
Zen and the Birds of Appetite by Thomas Merton (1968)
Gandhi on Non-Violence: A Selection From the Writings of Mahatma Gandhi by Mohandas K. Gandhi, edited by Thomas Merton (1965)
Thoughts on the East by Thomas Merton (1995)
Introductions East and West: Foreign Prefaces of Thomas Merton by Robert Daggy, ed. (1981)
My Argument With the Gestapo: A Macaronic Journal by Thomas Merton (1969)
Original Child Bomb: Points for Meditation to be Scratched on the Walls of a Cave by Thomas Merton (1961)
Cables to the Ace; or, Familiar Liturgies of Misunderstanding by Thomas Merton (1986)
Selected Poems of Thomas Merton by Thomas Merton (1967)
In The Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton by Lynn R. Szabo; Kathleen Norris, forward (2005)
The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton edited by Patrick Hart (1985)
A Catch of Anti-Letters by Robert Lax and Thomas Merton (1978)
School of Charity: The Letters Of Thomas Merton On Religious Renewal And Spiritual Direction by Thomas Merton, ed. Patrick Hart (2003)
Survival or Prophecy?: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Jean LeClercq edited by Patrick Hart (2002)
The Springs of Contemplation: A Retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani by Thomas Merton, Jane Marie Richardson

The Monastic Journey of Thomas Merton by Patrick Hart (1978)
Thomas Merton's Dark Path: The Inner Experience of a Contemplative by William H. Shannon (1987)
Merton Annual: Studies in Thomas Merton, Religion, Culture, Literature, and Social Concerns, Volume 1 ed. Robert E. Daggy (1988)
Merton Annual: Studies in Thomas Merton, Religion, Culture, Literature, and Social Concerns, Volume 2 ed. Robert E. Daggy (1989)
Merton Annual: Studies in Thomas Merton, Religion, Culture, Literature, and Social Concerns, Volume 3 ed. Robert E. Daggy (1990)
Merton Annual: Studies in Thomas Merton, Religion, Culture, Literature, and Social Concerns, Volume 4 ed. Robert E. Daggy (1991)
Silent Lamp: The Thomas Merton Story by William H. Shannon (1992)
Follow the Ecstasy: The Hermitage Years of Thomas Merton, 1965-68 by John Howard Griffin (1993)
Contemplation and Compassion: Thomas Merton's Vision by Anthony T. Padovano (1984)

A few of the last minutes of conversation over at Dan and Amy's has been rattling around in my head for the last few days. I don't remember how either point came up, whether they actually flowed from the conversation at that point, or whether they were the sort of things that came from some new thought or free association that popped into someone's head. Amy mentioned praying the office to me, which surprised me as I didn't know that she or Dan had ever done, or even heard of, the Liturgy of the Hours. I was probably thinking of it a lot more of late just from my reading in Thomas Merton, which very well might have been how the subject came up. Praying that liturgy throughout the day is a context to all of Merton's thinking that a number of people fail to recognize, or at least give sufficient weight to its effect, which is easy if you've never sunk into that rhythm at a monastery.

Lent this year has, for me, been an occasion of some meager recollection of that spirituality, with a greater recognition – or admission – of how much better I do with that kind of structure. I would once have bristled about a lack of spontaneity in such a format, but that is starting to look more and more to me like a function of age, of a certain sort of youthful enthusiasm, like that which would see "self-expression" as a key part of art, but which is coming to appear more and more like a substitution of mere energy for real vision. Prayer seems more like art in that way to me, I think, where there is certainly something to be said for sincerity, of course, but where that is revealed to be pretty thin beer the longer you sit with it.

Then somewhere near the end of the evening Mike said something to me about being weak in art history, particularly as regards its tie to theology and theological history: a thought that he had expressed earlier in the evening's conversation. Something recently had gotten me thinking about how I started picking up that interest, myself, back in the summer of 1991 in Madison. Perhaps that had come up in the "spirituality and autobiography" conversation with Meg last week, as we also talked about her work in, and thoughts about, theatre. So I found myself making a bit a strange recommendation to Mike in suggesting that he might want to start reading in that direction the same way that I did: through the Protestant Fundamentalist theologian Francis Schaeffer. I call this a bit of a strange recommendation in that quite disagree with Schaeffer on a great many things, now, finding him guilty of trying to squeeze too much into the formula he was describing as he attempted to diagnose the shift of Western culture from its Christian philosophical, theological and spiritual roots to a new Secularist paradigm, basing far too much of the latter on Existentialism. The phenomenon he is trying to describe is a real one, it was just that he oversimplified the mechanism of how that shift was occurring, resulting in a number of problematic descriptions and assessments in support of his overall argument.

But nevertheless, like Merton said about Tertullian, "he's worth reading even when he's wrong." The genius of Schaeffer was that he tried to do a very necessary work that it us utter anathema in today's academic culture: he tried to be a generalist. The generalist tries to master a great many fields so that their interaction can be described. For all the noise we make today about being "interdisciplinary," it's all too easy to find fault with someone who tries to do this, because no one today can possibly master all major fields of human knowledge. I just found fault with him, above, although I might argue that I was speaking as a specialist somewhat closer to the heart of his program. But it's not his ambition or his intention with which I am finding fault, nor am I trying simply to be an academic nit-picker. I think that those attempts at speaking in a more "generalist" way are important, and that is a work that particularly falls to theology among the sciences. (See the "definition" of theology I have on my profile page, to see more of that idea.)

So, why the recommendation to Mike? Schaeffer seriously attempts to incorporate art history into his survey of the shape of how our culture is and has been shifting, integrating it into his philosophical, theological, historical and political argument as a serious voice and influence in the cultural conversation. So: music, art, film – all these were major fields for a Christian to know, which was a rather novel position in American fundamentalism in the 1960s or 70s. As a model, or a starting-point in trying to get a sketch of an integrated view of art and the history of ideas, Schaeffer still strikes me as a useful starting point, in just the way a lot of theological educators might use Justo Gonzalez's survey histories of theology for undergraduate or Master's students who are trying to learn their way "around the map" of history, even though you will tell them later on to toss out a lot of the generalizations that Gonzalez makes as they grow more competent. Mike is more than competent enough in the general history of thought, and in Christian thought in particular, that he could read Schaeffer without swallowing it all whole, as I did as a beginner in such things, where I had to continue to work just to see how much more there was to learn than his direct summations. So for the first time in 15 years I find myself hefting the one-volume work How Should We Then Live? The Decline of Western Thought and Culture, which became Schaeffer's major entry into public conversation on the cultural impact of the anti-Christian shift in Secularism, both as a book and even more as a documentary series. (Which is an interesting story in itself, given that this documentary series was produced in many ways as an answer to the more-or-less uniform Secularist vision given in many PBS documentaries of the time, with PBS protesting – in all sincerity – that they couldn't show something that was so one-sided in its perspective.)

It'll be interesting to revisit this just for intellectual autobiographical reasons in seeing whether it does indeed work for Mike in the way I suspect. I figured that the Protestant orientation would be familiar, and that its direct and popular nature would make for a far easier starting-point than something like the vast (and very Catholic) theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar, however much better Von Balthasar's work might be in a more final sense. Bob Foster is going to be in town tomorrow and we're gathering to enjoy his company – "Thursday is the new Friday," quipped Amy – and it'll be interesting to see whether he agrees with my thought that this could still be a useful starting-point for Mike in trying to integrate art history into his theological work.

As I've mentioned before, I have returned heavily to Merton since Chrysogonus's death. Outside of my dissertation reading and work, my reading has largely been Merton. I tore through the epic autobiography of The Seven Storey Mountain while traveling, moving too fast to get any good out of this journal as a reading journal. I was most stunned in my re-reading of it on two related points: the first being one of cultural history, we might say, and the second being more concerned with Merton himself.

I was struck by the reading of the Second World War as a result of a spiritual miasma in the generation leading up to it, of Merton's partial blame for the war on himself – and all others like him, caught up in the cult of Self. What struck me so heavily was that there was no sense in any response I've ever heard of to the book that this reading was condemned. For all those that would mis-read Merton as "going hippie" in the 1960s, there was no condemnation of him as an antiwar "peacenik" in the generation of the war itself: instead people responded very positively to the book. I finally saw all this in contrast to the narrative of the War that I had acquired when growing up from movies, television and especially from all the 1950s youth histories of the war that I read in grade school – my first serious investment in history, and the foundation for my becoming an historian. In all these, the Second World War seemed to be presented as a kind of inevitable triumph of American technology and can-do confidence in responding to evil abroad. There was, in the face especially of Nazi horror, no self-doubt and no questioning about the evil of war itself. I'm not noting this as a pacifist, or as one holding to classical Just War Theory. I'm just suddenly struck by noticing the stark difference between the narrative of the Second World War as I received it, and the narrative as Thomas Merton presented it in a wildly-popular (if clearly penitential) book among those who experienced the war. (Not to sound all Post-Modern with regard to "narratives.") No hint of a perspective on the war as Merton describes it – as of great moral ambiguity, even – has survived in any other account that has made it to me, except in cases where what I'm seeing is a clear projection of Vietnam-era politics back upon the past. That's common-enough in that 1960s-era narratives are still dominant in our entertainment and politics today.

The second thing I was struck by, that more concerned with Merton himself, is a related point. This is the fundamental consistency I'm seeing between two Thomas Mertons who are often set against one another: "the Merton of The Seven Storey Mountain" and "the Merton of the 1960s." This way of looking at Merton is often heard from those who have not read Merton, or at least have not read Merton very closely, it seems to me: even from some Catholic bishops. (It is similar in that respect to those who blame Augustine of Hippo for every imagined sexual dysfunction in Western culture, which is popularly taught among college professors of many fields who haven't read Augustine himself, but who listen closely to other professors who haven't read Augustine.) In that telling, the "spiritual Merton" of the early books gave way to the "social justice Merton" of the 1960s, who had more-or-less gone off and become a Buddhist, or was about to, by the time he was killed. The latter idea is just silly to anyone who knows his writing and his life: it was the depth of his Christianity that was empowering his explorations of Asian religions, and which made the leading figures of those faiths take him far more seriously as a conversation partner than the fundamentally areligious dabblers in Asian religions that became so ubiquitous from the 1960s onward. The youthful Dalai Lama was powerfully affected by their meeting, but has never reported supposing that Merton was a Buddhist or about to be one: it was the depth of Merton's Christianity that so struck Tenzin Gyatso, according to his account of their meeting. So the "spiritual Merton" was driving the "social justice/inter-religious dialogue Merton" of the 1960s, and in The Seven Storey Mountain I was strongly moved by the social justice themes – however much they were articulated in the language of a recent and traditionalist Catholic convert of the 1930s – that ran throughout that text. However much Merton developed as a scholar, as a writer, and as a human being – and there are dramatic differences in style and depth between 1948 when The Seven Storey Mountain was published and 1968, when Merton died at the monasticism conference in Bangkok – there is a fundamental consistency of vision throughout his corpus that I had never before so strongly perceived.

My Saint Patrick's Day was a mellow one, particularly by American standards. If anything, I would have enjoyed hitting the Saint Patrick's Day Mass at Notre Dame and soaking in that liturgy as an aid to a good time of prayer (as well as just great music from the Folk Choir). I was really amused when I learned that Saint Patrick's Day back in Ireland really was more of a religious holiday than anything else, although I'm embarrassed to hear that the ongoing vulgar Americanization of this, too, is making way there. There was a time when the Irish would have found it insulting to have our culture reduced to nothing more than going on a bender. I did have an interesting if random conversation on the bus today (a celebration of my Irish gift of the gab?), when a woman named Anita sitting next to me introduced herself when asking if I was a seminarian. (She had noted my reading material.) When I said I was a theologian, I discovered that she'd done Master's work in Theology at Garrett, with undergrad work in Economics and Mathematics, and had recently gone back to school for another undergraduate degree in something biological, as a prelude to doing M.D. work, with an eye toward combining it all in medical/economic ethics. It was a fascinating conversation, really, as she outlined some of her proposed work, which involved an amazing amount of intersecting expertises. Add to that some of the ethnic/cultural angles she wanted to address as an African-American woman, she seemed to be a potential powerhouse in getting all the credentials to be able to tackle the problematic ways we're doing medical care in our country, particularly as medicine becomes increasingly a corporate animal, and with its rush to implement any innovation, with profit far outstripping ethics as a deciding fact in whether to implement new technologies. Interesting stuff. Another point for public transportation!

Meg and I, after enduring a number of weeks of postponing our dinner plans, finally managed to get together on Wednesday now that my schedule has settled down. We decided to postpone exploring Milwaukee's famed German restaurants until after I got my taxes back and wasn't feeling so financially cautious, and so we met at the Twisted Fork, to which neither of us had been in some time. I arrived, a few minutes late, to find her already waiting and waving as I came in through the door. As we hugged and started yammering together, and I turned to the hostess to ask for a table for two, I was amused to see the look of a rapid set of narrative calculations go across the hostess's face as she seemed to be filling in the blanks and figuring out what kind of story she was watching: evidence = old friends, non-couple. I suppose that that's the type of game you play when you watch this many people come through your door. It was pretty busy in the restaurant, for a Wednesday, and we took advantage of their Wednesday/Sunday Half-Price Bottle of Wine deal (read: regular mark-up instead of double mark-up) to grab a pretty yummy Shiraz, which we then continued to casually finish for some time after the meal. I checked to see that they were still running the special, given how long it had been since I'd been there.

Dinner conversation – the dinners were there amazingly fast – kicked off with a series of questions Meg fired at me on spiritual experience, starting with definitional questions about what I thought of Pentecostalism and spreading out from there. We hadn't talked about much in that direction for a while, so I was a bit surprised, as I had come with no prepared conversation topics other than to ask her if she possessed my missing Star Wars DVDs. (She had had me introduce her to those movies a few years back, admitting she'd never seen them, and basically asking me for a tutorial so that she could get all the references people expected her to know, which was kind of an hysterical way for me to watch these movies again.) So we talked about Pentecostalism, about the Charismatic Renewal, about those as a particular style of spirituality and a particularly demonstrative one at that, about possibilities between authentic spiritual experience and human learned behaviour, and of the psychology of spiritual experience in general. I touched on my dissertation, as I had never expected to be writing on a topic that had so much intersection with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, as that had never been an academic interest of mine. And then I had to go way back, and talk about how, despite my relative contemporary lack of interest (revved up some since I'd stumbled into my dissertation topic, of course) I nevertheless had had a number of early spiritual experiences that tied into that movement. And I talked some about how many of the Theology faculty had had similar experiences, to my surprise, which I had learned in conversation as my dissertation topic had come into focus.

This made me touch on some of my recent thoughts about spirituality and autobiography. Given the recent re-read of Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain, as well as my dive through Augustine's Confessions again with Barnes (he has his class using the Chadwick translation), and some thoughts about what kind of college courses I would like to create, I had been thinking quite a bit in terms of spiritual autobiography over the last few weeks. Back at Saint Joe's, I had done a Directed Readings course (individualized courses for select seniors, by audition) with Tom Nolan on "Religion and Autobiography." I think that's what we called it. There we read Augustine, Merton, Lewis's Surprised By Joy, and Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and Tom had come up with an interesting thesis project on The Role of Friendship in Conversion from these texts. I think I'd really enjoy taking that basic concept and doing it as an undergraduate course. This is definitely part of personal preference, as I've found these sorts of books quite spiritually nourishing myself over the years, and relatively easy to engage students with. And personally, I know that reflection on my own life – the only human life I get to truly experience from "the inside," and thus extrapolate to others's subjective experiences – has long been a fruitful source for my own spirituality; this journaling not least in that process. These are literary versions of some of the best sorts of conversations I ever have. So that kept Meg and I going for a while, talking about autobiography and biography in this way, well toward the bottom of the bottle of wine, nearly four hours later.

On the random side of things, I discovered was that she doesn't have much of a sense of direction at all, and so I did my Good Deed for the night by realizing that she was about to set off in the entirely opposite direction from the bus stop she was trying to find. That was lucky, as I was a bit fuzzy on the street names there for a minute, myself, and it was too cold a night to be wandering around. We had gotten to talking about Iowa, and I was horrified to discover that she had no idea of how to describe the location of her hometown relative to anything else in the area. I got my Mom's perfect sense of direction instead of my Dad's clueless sense of direction, mercifully, and cannot understand how the Other Sort of People function at all. Still, I shouldn't talk, after having recently found out how many appointments I missed because I forgot to tell my computer to tell me to go to them. It takes all kinds....

I got delayed at O'Hare for about 3 1/2 hours, arriving in Milwaukee at 7pm instead of 3:40pm, and having to wait for my no-show luggage for over half an hour before discovering that it had arrived on an earlier flight, and that I could just fetch it out of storage. So it was about 830pm before I stepped through my door, after catching a bus and having a decent connection time. So that was a long end to an otherwise fun visit and set of interviews. And that's all I'll say about that now.

Today I wanted to somehow really feel like I was remembering/celebrating the Feast of Perpetua and Felicitas (and uncredited Saturus and the others, of course), who have long been favourites of mine, but nothing in my day other than some basic recognition and maybe a mini Litany of the Saints in my head really spoke to that. (And, of course, remembering my visit to the Amphitheatre in Carthage where they were martyred on this day, 1806 years ago.) I spent most of my waiting around today continuing my first re-read of Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain, as part of the resurgence in my Merton interest and reading since Chrysogonus died. It's so much less mature than I remembered, compared to his later writing, but there are still some parts that are just utterly classic. I'm interested to note how well it continues to sell on Amazon.

Dan stopped by tonight after finishing his grading at the library. We took in a game of chess and a few glasses of sherry, which were both very pleasurable. I think we're pretty evenly matched as players, although I took the game pretty handily. I got a knight behind his right flank and ran amok for a while, and the way things played out he was never able to shore that side up, and all the momentum went my way.

It was funny that he had sent me an email this day of all days, asking if I'd be interested in a game (he'd noticed my set when he stopped by for drinks last week), because I had chess on the mind, too. I had just finally gotten around to enhancing and converting to digital files the video I shot with Brett Boessen of the January 1996 Notre Dame Folk Choir tour of the southeastern United States. In the first section, in this scene below, where I'm standing in line to board the bus at a rest stop in northern Florida where we had stopped and played for a famous hour, you can hear the Director, Steve Warner, mocking me in the background. I'm talking to a few people in line, holding J.P.'s travel chessboard, as I had started playing a game with him before we broke off to play tag with everyone. Unbeknownst to me, Steve was making a joke, having moved one of J.P.'s pieces while we were away, thus putting me in an impossible position. And so you can hear Steve in the background, saying to someone, "Oh, Mike, you're so intellectual: let's see what happens now!" (This makes me feel less embarrassed about our juvenile ragging on him in the next part of the video.) In fact, I remember sitting down on the bus and then looking at the board for the first time since picking it up, and going, "What the hell?! That can't be right!" The irony is that, for all that I was the "academic" grad student, playing chess with J.P. was and is for me always a lesson in humility: he almost always mops up the board with me, though I learn a lot from it. So, having just seen and played with this video, chess was on my mind.
Dinner with Markus on Saturday night was kind of gorgeous, marred only by Barnes feeling a bit under the weather and leaving after hors d'oeuvres. Amy had conjured up a fantastic and creative spread to keep us occupied until dinner, which we delayed until 8pm, after the kids had eaten and been put to bed. The academic talk was more reserved for this time, and the kids were herded into the kitchen for a more simple dinner. Markus had brought the kids gifts of two books, filled with great childrens-book kind of paintings, one on bears and the other on bats, and the one on bats, Bats At The Library had us especially laughing, looking at the pictures of the bats clustered around open books, while others hung upside-down, avidly straining for a view of the page.

On the ride down to Dan and Amy's, we talked directly about his research, and the current book he was working on regarding the state of contemporary Martin Luther scholarship, and shaking up some off some of its staleness in order to revive interest more broadly in just why Luther matters. Once faced with Amy's appetizers, we instead got to talking about the pluses and minuses of university education being increasingly conducted on a scientific and/or business model, I think out of some meeting Markus had had, which brought to mind some reading I had been doing in Gillian Evans's rather brilliant Academics and the Real World.

Somehow from there we got to talking about sending the kids to the German school here in town, and the language benefits for them, which then lead into a talk on how Markus's two kids were doing, with his son thinking of becoming a renaissance man of a pilot who reads The Odyssey in the original Greek and composes music on the side, and his daughter as she is on the cusp of going to university. Markus rose up in challenge to something I said and got to talking about the relative unimportance of atheism as the principle problem for theological education as much as simply the indifference we have today in a consumer society about any call for a particular way of life: that nothing has any implications for how we should live, whereas in the ancient world it was always understood that philosophy was the critical science because it intrinsically meant a way of life, and was never "just ideas." From here we spent a long time talking about liturgy, moving from liturgical and church problems in Germany to a more general conversation about what were the general benefits of liturgy: educating and inculturating the gospel, contrasts between denominations that did not stress a formal liturgy, or differences between liturgies of the Word and liturgies of the Eucharist, while I developed a point I had become aware of over the years of how I valued the liturgy's forcing me to keep moving through many moods of prayer, not letting me settle or focus on whatever my own psychological/spiritual mood happened to be in a given moment: to ease me from one spirituality or spiritual mode to another, and into the mysticism of the Eucharist.

Then we got to talking about the ongoing difficulty of transmitting the faith in our larger church communities, and how even the parish was too large a group in contemporary times to instill the kind of community it once had, particularly as in the United States there was less and less of the ethnic factor augmenting church efforts. We talked a lot about small groups, and what a force those were for spiritual development, and I certainly felt – from my university years and my dive into Evangelicalism at that time – that that had been a critical part of my formation. And so I wondered out loud about how the Catholic Church might better encourage such groups, even though that raises the complications that can come with a lack of oversight or more educated guidance at times. At this point we were also talking some about Catholics' frequent ignorance of Scripture or even their fear of it. This came up simply because small groups can be such great places for scriptural reading, learning and prayerful incorporation into a spiritual life. It came out at this point that Markus had an entire book for which he had been unable to find a publisher in Germany on humour in the lives of the saints, and how much humour was in their writings, their lives, and the outlook. We all thought he might find a publisher more easily in the States, but that would necessitate translating the entire text into English, which was a possibility he clearly did not relish. Somehow the end of our conversation before dinner, as best as I can recall it, seemed to come to a discussion about the acidity in white wine, which had less to do with where the conversation had been as it had to do with what we were drinking with our hors d'oeuvres.

Dinner was a joy, with teriyaki and Cajun styles of grilled salmon, Amy's risotto, and green beans. Dan opened a bottle of the Masciarelli Montepulciano d'Abruzzo that we will often use as our not-too-expensive red with dinner. Conversation became more family-centered, and we heard about Markus's growing up as the son of a well-known architect in Hamburg, and how that informed his feeling that his daughter might enjoy university away from FrankfurtMain where she wouldn't have to be constantly known as his daughter. We spent a phenomenal amount of time trying to figure out that the English name for a tree he was trying describe was "beech," which included a phone call to Mike's German mother before Mike hit upon the idea of grabbing Dan's massive German-English dictionary and just looking it up. I talked about Nathaniel's baptism, and conversation about books and movies worked its way in to the mix when I asked about whether there were any new additions to his list of 100 Best Books, a personal list he and a friend back home each keep, with any new additions having to be explicitly justified. The sad news was that that friend was now fading from cancer, we found out. Picking up later on the general theme of recommendations, we got to talking restaurants (capitalizing on Markus's status and knowledge as one of Germany's most famed food critics) and what new recommendations for Milwaukee he had to make, all of which I've now forgotten and will have to ask him about. By the end of the night, we spent a considerable amount of time talking about bats again, picking up off from the children's book he had given the Lloyd kids, which he now showed to Amy. And so we found ourselves sharing bat stories, which somehow morphed into sharing owl stories, particularly about the little owl that has been living in his yard for some six years. (And would that writing about, and trying to preserve some sense of all this talk was nearly as fun as the talk itself!)

I've been scooting so much from one thing to another that I haven't jotted down some good times worth remembering. On the 8th, I headed down to Leslie and Jim's for an extended weekend, which included some babysitting duties, which I'm always happy to provide – both so Leslie and Jim can get some time to themselves as well as so I can just enjoy the company of my nieces. This was also my "make-up Christmas," since I had gotten the flu right before Christmas Eve, and therefore ended up missing all my family festivities.

I had to smile that first afternoon, after Grace had gotten home from school and neighbourhood friend Lisa was over, playing with Grace and Haley. After a while Grace kind of checked out into a book, and contented herself reading a story while Lisa and Haley continued to tear around the house. Leslie hinted to Grace that she might want to put the book down and play with Lisa while she was over, and that she was being rude, which, quite frankly, she was. But I remembered doing the same thing at some point when I was a kid, and I was just so tickled with how much Grace was loving reading that I was likely too quick to excuse her. So I complimented her on that, and at a few points then through the stay, I'd just find myself crashed out on the couch with her. She occasionally read aloud some especially funny part of Junie B. Jones and Some Sneaky Peeky Spying to me, and I told her some of why I was especially liking Follow the Ecstasy: The Hermitage Years of Thomas Merton, which I'm sure she found less interesting.

Friday, when Haley was home from preschool that afternoon, she and I headed out to play in the snow some, and to try to build a fort with which to ambush Grace when she got home. That turned into a staggering failure as the snow wasn't packing well enough to hold together anything larger than a snowball. This, however, was actually perfect for the little girls: they could have all the fun of snowball fights without any of the accidents caused by a too-hard snowball hitting you. The snow packed just enough for a ball to stay together and to (mostly) make a flight through the air to its target. So Haley and I went at it for a bit, although I couldn't convince her that her "snowball maker" was a liability. This thing was a plastic mould that seemed made for just that purpose, like a larger version of a bullet mould for making musket balls in the Revolutionary War. I tried to convince her that the fact that I could make five snowballs by hand – and throw them at her – in the time it took her to make one perfect snowball in her mould meant that she should learn to make snowballs by hand. "This makes snowballs." she explained matter-of-factly, and that ended whatever discussion we might have been having. Haley is often adamant in defending her ideas, regardless of the facts, which boggles my mind as to how that tendency will play out in her classroom learning.

Saturday we went out again, this time with Grace as part of the game, and with snow falling down heavily, in what was, if I remember correctly, a six-inch snowstorm. Leslie took all these outdoor pictures then, watching us through the family room window. Grace was quickly willing to learn how to make a good snowball by hand when I showed her how much faster I could do it, though she clearly liked the perfection of the moulded snowball as well. So I took a little time to show her how to cup her hands correctly in order to pull off the art of the snowball, and then ran around while the two of them ganged up on me in good sisterly fashion.

I occasionally used size to advantage to charge them or drag them around a bit, and there were occasional pauses for activities like snow angel making. Haley capped her snow angel off with a smiley face drawn on it, and then added a halo after I explained what a halo was and why angels usually have them in pictures. They also very much sliding down the slide of the fort and plowing into the snow below, as well as plowing off the snow on the slide itself. The attempt to bombard me from the safety of the fort didn't work out as well, given that I had most of the ammunition down on the ground with me.

Perhaps the funniest thing to me was Haley's habit of crying out "Oh, man!" every time she was hit or her snowball fell uselessly out of her hand or mould and disintegrated on the ground. It was so earnest and so cute at the same time that I couldn't get enough of it, as she was so throwing herself into the game. I loved that she wasn't getting frustrated with the process but only the error of the moment, letting it go and diving straight back into the fun without another thought.

Sophie was super-cute, too, throughout the visit, although on Saturday when Jim and Leslie were out she gave me a meltdown that was unlike anything I'd ever seen – from any of the girls, ever – when I tried to put her to bed. I've had the girls cry, throw fits, all the usual little kid stuff. And I know that, since I'm not a parent, I'm a little more naive about what to take seriously or not, but Sophie's reaction this particular night was as though I were doing something so awful to her that it was the equivalent of every human betrayal possible. Unable to get her to calm down enough for me to do the normal pre-bed routine, I tried putting her straight into the crib and calming her down enough to leave. Instead she clung to me, sobbing so strongly that my left shoulder became wet, and gasping for air in-between sobs, making me feel like I had just dropped her off at a concentration camp. Utter, utter ruin. When I finally caved and decided just to let her stay up a bit longer, she was soon collected and once again happily playing with the picture Memory cards with me and telling me that "Doggie says 'arf! arf!'" After a while, even Grace gave me a disapproving comment that Sophie was up too late, and I once again tried to put her down with similar results. Finally, remembering a tactic Mom had tried the day before when Sophie was fussing with her nap, I put her down in Mommy and Daddy's bed for about ten minutes, by which she had almost dropped off when I moved her back to her crib with only a minimum of protest on her part. By the time I got out the door, I felt like I'd been through the proverbial wringer; my stomach still knots up just remembering how awful she sounded. Mike got played.

Otherwise, things were normal and low-key. I got to visit with Mom quite a bit, too, as part of making up for my Christmas absence, although Dad's travel got snowed out by the Saturday storm, and so that was a disappointment. The girls reacted as well as I had hoped with the children's encyclopedia One Million Things that I gave them, and I had a few sessions of page-turning, picture-looking and explaining with them. Haley was particularly interested in finding out what the Earth looked like underneath the surface and about volcanoes, although the sheer existence of those latter especially seemed to worry the easily-concerned Grace. Both Haley and Grace seemed quite interested in other planets, and so I think they might find some astronomy or space-travel material as interesting as I thought it when I was a kid. Haley cracked me up when she shouted out "All Star!" when the Smash Mouth music video for that song came on the television, which Jim had left on to MTV. The song was one I'd included on the Grace Fun Mix. Later on, Brittney Spears came on – after which the TV went right off – and the girls further cracked me up by making comments among themselves that they found the girl rather strange and disturbing. Here's hoping they stay independent throughout their school years!

I happened to glance into an old letter I'd written some years ago and found the following quote from my reading in a volume of Merton that Erik had given me as a gift after our Pentecost 1996 visit to Gethsemani. (I believe the arrangement was that we had bought one another a gift of a volume at the bookstore in Bardstown as we were leaving for Cincinnati, neither of us being able to really justify buying a book for ourselves, but able to justify splurging for a gift for someone else.) It's odd to note this passage, as some parallel thoughts had passed through my mind the other day, when I was thinking about passages in Merton's 1966 journal, as he began to sense that there was something "off" in some of his fellow social justice seekers who were attacking him for living a monastic life. He was beginning to see the patterns resulting from social activism cutting itself off from its spiritual roots and turning angry and ugly as a result....

Since I am a man, my destiny depends on my human behavior: that is to say upon my decisions. I must first of all appreciate this fact, and weigh the risks and difficulties it entails. I must therefore know myself, and know both the good and the evil that are in me. It will not do to know only one and not the other: only the good, or only the evil. I must then be able to love the life God has given me, living it fully and fruitfully, and making good use even of the evil that is in it. Why should I love an ideal good in such a way that my life becomes more deeply embedded in misery and evil?

To live well myself is my first and essential contribution to the well-being of all mankind and to the fulfillment of man's collective destiny. If I do not live happily myself how can I help anyone else to be happy, or free, or wise? Yet to seek happiness is not to live happily. Perhaps it is more true to say that one finds happiness by not seeking it. The wisdom that teaches us deliberately to restrain our desire for happiness enables us to discover that we are already happy without realizing the fact.

To live well myself means for me to know and appreciate something of the secret, the mystery in myself: that which is incommunicable, which is at once myself and not myself, at once in me and above me. From this sanctuary I must seek humbly and patiently to ward off all the intrusions of violence and self-assertion. These intrusions cannot really penetrate the sanctuary, but they can draw me forth from it and slay me before the secret doorway.

If I can understand something of myself and something of others, I can begin to share with them the work of building the foundations for spiritual unity. But first we must work together at dissipating the more absurd fictions which make unity impossible.

– Thomas Merton, Confessions of a Guilty Bystander, p. 95

Slept for about five hours and then couldn't sleep any more. I've been up for a few, now, mostly reading in the sixth volume of Merton's journals, Learning to Love: Exploring Solitude and Freedom. I've been poking through it for about a month now, off and on.

When Chrysogonus Waddell died about six weeks ago, I had to ask myself why it had affected me as much as it did. After all, you could say, I had only been around him a dozen or two times, visits long or short. We hadn't talked in a few years, and he came up between my friends and me in these last few years only when we tossed around the idea of gathering at Gethsemani to visit him and then put it off for another year. Maybe he was more acquaintance than friend? Whatever label one could slap upon the friendship, however you try to quantify such things, if you can or must, it was clear to me when I thought about it, that Chrysogonus was a hugely symbolic friendship for me, beyond just the joy of the man himself.

On one level, he was emblematic of the huge turn in my life that was 1995-96: on the advice of my faculty at Notre Dame, I had turned down all Ph.D. opportunities in order to stick around Notre Dame for an extra year, extending my Master's residency, in order to try to get into Notre Dame's History of Christianity program, for which I had been the runner-up in the spring of 1995, for one of the two positions they had each year. In 1995-96, then, I joined the Notre Dame Folk Choir and found myself moving from a primarily graduate-student circle of friendships to an increasingly undergraduate circle of musicians, a few years younger than me, particularly in the sudden development of my friendships among the Freeks. These would remain among the richest friendships in my life, feeding me in the way that I've always found fulfilling in being around active artists, and introducing me to Chrysogonus along the way. Doctoral studies would be further postponed, for a variety of reasons, but which allowed me to enjoy and strengthen these friendships while I taught in South Bend.

On another level, Chrysogonus was a direct connection to Thomas Merton. That year was my introduction to Merton as well, when I was given the extraordinary opportunity of assisting Professor Lawrence Cunningham in the editing of a volume of Merton's private journals for publication, the 1952-60 journals, eventually published as A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk's True Life. Walking around St. Mary's Lake, making notes in the typescript as I read these restricted journals, one of the first ever to do so, was an unusual introduction to Merton, but as a journal-writer myself, one that provoked great sympathy as I began to get used to the fits and starts of his mood, and the rich depths of his thought. Over the years, as I read Merton more, to see Chrysogonus pop in and out of his journals was an odd thing – to have a mutual friend with someone I knew only as a great author was unique in my experience. At the first Chrysogonus Fest, Chrysogonus told a long story at Mark's request, about Joan Baez's visit to Merton, which Chrysogonus was present for much of, and in such ways we would occasionally have a visit from Merton in memory, as a figure in a friend's own experience and "oral tradition."

So Chrysogonus was a symbolic friendship for me in those two ways, I realized. Mourning him, I turned to his own words, listening to his music and pulling out books of his own medieval scholarship, and items dedicated to him, reading in Praise No Less than Charity: Studies in Honor of M. Chrysogonus Waddell, Monk of Gethsemani Abbey, Bernard of Clairvaux: Homilies in Praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Amadeus of Lausanne: Homilies in Praise of Blessed Mary. Then I picked up Merton's journals, paging through some of the mentions of Chrysogonus, which brought me to 1966, and Thomas Merton falling in love.

Merton's journal from this spring and summer is poignant to me, as he is faced with the impossible situation of having fallen in love with a student nurse who had been helping take care of him during his recover from surgery that March. Because they are journal entries, Merton's descriptions here over-emphasize his conflict to the detriment of simply the pure expressions of love, though those are present, as well. His poetry at the time – poems for her – best among his writings capture the authentic feeling he has for what they share, in his estimation. Mostly, though, in these words I find a man working past the difficulties not of loving, but of the often-harder task of allowing oneself to receive love. Mostly, he is discovering that he is capable of receiving such love, in stark contrast to who he was in his youth, with love affairs with young women from whom he was so detached that he can no longer recall their names – memories of callousness that now pained him. The fear, of course, is that that ass is who he really was, and the almost unbelievable thing that Margie is now teaching him, is that, no, he is no longer that person: he did not enter the monastery in order to cut off and suppress his humanity, as the glib accusation against all monastics might have it, but he had gone into the monastery and reclaimed his humanity in the disciplined life of loving God.

But he was who he was: a monk. It was being a monk that made him both someone capable of now truly loving another and of being capable to receive her love, but he was still, inevitably, a monk, and so the thing was doomed in having any formal future. He was capable of loving her, but not of making a life with her: he had made his vows already, not to another lover (other than God, who would have no objections as such to his falling in love with a woman) but to a way of life, and to a community, and that, too, was truly him. Some have been scandalized or embarrassed by this story, in Merton's pushing the bounds of his vows, but it was simply human, and the two of them, despite the pain of their inability to follow through on their feelings, handled it responsibly, all told. Chrysogonus spoke very fondly of her, not that I'm aware that he ever met her, but that he recognized that, in the end, this was a profoundly important episode of his friend's life. It sounded, when he spoke of it with me and Erik, that he saw how, in the end, it enriched the character of Merton's own life, providing in its pain a kind of healing that nothing other than such love could provide.

For a writer dedicated to exploring the inner experience, a contemplative Catholic monk for whom mysticism is a way of life, the sudden experience of simple, pure passion could come as something of a shock, to say the least. Where he was trying to cultivate stillness, he found turmoil, but he recognized that both were aspects of the one reality of love, and so submitted them to the God who Is Love. This last comment is not a piece of theological romance – of decorating the whole in "religious language," but a serious marking of the boundaries of the reality of what had happened in the context as Merton (and Margie, who I understand to be a Catholic believer) would ultimately understand it. For all the people who dislike Merton – as too political, too 1960s Left, too interested in the East, whatever – this is another occasion to write him off as not sufficiently Catholic. Not so. Never was he more Catholic than in having to work out his love for Margie, which he did with a care that tore him to shreds inside, as you can see in the journal (though I see others casting him as dismissive, or even, in the current feeding frenzy, "abusive"). To be Catholic is to embrace the whole, the universal, all of truth, especially those parts we don't like or find uncomfortable. His Catholicism is best revealed in his choice to be most honest and true to her and to him in the whole of his life, than to deny any part of that complex reality, whatever the gains might have been. I think there's lessons in this story that will provide a service to all who think about the call to love in the priesthood.

I went to bed before midnight last night and slept for 14 1/2 hours, which is now why I'm up at 3:30am. I do one thing right and get screwed up another way. So back to being nocturnal. Still feeling better, mostly just weak now, with the headache not nearly so bad and fever mostly gone. It's been a movie kind of day. Got sucked in this evening by Turner Classic Movies, which happened to be what my TV was still tuned to when I turned it on, originally intending to watch a DVD over a meal. And then, boom: an interesting interview with Mickey Rooney, an old movie short on Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, who figured out the medical need for hand-washing by doctors and was ridiculed by the medical establishment for it, Lawrence of Arabia (which I had just been toying with the idea of watching as I perused my DVD collection), and then the 1952 Ivanhoe (while reading a bit in The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History for reference), bringing me to now, just short of 1am.

Since then I've been reading some essays in The Church and Galileo, a volume I picked up a few years ago at Notre Dame, from their series Studies in Science and the Humanities from the Reilly Center for Science Technology and Values, and edited by Ernan McMullin, a professor there. Notre Dame is where I first got turned onto the distinct field of the History of Science, and that news story I saw the other day got me looking a little more closely at some of this research. As I mentioned I've been increasingly interested in the way that the story of the Church's mistaken judgment of Galileo four hundred years ago is employed by people today. The embarrassing incident at La Sapienza University in January, where a group of professors began raving about Galileo as proving there was an utter wall between faith and reason – so as to silence, in the name of academic freedom, the planned address by Benedict XVI who has been a constant champion of the power of reason – is a classic example of the dangers of educated people acting beyond their competence. (Which I'm sure that I do all the time, too, and, of course, should justly be corrected and aided from doing such things more.) The treatment in later years of the incident with Dr. Semmelweis, mentioned above, is much more realistic an example of how such affairs as the Galileo Affair ought to be judged and remembered: the recognition of a dreadful error made because of the establishment of a certain kind of scientific perspective, but not made as an incident into an ideological dogma for all time.

I have to say, the Mickey Rooney interview was fascinating. As I've had a few – very basic, of course – historical conversations with my niece Grace, I've been amazed to watch those moments of awareness dawning in her eyes, as she excitedly learns something new about the context of the world into which she was born. The recentness of things like cell phones and computers was astounding to her, and moreso that electricity itself was only a few generations old. Suddenly, she had to imagine a world utterly different than anything she knew. So I'm hoping that she'll coax stories out of her grandparents with the same pleasure that I did from mine, and try to get a handle on just how much has changed in such a short time. So. Mickey Rooney. While the interview was from 1997, the fact that Rooney is still alive and is working (Night At The Museum, anyone?) makes him the last great voice of the Golden Age of movies, and that's another way in which I hope Grace and the rest of my nieces get to know something of how their land has changed. Despite all the mistakes one can take from film (Did everyone in the 1930s spontaneously break into song and tap-dance in the street?) there's so much you can pick up from the history of film. I didn't know who Mickey Rooney was when I first saw him in The Black Stallion, I just knew that I kind of liked him.

To hear him talking not just about being a child star in the Golden Age of film, but to talk about his time in silent film before the "talkies" came along, and about his experience of vaudeville just made me realize once more How Fast It's All Been. That's still living memory. Oral tradition. He was a vaudeville performer, a silent movie star, a Golden Age movie star, who Cary Grant unhesitatingly described the most talented figure in the industry. He now maintains a website. As I think of the nieces and nephews coming to understand the story of the land and the world they have been born into, it struck me while listening to the interview that it would be amazing for them to hear the thing themselves, especially while he was still alive, and to realize just how dizzying it all is, this last century and the change it has seen. If there's anything movies do well, it's let you see something: that's the whole medium. And while movies can be shady or downright awful in trying to represent history, as an historian I swear by movies' ability to always convey their own period's sensibilities.

While in Tulsa, I briefly heard word of the Friday morning death of Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J. I never knew Avery Dulles personally. I decided not to even consider doing my Ph.D. with him because I did not think that he would live long enough to see the process through, given his advanced age. I was startled to discover that I was known to him, as I recounted elsewhere, and was honoured by his willingness to simply inscribe his new book Magisterium: Teacher and Guardian of the Faith for me, with not just his signature but even with a brief joke about my name (which I share with another – and famed – Catholic writer, for those not in the know). I had seen Dulles speak a few times, and saw him growing frail as a reed, and heard of his awful decline as symptoms of his polio robbed him of movement in his final months.

Dulles was the most famed of ecclesiologists – of theologians doing ecclesiology, the study of the Church – and therefore of particular note as I write my dissertation on ecclesiology, on Francis Sullivan, who was the other Grand Old Man of ecclesiology, though not as well known in the United States. This was because Sullivan spent his academic ministry in Rome, while Dulles was in Washington and New York, and became very well known here through both his writing and his frequent appearances on the lecture circuit. Sullivan actually served on Dulles's doctoral board in Rome, as Dulles was a latecomer to the priesthood, to the Jesuits, and to scholarship, but the two of them, along with Patrick Granfield, Joseph Komonchak, Richard McBrien, Richard Gaillardetz, William Cardinal Levada, and not least my own director, Michael Fahey, have all together made Ecclesiology a particularly American field of theological expertise. Dulles's work was prolific, and more than made up for his "late start," with his book Models of the Church probably being his most (and rightly) famed contribution to the study of the Church. I am going to miss him as a teacher, 'though he's been one from a distance. The clarity and breadth of his insight is a challenge to anyone doing this sort of work.

I include a number of articles, obituaries and recollections below the cut:

Cardinal Dulles recalled for brilliance, simplicity, kindness Catholic News Service
Cardinal Dulles dies at 90; Jesuit theologian made a cardinal in '01 Catholic News Service
Avery Dulles, 90; Prominent Catholic Cardinal, Theologian The Washington Post
Avery Dulles: Friend, Hero, Christian by James Martin, S.J. for The Washington Post
Cardinal Avery Dulles, Theologian, Is Dead at 90 The New York Times
EDIT: An unpublished interview with Avery Dulles John Allen/NCR

( Read more... )

Had a more-than-pleasant dinner out at Louise's with Meg, which we had visited back in March. Lots of catch-up, because we've been particularly unlucky in trying to catch one another: her relationship with Brian, my job stuff. She even insisted on treating me, but made no bones about the fact that she firmly intended to cash in once I landed a professorship somewhere, which of course I'll be happy to oblige, once the opportunity rolls around.

Still thinking some of Thomas Merton, and the 40th anniversary of his death, as I mentioned in the previous entry this morning. I had hoped to find that someone had posted on YouTube the film that was made at the Bangkok conference, of him speaking right before his accidental electrocution, but no such luck. I did find a clip from the 1984 film, which I possess on videotape, called Merton: A Film Biography, but that was the best of any such documentation a quick search revealed.

I have been thinking of Last Words with regard to Merton.

The last words of his journal were incidental, as one ought to expect with unexpected death, and are illuminating only in their lack of pretense or weight, kind of reminding me of the way that the "Year In Review" meme that people do in December on LiveJounal can somehow sort of sketch something real about our lives, even if is nothing of the sort of thing we would actually choose as important or illustrative of what our lives mean to us. Two days before his death, on Sunday, 8 December 1968, Merton wrote:

Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. In a little while I leave this hotel. I go to say Mass at St. Louis Church, lunch at the Apostolic Delegation, then on to the Red Cross place this afternoon. No mail here yet except a letter from Winifred (hippie girl at Redwoods) forwarded from Calcutta.

The last words of Thomas Merton, "Fr. Louis," in that bit of film were always striking to me, in that sort of eerie way things sound only when you look back at them. He concludes the presentation he was making with:

So I will disappear from view and we can all have a Coke or something. Thank you very much.

He had lunch with some of the company and returned to take some afternoon rest and a shower, and coming out from the shower was electrocuted by the floor lamp in the room, with its faulty wiring, and which fell on top of him, severely burning him by the time the body was felt.

At the funeral at Gethsemani, which Chrysogonus talked about with me and Erik during my first trip to the Abbey over Fall Break in October 1995, Chrysogonus had the closing words of Merton's breakthrough autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, read to conclude the service:

But you shall taste the true solitude of my anguish and my poverty and I shall lead you into the high places of my joy and you shall die in Me and find all things in My mercy which has created you for this end and brought you from Prades to Bermuda to St. Antonin to Oakham to London to Cambridge to Rome to New York to Columbia to Corpus Christi to St. Bonaventure to the Cistercian Abbey of the poor men who labor in Gethsemani:

That you may become the brother of God and learn to know the Christ of the burnt men.

Thomas Merton died 40 years ago today, electrocuted by the faulty wiring of his floor fan as he stepped out of his shower at a world-wide conference of monks in Bangkok. The National Catholic Reporter has an article commemorating Merton, which in a Left kind of way seems to magnify the tour Merton made at the end of his life, where he, as one of the West's best scholars of Asian religion, resonated deeply with the forms of Hindu and Buddhist display he encountered there, as though his Christianity were best remembered by not being mentioned, and best characterized by his open-mindedness. By way of contrast, the Wikipedia article on Merton dotes, in a kind of Right way, on the early Merton of the conversion story detailed in his bestselling The Seven-Storey Mountain, as though the deep immersion into the social justice causes of the 1960s was not a direct outgrowth of both his Christian and monastic callings.

When I was at Notre Dame, I was lucky enough to aid Lawrence Cunningham in the editing and production of the 1952-60 volume of Merton's private journals, published as A Search For Solitude: Pursuing the Monk's True Life. It is this little-mentioned in-between period of Merton's life, extending into the 1960s, that has come to be of greater interest to me, and was fed even more by stories from Chrysogonus as he recalled his old friend and teacher at the Abbey of Gethsemani. This was the time of experiments in hermitage, in solitude, of the writing of Thoughts In Solitude and of Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. It was the time of his mystical dream of a Jewish girl named Proverb and his Louisville street corner vision of Love and what is lovely in all people. It was the time of falling in love with a young nurse who had taken care of him in the hospital and of having to let that go in the face of his own true calling, but with the knowledge that he had finally become a person who could truly love another.

The caricatures of Merton – the Christian who fell into Eastern fascinations, or the Christian who left behind Christianity for true Eastern wisdom – are convenient fictions for their promoters. Merton instead recognized and actuated in himself the Second Vatican Council's mandate toward what is good in all religions in the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate; Merton was the liturgical "conservative" who took a number of relics with him from Gethsemani on his "liberal" journey through Asia. He was the Christian monk and scholar of Christian spirituality first so that he could actually be equiped to be a Westerner who could enter into Asian monasticisms, and was recognized as possessing a keener kind of insight by Easterns like D.T. Suzuki or the young Dalai Lama because he came out of a fully-formed spiritual tradition rather than being one of the more dislocated Westerners more commonly exploring Eastern perspectives. He was simply who he was: gifted, extreme, wounded, given to saying over-the-top things, but leveling them out into wisdom through editing and contemplation and prayer.

Two articles noted. The first is one Mom grabbed from the Chicago Sun-Times to bring up to Thanksgiving dinner at Uncle Bill and Aunt Helen's, and is about a girl I knew in high school, Molly McNett, turned award-winning author. I didn't really know her: she was a senior when I was a freshman, one of the leaders in our exceptional vocal music program while I was still a plebe, so maybe it's better to say that I knew of her: we probably barely had ever spoken. I was more friends with some of her guy friends from choir, with her younger sister Katie, and with her dad Mike McNett, who was one of the guidance counselors who would faithfully kick my ass just when I needed it, for which I'll always be grateful. (On a trivia note, he was also the officially Most Painful Singer I've ever met, through no fault of his own: his "party trick," to call it that, which I remember him explaining to me once, was that he had a tear of some sort in his vocal cords, which gave him a cool, gravelly speaking voice, but which also resulted in his hitting two notes at the same time when he sang. If he had hit a third or a fifth, so that he was always harmonizing with himself, this would have been beyond cool. Alas, it was more a half step up, and C and C# together continually just isn't cool, no matter what the 20th century composers might want to sell you.) Anyway, so it was interesting to see what Molly had been up to and the success she is enjoying.

The other article is more the norm for the sort of things I'll jot down here, in this case being an article on the ongoing destruction of Middle Eastern Christianity in Iraq. The persecution of these people, already heightened in the last generation by the rise of militant Islam, has been awfully exacerbated since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Those who survive the attention of their neighbours are being scattered across the globe, which is no formula for the survival of a culture.

Writing was on the wall: So mom-to-be Molly McNett made dream come true with workshop, award-winning collection
Some fearful Christians hope to flee Iraq

( Read more... )

Was this the most alarmist headline that the Times could come up with this morning? No noting that the other major world religions have demonstrated no intrinsic initiative on their own to participate in hip and cool dialogue? No mentioning that Pela, while "center-right" and therefore suspect, is an atheist philosopher who has seen the intellectual dependence of European freedoms – even the secular ones – upon Christian presuppositions, and that undermining the latter threatens the former, as has another of the Pope's conversation partners, atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas?

The article text, mercifully, isn't that bad, but I gotta wonder if Donadio's article got slapped with this headline by some editor who wanted to make sure that we all understood, whatever the article said, that Benedict was a reactionary nitwit.

Pope Questions Interfaith Dialogue
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: November 23, 2008

ROME — In comments on Sunday that could have broad implications in a period of intense religious conflict, Pope Benedict XVI cast doubt on the possibility of interfaith dialogue but called for more discussion of the practical consequences of religious differences.

The pope’s comments came in a letter he wrote to Marcello Pera, an Italian center-right politician and scholar whose forthcoming book, “Why We Must Call Ourselves Christian,” argues that Europe should stay true to its Christian roots. A central theme of Benedict’s papacy has been to focus attention on the Christian roots of an increasingly secular Europe.

In quotations from the letter that appeared on Sunday in Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading daily newspaper, the pope said the book “explained with great clarity” that “an interreligious dialogue in the strict sense of the word is not possible.” In theological terms, added the pope, “a true dialogue is not possible without putting one’s faith in parentheses.”

But Benedict added that “intercultural dialogue which deepens the cultural consequences of basic religious ideas” was important. He called for confronting “in a public forum the cultural consequences of basic religious decisions.”

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the pope’s comments seemed intended to draw interest to Mr. Pera’s book, not to cast doubt on the Vatican’s many continuing interreligious dialogues.

“He has a papacy known for religious dialogue; he went to a mosque, he’s been to synagogues,” Father Lombardi said. “This means that he thinks we can meet and talk to the others and have a positive relationship.”

To some scholars, the pope’s remarks seemed aimed at pushing more theoretical interreligious conversations into the practical realm.

“He’s trying to get the Catholic-Islamic dialogue out of the clouds of theory and down to brass tacks: how can we know the truth about how we ought to live together justly, despite basic creedal differences?” said George Weigel, a Catholic scholar and biographer of Pope John Paul II.

This month, the Vatican held a conference with Muslim religious leaders and scholars aimed at improving ties. The conference participants agreed to condemn terrorism and protect religious freedom, but they did not address issues of conversion and of the rights of Christians in majority Muslim countries to worship.

The church is also engaged in dialogue with Muslims organized by the king of Saudi Arabia, a country where non-Muslims are forbidden from worshiping in public.

( The AP story 'Pope: Dialogue among religions should be pursued' manages to be more clear, noting Jewish and Muslim praise for his remarks. AND a translation of the Pope's letter to Pera, in full. )

Some of you are philosophers at a far more professional and educated level than I, or just well-established Thomists of one sort or another, and I was wondering if I might get some help from you or anyone who might know something in this direction.

The other night while I was still babysitting my nieces, I was reading through a small book called Does Science Make Belief In God Obsolete?, which was put out by the Templeton Foundation and which I had picked up with some other material of theirs at the American Academy of Religion conference in Chicago. It's actually free and available online on their website, and made for better middle-of-the-night-bathroom-break reading than Templeton Prize winner John Polkinghorne's book Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship, which would have required me to wake up a bit more.

The book contains a series of responses by a variety of people: scientists, philosophers, theologians, writers. I was reading through the response of Christopher Hitchens, one of the "New Atheists" who I have noted in this space before. His response was characteristic of why the New Atheists have come under such criticism, even from other atheists: it is more insult than insight, trading on stereotypes and old generalizations rather than serious history or research, mostly "preaching to the choir," or persuasive to the lightly-educated in this field. When his reasons for thinking science should make theism obsolete were extracted, they boiled down to two ideas: that nature (via science) essentially explains itself without need for a God, and that if a good, all-powerful God existed there was no way such evil would exist in the world. These arguments, the two most substantial arguments ever made against belief in God, while thought very modern by some, are as ancient as theism itself. In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas deals with them as classics in his Summa Theologiae as the principle objections in his brief article on the existence of God.

So here's the thing: as I was reading through Hitchen's restatement of these thoughts, I thought I noticed a problem, one that I'm not sure whether I've ever heard addressed before. It seems to me that the two objections, while notable in themselves, are incompatible. These are the notes I jotted down the next morning. I would be really interested in knowing whether this line of reasoning has been pursued before, or if anyone sees a flaw in my own midnight logic.

Presumption #1: It is better to have an ordered cosmos, uniformly following those "natural laws" observed by our scientific disciplines. This is superior to the notion of a capricious God or gods, who have to "work" the universe in response to our prayers and desires.

Presumption #2: The history of the cosmos, with its capacity for destruction, its indifference to human life, and its potential for allowing or bringing our species to the brink of extinction, cannot be reconciled with the existence of a loving God who actively intervenes in history on our behalf.

Mike: One of the presumptions could be true, but not both. Presumption #1 argues that a God intervening in history of the cosmos is a capricious and unworthy God – an object of human superstition. Presumption #2 argues that a God who does not intervene in such a history as ours is capricious and cruel.

These two arguments together therefore attempt to argue both sides of an idea as against the possibility for God's existence. But you cannot at the same time argue that a God who interferes in history is inadequate, and that a God who does not interfere in history is inadequate, and that these together make an argument against the existence of God. For Hitchens's purposes, this is a "Heads I win, Tails you lose" argument.

You must either argue one of two possibilities. The first is that God makes a consistent and logical universe that he allows the dignity of its own existence and integrity (a universe that follows "scientific laws"), and that therefore includes pain and suffering as nature follows its rules (gravity leads to car crashes, environmental poison to cancer). Or you must argue that a "scientific" universe with its own laws of nature and their painful consequences is itself an act of cruelty unworthy of a Creator God, and that God should interfere in every aspect of the world that could cause pain and suffering, even if this means the destruction or denial of any scientific law and of human freedom.

In other words, the two arguments that Thomas Aquinas identified as the primary arguments against the existence of God – that nature alone accounts for all phenomena without requiring the existence of God, or that the presence of evil in the world in itself proves the lack of an all-good, all-powerful God – are incompatible. You can hold to one or the other of these arguments against God, but not both, for they depend upon contradictory and opposing presumptions about the relationship of God to the universe: that God must and ought to intervene in its affairs (as in the "problem of evil" objection) or that God must and ought not to intervene in its affairs (as in the "problem of nature" objection).

Thoughts? Again, does this hold, or have I missed something? I haven't kept a steady reading diet in Philosophy of Religion in some years, and it seems too classic a set of issues not to have been already developed, but I haven't been able to find anything yet on it.

An old friend came through town yesterday and today: Brian E. Daley, S.J., one of today's great theological historians. I got to know him when he was a visiting professor at Notre Dame, taking a semester off from his position teaching Patristics at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Boston and considering a move to Notre Dame, seeing how he enjoyed teaching undergraduates as well as graduate students. Even though I wasn't taking a course with him, we got to be friends just meeting and talking in the halls and one night, out to dinner at Macri's Deli before heading over to see a showing of The River Wild, we were telling one another our stories, particularly our spiritual/theological stories, and I was telling him how it was that I had come back to Catholicism after abdicating for some years for an exploration of Evangelicalism. I mentioned that two books in particular had given me a historical context for that American Evangelical experience and for its theology, and which had let me see it in context – a context I was ready to leave behind. These two books were George Marsden, the great historian of American Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism's masterpiece Fundamentalism and American Culture (Marsden, who we wooed to Notre Dame from Duke and who let me sit in on a few of his doctoral seminars, was taken aback when I later told him that) and a book called The Hope of the Early Church, a survey of Christian eschatologies – theologies of death, judgment, end times, afterlife – in the first eight centuries of the Church. That book was by some Jesuit whose name I didn't remember. Seated across from me at the Deli, Brian looked at me, somewhere between awkward and bashful, and said, "I ... I wrote that book." "Get out of town!" I blurted. I mean, what are the odds?

Yesterday, Brian gave Marquette's first annual Theotokos Lecture, a new lecture series recently endowed at the University, entitled 'Woman of Many Names': Mary in Eastern and Western Theology. I asked Dan to pick me up a copy of the printed version, since I couldn't make the lecture as I was finishing up with my babysitting gig with the nieces. But I was able to make it to a session this morning where he was free to meet with graduate students for an hour. I was disappointed that it wasn't better attended, especially given how lively our Patristics/Early Church graduate student and faculty community is here, but apparently it was a nightmare moment of schedule conflicts, with Professors Barnes and Golitzin both out of town. It ended up being a lively conversation with me, Ellen Concannon, who had also known Brian during her Master's at Notre Dame, Professor Del Colle and Brian, and wandered around topics of Marian piety, its development, its interaction with notions of original sin and with the theology of immaculate conception, the papal definitions, ecumenical implications and conflicts in Marian understandings, theologies of the saints and of grace and freedom. We even tied a few things into my dissertation, which I had filled him in on. Tying Marian piety and theology more firmly into theologies of the saints seems obvious, but it was one of the bigger ideas to rattle around in my head from the discussion. I'm more comfortable with the saints and their various histories and spiritualities than I am with some of the excesses of Marian devotion, and to not let the Marian stuff become something separate, but couched within the wider context of our reaction to people of great spiritual gifts made it less an aberration to me. Del Colle said something really interesting about people receiving exceptional callings or graces to particular missions, and that resonated with me, too, because a lot of the excessive Marian language sounds more like a calling to simply a higher status, and that can't be right. So. Good stuff.

Brian's visiting this semester at Fordham University, and had seen Cardinal Dulles a few weeks ago, who is now so fading that he is mostly paralyzed and speechless, the poor man. His longtime secretary knows him so well that, in setting questions up entirely as "yes" and "no" questions, he can still communicate by moving his head, and he seems perfectly lucid. But it's a tragedy for such a great theologian to be so stricken at the end, as it is for anyone, of course. All told, it was good to be able to talk with Brian again, to hear a bit of how he was doing and such. We haven't stayed in touch over the years, but for a time, when I was in my Master's, he was both a good friend and spiritual advisor, with one letter of his in particular, back when he had returned to Boston before moving to South Bend, being a major moment of wisdom for me at a confusing point in my life.

I frequently find myself having to struggle to define "systematic theology" to people with no formal theological background. It's one of those terms for a subdivision within the field of theology, and it happens to be the aspect of theology in which I am primarily doing my doctoral work – my "major," as it were. I've been reading in Avery Cardinal Dulles' 1995 The Craft of Theology: From Symbol to System tonight as part of my dissertation research, in which I am currently playing around with his theological language of "models" of the church, and I found a passage I thought said things neatly:

Systematic theology aspires to deal in a consistent way with all significant questions pertaining to Christian faith and to develop answers to each of these questions in correlation with all the others. A theological system, as an original construal of the meaning of Christianity, is a major achievement of the creative imagination. Faithful to the data of Scripture and tradition, as well as to all that is known from other sources, the systematician integrates all these manifold elements by means of certain overarching principles into a complex and unified whole. Thomas Aquinas and the great medieval doctors were systematicians in this sense. So were Calvin and Suarez. In our own century the same may be said of a few authors such as Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner, and Wolfhart Pannenberg.

The greatest systematic theologians have always, in my estimation, been somewhat unsystematic. They have never been slaves to the logic of their system. Augustine never fully reconciled his Neoplatonic metaphysics with his commitment to the biblical vision of salvation through time and history. Thomas Aquinas, notwithstanding his preference for Aristotelian categories, never abandoned his attachment to Neoplatonism, even in the acute form represented by Pseudo-Dionysius. He interpreted Aristotle with extraordinary freedom and, when it suited him, shifted to biblical and juridical categories. Thus the method of models is helpful not only for mediating between different theological systems but for analyzing the inner tensions within a single theologian's work. No opposition exists between the approach through models and the practice of systematic theology.

Been on a roll for hours now, reading on communion ecclesiology, in one of those delicious moods where I'm able to absorb reading and information at great length without losing concentration or ability. I don't know quite what it is that makes that easier at some times than others, but it's a good feeling. It certain helps, though, to have good texts to read. Dennis M. Doyle's Communion Ecclesiology: Vision & Versions, which I got out of the library the other day, is a marvelous example of a well-ordered and instantly-accessible book, and has been helpful for an overview of a number of different communion ecclesiologies and their developmental courses. I've been using the CDF's 1992 letter Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion, which is a central text, and bouncing around both the very useful The Gift of the Church: A Textbook on Ecclesiology in Honor of Patrick Granfield, O.S.B., which Professor Fahey had us use in my seminar with him when I arrived at Marquette, and Cardinal Dulles' classic Models of the Church. So all this will lead into the final-stretch writing spurt to finish off this chapter over the next week.

Yet another job post was advertised yesterday and was forwarded to students by our new Chair, Professor Wood. This would be a delicious posting, though strangely undergrad-free in a theological graduate school, plopping me not only in the heart of a huge theological network, but also having me live in Erik's neighbourhood, which would be a ton of fun for that old friendship. I let him know about that in a note last night, and told him that if anyone asked about me, he still owed me for breaking my rib back during his graduation celebration at Notre Dame, when weaklingrecords packed a very respectable bar into his backpack and set up shop on Stonehenge at midnight after graduation. I got a funny note back from him and the whole exchange made laugh:

Here's a bit of a surprise new job ad that I just got today and for which I am now just finishing my application. If anyone asks you about me, remember: you still owe me for breaking my rib. Bastard.

Mike


That would be awesome, brother. Let me know if/when you get to come out for an interview. Your rib story reference is very timely. I was at ND this weekend for an ACE gathering and I told someone the rib story as we were passing by Stonehenge. I thought to myself, "The sad prick deserved it." ;-)

Truly,
Dr. Bastard!!!!

I do hope he remembered what I thought the funniest part of the story: when I was sitting stunned in the water and gasped out, "You broke my rib!" Bongo Bob, who had helped himself to quite a bit of the drink by this point, slurred "You wuss!" As though my rib had popped by some lack of character. Soaking wet and in some pain, I still instantly thought it was hysterical.

And lastly, a little article caught my eye, given the way I've always thought the Tao in Confucius' Analects lined up so stunningly with Jewish-Christian Logos theology – a point I've used in my Intro classes when I get to the Gospel of John.

Cardinal: Traditional Chinese wisdom contains seeds of word of God

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- For the good of Chinese society and the defense of people, the Catholic Church must engage in dialogue and work with those who defend the traditional values found in Confucianism, said Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun of Hong Kong.

Cardinal Zen told the world Synod of Bishops on the Bible Oct. 15 that, before being written as the Scriptures and incarnated in the person of Jesus, the word of God was the force that created beauty, the universe and the human person.

And, he said, the traditional Chinese wisdom founded in and fostered by Confucianism contains the "seeds of the word" of God that the Second Vatican Council said are present in religions and cultures.

Cardinal Zen said the church in Hong Kong has developed a healthy dialogue with followers of Confucianism, aimed particularly at "trying to preserve the precious heritage of Chinese wisdom."

"If, moved by charity, we are able to instill in the younger generation the Chinese virtues of fidelity, honesty and shame, we will have helped them take a big step toward holiness," the cardinal said.

In too many instances, he said, the Chinese people are losing contact with their traditional values, as is seen in instances of corruption and attacks on human life, marriage and the family.

( Read more... )

The last few nights, the security staff at the library have been very prompt in beginning to turn off the lights after the 11:15pm announcement of the 11:30pm closing of Memorial Library, with the lights snapping off within a minute of the announcement, since they typically start up on the 5th floor, where my study carrel is. Coming out of my carrel after being surprised and having to pack in the dark, I saw a big, football-player-sized guy making his way toward me in the light of the few 24-hour lamps still on.

"How do you get out?" he asked me, and I pointed out the stairwell door under the light to him, and began to lead the way down.

"Never been up on the 5th floor before?" I said lightly, so that he wouldn't be embarrassed.

"I always work in Raynor Library," he said, referring to the connecting library that is mostly workspace, with lots of large computer clusters, along with Reference, New Journals, Archives and the Reserve sections.

"You never need the actual books?" I said, with a bit of surprise.

"I usually work with online resources," he said.

And I caught myself before replying, "And you got into Marquette?!"

I'm back to Marquette and trying to tie up the job application business after spending a few days down at my sister's, where I had the opportunity to help a bit by watching the girls a few times, to go to Grace and Haley's soccer matches, and to spend even more time than ever before just hanging out with Sophia, who loves to say "Unca Miiike?" with a smile and a tone that makes me sound like I'm the very incarnation of Fun. I also dashed over to Chicago to spend Sunday afternoon and evening hanging with Emily and assorted companions of hers – costume historian Megan, biochemist Sarah, and Media scholar Katie Z. – which was a good time, if too brief. Dinner was at the equally-cool Tapas place Café Ba Ba Reeba near DePaul University. And Emily gave me a copy of a treasure I had confessed that I had not read – Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey – and, generous 18th Century scholar that she is, even annotated it for me with scattered and cool insights and comments, in a cool "Longman Cultural Edition" that is already full of interesting scholarly intros and articles. It would be so fun to do that stuff for a living, too, though I wouldn't want to join Em in worrying about that market: my job search is hair-raising enough without thinking of the poor Literature scholars! :-(



I gave Grace the "Grace Fun Mix" I conjured up for her years ago, now that she was finally of age and now that I finally remembered to do so. And so I also had to make a "Haley Fun Mix" because she was about old enough, too, and definitely old enough to feel slighted. I had been playing with a large selection of songs for her for awhile, but I needed to get it burned to disc before I left. So I've been re-listening to the Haley mix to see if I still think it flows, given that it was finalized quickly. They're both on CD, as I'm "old school" like that. The girls called them "playlists" as they're totally digital babies, but I still have yet to get an iPod, as I'm holding out for a 32GB iPhone to be released before making the iPod/cellular phone leap, and so I still am functioning with discs, although Professor Barnes reported the other day that the undergraduates see them as archaic and a dead form, and I guess this was thus confirmed by Grace and Haley. They have a list that they'd kind of pulled together from stuff of Jim and Leslie's that they like. 4 year-old Haley observed to me "I've already got 'Just Like Heaven.'" (Actually, I used a cover version by Katie Melua that I'd gotten from Emily.) But the sudden image of Haley as a four year-old purist fan of The Cure made me laugh. As I confessed long ago, before Haley was born, when I first put together the mix for Grace, some four years ago, long before she was ready for it, in a fit of Uncle-ish anticipation, there was a secret agenda to all this. Secret agenda: to endow the girls with wide musical tastes and getting them to like more than what all their friends will tell them they have to like. Secret secret agenda: Haley's list is a bit heavy on piano, one of which Leslie recently purchased....

( The Grace Fun Mix and The Haley Fun Mix )

The question as to whether I committed some musical crimes likely remains open.

So, six more applications are finished now, and I'm now left tackling those asking for more bells and whistles, like "Statements of Scholarly Interests," writing samples, and proof of teaching effectiveness. And sending off for and purchasing more of my transcripts. Yay. Notre Dame, at least, gives me those for free, but I have to pay $5 a pop for my Marquette ones. Small investments, to be sure, compared to getting a job in the uncertain economic future we're all looking at, but in the present they're little costs that add up and add to the churning stomach acid. Okay: done with the job stuff for the night and back to a bit of dissertating before bed. I'd hoped to catch up with a friend on the phone tonight, and I've still not made it out of the Library....

Five new junior faculty positions have been listed on the American Academy of Religion website, including an ecclesiology position at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C., and a history of modern Christianity position in a Religious Studies program at the University of South Florida in Tampa. The latter is a newish school, but one that very much wants to grow into a serious research institution and only has a 2/2 teaching load. So these are among new positions to think about. But the core of my prep work on the application process is (mercifully!) done and so I won't have to spend nearly so much time on all of this as I have the last few weeks.

Yesterday was the first session of this year's meetings of the Seminar on the Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism, with Professor William Kurz, S.J., one of our senior biblical scholars, speaking on "Mary: Woman and Mother in God's Saving New Testament Plan," which was a theological and canon-critical reading of Mary in the New Testament, built off of, but not limited to, a historical-critical approach to the New Testament, in the manner described in his and Luke Timothy Johnson's The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A Constructive Conversation. This was a look at a forthcoming article that provoked some interesting discussion afterward, mostly on the Jewish lines typical of the Seminar, such as looking at the imagery tying Mary to the Ark of the Covenant/Mercy Seat. One thing that grabbed my attention was his addressing Luke's repeated meditations on the theme of Mary "pondering in her heart" the events of Jesus' conception, birth and life. He speculated this repeated theme as being an indication that Luke bears a Marian-inspired theology of the Incarnation, or a Marian tradition of interpretation. This was an idea I'd never heard before, particularly in contrast to the ancient tradition of Luke as an interpreter of Paul, and so I thought it would be interesting to re-read Luke with that question in mind and to see if it seems to work.

Talking with him afterward, he mentioned that he had written me a very strong letter of recommendation, reporting my gifts and reputation as a teacher as unique among graduate students. That was kind of flooring to hear words so generous, and I couldn't help but be incredibly gratified. So I certainly hope that that could help me get over the "paper hump" and to the first-stage interviews at the American Academy of Religion in Chicago next month.

It's a bold orange sunrise this morning over Lake Michigan. The clouds are spaced out and built up just enough to look like an armada of tall ships sailing across the sky. It was all striking enough to make me freeze as I walked past the windows to the kitchen to pour a drink. Finished up the Küng tonight and put it to bed, leaving me only the Rahner and Boff to finish in the historical section of my chapter. I keep thinking I'm done with Rahner, and then find something else in his writing to consider, as though he were still alive and was cranking out articles just to mess with me. But he's building upon and revisiting key ideas enough that I don't need to add too much to what I've already written, and I'm going to forgo Professor Fahey's suggestion that I teach myself Portuguese to read Boff in the original, just to save me a bit of time. I'll check some of the reviews of the translation, just to see if there are any major objections in the area dealing with my theme. I'm getting pretty anxious to move on, and to get something of this chapter into Fahey's hands as quickly as possible. The only other note of the night was my frustration at the fax machine at the Registrar's office at Notre Dame being busy all night so that I couldn't get my transcript request in: I hope that won't be a problem today during business hours.

The other day I finally signed up for LibraryThing, after being tempted to for over a year since frey_at_last first wrote about it. friede had finally bit the bullet and signed up a few weeks ago, writing up some of her experience, and I was sufficiently zoned out in the "I can't write and can't sleep" state for that kind of reference work to seem oddly entertaining. LiveJournal just apparently doesn't work with Java, and so I can't use the cool LibraryThing widget that I admired on Michael Wurtz's blog. Still, that's hardly the worst thing in the world. Mercifully, I was able to import hundreds and hundreds of books I had already marked as my own on Amazon over the years, and so that saved me a bunch of work. Library Thing's printed format will save me a bunch of work should the worst happen to my library, as all the photographs I have uploaded of my shelves in my photo album would still have to by typed up for insurance purposes. That would have been fun. And it's kind of dorky-cool to see some of my academic friends' libraries. Anyway, I stuck the link to my account over in the sidebar, underneath the visitor map.

Robert Giroux has died, I read in The New York Times. That's getting to be near the end of the associates of Thomas Merton from his Columbia generation, following on the loss of Robert Lax not too long ago, who I had once conceived of hunting down on Patmos with Erik.

Robert Giroux, Editor, Publisher and Nurturer of Literary Giants, Is Dead at 94

EDIT: Added is a version of Giroux's relatively recent introduction to the latest issuing of Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain – the breakthrough best-selling spiritual autobiography that Giroux published – which The New York Times printed on October 11th, 1998, as I just saw added on this same story at the very impressive Father Louie blog.

Thomas Merton's Durable Mountain

( Read more... )

The sky turned an almost uniform shade of peach tonight at sundown. I don't think I'd ever quite seen anything like that before. Weaving my way through clumps of undergrads scattered around campus, I was spending the sunset hour reading over at the Courtyard, where the roses are finally growing back around the fountain. Father Fahey had given me a heads-up as he was reading Hans Küng's Memoirs that the first volume had a reference to the intervention on the charisms of the faithful that Cardinal Suenens had given at the Second Vatican Council, which I had been doing some work on for the dissertation. Küng mentions that he had written the bulk of the address to the rest of the bishops, and so I had fetched the tome from the library and was working through the relevant pages (and some irrelevant ones). I suddenly noticed how, as I'd turned toward the east and was angling the pages to catch the fading light, how all the page had gone peach, and so turned around to look at this unusual sky. Walking home shortly afterward, with the heat and thick, humid stillness, I found old instincts turning me toward the southwest, how back when I was a kid, a colour and an atmosphere like that might get me looking for the big storms coming up Tornado Alley. Nothing like that, mercifully, seems to be going on tonight, but it was certainly a colour worth noting.

I'm off in the morning to help Mike install the new countertop in their kitchen. Clearly there is a desperate need for hands.

Madeleine L'Engle's novel, A Wrinkle In Time was rejected by at least 26 publishers before being accepted by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, after two years of frustration for L'Engle. The book has remained continuously in print, won several awards, and secured L'Engle's reputation and ability to sell all her later, considerable work.

A first edition in the original dust jacket was offered for sale on eBay. A rare book, now, no first editions have been reported for sale at auction for fifteen years. I did not bid, as the opening bid was for $3000. No one bid on the book. That is, until 80 seconds remained in the week-long auction. In the subsequent 80 seconds, 17 bids were offered, with the book selling for $9000.

I suspect that this would have added just a little bit more amazement for Madeleine at her own tumultuous story with regard to the role of this book in her life.

The book's role in the history of my own imagination and education is considerable, but I do not think it her best work, and among this set of books, I recommend the two subsequent books in the "Time Quintet," A Wind In The Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, with greater enthusiasm. As to A Wrinkle In Time, the paperback from Amazon is a comparative steal at a mere seven bucks.

A new L'Engle thing I found, an interview from 1997, as I was reading over breakfast the introduction to The Joys of Love, L'Engle's new/old novel from 1946 that has just recently been published, and which arrived in the mail yesterday.


Listening to the Story: A Conversation with Madeleine L'Engle

I turn down the long, dirt farm road and go west, into the sun. I recognize the house, Crosswicks, from the cover sketch on one of her more than forty books. In that house in Goshen, Connecticut, Madeleine L'Engle and Hugh Franklin began to raise their family while Hugh managed a small general store and Madeleine struggled to publish the stories that came, that kept coming. When the family moved back to New York, Crosswicks remained their home for part of the year, a family gathering place.

Now Madeleine lives across the road from the family home in a bungalow built on the foundation of an old farmhouse. She welcomes me into her home with the same spirit of openness she brings to hundreds of public engagements each year--workshops, retreats, speeches. Tea is poured. Time is open. As we talk, neither of us can resist taking in the brilliant sea of grass, wildflowers, and sky outside the windows. Down the hallway, I can see that the writing desk in her room faces directly into it.

I have known her stories from childhood. As an adult, her journals and reflections on writing have inspired me--and given me plenty of space to laugh at myself. But the miracle of the whole sweep of her diverse work, from science fiction to theology, is how clearly it has reflected her vibrant and changing Christian faith.

What will the writer, the woman, the mother, the friend share from the perspective of this year in which she turns eighty? This is the story I have come to hear.

--Dee Dee Risher

( Read more... )

I do hate it when I wake up aforetime and cannot get back to sleep. I woke from a dream that seemed to be reviewing moments from 2001, particularly the pre-release images from Peter Jackson's then-forthcoming The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings. I had been commenting on my interesting in the films to students from when I started teaching, as I had been following the films from long before filming or even casting had begun: from back when Jackson was finishing up the screenplays and hawking them to various studios, until New Line Cinema finally had the foresight and the courage to bet their whole house on the thing. Still, at this point from which I was dreaming, I only had Jackson's pre-released images to work from, most of which were dead-on, relying on Alan Lee and John Howe's artistic guidance, as he was. I had yet to see some of what I thought real mistakes in direction, which I'm sure I've complained about elsewhere: where Jackson substitutes his sledgehammer for Tolkien's feather, such as in my disappointment of how over-played I thought the supporting part of Galadriel had been played.

I had been moved by the first teaser poster, a print of which went up as part of my classroom decoration, all of which I intended as passive lessons for those zoning out during my course. This image was of Frodo, rather devastated-looking, I thought, or perhaps a look of dawning comprehension and horror, holding the One Ring, the seemingly-innocent locus of evil in his story. I dreamt back of talking about this image and others with students, until I awoke.

But I especially remembered, then, the effect on me of a still of Cate Blanchett playing Galadriel, speaking with Aragorn. We didn't actually see this scene, if I recall correctly, in the briefer, theatrical cut of the film. But I saw the picture, here, in the Cannes 2001 booklet on The Fellowship of the Ring, where the long Moria sequence had been screened. That image, set against the book's portrayal of Galadriel in my memory, and not the heavy-handed route Jackson would lead Blanchett down – that image devastated me. I can remember tearing up just looking at it. That might seem over-reacting, I know, but you have to make allowances for this novel being the biggest literary influence in my development outside of Scripture, and for the context of the story itself. Setting aside Cate Blanchett and just seeing Galadriel is what did it to me: imagining – and now seeing this moment – the portrayed moment was overwhelming. Think of what we feel looking into the eyes of another human being: the depths of emotion, understanding, and communication that we have had in those most honest of moments when we dare make eye contact with another human being: "dare" because we know how vulnerable such communication can be. Imagining looking into the eyes of Galadriel – a supporting character in all of Tolkien's mythology who had grown in importance to me over the years, until I could finally see the deep meaningfulness she held for him, not least as drawing upon his image of Mary of Nazareth – imagining looking into Galadriel's eyes takes that vulnerable human moment to a level I don't know if any of us could endure. At this moment in Tolkien's mythology, Galadriel is over 7100 years old. That's the thing. Can you imagine it? Imagining looking into the eyes of someone with that much experience, that much life coming through them – it broke me up. It breaks me up. I don't know that I could manage it. I wonder what kind of similar effect might have been a result of the Incarnation. Waking to some dream echo of that particular moment of imagination, well, perhaps it was no wonder that my thoughts were already stirred up too much to let me get back to sleep.

My little joke yesterday, or whatever I should call it, went well. Jim, Leslie and the nieces were flying into Milwaukee from LAX after visiting Jim's sister, Juliet, who with me is Godmother to Grace. Since my work right now is either reading or reading-and-writing, I could easily do the "reading" option and take my work on the city bus with me, which I did, and headed down to the airport. And so there I was reading, sitting off to the side of the walkway out to their gate when they came walking along from where the plane landed. I feigned surprise to see the girls, wondering what they were doing here in my town, but I think no one caught that amazing thespian moment. Mostly I was relieved that Jim and Leslie seemed to take it as a pleasant surprise and not me being completely annoying. So I got to hear the girls talk about petting a penguin at SeaWorld, seeing Shamu do a nighttime show, seeing pelicans, holding starfish – oh, and Auntie Juliet, too. Leslie was the one who thought to mention their going on a whale-watching trip (apparently blue whales are in season now, which got me incredibly excited to hear, though they didn't see a thing) and described to me how the whole lot of the girls got seasick on the unusually rough waters, and the parental perspective of the pleasures of one's daughters taking up the sport of synchronized vomiting. Haley (no worse for her fall, I heard with relief from Leslie, even scrambling right back up on the monkey bars when she had the chance) and Grace gabbled to me about things they had seen while Jim and Leslie dealt with baggage recovery, and in a few quick minutes already had the shuttle to their hotel where they had left their car the week before. The car was packed out with kids and luggage, so they couldn't offer me a ride when they mentioned their intention to grab some food. I rather thought they were talking pretty much in terms of fast-food on the way out of town, and so I didn't even suggest their coming north to my downtown section of the city, even though getting downtown and back out isn't the long affair that it can be in Chicago. Had they had the time, I would have loved to do one of my deli-run/picnic dinners down by the Lake with all of them. Nor did I think to recommend one of the few remaining A&W restaurants to them, 10 or 15 miles south of the city on the interstate, which is my favourite fast food place to stop when heading in their direction.

I took the 80 bus back downtown and walked back from the Wisconsin Avenue stop instead of waiting around to catch a connection for the last mile and enjoyed the early evening sun, and just reading as I walked. I decided to head over to the Courtyard early and just picked up my reading there. It's been my habit for some years to spend my outdoor summer on Marquette's campus in the Courtyard of the Fountain in front of the Chapel of Joan of Arc. This year, though, when I've been in town, it's become my particular habit to spend the last hour of the light reading there, sometimes work, but often to take that time to break with a novel. Then I finished The Small Rain which I had read well ahead on when I was feeling under the weather the other day. The simplest difference in reading that this time, which I should have expected, was simply that since the last time I had picked it up, I had been to the place that much of it takes place in: Switzerland around Lake Geneva. The images were therefore more crisp than I usually get out of a book where I'm supplying the visuals to the author's descriptions entirely out of my collaborative imagination. Now, instead, I was flashing back to my train ride back from Italy around the north end of the great Lake, and of sitting next to it, sipping drinks with the fabulously fun Nicod sisters as Erik and I were getting to know them.

Somehow, yesterday evening was just kind of perfect in light, temperature, and relative quiet. I enjoyed myself immensely, missing only the roses around the fountain, which had been trimmed back a few weeks ago. I shared a smile with a young woman who also came a bit later to read in the Courtyard, and who had the look, I suspected, of a new graduate student, newly moved to campus and trying out the ambiance for herself: I've seen that style of drifting around looking and testing different sitting-spots before. I glanced occasionally at the Chapel, which was originally in the Rhone Valley as well, as I recall, or over at the Dove of the Holy Spirit relief high up on the Memorial Library wall, and the occasional gull flying overhead. I was very conscious of my lack of real knowledge and feel for classical music as I finished the book, scattered throughout with the names of pieces from various composers. The next time I read The Small Rain, I resolved to do what I did the last time I read Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy: to go on iTunes and make/buy a mix of pieces mentioned, so that I can enter more fully into the author's intention by resonating with the soundscape she invokes in citing the music. I don't really know what separates the great pianists from the proficient ones, I suspect. With classical music, I'm still at the most basic level of discernment of "I like what I like." That's not bad, of course: in a certain way, that's the most honest of all taste, and the one that most defies any pretension. Still, the world is full of ears that have been conditioned to the likes of Brittney Spears: I'd like to be more sensitive to the music that the real musicians know is good playing. Buying the setlists from The Small Rain and its sequel A Severed Wasp, however, will set me back a few pennies, as they're rather full, even discounting the fictional compositions of Katherine's father and those of her husband. And then there will be the long process of listening to multiple versions on iTunes, trying to decide with my limited knowledge and ear which are the ones worth investing in. But the reading game me cause to think about music in new ways, and of my efforts, or lack thereof, in really opening myself up to certain forms.

And for the first time, I think I finally truly understood the title of the novel, which, while good in itself, made me feel rather thick for not having worked it out much earlier. Of course, that feeling, too, might ultimately be good in itself, or at least good for me....

For the first time since her death last September, I've had the heart to pick up one of Madeleine L'Engle's books again, starting reading her again most sensibly, perhaps, with her first novel, the critically-acclaimed 1945 effort, The Small Rain. I went online a bit ago to look something up about her and I discovered this lovely little bit on her, published back in 1963, by a fellow who never quite mentions up front that he is married to her. Along with this was the discovery that a new work of hers has been published through the efforts of her granddaughters, The Joys of Love, which apparently is a story she had written in the early 1940s.

From the August 1963 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Madeleine L’Engle

By Hugh Franklin

AFTER READING Madeleine L'Engle's novels people may think they see a similarity in some of her teen-age heroines — the gangling, awkward ugly duckling trying to find her way through adolescence — and may think the author has written of her own childhood. Well, if Meg Murry and Vicky Austin have bits and pieces of the young Madeleine L'Engle, their mothers have large chunks of the mature Madeleine Franklin, chief cook and bottle washer for a husband, daughters, fifteen and thirteen, a son, eleven, a collie and a cat, all living with joyful noise in a rambling old apartment near Columbia University. The hubbub of the home, with the hi-fi blaring out Bach, Brahms, and Bernstein, the telephone always jangling, the doorbell clanging, the dog barking, is a much more faithful backdrop for this tall, statuesque woman ("I have the same dimensions as Gypsy Rose Lee—or I used to") than her shy and sensitive heroines would have us believe.

The shy and sensitive girl, if ever she was that, has developed into a volatile, dynamic woman. With an interest in and a curiosity about everything except newspapers ("I don't have time — you're supposed to tell me when there's an article I should read") she is ready every morning, as soon as she wakes up and her feet hit the floor, to discuss anything from Aristotle to Zen Buddhism, to the bewilderment of a cantankerous husband who can't even comment on the weather until he has had his second cup of coffee. She devours books ravenously, thinks it immoral to pass a bookstore without buying something, and is always eying the walls of her home for space to build new bookshelves. Impetuous, she believes in doing immediately whatever she thinks has to be done, to the consternation of a procrastinating husband. And she still has enough of the child in her to relish Christmas as few people do. Starting on Thanksgiving Day, she replaces Bach with carols, and during Advent she adds decorations to the house each day, some of them out of her childhood, worn with age but rich in nostalgia. If ever she was inhibited she has outgrown it. Trying to find a taxi, especially when traveling with the whole family at rush hour, she has been known to throw herself on her knees on the pavement of Park Avenue, with hands upraised, hoping some taxi driver with a sense of humor will stop, a practice frowned upon by her husband. Prone to exaggeration ("Of course I exaggerate — I'm a writer"), she can't resist making everything a little bigger than life, with hundreds becoming thousands and thousands becoming millions. She even refers to Chekhov's Three Sisters, as Four Sisters, and Orwell's 1984 as 1985. She can't help it.

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