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February 4, 2007
All Is Well
I apologize.
I've been so frantic about friends that I've not posted myself. After checking with all and sundry in my region, I find that everyone has reported in okay. In Orlando we were hardly touched at all--as is common with these kinds of things. The main event took place about thirty or forty miles north of the city proper near an area called The Villages.
Thanks to all who have written. Prayers are solicited for those who did not fare so well.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 2:18 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 7, 2007
News You Can (But Probably Don't Want to) Use
I am amused--a clipping from a friend:
Answers to Silly Questions That Probably No One Asked
"In a remarkable feat, three amateur explorers have stumbled upon more than 100 fossilised eggs of dinosaurs in Madhya Pradesh," reports the Hindustan Times. Stories like this are always fun because they remind us of our boyhood enthusiasm for dinosaurs.
We also got a kick out of this quote from one of the explorers, Vishal Verma: "The eggs are from upper cretaceous era when the dinosaurs were yet to be extinct."
We wonder what question the reporter asked Verma to elicit this answer. So, were the dinosaurs already extinct when they laid these eggs? [FPJs comment]
Thanks FPJ.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 3:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 8, 2007
Vicki Carr Spirituality
Don't blame me, I can't help where inspiration comes from.
It Must Be Him
I tell myself what's done is done
I tell myself don't be a fool
Play the field have a lot of fun
It's easy when you play it cool
I tell myself don't be a chump
Who cares let him stay away
That's when the phone rings
And I jump
And as I grab the phone I pray
Let it please be him
Oh dear God
It must be him
It must be him
Or I shall die
Or I shall die
Oh hello, hello,
My dear God, it must be him
But it's not him and then I die
That's when I die
After a while
I'm myself again
I pick the pieces off the floor
Put my heart on the shelf again
He'll never hurt me anymore
I'm not a puppet on a string
I'll find somebody else someday
Thats when the phone rings
And once again I start to pray
Let it please be him
Oh, dear God,
It must be him
It must be him
Or I shall die
Or I shall die
Oh, hello, hello, my dear God
It must be him
But it's not him
And then I die
That's when I die
Let it please be him
My dear God, it must be him
Or I shall die
Or I shall die
In a short, melodramatic song we have the summary of the spiritual life of most lukewarm Christians. Or at least how it might look from outside and how it sometimes must seem to God that we react.
I sit and wait for God, praying for intervention, enlightenment, help. I spend my time doing for myself, think my own thoughts and going my own way and telling myself that I can do it alone, completely alone.
Then something happens. Great or little, good or bad, the telephone rings and I rush to it completely devoted now to the thought that this is God's communication to me. He's there, he's calling, finally I'll hear what I've wanted to hear all this time.
And no, it isn't Him, and I'm let down. I die.
If so, I die in ignorance. It's always Him. Always. In every caress of the breeze, in the noise of children playing, in the traffic in the streets, in the snow in the driveway. Not one thing happens that He did not cause to happen. And every day we meet Him in the persons of those around us. Every day.
Nothing happens without His consent, without His will. What we see as catastrophic is His will for the moment and we must recall that "all things work for the good of those who are called to His purpose."
When the telephone rings, no matter who is on the other end, it is Him. There is a task, there is a job, there is a need to fulfill. I just need to learn to hear Him on the other end.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 7:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Miramar
Naguib Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel prize in Literature in 1988. He was stabbed by Islamic extremists after a casual remark about his "blasphemous novel" being the stimulus to Salman Rushdie for his deplorable Satanic Verses. He die in August of last year.
Miramar is a simple story of a small group of people who live in the Pension Miramar in Alexandria. It is a theme in four voices--each one a resident at the pension. The story centers around the attractions, distractions, or interest provided by a young serving girl working at the pension who has left her home and property after she had been threatened with being married off to a man four times her age.
I haven't processed the entire novel--there is much in it about Egyptian politics--subtleties I'm sure I don't understand at all. But the heart of the story is painfully human--lust and desire and how these shape lives, opinions and viewpoints.
Short, perhaps melodramatic, the novel has overtones of John Forsyth and others of his ilk in its attempt to portray the people of a time and place as accurately as possible. Mahfouz has a deft hand with characterization and he has an ability to move quickly into the heart of a character or situation.
Miramar probably isn't a great book, but it is a good enough book to encourage me to read more. And I suppose that's the finest recommendation an author can receive.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Warmth of Joyce Carol Oates
I don't much care for many of the works of Joyce Carol Oates, although some stand out brilliantly against her vast opus; however, I have always liked the sense of the person I received when reading Joyce Carol Oates. An example:
from The Faith of a Writer
Joyce Carol OatesWhat advice can an older writer presume to offer a younger? Only what he or she might wish to have been told years ago. Don't be discouraged! Don't cast sidelong glances and compare yourself to others among your peers! (Writing is not a race. No one really "wins." The satisfaction is in the effort, and rarely in the consequent rewards, if there are any.) And again, write your heart out.
Read widely and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read. (As Hamlet remarks, "I know not 'should.' ") Immerse yourself in a writer you love, and read everything he or she has written, including the very earliest work. Especially the very earliest work. Before the great writer became great, or even good, he/she was groping for a way, fumbling to acquire a voice, perhaps just like you.
What good common-sense. What profound human sympathy. It is this strain and these things that I love when I find them in Oates's writing. They lift me up as I read them and set me down gently, renewed and ready to go on again.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:30 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
A Personal Insight that Resonates
from The Faith of a Write
Joyce Carol OatesI'm a writer absolutely mesmerized by places; much of my writing is a way of assuaging homesickness, and the settings my characters inhabit are as crucial to me as the characters themselves.
Homesickness. Almost all of what we do is a way of assuaging homesickness, of trying to forget for a moment that we are not aware of the presence of the One who loves us. We anaesthetize ourselves against the pain of being far from home, lonely, and cold in a world that, while beautiful, offers cold comfort in comparison to being with the One who loves us deeply and completely.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 12:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Wrathful and the Lustful
In his classic poem about the supernatural abodes, Dante divided the sins into two categories of defects (although he might not have stated it this way): the defect of absence and the defect of excess. Those suffering from the defect of excess were punished much more lightly than those suffering from the defect of absence. In a surprising turn, the Lustful received the lightest of punishments, being whirled around perpetually to simulate in the afterlife the wavering that dominated their lives of lust.
It occurs to me that meditation upon Hell is not necessarily incumbent upon everyone, and is likely to be detrimental to some people. The threat of Hell is for me a far less enticing inducement than the joy of being in the presence of the Lord. I am among the many whose sins tend to be those of excess--lust, gluttony, avarice. To me the threat of Hell is one of those things that makes me think of God as a petty accountant, dishing out eternal damnation because I ogled Mildred Smythe-Hyde at the beach. I'm not saying it won't happen, merely that it has no internal resonance. I am not interested in Hell, and I would expect that those of us who are prone to excess might feel similarly.
Contrariwise, those who are prone to the defects of absence might find the thought of Hell quite salutary. Love cannot induce them to His end, so perhaps threat of powerlessness and emptiness in the afterlife will bring them around.
So, I find in my meditations and thoughts about God, Hell simply never enters the equation. The arrow of desire quickens and points to the delights of love as humans know them and identifies this with the source of love. And then we see Bernini's famous representation of the Transverberation of St. Teresa of Avila, and we begin to understand that what we know of love and transcendence here on Earth pales in the light of what lies beyond.
The wrathful tend not to have this access, love and its delights are of secondary interest. Setting things to rights and making things move the way they ought is much more at the core.
There is much to be gained from the meditation on the four last things, however, there is even more to be gained from sitting in the presence of Jesus and not worrying about things we cannot possibly understand anyway. For some one path will be better, for others, the opposite path. And for one person at different times, the two paths may serve to enrich the walk with God. The important point is to not let what we ought to think get in the way of spending time with God. If your reflection is on the majesty of the Sand Hill Crane and that brings you into His presence, then by all mans, reflect upon the crane. On the other hand if your joy comes from knowing that there is justice, rightness, and right order in the world beyond, reflect upon the four last things.
Most importantly, do what brings you to God regularly, predictably, inevitably. Shy away from what distracts you from His love.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 3:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
How to Identify Envy
The truly envious person will delight as much or more in your inability to have and enjoy something as in his or her ability to have and enjoy it.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 3:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 9, 2007
Pan-atheism
from Teaching a Stone to Talk
Annie Dillard, cited in The Language of God
Francis S. Collins.We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism. . . is is difficult to undo our own damage and to recall t our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it. We are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. Did the wind used to cry and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from the lifeless things of the earth, and living things say very little to very few. . . . And yet, it could be that wherever there is motion there is noise, as when a whale breaches and smacks the water, and wherever there is stillness there is the small, still voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song and dance, the show we drove from town. . . . What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Aren't they both saying: Hello?
We explore the unknown to find something that is not us while we ignore what has been made known that plainly, unequivocally shows it. We are an amazingly perverse people.
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Bishop Challoner's PDF
Enjoy at will.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 1:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Via Speculative Catholic
Butler's Lives of the Saints--The first three months of the year.
Soon to be followed by the other volumes, one hopes.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 3:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack