Worth a Thousand Words: Roar!

Roar!, Remo Savisaar

Worth a Thousand Words: View of Earth from Apollo 4

View of Earth from Apollo 4, NASA

Well Said: Railways and the Church

Railways and the Church have their critics, but both are the best ways of getting a man to his ultimate destination.

Wilbert Vere Awdry

A History of the Church in 100 Objects - Mike Aquilina and Grace Aquilina

The history of the Church didn't take place shrouded in the mists of time. It actually happened and continues to happen through things that we can see and sometimes hold in our hand.

This is the Christian answer to Neil MacGregor's New York Times bestseller A History of the World in 100 Objects.

This is a brief history of the Church, complete with pictures of the items which serve as touchstones for bringing up important historical events. The items include the Christian things you might expect but also range into seemingly non-Christian things like Islamic coins, an Egyptian boy's math notebook, and a medieval science beaker.

Two or three pages of brief yet comprehensive commentary accompany each item. It is easy to read and even-handed, yet never dumbs it down. At the end of each entry, there are two recommended books listed for those who would like to pursue a topic in greater depth. That was a thoughtful feature I really liked, even as my reading list grew and grew.

I especially enjoyed the way the authors fleshed out our understanding of events, often with thought provoking questions or comments. For example, in the instance of the Islamic coin, we see that the Roman emperor may have given their subjects reason to see Islamic conquerors as a decent governing option.

All these people had suffered persecution under Justinian and his successors. And they had been taxed heavily to support Justinian's wars in the West. Is it any wonder that some welcomed the Islamic Arabs as liberators? And is it any wonder that some chose to submit to Islam?

The conquered didn't turn Islamic all at once. In some places, they were given a stark choice: convert, submit to the tax, or die. But the Umayyads were more tolerant, recognizing the value of Christians and Jews as a steady tax base.

This allows us a more nuanced picture of history than we're often given. And it opens the door for questions of how the modern world tempts me to let my Christianity wither slowly away under gentle pressure. The authors do this again and again. A wedding ring brings considerations of how Christian marriage differed from pagan marriage. Armor brings a consideration of how Pope Gregory gradually moved warrior culture from waging war to knightly behavior.

There are also nuggets of information I'd never heard. I didn't know that Napoleon kidnapped Pope Pius VII from the Vatican. Or that Pius VII later gave shelter in the Vatican to members of Napoleon's family. I knew Cardinal Cisneros was a stalwart defender of American natives but not that he cooperated with the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain. In almost every entry there is something showing that history is more complex than we realized.

In essence, what one learns reading this book is that "The Church on earth is always in motion. Catholic doctrine and devotion are always developing. And every age presents particular challenges with require a creative response." As earthly pilgrims heading toward heaven, we can draw inspiration and strength from where the Church has been on that same road.

I've got more pages marked in this book than you've got time to read. So just go get this book and read it! It made a great devotional for me. I read an entry (or two or three) daily and found it invigorating and centering as a start to the day.

Worth a Thousand Words: Aisle of Tintern Abbey

Aisle of Tintern Abbey, Roger Fenton
via Getty's Open Content Program

The Form of Emptiness

Tomorrow begins the novena leading up to the solemnity of Mary's Immaculate Conception. This is a good place to begin.

That virginal quality which, for want of a better word, I call emptiness is at the beginning of this contemplation.

It is not a formless emptiness, a void without meaning; on the contrary it has a shape, a form given to it by the purpose for which it is intended.

It is emptiness like the hollow in the reed, the narrow riftless emptiness which can have only one destiny: to receive the piper's breath and to utter the song that is in his heart.

It is emptiness like the hollow in the cup, shaped to receive water or wine.

It is emptiness like that of the bird's nest, built in a round warm ring to receive the little bird.

The pre-Advent emptiness of Our Lady's purposeful virginity was indeed like those three things.

She was a reed through which the Eternal Love was to be piped as a shepherd's song.

She was the flowerlike chalice into which the purest water of humanity was to be poured, mingled with wine, changed to the crimson blood of love, and lifted up in sacrifice.

She was the warm nest rounded to the shape of humanity to receive the Divine Little Bird...

It is the purpose for which something is made that decides the material which is used.

The chalice is made of pure gold because it must contain the Blood of Christ.

The bird's nest is made of scraps of soft down, leaves and feathers and twigs, because it must be a strong warm home for the young birds...

The material which God has found apt for it is human nature: blood, flesh, bone, salt, water, will, intellect.

It is impossible to say too often or too strongly that human nature, body and soul together, is the material for God's will in us...

Think again of the three symbols I have used for the virginal emptiness of Mary. These are each made from material which must undergo some experience to be made ready for its purpose.

The reed grows by the streams. It is the simplest of things, but it must be cut by the sharp knife, hollowed out, and the stops must be cut in it; it must be shaped and pierced before it can utter the shepherd's song. It is the narrowest emptiness in the world, but the little reed utters infinite music.

The chalice does not grow like the flower it resembles. It is made of gold; gold must be gathered from the water and the mud and hewn from the rock, it must be beaten by countless little blows that give the chalice of sacrifice its fitting beauty.

The twigs and fluff and leaves of the bird's nest are brought from all sorts of places, from wherever the brave careful mother alights, with fluttering but daring heart, to fetch them, from the distances and explorations that only the spread wings of love know. It is the shape of her breast the moulds the nest to its inviting roundness.

Thus it is with us -- we may be formed by the knife, pared down, cut to the least, to the minimum of our own being; we may be marked indelibly by a succession of strokes, blown from the gold-beater's hammer; or we may be shaped for our destiny by the love and tender devotion of a devoted family.

Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

I don't know why no one has ever mentioned Caryll Houselander among all the wonderful Catholic writers that are quoted so often. I have seen her mentioned only in Magnificat and every time that I have read an excerpt it has spoken right to my heart. If I had let myself go I could easily have put the entire book on this site. I had to stop myself from underlining practically everything in it. It is a wonderful contemplation of the Virgin Mary and, through her as always, we get a clearer and better look at her son, Jesus. The excerpt above says better than I can what sort of a writer and thinker she was. It is simple but provides many opportunities for our own contemplation.

Well Said: A Student

A student is not a container you have to fill but a torch you have to light up.

Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions

Worth a Thousand Words: Golden Leaves

Golden Leaves, Remo Savisaar

Interview on Catholic Mom

Nancy Ward interviewed me after Seeking Jesus in Everyday Life came out. It is now featured on Catholic Mom! It was great fun talking with Nancy and I really appreciate the publicity for the book — which makes great Advent reading or a Christmas gift!

Well Said: Say It Again

Say what you have just said, but in a different tone, without anger, and your argument will gain in strength and, above all, you won't offend God.

St. Josemaria Escriva

Well Said: Peter the rock and Peter the denier

We have grown accustomed to make a clear distinction between Peter the rock and Peter the denier of Christ — the denier of Christ: that is the Peter as he was before Easter; the rock: that is the Peter as he was after the Pentecost, the Peter of whom we have constructed a singularly idealistic image. But, in reality, he was a both times both of these... Has it not been thus throughout the history of the Church that the Pope, the successor of Peter has been at once Petra and Skandalon — both the rock of God and a stumbling-block? In fact the faithful will always have to reckon with this paradox of the divine dispensation that shames their pride again and again.

Pope Benedict XVI

Worth a Thousand Words: Red Squirrel

Red Squirrel, Remo Savisaar

Well Said: Judas

Judas is neither a master of evil nor the figure of a demoniacal power of darkness but rather a sycophant who bows down before the anonymous power of changing moods and current fashion. But it is precisely this anonymous power that crucified Jesus, for it was the anonymous voices that cried, "Away with him! Crucify him!"

Pope Benedict XVI

Artemis by Andy Weir

Jazz Bashara is a criminal.

Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you're not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you've got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent.

Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down. But pulling off the impossible is just the start of her problems, as she learns that she's stepped square into a conspiracy for control of Artemis itself—and that now, her only chance at survival lies in a gambit even riskier than the first.

This was a huge disappointment as Andy Weir's first book, The Martian, was a real favorite of mine and I was really looking forward to seeing how he did with a different sort of story. Unfortunately, for me the new book is something of a cross between a YA book and an engineering manual featuring aluminum manufacturing. If this sounds like an awkward mixture, it is because it is.

Weir obviously loves engineering and how our lives depend on it, often in ways we don't think about. In the The Martian the story drove our need to know about engineering so the hero could survive. In the case of Artemis, our need to know is not obvious as the heroine engages in a shady deal to score 1 million slugs (lunar currency). However, the story often pauses to point out how aluminum provides more than enough oxygen to keep humans supplied and so forth. By the end, we do indeed need to know details about aluminum manufacturing, however I am fairly sure I needed to know less than half the information which we stopped so often to absorb.

Enough of the engineering side. But what of the story itself? It is a heist tale with tendrils that sink into the seamy underbelly of the lunar economy. Unfortunately it is told to us by Jazz, a young woman who has the virtue of being a genius and very stubborn but who otherwise has almost no personality. She has a secret — why does she need a million slugs? But we are told so little about it that I soon forgot she had a secret at all. And I never cared about it or her. I don't mind YA, or as they used to call them in Robert Heinlein's day, juvenile stories but this had little of Heinlein's skill which always told the story about engaging characters first and filled in details/science only as necessary to keep things rolling along.

In fact, by the time the final big plan was being laid out for the assembled gang, I had become so bored that it was only by a sheer effort of will that I finished the book at all.

That isn't to say that the book doesn't have good points. I thoroughly enjoyed the worldbuilding. Artemis and the way citizens lived was really interesting. The letters between Jazz and her penpal were wonderful at giving us information briefly but evocatively. If more of the book had been like that, it would have been much more interesting. There was one sequence which grabbed me when Jazz was doing a job for a local mob-boss on the lunar surface. Obviously one of Weir's authorial skills is creating high tension moments and making readers care about their outcome. Unfortunately this book only pulled that off once for me.

I appreciate that Weir is trying something different and it has to be insanely difficult to follow up a first novel that was also made into a big movie. More than anything this book makes me interested to see how his next book turns out.

Worth a Thousand Words: Doggy!

Doggy!, Karin Jurick

Well Said: Trouble

Trouble is so hard to bear, is it not?—How can we live and think that any one has trouble—piercing trouble—and we could help them, and never try?

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Listen Up — Wolf 359, Gone with the Wind

As I mentioned, I've been working on a big project lately. Luckily, it's the sort that lets me listen to podcasts and audiobooks while I work. Here are one of each that have been the backbone of my listening.

Wolf 359 is a radio drama in the tradition of Golden Age of Radio shows. Set on board the U.S.S. Hephaestus space station, the misfit crew deals with daily life-or-death emergencies, while searching for signs of alien life and discovering there might be more to their mission than they thought.

Early episodes begin as Communication Officer Matt Eiffel's audio diary, broadcast into space at large to break up his boredom. He's a slacker, but an entertaining one and we learn about the crew and life aboard an out-dated space station. Day-to-day activities are more wide ranging than you'd expect and the growing sense that something sinister is intended from the employers on Earth keeps things jumpy — especially as star Wolf 359 begins acting unpredictably.

I'm hooked on this and have been binge listening, only slowing down in the last week or two as the suspense began to get to me. I've been especially impressed with the way that the show can take you from loathing to liking ... and sometimes back to loathing ... particular characters with each new revelation of backstory.

Gone with the Wind was on my parents' bookshelves when I was growing up and, as happened with so many classics, at some point I picked it up and devoured the whole thing. I've probably read it three times during my lifetime, enjoying it more each time.

Having been written in 1930 by a Southerner, some of the characters have attitudes that were unpopular when I was growing up, much less during these cracklingly divisive times. And that includes the author who will break out in little asides occasionally for commentary about the South. That's when it turns into a look into the mind of those who lost the war. At least, that's what I remember. It must have been 20 years since I've read this.

No matter what, it remains a wonderful story. I had just finished listening to the audiobook of Kim and it immersed me me in an exotic place and mindset. I missed being in such a different world. Since I'd heard several people recently mention they were listening to Gone with the Wind, it somehow seemed like it might fill that gap. And it did. I'd forgotten how many details Mitchell put into her novel and every time I felt as if I couldn't stand Scarlett for one more second something would happen which would pull me back into the story.

I'm about halfway through since I'm taking it slowly but if you've never tried this book I encourage you to pick it up. If you have read it, you'll discover, as an acquaintance said recently, "Every time you read it you find something new there."

Worth a Thousand Words: Lion Resting

Lion Resting, Rembrandt
via Lines and Colors

Apologies for my absence!

So sorry I haven't been around much lately. It's my annual crazy time doing layout for the Worthington Direct catalog. 162 pages this year, my part takes about a month and a half with intensity increasing as we go. It will go to the printer the week after Thanksgiving so lately I've been working nights and weekends to make sure I'm keeping up my end.

I really enjoy the work but it does take its toll on available time and also memory! I meant to post this apology last weekend!

I'll be back to normal soon, hopefully getting us back to normal around here next week.

Thanks for your patience!

Well Said: Sun, Rain, and the Holy Spirit

Just as the sun shines and the day brings light, the stream irrigates the soil and rain waters the earth, so the heavenly Spirit pours himself into us.

St. Cyprian of Carthage