Deep Furrows

Twitter @Freder1ck (note the number 1 instead of the letter i)./

2009-11-07T10:57:00.001-06:00

Co-Bearers of Apostolic Life and Its Universal Task

2009-10-25T16:42:00.004-05:00

Nuns and religious sisters have been in the news lately, due to a visitation of religious congregations taking place in the United States. Unfortunately, most accounts reduce the reality of religious life to institutional service, and/or a kind of professional religious lifestyle (a sort of second-class clergy). The call of the Second Vatican Council to return to the historical roots of religious life and to renew the memory of the founders of religious life seems mostly to have been forgotten. In contrast, Joseph Ratzinger reminds us of this history.

"An element that, while by no means absent from the movements, can easily be overlooked, now comes powerfully to the fore here: the apostolic movement of the nineteenth century was above all a female movement, in which there was a strong emphasis on caritas, on care for the suffering and the poor-we know what the new female communities meant and continue to mean for the hospitals and for the care of the needy-and a central emphasis on schools and education. Thus, the whole gamut of service of the gospel was present in the combination of teaching, education, and love. When we look back from the nineteenth century, we see that women always played an important role in the apostolic movements. Think of the bold women of the sixteenth century like Mary Ward or, on the other hand, Teresa of Avila, of female figures of the Middle Ages like Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena, of the women in the circle of Saint Boniface, of the sisters of the Church Fathers and, finally, of the women in the letters of Paul and in the circle around Jesus. The women were never bishops or priests, but they were co-bearers of apostolic life and its universal task."
The Theological Locus of Ecclesial Movements

In his 1998 address to the gathering of movements in Rome, Joseph Ratzinger, clarified the essential nature not just of ecclesial movements, but also of their precursors in monasticism. The essential task of religious orders, the various kinds of monks, nuns, brothers, sisters, and movements of the faithful is to be an apostolic ferment among the local Churches, to make the memory of the apostles present in the parishes and dioceses of the Church.

Son of the Furrows

2009-10-25T13:52:00.003-05:00

Bartholomew (Greek: Βαρθολομαίος, transliterated "Bartholomaios") comes from the Aramaic bar-Tôlmay, meaning son of Tolmay (Ptolemy) or son of the furrows (perhaps a ploughman). Based on this meaning, many have assumed it was not a given name, but a family name. Wikipedia

The Son of David meets the Son of the Furrows

A Kind of a 'Novel'

2009-10-17T13:07:00.003-05:00

Is It Possible to Live This Way? An Unusual Approach to Christian Existence.

The general introduction to this series makes the claim that "it is a kind of 'novel.'" I would note that this book is similar to a novel that is made entirely of dialogue, maybe something by Bernanos. By way of contrast, this is not a book of analytical theology or a classic of Western spirituality like The Cloud of Unknowing. It is not a book that lays out a AAA TripTik for the perfect life. It presents no schema of rungs on Jacob's ladder or rooms in a castle or petals on the Mystical Rose. Instead, it's like a mystery novel that begins with a certain corpus delecti. The initial transgression in this case is an exceptional man who made a provovative claim. Like some stories of Sherlock Holmes, this series opens with a discussion of reason and method.

How does one read a novel: skipping ahead to the resolution? No, but by savoring the words and the discoveries as they unfold. By risking one's own humanity in the narrative and identifying with the human problems of the protagonists.

A Novel?

2009-10-17T10:13:00.004-05:00

"This is an unusual book. It is a kind of 'novel,' as those who first read the proofs noted. In this work the discovery of life as 'vocation' comes about not through deduction but through the evidence of an experience lived according to reason, within the same breadth as Mystery.
[....]
The book can be conceived as an exemplary narrative where spontaneity, loyalty, and seriousness in the consideration of one's own existence was able to ascribe a suggestiveness to something that most people would censure or disdain because of an abstract fear."
Excerpt from "By Way of Introduction" from the series: Is It Possible to Live Like This: An Unusual Approach to Christian Experience.

How is this series of books a novel? What kind of novel is it like? In what ways does one approach a novel differently than one would read a work of theology or a classic of Western spirituality?

Instead, There is No Poetry without Judgment

2009-10-14T20:57:00.002-05:00

"it seems that having to judge beautiful things, intense things, ruins the enchantment of what we’re living; to some degree it takes the poetry out of experience, ruins it." Experience: The Instrument for a Human Journey.

Wonder or Contempt?

2009-10-12T22:06:00.003-05:00

When I was 20, I was amazed at this dramatic escalator to the underworld, indeed the whole wonder of taking the Metro. As I looked at the faces around me, I could see that most wore a facade of .... what? apathy? Perhaps it was more like contempt. I thought about this moment as I drove to work this morning. As I was remembering this wonder I felt as a 20 year old, I realized the drama of my own commute: hurtling back and forth to work every day propelled by gasoline - energy stored millions of years ago by lush plant life that fossilized. For me to live my life now, something had to happen millions of years ago.

When I was 20, it seemed to me that if one made that trip through the Metro every day for 20 years it would change them. I understand a bit more what that change is, however. Every day one becomes more contemptuous of everything; or every day one surrenders a bit more to the wonder of everything. When I was 20 it seemed unforgivable for folks not to be moved at such a sight; now, I see that only a miracle can wrench us from this contempt. But it's a miracle that can happen everyday if you ask for it, and if you surrender to what is.

Escalators at Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan Metro station. Photographed by Ben Schumin on October 26, 2003. The photo is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Nabbed from Wikipedia.

Born on the Feast of Saint Francis

2009-10-10T03:47:00.001-05:00

Saint Francis Borgia, SJ

Today's saint grew up in an important family in 16th-century Spain, serving in the imperial court and quickly advancing in his career. But a series of events—including the death of his beloved wife—made Francis Borgia rethink his priorities. He gave up public life, gave away his possessions and joined the new and little-known Society of Jesus.

Religious life proved to be the right choice. He felt drawn to spend time in seclusion and prayer, but his administrative talents also made him a natural for other tasks. He helped in the establishment of what is now the Gregorian University in Rome. Not long after his ordination he served as political and spiritual adviser to the emperor. In Spain, he founded a dozen colleges.

At 55, Francis was elected head of the Jesuits. He focused on the growth of the Society of Jesus, the spiritual preparation of its new members and spreading the faith in many parts of Europe. He was responsible for the founding of Jesuit missions in Florida, Mexico and Peru.

Francis Borgia is often regarded as the second founder of the Jesuits. He died in 1572 and was canonized 100 years later.

Letterman fans stunned to discover that TV persona is consistent with personal life./

2009-10-03T09:56:00.000-05:00

Island of Stability

2009-09-28T22:37:00.001-05:00

"We search for the island of stability because, like Mount Everest, it is there. But, as with Everest, there is profound emotion, too, infusing the scientific search to test a hypothesis. The quest for the magic island shows us that science is far from being coldness and calculation, as many people imagine, but is shot through with passion, longing and romance." -- Oliver Sacks

Anyone who gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ, amen, I say to you, will surely not lose his reward./

2009-09-27T17:12:00.000-05:00

Mark 9

"If you don't live the question, the response you propose is fake" Chris Bacich

2009-09-20T21:52:00.000-05:00

from Communio blog

Bridge of Stars

2009-09-18T23:32:00.001-05:00

Rentry Blues

2009-09-13T20:17:00.002-05:00

Just finished reading The Religious Sense, At the Origin of the Christian Claim, and Why the Church? My review of Balthasar: A Guide for the Perplexed was accepted by Traces magazine. I read Miguel Manara yesterday. I just pre-ordered Is It Possible 3. What to read now?

The face of Christ is reflected in the eyes of the company of sinners known as the Church./

2009-09-10T20:13:00.002-05:00

Sacrament is the Simplest Form of Prayer

2009-09-09T20:41:00.001-05:00

"Imagine a small agricultural community at the turn of the century where the need for social justice has just begun to make itself felt. A 'leader' identifies some grievances against the landowner, his employer, and at a certain point, he is delegated to go to the town and confront the boss. None of the workers has ever been to what must have seemed a great metropolis and, after putting on a show of euphoria at the very idea in front of his mates, who would have given him a hearty and noisy send-off, the delegate feels apprehension creeping over him on his journey. He arrives at a town, and almost forces himself to begin his odyssey and look for the employer's address. He gets lost once, twice, three times before he at last finds the boss's office. He asks to see him and there he stands, before the boss. But all the arguments he has so painstakingly formulated with his workmates cloud over in his mind. He knows that he is there for a good reason. He knows and personally espouses the whole cause. However, he cannot utter a word. So was all the effort — his and his workmates — just a waste of time? Of course not. His presence there, which was such a rare thing in the whole course of relations between that boss and his workers at that time, had not been futile even though he was unable to articulate what he had come to say. The presence of this man, fumbling, stuttering, standing there twiddling his hat, is still the act of asking. It is a presence which can yet be defined as 'asking,' and the request is not abstract." Why the Church? 197-198.

Slumdog Millionaire: knowledge is an event beyond abcd. Jamal understands because he stands-under those whose world is entertainment/trivia.

2009-09-08T21:33:00.000-05:00

2009-09-06T13:45:00.005-05:00

"All of the Protestant outcries against Catholic theology that are worthy of attention begin with a vivid sense of the centrality of the cross. [....] I would like to suggest that no Catholic theologian of the twentieth century took these criticisms more to heart than Hans Urs von Balthasar. And in doing so, he has bequeathed to the Church a fully robust and at the same time a fully Catholic theology of the cross that has within it all that Luther and Barth attempted to offer, without for all that falling into their occaisional — or in the case of Luther, not so occaisional — one-sidedness."
(Howsare, Balthasar: a Guide for the Perplexed, p 143-144).

As one who has read Balthasar since 1988, I highly recommend Rodney Howsare's clearly written, substantive exploration of the heart of Balthasar's thought. This book will be especially helpful to academics because it positions Balthasar relative to other figures like Karl Barth and Karl Rahner. Balthasar's relationship to Thomas Aquinas, Maurice Blondel, and Scholastic Thomism are also addressed as is his current role in Catholic and Protestant theology.

See "Balthasar and the Resurgence of Traditional Catholicism," an excerpt at the T&T Clark blog.

Balthasar: A Guide for the Perplexed by Rodney Howsare, T&T Clark, August 30, 2009.

Americans Confronting The Meeting in Rimini

2009-08-27T06:55:00.002-05:00

"On August 25, 2000 I invited two prominent American liberals to participate in the Meeting in an 'Encounter with American Liberalism.' The two were Peter Beinart, at the time the editor of The New Republic, America’s most respected magazine of American liberal thought, and university professor Peter Berkowitz who was working on a book on Christianity and American liberalism. Both Beinart and Berkowitz are Jews. Beinart accepted the invitation to describe their experience at the Meeting in an article for Traces in which he explained why he thought it was difficult to imagine an 'American Meeting.'

According to Beinart, the Meeting had three dimensions that in America were in fact experienced as incompatible. The Rimini Meeting was like a meeting of the “Christian Coalition,:” whose approach to faith and culture was defined by evangelical Protestantism. Rimini was also an uncompromising expression of Christian faith, but unlike evangelical Protestantism, this was not a defensive faith, but one apparently not afraid to be open to all authentic human experiences. As Berkowitz had told me, this was a Christianity not seen in America." (Msgr Albacete on The Meeting in Rimini, 2009)

The Pillars of Hercules!

2009-08-18T18:26:00.004-05:00

"Reality in its impact with the human heart draws out the dynamic that the Pillars of Hercules evoked in the heart of Ulysses and his companions, their faces taut with the desire for 'other." (Religious Sense, p134).

2009-08-09T09:56:00.002-05:00

"We tell in front of everybody who Christ is for us by the way we live the circumstances. Everyone can look at himself, can discover himself in action, because everyone has acted within these circumstances. We have all acted, we have all been challenged by these circumstances. We have all been obliged to come out into the open (and no one is spared) and we have said what life means for us, what it is we treasure more than anything else, above and beyond our intentions."
From Faith, the Method

Milan, Lombardi

2009-08-02T15:08:00.002-05:00

During vactions, I heard a remarkable presentation by Henry Artis on the life and art of Caravaggio. A key point was that Caravaggio's realism was rooted in the reforms of St. Charles Borromeo in Milan, Lombardi. I do see that Borromeo promoted the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, which introduce retreatants to finding God in all things. Milan has a rich tradition, and I would be interested to hear recommendations to books which would deepen my appreciation of this heritage...

Communion and Liberation, Msgr. Luigi Giussani

2009-08-01T16:33:00.007-05:00

Fr. Meinrad Miller: "How Communion and Liberation Moved Me"

Seven years ago this fall an event happened here at Benedictine College that would change my life. My college roommate, B.J. Adamson, had told me over the years about a Catholic movement he had discovered back in Denver: Communion and Liberation (CL). B.J. would often tell me about the method of the movement's dynamic founder, Monsignor Luigi Giussani (October 15, 1922-February 22, 2005), and of a friend of the movement here in the United States Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete. Cardinal Stafford, then the Archbishop of Denver, had spoken highly of CL.

Giussani: "Open Christianity"

Logos Journal Fall 2007.

I point the finger at myself for having yielded to stoic asceticism instead of Christianity. I charge myself with having placed 90 percent of my cards on the structures of human will, on the exercise of freedom and its feeble energies, and then simply sticking on a label with the words "Jesus Christ." What I should have done instead was to turn to the human and Christian conscience, to that Christ who is imprinted upon every Christian.

Zucchi: "Luigi Giussani, the church, and youth in the 1950s: a judgment born of an experience."

Logos Journal Fall 2007.

Thus for Giussani, everything began from that event, from meeting up with a few students, a phenomenon that he understood to be nestled in the great story of Christ's encounter with John and Andrew and Peter and Simon and the many disciples who followed. It was clear to Giussani that these high school students were not his to be "managed" but that God's Mystery had somehow entrusted their friendship to him. As he would put it in later years, "I belonged to those three teenagers, I did not belong to them but to the unity with them." It was this perception of the Church that allowed him to eschew any reductionist approach to the life of community. He understood that a movement had burst forth within him, that it was an application of what he had apprehended his whole life, starting from his family, and the teachings of all his professors in the seminary: "the existence of God, a true philosophy of the understanding of life, to cut to the chase, the Church. The synthetic word is the Church, to belong to the Church." (23)

Infatuation, Intemperance, and a Virtual Adventure

2009-05-02T17:04:00.004-05:00

For the last few weeks, I've been infatuated with the PC video game Fate. In this game, players test themselves in dungeon battles, collect gold and weapons which can be kept and sold, and buy things that change their abilities and appearance (and those of your pet).

My first thought about this infatuation was to quit playing, and that's how I've handled previous fits of intemperance. However, my wife (who brought the game into the house) recommended moderation instead. Taking a step back, I thought a bit about what was happening.

What I realized was that I'm attracted to the game. I also realized that intemperance is a reaction to attraction. In my past, I've had intemperate reactions to crushes, to novels, and to food. In reading novels, for example, I've thought that my voraciously reading for the end was motivated by fear of being manipulated or tricked by the author. In this latest reaction, I see that instead, intemperance is an attempt to eliminate desire by satiating it. What I fear is that the beauty will seduce me and I will lose myself.

But I have encountered something else for whose beauty conquers me, that is Jesus Christ. Defended and saved by this victorious desire, I can ask why I have this other desire, what is it given for?

It turns out that the game Fate is the latest expression of a desire that goes back to middle school, when I read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings - and to high school, when I played Dungeons and Dragons with friends and played Zork online on the school district's mainframe. I left Dungeons and Dragons behind when I saw that working on a role playing character takes as much energy and creativity as building a life in the world, and that being a dungeon master takes energy and creativity that could find a wider audience in writing fiction, for example. There is something in me that is attracted to the symbolically rich world of Fate, to the test of battle, and to rich virtual worlds. The desire is in me, and I suffer it with the certain hope that it is given to me for a greater purpose.

The other thing has been the way my wife and I and the younger kids have come together in playing this game. We all have an interest in it, and we work together and help each other play. As a father, I have to use everything that happens as an opportunity to help the kids learn about life. Even my intemperance, then, can become an opportunity for helping the kids learn how to face their own infatuations.

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In the above screenshot, you can see my character, Frederique the Glorious, now that I have retired him. To his right, you can see the pet (dog) Barquer changed into a unicorn. In his right hand, Phrederique holds his Elite Flaming Claymore sword. His left hand once held a black tower shield with resistance to fire, ice, and electrical damage. My 9-year-old son has taken over the descendent of this character and for his inheritence he chose the tower shield. After my last quest, I sold off everything except the equipment on his back - in a gesture reminiscent of Everyman (from the Medieval mystery play of the same name) saying farewell to strength, good health, and the other allies of life.

___

A review of Fate that captures the charm of the game.

2009-04-23T19:19:00.000-05:00

I've been playing Fate...