Flos Carmeli

A Gift from a Good

A Gift from a Good Friend

This Quiz:

I am truly passionate.

Find your soul type at kelly.moranweb.com.

Enjoy

Revolutionary War Books and Articles

Revolutionary War Books and Articles

From Fort Klock repository. These books and articles are a treasure trove. Another of my enthusiasms.

More by G.K.C. Although miscategorized

More by G.K.C.

Although miscategorized at Blackmask, G.K. Chesterton's A Miscellany of Men is now available there in electronic format. Those with PDAs, used Plucker, or download the mobipocket or iSilo (my preferred format) versions. Or convert the html with iSiloX (allows greater editing and formating beforehand, should you think to need it.)

Forewarned is Forearmed Hi all.

Forewarned is Forearmed

Hi all. My wife reports that my ISP is acting up at home--may be cyberspace, may be hardware. So there's an off-chance that I may not make it back on this weekend. Hope that is not the case, but if so--no worries. I'll be back eventually.

Peace to all.

The Selections Below

The Selections Below

I offer these poems humbly, knowing full well that they need a great deal of work. But hoping that by allowing them to breathe, the work necessary will become far more certain, more clear. Sometimes, they must be released from their spells of paper, reincarnated as it were, to be able to speak and show their flaws--and the flaws are great and many. But these children are the ones I allow out to play because they will play well with others and they can grow and change and become more functional members of poetic society. The others I cherish and care for, but do not expose to the outside world both for their benefit and the benefit of the world at large.

I'm Sure This Will Get a Sigh of Relief--Last Poem for the Day

Jesus Laughing

Do you suppose at Cana Jesus frowned
at all the guests? Scowled at all the requests
from host and hostess, mother and all? Droned
endlessly about Himself and suggested
ways each person could improve his life and
then stormed away like a prima donna
when they were far too drunk to understand
a word He said? Or do you think he laughed
and sang and wished the couple joy, and ate
and danced and showed all there how to live well?

Do you suppose he stood away, now quiet
distant and removed? Or did Jesus tell
a joke and talk to everyone?

© 2002 Steven Riddle

Elijah It took you

Elijah

It took you so long
to hear the still small
voice that had been speaking
to you from the beginning.

To travel through fire
and Earthquake
to face Ahab and worse yet
Jezebel, we know the
end of it.

When you stood before
the prophets of Ba'al
did doubt assail you?
Did you tremble
in the deep fear
of what if?

Yet you soaked that wood,
not once, nor twice
but three times,
letting it soak in--
a new lesson in trust.

You knew in your
marrow God could not
abandon those He
so loved.

Teach me.

© 2002 Steven Riddle

Chanterelles

Chanterelles

When I first learned of them
they were a form of poetry,
a small French song.

          Indeed, they are.

© 2002 Steven Riddle

Haiku al Fresco (since I can't be)

Haiku al Fresco (since I can't be)

These flags fluttering
like thick water over thin
rocks, speak with the wind.

A small miracle
heron and lizard in sun
side by side, at ease.

We write haiku to
be flowers, edelweiss on
less than alpine slopes.

© 2002 Steven Riddle

Breath of the Sea

Breath of the Sea

The hope I hang onto
as I sit here so distant
from anything natural
is the scent of the sea
the shimmer of sun
on thin water sinking
into sand, the hop
of sandpiper, the call
of gulls, the sussuration
of the waves as they
return to their watery
vault. Oh, I hope
they will not be
drowned by the still
low drone of the human
buzz. How I hope
I can hold on
and hear again
the conversation
of the sea and sky
of sand and air,
the song of salt
and wave spume.

© 2002 Steven Riddle

On Another Subject Out-of-Focus Groups

On Another Subject

Out-of-Focus Groups

In this small room
two circles of people
cycling endlessly
saying nothing.

© 2002 Steven Riddle

More Poetry

Reminders
Bauhaus monument
to utilitarian bad taste,
buff concrete and rebar,
these block buildings
dot our landscape
boldly declaring
our independence
from all bounding
principles, making
our formal offering
to the only God
we acknowledge--
call it what we will--
liberty, equality,
beauty, personality--
it all becomes the same--
ourselves.

© 2002 Steven Riddle

Prayer Requests and Praise I'm

Prayer Requests and Praise

I'm pleased to report that I am at least mostly keeping my commitment to at least a "Catholic Fast" each day. Those who write to me are prayed for each day for their intentions. Now I come and ask your help for:

Gordon who is still seeking work

Katherine, Franklin, and family as they face some big decisions and a time of potentially great stress.

Praise report:

I asked your prayers for a specific need a few days ago and God delivered not only on that need but so far beyond my expectations as to be miraculous. After a couple of very stressful days, things are beginning to move much more smoothly and I am being blessed in ways unthought of. Thank you so much for prayer support.

Poetic Offering

from 31 Poems for 31 Days

VIII
Night shattered
by the noise of the first
two bare twigs counting out
the time of the breathing
wind.

IX
Apples, the last and first
of the season,
the taste of that last
bee-buzzed cider.

X
All that isn't
begins to come together
the promises of vacant days
thee abandonment of beach umbrellas

XI
Ask where and who and why
and kick the leaves as
they die and fall and float
and drift and fill
the fields and choke the
streets with color.

XII
I have seen the birds
fail. I do not hear
the chirp of frogs
and I know I am not home.

XIII
Turn me around and I am the end,
Read me as I am and I am the end.
Mute, imperfect, and prime as my mirror.

XIV
Full fire the color flashes
destroying all illusion
of lingering summer
the illness has come upon
the year

XV
Clap hands, dance
and sound the tambourine,
sing your voice back
into its birth,
join in making all things new
by coming to birth
yourself.

© 2002 Steven Riddle

You can see that the punctuation is still crude and the definition of some of the days not quite there--but I had dismissed this handful of trivia some time ago and was surprised at how fresh it seemed this morning.

Unusual Untitled

Your speech, your song,
winds words breathed with arctic
breath that burns like tropic sun.

You have convicted me with the lies
I tell others and acquitted me in my
sin, freely without cost

but at such great cost I cannot
bear it--freely as water in a well
costly as a fragrant oil or

frankincense purging all
impurity left behind and asking
God to hear us all

and bate that winter's breath
that arctic tropic sun that burns
with such cold beam

O my seigneur

© 2003 Steven Riddle

More Poetry--Can You Imagine?

Serenity Wake

The vortex that passes where she walks
unstirs the vibrations of the air,
undoes the coils of conspiracy
untwists the lies that have woven so thick
a web on lives all around.

She passes scentless, like a dream
of roses--color and light and the promise
of a gentle aroma--and yet
nothing. She is precious.

© 2003 Steven Riddle

Via Mr. O'Rama This very

Via Mr. O'Rama

This very amusing, somewhat touching, very sad exposition of the plight of the normal Iraqi soldier. Does this not suggest something about the offensiveness of the regime from which they were fleeing?

One More Response I know

One More Response

I know I risk alienating some with another statement regarding the war, but I'm not trying to challenge the validity of the particular situation, but to answer a proposition that I believe to be false. The following is a copy of what was posted at Disputations in response to Kairos Guy (for whom I have the greatest respect, but with whom, on a single slender facet of this issue, I could not disagree more).

I couldn't disagree more:

""War is always a disaster" is the kind of thing one says to avoid having to give the choice for war serious consideration."

I would only want someone holding this opinion to make the choice for war. War is always a disaster. Lincoln did not leap into war at the first opportunity, he undertook the responsibility gravely and with full knowledge of its disaster.

You say on your site, "Why is it so much worse than all the other indicators of the fallen condition?" This seems to suggest that you regard these other indicators as something less than a disaster for humankind. All indicators of the fallen human condition are disasters of the first water stemming from that first fall. None of them are less serious than war, and indeed are a certain type of war themselves.

To say that war is always a disaster does not say that it isn't EVER necessary. On the contrary, it suggests that the exigency of war must be regarded with the greatest possible horror, and only when all recourse is exhausted should such a project be undertaken. I leave to the appropriate civil authorities (not, in my opinion a U. N. commission) the question of whether our current crisis entails war. But to say that it is always a disaster in no way suggests that it is not sometimes necessary.

If one enters into a war with any other attitude, we end up with people flying into towers declaring a glorious "war" on innocents and civilians. To suggest that war is a source of anything other than wretchedness, heartache, pain, and loss is to invite glorying in destruction. However, to suggest that people like Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Robert Mbotu (from what I'm hearing from Zimbabwe), Kim Il-Jong, should be allowed to continue their oppression and reigns of terror unchallenged suggests, perhaps, an even greater calamity for humankind.

War is always a disaster, but it is not always a crime, and certainly not the gravest of crimes in some situations.

I think a clear demarkation must be made between "War is a disaster" and "All War is evil and uncalled for." The two statements are not equivalents.

I believe the Pope and his Cardinals articulate the truth in this matter even as they make prudential judgments that may be contested. And perhaps it is the unfortunate conflation of the two that gives rise to difficulty with the centrality of the truth they wish to express.

So once again, I leave it all in God's hands. I believe our president is a man of God, I pray for him daily. I trust that he will make the correct decision (a confidence I could not have expressed with our former regent). I do not want war; neither do I want Swamp Arabs chased from their homes and massacred, untold environmental destruction, people buried alive in pavement, Kurds gassed in their homes. It is unjust not to exert some force to make this stop. Whether it is sufficiently unjust to entail a conflict I leave to those who must make the very difficult decision, and I trust God completely that He will guide them if they are willing.

A Poetic Offering

What I See When God Looks at Me

When His pale eye searches me
a mourning light wings a little way
from heart to spirit, proud night
stars unfurled in the giant space
that perfects me, wink out and then
glare with brilliance that makes
translucent bones that throb in His
agony. That beam clarifies the eye
so that once seen blue oceans
turn under the cloudlit sky to
pale ochre, sunset rouged
and back again with jeweled
intensity that dazzles not just
the eye, but every sense is subdued
renewed, made over again so that
things without scent now writhe
with fragrance--silent spaces
are filled with the sounds of His
voice, salt-burned tongue can
taste light, sense-worn skin
wears air as bright as rainbow droplets.
What have You asked of me
for all that You are? Where have
you hidden my heart? Will the
years shyly drop away until
unclothed I stand in the center
of Your glorious eye wearing the Glory
you wreathe me in, the patina of spilled
blood so red it is white?

© 2003 Steven Riddle

Is War Always a Defeat?

Is War Always a Defeat?

A spectacularly good, articulate post on the issue. This excerpt gives the tone:

This does not mean I am against every conceivable war. This does not mean that I would not participate in any war. But it does mean that any war I thought was just, any war that I judged to be morally good because it was morally the only option I could discern with the best of my limited abilities, would still be a disaster, a failure that I would feel to the core. As Pope John Paul II recently wrote:

War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity.

I cannot think of anything to add. But to make it unqualifiedly clear I do add what I have said in several places--"War is always a defeat for humanity; but sometimes to escape annhilation, we must accept defeat." There is nothing good about war except its ending--but there are things far worse than war loose in the world today and the only way to see them end may be to engage in warfare. It is truly, deeply sad. So I'm not an unqualified pacifist, nor do I regard myself as a coward, but I must add my voice to that of the blogmaster at Minute Particulars.

Reporting My Believe-o-Matic Results I

Reporting My Believe-o-Matic Results
I am delighted--most particularly with 1, 2, and 4 (my favorite, favorite, favorite, branch of Protestantism).

1. Eastern Orthodox (100%)
2. Roman Catholic (100%)
3. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (94%)
4. Orthodox Quaker (88%)
5. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (86%)

At Least a Partial Report

At Least a Partial Report

My thanks to all for prayers. The day was tedious, but not nearly so awful as I had thought it might be. Praise God, and thank you all for supporting me through it!

Book Review: Mark Salzman--Iron and

Book Review: Mark Salzman--Iron and Silk

Book: Iron and Silk
Author: Mark Salzman
Recommendation: Highest

Having recently read and reread Salzman's Lying Awake for book group discussion, I took up the recommendation offered here by a couple of St. Blog's parishioners and by one of the book group members. I read Salzman's Iron and Silk. While not a particularly spiritual book, Iron and Silk is beautifully written and filled with small, exciting moments that give one a glimpse of China that would be otherwise impossible. For example, Ha Jin, a native of China, sees China with a native's eyes, and while his books are well-done, I found China a rather uninteresting, drab and dull place.

Salzman's book opens China up for the Western reader. Salzman was a Yale student who received a teaching position in Hunan for two years. He went there with an intense interest in Chinese Literature and culture, and seemed to come away not alienated, but enriched. He met the people of China on their own terms, communists, socialists, and simple people. He met martial arts teachers, teachers of calligraphy, and ordinary peasants. In the course of his book, we meet an eleven year-old runaway, a woman with whom he clearly falls into infatuation, about four martial arts teachers, at least two calligraphy teachers, and several more or less pleasant government figures and ordinary shop keepers.

The "chapters" are divided into vignettes about three to six comprising each section. One sample is a story of trying to get a cup of coffee from a very rare "coffee shop." The exposition is interesting, the end result a hjilarity of bureaucratic coldness. So too with Catching a Rat, and receiving mail from home.

The prose is lively, engaging and real. Never stumbling into the over-poetic, it is as finely balanced as his art of Tai Ch'i. Truly, a stunning, admirable work. Posbbily the second five star book I've read by this author.

High recommended.

Please Pray For me,

Please Pray

For me,
Today, as I go through a particular arduous day at work and personally.

For some close friends as they consider God's will in their lives.

For a good friend still seeking employment.

For Karen Marie Knapp--for complete and swift recovery.

Thanks.

A Puritan Poem

Today a Puritan Poem of rare loveliness. Edward Taylor has nearly completely vanished from the poetry scene in any course you might take. One leaps from Anne Bradstreet, or more likely Phillis Wheatley to Freneau and William Cullens Bryan without so much as a toe dipped into the richness of the Puritan poetic tradition, and it is a shame for such lovely lyrics to be lost because we're afraid of a bit of that "old-time religion." So without further ado:

"Prologue" from Preparatory Meditations
Edward Taylor

Lord, Can a Crumb of Dust the Earth outweigh,
     Outmatch all mountains, nay, the Crystal sky?
Embosom in't designs that shall Display
     And trace into the Boundless Deity?
     Yea, hand a Pen whose moisture doth guide o'er
     Eternal Glory with a glorious glore.

If it its Pen had of an Angel's Quill,
     And sharpened on a Precious Stone ground tight,
And dipped in liquid Gold, and moved by Skill
     In Crystal leaves should golden Letters write,
     It would but blot and blur, yea, jag, and jar
     Unless Thou mak'st the Pen, and Scrivener.

I am this Crumb of Dust which is designed
     To make my Pen unto Thy Praise alone,
And my dull Fancy I would gladly grind
     Unto an Edge of Zion's Precious Stone.
     And Write in Liquid Gold upon Thy Name
     My Letters till Thy glory forth doth flame.

Let not th' attempts break down my Dust, I pray,
     Nor laugh Thou them to scorn but pardon give.
Inspire this crumb of Dust till it display
     Thy Glory through't: and then Thy dust shall live.
     Its failings then Thou'lt overlook, I trust,
     They being Slips slipped from Thy Crumb of Dust.

Thy Crumb of Dust breathes two words from its breast,
     That Thou wilt guide its pen to write aright
To Prove Thou art, and that Thou art the best
     And show Thy Properties to shine most bright.
     And then Thy Works will shine as flowers on Stems
     Or as in Jewelry Shops, do gems.

c. 1682

Out of Orders Go find

Out of Orders

Go find out what Kathy the Carmelite thinks of all the talk about contemplation, truth, beauty, and goodness, and all manner of other exciting topics.

Oh, I have Stumbled Upon a Treasure Trove

Start here with an arrangement of Herbert lyrics specifically selected and laid out for Lenten Reading.

Then visit the Tenebrae service accompanied by Herbert's "The Sacrifice"

And then go here for Herbertalia galore, including A Priest to the Temple and other Herbert Poems and writings. Wonderful, wonderful stuff.

Today's Offering of Poetry

From George Herbert, whom I do not like so well as some of his contemporaries, but for whom affection increases with each successive reading.

Love (I)
George Herbert

Immortal Love, author of this great frame,
Sprung from that beauty which can never fade,
How hath man parcel'd out Thy glorious name,
And thrown it on that dust which Thou hast made,
While mortal love doth all the title gain!
Which siding with Invention, they together
Bear all the sway, possessing heart and brain,
(Thy workmanship) and give Thee share in neither.
Wit fancies beauty, beauty raiseth wit;
The world is theirs, they two play out the game,
Thou standing by: and though Thy glorious name
Wrought our deliverance from th' infernal pit,
Who sings Thy praise? Only a scarf or glove
Doth warm our hands, and make them write of love.

Talk about the cold, closed, tight nature of the human heart--all the glory of creation around us and "Only a scarf or glove/Doth warms our hands, and make them write of love." Not love itself, which we reject by a myriad of motions and notions, but cloth which we manufacture. Love lights no fire in us and we trudge along obediently seeking to serve, but not really seeking to love.

From Basho, Some Relief

From Basho, Some Relief

As with Poe, who when disturbed by thoughts of his terribly young cousin/wife, whom he gave the name Lenore, I too go to my books for surcease of sorrow. And in this case here is what I found:

from The Narrow Road to Oku
Matsuo Basho
Station 33 - Echigo

After lingering in Sakata for several days, I left on a long walk of a hundred and thirty miles to the capital of the province of Kaga. As I looked up at the clouds gathering around the mountains of the Hokuriku road, the thought of the great distance awaiting me almost overwhelmed my heart. Driving myself all the time, however, I entered the province of Echigo through the barrier-gate of Nezu, and arrived at the barrier-gate of Ichiburi in the province of Ecchu. During the nine days I needed for this trip, I could not write very much, what with the heat and moisture, and my old complaint that pestered me immeasurably.

The night looks different
Already on July the sixth,
For tomorrow, once a year
The weaver meets her lover.



The great Milky Way
Spans in a single arch
The billow-crested sea,
Falling on Sado beyond.

The whole work is available via the link in the left-hand column.

Mood du Jour

This encapsulates it well, please pray for me.

from The Merchant of Venice Act I scene i
William Shakespeare

[Antonio speaks]
In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:
It wearies me; you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn;
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself.

And just in case you were curious this is not the explanation:

"Your mind is tossing on the ocean;
There, where your argosies with portly sail,—
Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood,
Or, as it were, the pageants of the sea,—
Do overpeer the petty traffickers. . ."

To use Shakespearean terminology--would that I had argosies to fret over. Or to paraphrase Tevye, "Would it harm some grand eternal plan. . ."

But that's not the cause either.

On Universalism As always, the

On Universalism

As always, the blogmaster at Disputations has some excellent and timely thoughts on the subject. The exposition is beautifully done. I may not concur with the incipient conclusion, but that is because I allow hope to prevail. And hope is only a virtue where the likelihood of the outcome is truly in doubt. (paraphrase of Chesterton).