FTD + UPS = Wilted Flowers

I don't know what genius at FTD thought that UPS would be a good way to deliver flowers.

Books, yes. Canned tuna, yes. Anything that is hardy enough to take being on a truck from 7 in the morning until reaching its destination at 4 in the afternoon.

But not flowers. Not delicate, living organisms.

The first delivery, when I thought their specification of UPS odd but figured that they'd worked it out, wound up with practically dead flowers on my mother's doorstep. All but 2 gave up the ghost by the next day.

The replacement delivery, set up by an aghast and sympathetic FTD representative on the phone, suffered the same fate. Not quite as wilted, perhaps, with a few more living the next day.

It wasn't as if I were trying to get orchids delivered. These were sunflowers, some of the hardiest flowers around.

Overall, FTD's experiment is a gigantic failure and one that assures I will avoid them like the plague in the future.

H-E-B's coming to Dallas. And there was much rejoicing ...

I've been longing to shop at H-E-B just about forever. At least since Hannah was at A&M and kept telling me of their many delights.

And now they're coming to town!

What's better than that? It will be at Mockingbird and Abrams ... 5 minutes away. Let the celebrating begin!

Well Said: God speaks through one single Word

You recall that one and the same Word of God extends throughout Scripture, that it is one and the same Utterance that resounds in the mouths of all the sacred writers, since he who was in the beginning God with God has no need of separate syllables; for he is not subject to time.

St. Augustine

via The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 102

"since he who was in the beginning God with God has no need of separate syllables"

Wow. Now there is something to meditate upon.

Body and Soul, But Truly One

Lately I've been troubled by seeing people say things like "I am a soul. I have a body." or "My body is like a car that I drive around." This is often evoked in aid of fighting racial prejudice. I get it. Beauty is only skin deep and so forth and so on. It comes from a noble impulse.

But it troubles me on a deeper level. It feels like a rejection of the body in favor of the soul. And that is an ancient idea rearing its ugly head again. Gnosticism in modern form.

Bishop Robert Barron sums up neatly, with a current example. (Emphasis added.)

Gnosticism was, and is, a multi-headed beast, but one of its major tenets is that matter is a fallen, inferior form of being, produced by a low-level deity. The soul is trapped in matter, and the whole point of the spiritual life is to acquire the gnosis (knowledge) requisite to facilitate an escape of the soul from the body. ...

In justifying the transformation that he has undergone, [Bruce] Jenner consistently says something along these lines: “Deep down, I always knew that I was a woman, but I felt trapped in the body of a man. Therefore, I have the right to change my body to bring it in line with my true identity.” Notice how the mind or the will — the inner self — is casually identified as the “real me” whereas the body is presented as an antagonist which can and should be manipulated by the authentic self. The soul and the body are in a master/slave relationship, the former legitimately dominating and re-making the latter. This schema is, to a tee, gnostic — and just as repugnant to Biblical religion as it was nineteen hundred years ago. For Biblical people, the body can never be construed as a prison for the soul, nor as an object for the soul’s manipulation. Moreover, the mind or will is not the “true self” standing over and against the body; rather, the body, with its distinctive form, intelligibility, and finality, is an essential constituent of the true self. Until we realize that the lionization of Caitlyn Jenner amounts to an embracing of Gnosticism, we haven’t grasped the nettle of the issue.

Bishop Robert Barron, Vibrant Paradoxes

Our bodies matter. Try thinking noble thoughts and rising above when you've got a 24-hour bug. It reminds us that our body and soul are inextricably intertwined.

That, after all, is one of the most wonderful and mind blowing things about the Incarnation. Jesus became man. GOD became man, body and soul together.

Did Jesus get the flu and lie limply after throwing up? We don't think about that but it's very possible because illness is part of the human experience and no one is more human than Jesus.

When he was resurrected his body mattered so much that he still had the marks of crucifixion. And he was still body and soul ... eating fish more than once to prove it. Jesus shows us that the whole package matters. It's one of the reasons Catholics clothe the poor, feed the hungry, built hospitals to help the sick, visit prisons, and do so many other corporal works of mercy. Our bodies matter.

Heck, the final resurrection will reunite our bodies and souls. That's how much our bodies matter.

Undoubtedly, body and soul are different but in a mysterious way they are also one. On that note I'll leave you with this bit from the Catechism.

II. "BODY AND SOUL BUT TRULY ONE"

362 The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual. The biblical account expresses this reality in symbolic language when it affirms that "then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being." Man, whole and entire, is therefore willed by God.

363 In Sacred Scripture the term "soul" often refers to human life or the entire human person.230 But "soul" also refers to the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him, that by which he is most especially in God's image: "soul" signifies the spiritual principle in man.

364 The human body shares in the dignity of "the image of God": it is a human body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit:

Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity. Through his very bodily condition he sums up in himself the elements of the material world. Through him they are thus brought to their highest perfection and can raise their voice in praise freely given to the Creator. For this reason man may not despise his bodily life. Rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honor since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day.

365 The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the "form" of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.

366 The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not "produced" by the parents - and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection.

Catechism of the Catholic Church

Hendrick ter Brugghen, The incredulity of St. Thomas

Best Mapo Tofu

There's a new blogger at Meanwhile, Back in the Kitchen. My oldest daughter Hannah!

She posted a great sounding recipe, Best Mapo Tofu, that might help cure my usual problem with tofu ... I find it chalky tasting (or something like that). But this sauce sounds so flavorful it might do the trick.

Well Said: A Kick in the Teeth

You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.

Walt Disney

Worth a Thousand Words: Roman Fish Market

Albert Bierstadt, Roman Fish Market. Arch of Octavius

Via Lines and Colors where you'll find some delightful details enlarged for your enjoyment.

Scaramouche - full of swashbuckling goodness

Jesse, Paul, Maissa and I discuss Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini at SFFaudio podcast. Join us!

Weekend Joke

An elderly man in east Texas had owned a big farm for several years. He had a large pond in the back. It was properly shaped for swimming, so he fixed it up nice with picnic tables, horseshoe courts, and some fruit trees.

One evening the old farmer decided to go down to the pond, as he hadn't been there for a while, and look it over. He grabbed a five-gallon bucket to bring back some fruit. As he neared the pond, he heard voices shouting and laughing with glee.

As he came closer, he saw it was a bunch of young women skinny-dipping in his pond. He made the women aware of his presence and they all went to the deep end.

One of the women shouted to him, 'we're not coming out until you leave!' The old man frowned, 'I didn't come down here to watch you ladies swim naked or make you get out of the pond naked.'

Holding the bucket up he said, 'I'm here to feed the alligator...'

Via Traces of Texas.

Worth a Thousand Words: Coast of Vormsi Island

Coast of Vormsi Island
taken by Remo Savisaar

I want to go to there.

Well Said: All the kingdoms of the world belong to a fallen spiritual force.

In the Gospel of Matthew, we find the account of Jesus’ confrontation with the devil in the desert. After tempting Christ with sensual pleasure (“turn these stones into bread”) and with glory (“throw yourself down and the angels will hold you up”), the devil entices him with the alurement of power: “all these kingdoms, I will give you if you but fall down and worship me.” What is most interesting about this final temptation is that the devil couldn’t offer all of the kingdoms of the world to Jesus unless he, the devil, owned them. Indeed, in Luke’s account, this is made explicit. Satan says, “I shall give to you all this power … for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish.” I don’t know a passage in any of the literature of the world that is as critical of political power as that one! All the kingdoms of the world belong to a fallen spiritual force.

Whereas many (if not most) cultures both ancient and modern tend to apotheosize their political leaders, the Bible sees right through politics and politicians. One of the most important contributions of the Scriptures to contemporary politics, at least in the west, is this deep suspicion that power tends to corrupt. The institutionalization of this suspicion in complex systems of checks and balances is a healthy outgrowth of the Biblical view.

Robert Barron, Vibrant Paradoxes

Genesis Notes: Her Seed — Jesus

GENESIS STUDY
The Agony in the Garden - Luke 22:39-46
The Crucifixion - John 19:1-11; 19:31-37
The Resurrection - John 19:38-42; 20:11-18. Hebrews 2:5-18
The Tree of Life - John 6:41-59
Created In God's Likeness - Gal. 3:27; 1 Cor. 15:53; Eph. 4-22-24; Col. 3:9

We are still breaking away from Genesis with Genesis: God and His Creation to look at the answer to the promise that the woman and her seed would defeat God's enemy.

The previous posts about "the woman" made it clear that Mary had innumerable links to Eve. This summary that amazes me every time I read it. I mean, how much clearer can you get? In the immortal words of This is Spinal Tap: none, none more clear.

• Eve’s conversation with a fallen angel leads to the loss of God’s likeness in human flesh; Mary’s conversation with an angel leads to the Incarnation, God taking on human flesh.
• Eve, left exposed by her husband, talks herself out of being embarrassingly gullible in believing God’s Word about the forbidden fruit; Mary, full of grace through the work of her Son, chooses God’s will for her life, knowing the potential for embarrassment over her unusual pregnancy.
• Eve, having broken the covenant she and Adam had with God, hears God’s curse on her life, which will be pain in childbearing; Mary, having accepted God’s plan, hears a voice of blessing on her and her childbearing.
• Eve, Adam’s helper, assists him in entering the devil’s bondage; Mary, at the wedding in Cana, assists Jesus in showing Himself to be the Messiah Who had come to free Israel.
• Eve becomes the mother of the dying; Mary, the mother of the living.
• Eve is expelled from Paradise; Mary appears as the Queen of heaven.

Her Seed — Connecting Jesus to Adam
Now we are free to examine Jesus' connection to Adam in fulfilling the promise of "her seed." We see that God performs His surprising renewal through reversal once again. I must say that I felt pretty silly for never noticing all the times Jesus is connected with a garden.

Via Bad Catholic

The Agony in the Garden - Luke 22:39-46

It isn’t just a coincidence that Jesus happens to be in a garden when He has to make His decision to choose God’s will over His own, no matter what the cost. This is the moment when Jesus completes His work as the New Adam. The first Adam was silent and passive in the face of temptation. Jesus, well aware of what it will cost Him to obey God, puts the will of the Father first. The pride of the first Adam is replaced by the humility of the Second Adam. If Adam shrank from the danger in his Garden, giving into disobedience, Jesus rises to the challenge of the danger in His Garden, surrendering Himself perfectly to God’s plan. The undoing of the devil has begun.

In Genesis 3, God tells Adam that his face will be covered with the sweat of his toil as a punishment for his disobedience. Adam’s dominion over the earth, meant to be a source of joy for him, instead will bring him suffering. For Jesus to sweat "like great drops of blood" in His Garden is a vivid picture of Him taking on Himself the curse placed on Adam. The first Adam’s disobedience was punishable by suffering and death. Jesus, the Second Adam, in the agony of the Garden, begins to experience it. The sentence pronounced so long ago is now being executed ...

In these verses, we see a picture of Jesus doing precisely what Adam didn’t do. He was afraid, but His fear led Him to call down help from His Father. This is the test of love that Adam could not endure. Love has to be a real choice, which means that it must be tested. Love of God leads one to continue to trust Him and to seek His help in the midst of the most threatening circumstances. It is a conscious, willful choice to believe in God’s goodness, no matter how contrary the evidence. This anguished cry of Jesus, with tears, fills His Garden with the sound of faith. It was a cry that reached heaven, undoing the silence of the Garden of Eden.

This series first ran in 2004 and 2005. I'm refreshing it as I go. For links to the whole study, go to the Genesis Index. For more about the resources used, go here.

Seven Revolutions: How Christianity Changed the World and Can Change It Again

Seven Revolutions

How Christianity Changed the World and Can Change It Again
by Mike Aquilina and James L. Papandrea

As we present them here, the seven revolutions changed the world by changing human relationships, in ever widening concentric circles, beginning with the individual and extending outward to the world. A revolution of the individual affirmed that all people are created equal, in the image of God, and no one is expendable. A revolution of the home affirmed it as a place of safety and love, where women and children are not to be exploited. A revolution of the workplace affirmed that people are not property, that they must be free to choose their work, and that they must be given the free time for worship, for artistic expression, and to enjoy loved ones. A revolution of religion taught the world that God is love. A revolution of the community taught people to love their neighbor. A revolution of the way people thought about life and death rejected the culture of death and affirmed a culture of life and of hope, encouraging people to stand up for human rights. And finally, a revolution of government set up the ideal that rulers should serve those whom they rule (not the other way around), and that all people should enjoy freedom of religion. In short, the seven revolutions can be understood as cultural revolutions that gave the world a concern for human rights in two general categories: the protection of all human life, and the protection of each person's dignity and freedom.

I've been saying for a long time (with a singular lack of originality, I know) that we are living in times similar to those in which the first Christians lived.

Seven Revolutions spells out that truth in ways I hadn't even been aware of. Mike Aquilina and James L. Papandrea show what the pre-Christian world was really like and how everyday Christians, living out their faith, created a groundswell that gradually turned into a cultural revolution. Living in our post-Christian world, we too face a secular culture which doesn't understand our values and, therefore, misinterprets us and our faith.

The book not only covers past history but looks to the future with concrete ideas for converting our culture. It is a necessary read for anyone who isn't clear on the positive good Christianity has had and for those who aren't sure how to bring that good back into our world today. I found it heartening.

Maybe you've also heard that the Church is no longer relevant to the current generation. This is ridiculous. First of all, the mission of the Church is not relevance. Second, the definition of what is relevant changes by the moment and depending on the person, and the focus on relevance is in many ways a symptom of the very relativism that is part of the problem. Having said that, even if the Church is perceived as being out of touch with the current generation, the problem is with the generation, not with the Church. Was Jesus being irrelevant when he called his own generation adulterous and sinful? (Matthew 11:16-17; 12:39-45; 16:4; 17:17; Mark 8:12, 38; 9:19; Luke 9:41; 11:29-32). Jesus shows us that part of the Church's mission is to call each generation back to the Christian definition of relevance—which means the affirmation of life, in reverence to life's Creator.

This book isn't just for Catholics but for Christians of all sorts. Highly recommended.

And if you live in Dallas, it's at the library. Go borrow it!

Worth a Thousand Words: Flowers

Victoria Dubourg, Flowers
via Arts Everyday Living

I don't love still life paintings but I do love this.

Well Said: God said everything in his Word

In giving us his Son, his only Word (for he possesses no other), he spoke everything to us at once in this sole Word— and he has no more to say … because what he spoke before to the prophets in parts, he has now spoken all at once by giving us the All Who is His Son. Any person questioning God or desiring some vision or revelation would be guilty not only of foolish behavior but also of offending him, by not fixing his eyes entirely upon Christ and by living with the desire for some other novelty.

St. John of the Cross

via The Catechism of the Catholic Church

I felt a distinct absence in the time I had been devoting to reading a canto a day of Dante's Divine Comedy. What better to fill it with than the Catechism? I have tried before to read through it and fallen far short of the mark. So far, very early on, I am finding it extremely rich, insightful, and rewarding.

Lagniappe: Champagne and Truth

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.

Graham Greene

It's funny because it's true.

Worth a Thousand Words: La Lettre

La Lettre (The Letter). Émile Munier (1840-1895).

Hard Sayings by Trent Horn

Hard Sayings
A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties
by Trent Horn

Have you ever read something in the Bible and just scratched your head, or been challenged by a skeptic to explain a seemingly scandalous verse?

Trent Horn can help.

In Hard Sayings, Trent looks at dozens of the most confounding passages in Scripture and offers clear, reasonable, and Catholic keys to unlocking their true meaning.

Trent Horn addresses questions like the Bible being full of "bad" history, women being portrayed as less valuable than men, or that God is a murderous tyrant. Each chapter breaks down the reason for the questions and shows the Catholic explanations that help shed light on these objections. This  book would especially be good for someone who was teaching RCIA or who continually is having the Bible held up as a mass of contradictions.

Horn breaks down the confusing passages into three groups:

• External Difficulties - when the Bible seems at odds with modern knowledge
• Internal Difficulties - when there are contradictions between passages or 
• Moral Difficulties - where evil actions seem endorsed by God's commands

As he works through the sections and objections, Horn is also methodically educating the reader about the Bible as literature. This culminates in his Bible-reading rules. These include things like reading passages in context of the larger work, checking your translation against the original language, and that the authors weren't divine stenographers.

I knew many of those concepts, but a few were new when thinking about discussing the Bible. For example, the Bible is allowed to be a sole witness to history, incomplete is not inaccurate, and the burden of proof is on the critic, not the believer.

Hard Answers is an accessible, balanced work that I'll be keeping as a reference. Definitely recommended.

Worth a Thousand Words: The Animals' Picnic

The Animals' Picnic, illustrated by G.H. Thompson, c. 1900

I'd love to have this book. What a treat it would be considering the wit and joy of this cover.

Genesis Notes: The Woman: "Seeing" Mary

GENESIS STUDY
The Annunciation - Luke 1:26-38
The Visitation - Luke 1:39-56
The Presentation in the Temple - Luke 2:22-35
The Wedding at Cana - John 2:1-11
The Crucifixion - John 19:25-27
A Vision of Heaven - Revelation 12:1-7

We are still breaking away from Genesis with Genesis: God and His Creation to look at the answer to the promise that the woman and her seed would defeat God's enemy.

This look at Revelation and the Catholic interpretation of it may challenge Protestants the most. Yet, it does answer the common protest that veneration of Mary isn't Scriptural. This shows the basis for Catholic belief in Mary's protection of the Church and of us individually.

Madonna on the Crescent Moon, Peter Paul Rubens

A Vision of Heaven - Revelation 12:1-7

The dragon aimed his earthly wrath at "the woman" first. She was protected from his fury by God. So, being angry with the woman, the dragon then went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, those "who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus," which is the Church. Here we are able to see in dramatic detail just what God meant in Gen. 3:15 when He said He would put "enmity" between the serpent and the woman. In this scene from Revelation, she becomes the direct object of his assault, as he lashes out in anger as his time dwindles away. Who is this "woman"? Certainly she is a figure of Mary and the Church. Apocalyptic literature presents special interpretive challenges, but we can see why Christians throughout the ages have read this passage with Mary in mind. The point to note is how determined an enemy the dragon is of both the woman and her offspring. The woman is safe, but her offspring are terribly vulnerable while the dragon's time lasts. No wonder the Church has, down through the ages, given thanks for the special protection and advocacy which Mary gives to her children. This tender relationship is nurtured in the numerous Marian devotions that characterize Catholic life ...

Objections among Protestants to Marian dogma and devotion are usually rooted in their conviction that the Catholic Church teaches many things about Mary that simply aren't in the Bible. They are convinced that Mary has an exaggerated position in Catholic thought, either from over zealous pagan evangelism in the early centuries of the Church or from sentimentality over women in the Middle Ages or from a faulty understanding of redemption since the Council of Trent.

It was not always this way. At the time of the Protestant Reformation, in the 16th century, Protestants continued the 1500-year old tradition of reading the biblical references to Eve and Mary the way we have in this lesson. Even Martin Luther believed that Scripture accorded Mary a unique place in the human story. As time went by, however, a kind of Christian minimalism set into Protestant thought. Some of that was no doubt provoked by excesses and distortions practiced by some Catholics. Because of some abuses which seemed more like superstition than true Christian faith, Protestants gradually insisted on removing everything and everyone in Christian tradition that was not absolutely necessary to salvation. Jesus, of course, is necessary to salvation, so He is always at the center of the Protestant vision of redemption. Mary, we must remember, is a gift to the Church, as we saw in John 19:23-27. Gifts can be declined or left unopened or stored away and forgotten.

Modern Protestants, perhaps not knowing the history of the Church or even their own early history very well, have not been taught to "see" Mary in the Scripture as the New Eve. They are unaware of the fact that during all the years of Christian history before the Reformation, faithful Christians read the Bible this way. They do not realize that a Mary-less vision of redemption is a historical novelty. Mary appears to them to be an intrusion into an icon that has only Jesus in it.

Catholics can take confidence in the fact that, as we have seen in our lesson, there are strong scriptural reasons for retaining the icon of Mother and Son in our hearts and minds down through the ages. Being good students of Genesis, we would fully expect that when God conquers His enemy and restores man to a life of blessing, that life would be presided over by a New Adam and a New Eve, ordering everything as it was always meant to be.

This series first ran in 2004 and 2005. I'm refreshing it as I go. For links to the whole study, go to the Genesis Index. For more about the resources used, go here.