Counseling Kevin

Songs of Love In A Dying Language

2025-05-21T09:36:00.000-07:00

One percent of the Scottish people still speak Scottish Gaelic, the highest number being located in the Outer Hebrides islands off the northwest coast of Scotland. One of those islands is North Uist, the birthplace of Julie Fowlis. Though I don't understand a literal word she sings, I feel her music in my bones and, perhaps, my soul. She's an international treasure.

When You Come
---Maya Angelou

When you come to me, unbidden,
Beckoning me
To long-ago rooms,
Where memories lie.
Offering me, as to a child, an attic,
Gatherings of days too few
Baubles of stolen kisses.
Trinkets of borrowed loves.
Trunks of secret words.

The Wound of the Arrow

2025-05-21T09:11:00.000-07:00

The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes, so that later, from this experience, we take the criteria for judgement and can correctly evaluate the arguments. For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said: “Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true.”
--Benedict XVI

To Music
--Rainer Maria Rilke

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what?--: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,--
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.

Swimming Upstream

2025-03-23T11:02:00.000-07:00

From Thomas Merton's essay "Love and Solitude," contained in the collection entitled "Love and Living":

The power of genuine love is so deep and so strong that it cannot be deflected from its true aim even by the silliest of wrong ideas. When love is alive and mature in a person, it does not matter if he has a false idea of himself and of life: love will guide him according to its own inner truth and will correct his ideas in spite of him. That may be dangerous, but the danger is nothing new and the human race has lived with it for a million-odd years. The trouble is, though, that our wrong ideas may prevent love from growing and maturing in our lives. Once we love, our love can change our thinking. But wrong thinking can inhibit love. Overemphasis on the aspects of need and fulfillment, and obsessions which encourage a self-conscious and narcissistic fixation on one's own pleasure, can easily blight or misdirect the growth of love. That is why the advertising imagery which associates sexual fulfillment with all the most trivial forms of satisfaction-in order to separate the buyer from his dollar-creates a mental and moral climate that is unfavorable to genuine love. Unconsciously the power that should go into creative and positive love for the other person is being short-circuited by images of infantile oral fulfillment and other narcissistic symbols. The lover then becomes the beautiful glowing icon of self-satisfaction, the desirable, slick, and infinitely happy package, rather than the warm presence of one who responds totally to the value and being of the beloved. Even the advertising images of those beatified couples, for whom the years of early middle age are an unending ball, do not convince us of the reality of love: they merely enshrine the cool and consummated deal that our society believes in with superstitious reverence.

What are we going to do about it? Well, for one thing, we can be aware of these immature and inadequate ideas. We do not have to let ourselves be dominated by them. We are free to think in better terms. Of course, we cannot do this all by ourselves. We need the help of articulate voices, themselves taught and inspired by love. This is the mission of the poet, the artist, the prophet. Unfortunately, the confusion of our world has made the message of our poets obscure and our prophets seem to be altogether silent-unless they are devoting their talents to the praise of toothpaste.

Meanwhile, as our media become more sophisticated and more subtle, there is no reason why they should not also create for us a better and saner climate of thought-and present us with a less fallacious fantasy world of symbolic fulfillments.

There is no reason except, of course, that it is easier to make money by exploiting human weakness!

Running around town the other day, flipping radio channels to find something to dampen the embers of road rage threatening to flicker into flames, I heard a conservative talk show host express wonder at how parents could hope to counteract the influence of the popular culture on their children. As he put it, children swim all day in "the cesspool that is our popular culture." I wonder about that myself. I certainly don't have the answers, and wouldn't dream of advising parents, inasmuch as I'm not one.

On the other hand, parents could do worse than focus on first things first: "to be aware of these immature and inadequate ideas" and to realize that neither they, nor their children, need to be dominated by them. On a deeper and perhaps more fundamental level, parents could spend time contemplating what constitutes "genuine love"--the "agape" that Pope Benedict XVI so eloquently addressed in his encyclical "Deus Caritas Est"--and what influences of our popular culture, in fact, of our entire way of life, produce "wrong ideas" that "may prevent love from growing and maturing in our lives." That will be a difficult task, subject to understandable bouts of rationalization, denial, and all the other roadblocks we throw in the way of the Truth and in defense of the immature and inadequate physical and emotional gratifications served by our immature and inadequate ideas.

I may not know kids, but I know about "wrong ideas" and the way to obtain and sustain them, and I understand the ceaseless struggle required to overcome them. That said, Merton's on to something about the power of genuine love and its self-correcting power. I see it working, hour by hour, day by day, even in the seemingly worst of us. Even in what appear to be hopeless cases.

Forgiveness

2024-03-27T10:08:00.000-07:00

From a homily delivered decades ago by a now-deceased Texas priest:

The statement, “Yes, I forgive you” can be either a genuine desire to restore a wounded relationship, or it can be used as a power play. We see this a great deal in sick romantic relationships when one person always plays the role of the screw-up and the other partner plays the role of the morally superior martyr. Mercy is based in truly desiring to restore relationship with another human being; it is not a way of condescendingly exerting power over another human being. “Yes, Kobe, I forgive you: now where is my six million dollar ring?”

Forgiveness is rooted in trust. To refuse to forgive in a general sense is to refuse to trust in the providence of God. Therefore, being a forgiving person does not mean merely saying, “I accept your apology” to those who offend us, it also means forgiving the world, our own histories, our own situations… it means forgiving ourselves.

Trust is such a key component of the reality of faith. To lack forgiveness is to lack trust. Therefore, forgiveness is not merely a dimension of our faith; it is an essential component of our faith. Religious scholars call our faith a “salvation faith” because it is a religion based on the forgiveness, grace, and mercy of God. The God revealed to us is forgiving as part of his very nature and the story of his forgiveness is the key theme of our scriptures. Saying that we do not want to forgive is tantamount to saying, “I do not want to be part of the life of God.” Saying that we do not want to forgive is tantamount to saying, “I do not want to be Christian.”

Though not in the written record, when he delivered the homily at a Saturday Vigil Mass, he added, after the phrase "it means forgiving ourselves," the verbal parenthetical ("which can often be the hardest thing we do.").

I sat bolt upright during his presentation. I had the uncomfortable feeling that he was talking directly to me. He may have been. During the Mass, as he sprinkled holy water over the congregation, he hit me directly in the face with a full shot, then paused on his journey to whisper in my ear, "Got you good, didn't I? You're next." I have no idea what he meant by that at the time, but I'm finally beginning to get an idea.

Forgiving yourself doesn't mean forgetting that the wrong you have done was wrong, nor the reality that your penance for past misdeeds may be severe, in this world and the next. It does mean, however, that you're not greater than God, and that if God has revealed that He can forgive anything, then your refusal to accept this revelation is the ultimate assertion of a fatal pride. You're no better or worse than any other man or woman: we're all entitled to forgiveness.

To my understanding, the act of forgiving is the conscious release of your internal desire for vindictiveness and hatred, for revenge. Forgiving another's transgressions doesn't mean that you accept abuse or that you don't punish others who violate man's laws, but you should do so with a sense of humility rather than of avenging wrongs, and with more a sense of pity than hatred for a fallen man blinded by his nature from realizing God's love and acting accordingly. And you'd better have the responsibility for taking such action conferred upon you by the proper earthly authorities. If you take justice into your own hands or do it out of a sense that you, another fallen man, are meeting out justice or because you feel hatred or anger, you're taking God's work upon yourself, and you're damned by your pride and your usurpation.

This is one (of many) aspects of being Christian I find personally difficult. Anger at injustice, hatred of the dishonest and the evil, putting paid all debts of honor, revenge -- those are natural reactions to me. Kicking ass first, taking names later. That's a way of life. The wrong way, but it appeals to men and women everywhere, because they all want to be God.

As to turning the other cheek, as with most of the parables of Jesus, He seems to me to be talking to us at a level much deeper than we seem to prefer. To me, He was talking about our reaction to injustice. Only God can (and will, eventually) forge good out of evil. Man cannot. He also told His disciples that they should render unto Caesar what was Caesar's, and He told them to obey man's law. As Christians, they should not hate, they should no longer "take revenge" on those who wrong them. They should, in fact, forgive them as they forgive themselves. I may do things and not like myself much for having done them, and I may have to suffer my penance(both spiritual and earthly) as a result. But I must forgive myself. Moreover, I must treat others in the same manner when they do the same. I do not have the option of hating them and still calling myself a Christian.

He never said that as members of a civil society with a constituted legal authority, that we, when authorized by that civil authority, should not lawfully punish those who've broken the law as long as we do so in accordance with the law. Forgiveness is our action with respect to the attitude we choose to have toward another. It doesn't necessarily restrain other appropriate actions we must take against a wrongdoer as human beings living in a civil society.

I've heard before the argument that forgiveness can come only with repentance. It makes logical sense if you equate forgiveness with restoring your relationship with the transgressor to the same place as it existed before he committed his wrongful acts. I don't. As a Christian, I don't find that qualifier to be persuasive, and, as a practical man who's spent his life as an advocate for sometimes less-than-sincere human beings, I realize that I have no way of judging whether a man's professed repentance is or is not sincere. I can't judge that, only God can. Therefore, I'm left with the task of doing the only thing that I can do with any certainty: forgiving the transgressor. I may also sue him in civil court, or turn him over to civil authorities for criminal punishment in accordance with man's laws, or cut off all contact with him for the good of my well-being and/or the well-being of others (my children, for instance). However, I can't hate him and I must forgive him.

Tough issues.

Tides by Sara Teasdale

Love in my heart was a fresh tide flowing
Where the starlike sea gulls soar;
The sun was keen and the foam was blowing
High on the rocky shore.

But now in the dusk the tide is turning,
Lower the sea gulls soar,
And the waves that rose in resistless yearning
Are broken forevermore.

Stones taught me to fly
Love taught me to lie
Life taught me to die
So it's not hard to fall
When you float like a cannonball

A Night At The Movies With Villeneuve and Heidegger

2023-09-22T12:54:00.006-07:00

It's not often that movie reviewers refer to Martin Heidegger and concepts such as "being-towards-death," but this critic managed to reach across the movie aisle and "get serious." I thought of this review last night when I, again, watched Denis Villeneuve's masterpiece "Arrival." Rather than summarize or riff on the review, just read it and give it the reflection you think it merits. I gave it more than a few minutes, but I'm slow on the uptake and getting slower by the week. "Arrival" makes great use of Max Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight."

Richter's music has featured prominently, and been used to great effect, in other movies and in recent streaming series, including The Leftovers and The Last of Us, and I encourage readers who are not familiar with him to seek out his work. I also liked a much different musical take on "Arrival" that uses a song by the group London Grammar. While it's a different genre, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. . The person who created the music video has some editing "chops." Or, perhaps, I'm just easily amused.

The Spirit Sings A Simple Song

2022-02-01T11:29:00.000-08:00

The intellect thinks. The body dances. And the spirit sings. A song, a simple song. When love and memory are overwhelming, and the soul, though crushed, takes flight, it does so in a simple song.
Mark Helprin, "A Soldier of the Great War"

The Light Shines In The Darkness, And The Darkness Has Not Overcome It

2021-03-16T11:42:00.000-07:00

I have seen fine religious communities that are faithful and fervent. They remind of the Christians who, in the twilight years of the Roman Empire, kept watch over the flickering flame of civilization. I want to encourage them. I want to tell them: your mission is not to save a dying world. No civilization has the promises of eternal life. Your mission is to live out with fidelity and without compromise the faith you received from Christ. In that way, even without realizing it, you will save the heritage of many centuries of faith. Do not be afraid because of your small numbers! It is not a matter of winning elections or influencing opinions. It is a matter of living the Gospel. Faith is a fire. A person himself must be on fire in order to transmit it. Watch over this sacred fire!
-Robert Cardinal Sarah, "The Day Is Now Far Spent"

Pray more; pray harder; pray well.

What It Is And Is Not

2021-01-11T13:51:00.001-08:00

If anyone says, "I love God," but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. This is the commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.
--1 John 4:20-21

Hard cheese in a time of polarization and atomization, especially for those who've decided to render unto Caesar what is God's. Then again, as the late philosopher, Fr. James V. Schall, asserted, "We are living in a time where the logic of disorder is at work, rejecting systematically the logic of being a human being." Father Schall was also well-known for asserting that it is important for a philosopher "to say of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not." John, the "beloved apostle," declares what Christian love is and what it is not. If you don't like that, fine. Just don't call yourself a "Christian," because you're not.

As I write this, I'm gazing in a mirror, not as Narcissus would, but as St. Paul might have.

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."
--G.K. Chesterton

The Black Dog Held At Bay

2021-01-06T19:16:00.000-08:00

We Christians, like all other children of planet earth, are born into a reality that will necessarily incorporate grief and lamentation. We accept this actuality and reject any explanation that says our sorrowing is a waste or based on illusion. To unlock the meaning of our ordeals, we climb a hill where God-become-human dies in agony. After that culminating event, everything else in the world's history has a new illumination--a light born out of the darkness of Calvary. We see the awesome spectacle of a God in utmost need, struggling in our pain. St. Therese [of Lisieux] describes the face of Jesus as "luminous...in the midst of wounds and tears" (Letters, Lt 95, p.580).

The primal sin was accepting the serpent's promise, "You will be like gods, knowing good and evil" (Gen 3:5). And from that human decision came suffering and death. Who would have conceived of a divine response to this original betrayal whereby God would embrace the very penalty imposed upon sin: suffering and death? The Psalms of the Hebrew Bible sing over and over of God's abundant kindness, of God's steadfast love. Yet we Christians sing of a mercy that not only pours out compassion but enters into the experience of our desolation. We have an infinite God who has willed to feel our limitations, even our small ones.

Jesus does not explain human existence from afar. He allowed Himself to be restrained by the boundaries of the humanity He shares with us. But in so doing, He transforms those very limitations and endows them with power.

He looks at us in whatever lameness is holding us back from moving forward with Him. His words sound in our ears. "Get up and walk" (Mt 9:5). With His power energizing us, we know the path before us this very day-yes, with all its difficulties--leads to eternal life.

---Sister Margaret Dorgan DCM, "The Message of Jesus About Human Pain"

If a non-believer prefers a more secular perspective, perhaps the following passage by Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport, from the preface to Viktor Frankl's book, "Man's Search for Meaning," will help him or her.

[T]o live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in the suffering and the dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is. Each must find out for himself, and must accept the responsibility that his answer prescribes. If he succeeds he will continue to grow in spite of all indignities.

Cold comfort to many of us. To the rest, a warm hearth on a bitterly cold night.

Too Many Different Needs To Satisfy

2021-01-05T11:07:00.001-08:00

I Knew A Woman
---by Theodore Roethke

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,

When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;

Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:

The shapes a bright container can contain!

Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,

Or English poets who grew up on Greek

(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,

She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;

She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;

I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;

She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,

Coming behind her for her pretty sake

(But what prodigious mowing we did make).

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:

Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;

She played it quick, she played it light and loose;

My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;

Her several parts could keep a pure repose,

Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose

(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:

I’m martyr to a motion not my own;

What’s freedom for? To know eternity.

I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.

But who would count eternity in days?

These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:

(I measure time by how a body sways).

Waiting For A Shouting Light

2021-01-04T14:51:00.001-08:00

AVE MARIA, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

Winter's Night
--Thomas Merton

When, in the dark, the frost cracks on the window
The children awaken, and whisper.
One says the moonlight grated like a skate
Across the freezing river.
Another hears the starlight breaking like a knifeblade
Upon the silent, steelbright pond.
They say the trees are stiller than the frozen water
From waiting for a shouting light, a heavenly message.

Yet it is far from Christmas, when a star
Sang in the pane, as brittle as their innocence!
For now the light of early Lent
Glitters upon the icy step -
"We have wept letters to our patron saints,
(The children say) yet slept before they ended."

Oh, is there in this night no sound of strings, of singers!
None coming from the wedding, no, nor
Bridegroom's messenger?
(The sleepy virgins stir, and trim their lamps.)

The moonlight rings upon the ice as sudden as a
footstep;
Starlight clinks upon the dooryard stone, too like a
latch,
And the children are again, awake,
and all call out in whispers to their guardian angels.

Sit Tempus

2020-12-22T14:51:00.002-08:00

The hymn "Ubi Caritas" dates from the late Eighth Century A.D., and is traditionally sung in the Western Church as one of the antiphons during the washing of the feet on Maundy Thursday of Easter Week. Here is a nice version of the traditional hymn.

The lyrics are as follows:

Latin text		English translation
Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor. Exsultemus, et in ipso jucundemur. Timeamus, et amemus Deum vivum. Et ex corde diligamus nos sincero. Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. Simul ergo cum in unum congregamur: Ne nos mente dividamur, caveamus. Cessent iurgia maligna, cessent lites. Et in medio nostri sit Christus Deus. Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. Simul quoque cum beatis videamus, Glorianter vultum tuum, Christe Deus: Gaudium quod est immensum, atque probum, Saecula per infinita saeculorum. Amen.		Where charity and love are, there God is. The love of Christ has gathered us into one. Let us exult, and in Him be joyful. Let us fear and let us love the living God. And from a sincere heart let us love each other (and Him). Where charity and love are, there God is. Therefore, whensoever we are gathered as one: Lest we in mind be divided, let us beware. Let cease malicious quarrels, let strife give way. And in the midst of us be Christ our God. Where charity and love are, there God is. Together also with the blessed may we see, Gloriously, Thy countenance, O Christ our God: A joy which is immense, and also approved: Through infinite ages of ages. Amen.

Latin text

English translation

Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.

Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor.

Exsultemus, et in ipso jucundemur.

Timeamus, et amemus Deum vivum.

Et ex corde diligamus nos sincero.

Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.

Simul ergo cum in unum congregamur:

Ne nos mente dividamur, caveamus.

Cessent iurgia maligna, cessent lites.

Et in medio nostri sit Christus Deus.

Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.

Simul quoque cum beatis videamus,

Glorianter vultum tuum, Christe Deus:

Gaudium quod est immensum, atque probum,

Saecula per infinita saeculorum. Amen.

Where charity and love are, there God is.

The love of Christ has gathered us into one.

Let us exult, and in Him be joyful.

Let us fear and let us love the living God.

And from a sincere heart let us love each other (and Him).

Where charity and love are, there God is.

Therefore, whensoever we are gathered as one:

Lest we in mind be divided, let us beware.

Let cease malicious quarrels, let strife give way.

And in the midst of us be Christ our God.

Where charity and love are, there God is.

Together also with the blessed may we see,

Gloriously, Thy countenance, O Christ our God:

A joy which is immense, and also approved:

Through infinite ages of ages. Amen.

A few contemporary composers have rearranged the hymn or based longer works on the theme of the hymn. Three of my favorite contemporary works on this theme are by Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo, a contemporary chorale and symphonic composer whose various compositions often "strike a chord" within me (pun intended). The following are versions of Gjeilo's "Ubi Caritas" and "Ubi Caritas II" (which he has stated are, to his mind, "bookends," meaning that they work as stand alone pieces or performed together in order), the first sung by the exquisite British a cappella group Voces8, and the second performed by the Central Washington University Chamber Choir, with the composer accompanying the choir with an improvised piano part. While choirs also perform the second piece without a piano accompaniment, I usually think that it's interesting to see the composer of a piece perform it. I hope that readers enjoy these versions as much as I do. The advertisements are annoying, but a small price of admission, I think.

As much as I love versions I and II, I most love Gjeilo's third variation on this theme, entitled "Sacred Heart (Ubi Caritas III)." The following version is sung by the Dutch professional chamber choir Cantatrix, with orchestral accompaniment. The pictures that are featured in the video are well-suited to the music. As we approach Christmas day, I hope those of you whose hearts are open to it are touched to some degree by the beauty of this music.

Sit tempus (Blessed be the moment).

The Cult Of The Shadow

2020-12-14T14:50:00.000-08:00

God leaves us free to be whatever we like. We can be ourselves or not, as we please. We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours. We may wear now one mask and now another, and never, if we so desire, appear with our own true face. But we cannot make these choices with impunity.

Causes have effects, and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them. If we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that truth eludes us when we finally come to need it!

Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny….

The seeds that are planted in my liberty at every moment, by God's will, are the seeds of my own identity, my own reality, my own happiness, my own sanctity….

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.

This is the person that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy.

My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God's will and God's love - outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.

We are not very good at recognising illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves - the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin. For most of the people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin.

All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered.

Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honour, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface…

[...]

We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real...and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists.
--Thomas Merton, "New Seeds of Contemplation"

I think that so many of us spend our lives in the cult of the shadow, wearing our masks and wondering why, even if others buy the facade, we--in our heart-of-hearts--do not. Come home to reality, before it's too late.

To High Places By Narrow Roads

2020-12-05T11:26:00.000-08:00

A hymn composed in 1841 by poet, actress, and hymn writer Sarah Flower Adams, Nearer My God to Thee was arranged about seven or eight years ago by a Mormon named James Stevens, the then-artisitc director of a men's acapella vocal group at Brigham Young University, BYU Vocal Point. Stevens added a chorus of Latin background vocals, using the Vulgate, or Ecclesiastical, Latin pronunciation, the pronunciation used in the Catholic Church liturgy and in modern spoken Latin. It's closer in sound to modern Italian than to classical Latin. For example, in the line "Caelitus Mihi Viries," "Caelitus" is pronounced "Chaelitus" rather than "Kaelitus," and "Viries" as "Viries" rather than "Wieries." That might sound like a difference only a nerd could love, and perhaps that's correct. On the other hand, it displays an in-depth knowledge of a faith not his own that the marks the composer (to me, at least) as a person both learned and interesting.

In this season of Advent, I'll let anyone who's interested surrender to an unexpected arrangement of a 19th Century hymn, one both modern and yet, in many ways, classic.

The English translation of the Latin lyrics: "At the moment of death/My strength is from heaven/God helping, nothing should be feared/Forever/Direct us, O Lord/To high places by narrow roads/Such is the path to the stars/Ever upward."

This particular video has been viewed (to date) over 28 million times. I guess even the non-religious appreciate the very human yearning for the transcendent, at least when it's expressed so well.

Sell Your Cleverness and Buy Bewilderment

2020-11-19T11:44:00.000-08:00

And yet, I still struggle. Lord I believe, help my unbelief. (Mark 9:24). Faith does not give you the kind of certitude that you have when you learn something from a book. Why do I confess Christ, but wrestle to trust Him, and to obey Him? Why do I know that He is who He says He is, yet I do not love Him with all my heart, and I do not do as He commanded, and love my neighbor as myself? Why could those men of the High Middle Ages raise a matchless cathedral for the love of God, but I can’t even raise myself up out of bed early to pray as I should?

I have no answer, other than that dying to oneself takes a lifetime.
---Rod Dreher, "The Rose Window and the Labyrinth"

The great fault of our age (as of every age, from my reading of history) is pride. A lack of humility poisons everything, across all segments of society. Our political arena alone is so bereft of humility that any admission of human doubt or weakness is a death sentence.

Here's a news flash: we're all full of crap. Every one of us. Those most self-assured are, most assuredly, the most full of it, but even the few saints among us, while they might have less than the rest of us, are not completely spic and span. One critical difference between a saint and "a man in full," however, is that the saint will recognize and confess that fact.

Rod's right, I think. Dying to oneself does, indeed, take a lifetime. I wish I'd understood this sooner in life. I wish more people, particularly those who propose to lead us, understood this now.

On The Cusp Of The Rough Voiced Future

2020-11-13T19:36:00.004-08:00

Autumn Road

I follow the clean-edged macadam north

To catch the train. The maples lining both
Sides hang with leaves turned soft but brilliant reds,
Oranges, and umbers that will make their beds
Soon in the unmown grass that lines my street,
And crumble at the weight of passing feet.
The people who just moved in three doors down
Have ringed their banisters in black and brown
And hung a skeletal child from a swing,
Its eyeless stare a dark and menacing
Reminder to pray for the dead and of those
Horrors the coming darkness may disclose.
We haven’t met the tenants yet, and don’t
Want to. A glance into their yard has sown
Nightmares already in my children’s sleep,
Shaking them teared and screaming from its deep.
We’ve heard them crush their beer cans, out to smoke
Late at night, and guffaw at some crude joke.
A few doors farther on, the lawn is spiked
With signs for candidates I’ve long disliked.
Just seeing their names induces in me fear
Less supernatural but much more near
At hand than those that haunt the children’s dreams.
But then, I see that new foundations, beams
Of smooth pine pitched high in the sun, where two
New homes are rising, promise something new;
And hear St. Monica’s bronze bells in her tower
Govern our hillside as they toll the hour,
Chastening us that though our time seem dire,
Much has endured through beating rains and fire,
And good can still be made in this dark season.
I read a book last week that says our reason
No longer sees the world as from God’s eyes;
Where the ancient mind saw signs, ours now denies
To it all but the most material meaning.
I’m not so sure. It seems that thoughts are leaning
Up against every fence post, and the earth,
Stared at, stares back and quietly brings to birth
Between us words, morals, and promises
Which we might overlook but can’t dismiss.
I worry, as a father, that the year
Ahead will bear out omens all too clear
Such that my children, grown, will only know
The clash of good and evil’s fiery glow.
I stop to let the speeding traffic pass.
The gutter’s tiled with tins and broken glass.
Across the way, the Veteran’s Memorial
With polished granite, stirring flags, and aureole
Of silver guards the entrance to the station.
Its plaque says, These gave their lives for our nation.
I wait, clutching my ticket in my hand,
For what the rough voiced future will demand.

—James Matthew Wilson

Ships

2020-11-12T14:40:00.000-08:00

"The Ship"
---Bishop Brent

What is dying
I am standing on the seashore, a ship sails in the morning breeze and starts for the ocean.
She is an object of beauty and I stand watching her till at last she fades on the horizon and someone at my side says: "She is gone."
Gone!
Where
Gone from my sight that is all.
She is just as large in the masts, hull and spars as she was when I saw her, and just as able to bear her load of living freight to its destination.
The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me, not in her, and just at the moment when someone at my side says,
"She is gone"
there are others who are watching her coming, and other voices take up a glad shout:
"There she comes!"
and that is dying.

Several years before she died, my mother told me that she stopped believing in the existence of God the day my brother Jeff died in July 1989. I told her that was the day that I started to seek again the faith in which I was raised, though I didn't conceive of the search in that way at that time, and though it took me 16 more years to rediscover it.

"Well," she stated, "I think it's all a myth. You live and then you die and that's the end."

"I'll pray for you," I replied, tenderly, and I meant it.

She laughed.

Each of us grapples with the age-old questions in his or her own way. I am convinced by now, especially after recent experiences, that none of us can accurately get inside another person's head and see the world through their eyes, no matter how close we think we might be to them, and no matter how much we think we share in common. Even those of us who share the same DNA and the same close family history are often as different as if we had been raised by different tribes. All we can do is try to explain the world as we see it and hope that what we say strikes a common chord in others, or that others can, by sharing their perceptions with us, shape and inform our perceptions in positive ways.

By the way, I have honored the immediately preceding paragraph in the breach as often, or perhaps more often, than I have in the observance. It doesn't lessen its truth, if it has any.

As to death, I've come to the conclusion that if there is no ultimate justice, if the wicked are not punished and the righteous are not justified, then life is simply a matter of personal opinion and, objectively, ultimately meaningless. I don't want to get into an existential debate with anyone, I'm merely communicating how I personally perceive life and death. I choose to believe that my brothers Jeff and Dan, my sister Kathy (Kate, as she named herself), my mother Marjorie, and my father Joseph, exist in some conscious form in some other realm where truth, beauty, and the good are fully realized. If I didn't believe that, not only could I not proceed to perform the mundane tasks that I must perform today, I would be compelled to take a flamethrower and meet out mankind's notion of justice here and now.

A former friend, who is a close friend of a brilliant neuroscientist, used to tell me that the neuroscientist said that human beings' brains were hard-wired to desire something more than they had, which "evolution" had programmed into the brain as a survival mechanism. It gives us our motivation to plan and anticipate the future. She offered this as an explanation for human beings' seemingly constant search for something more from existence than what they experience with their five senses, and as an alternative to the existence of God. I asked her, assuming that her friend was correct, who or what had created a process of evolution that includes rules and possible outcomes that led to the ultimate result that human beings have the need to anticipate the future through a feeling of discontent as means of survival, but that Rhesus Monkeys do not? Who is the "programmer"? Frankly, she didn't know and didn't care.

Well, I do care.

My belief is close to what a whip-smart (and since-fallen) Franciscan once asserted to me: that we are discontented because we are not made for this Earth. We are all pilgrims, marooned in the land of the enemy, making our way to what we hope will be our true home. It's a common view, not at all original, and I think that makes it not one iota less "true" than my former friend's friend's view that it's all random atoms colliding and reacting in accordance with laws that were created by random chance or an impersonal force.

To me, we're all ships sailing on often storm-tossed seas, struggling to stay afloat until we reach home. There, we'll find our true safe harbor. Until then, we'll never be calm, never at rest, never at peace. In this life, our ships cannot rest at harbor because this world does not provide one, although many of us believe that our faith provides passage to one in the next life. In that next life, I pray that I'll sail with those I once loved and love still, on an ocean more glorious than the mind of man could even hope to imagine.

Je Regrette Tout

2020-11-10T12:13:00.000-08:00

Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.
--Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness"

I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
--From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot

Begin Again

2020-11-10T09:00:00.006-08:00

Every five-to-ten years, I remake this blog, each time winnowing the readership numbers.

Once more, into the breach. Those few of you who make their way (or way back) here, please stay, just a little bit longer.