A Name Both Revealed and Refused

In revealing his mysterious name, YHWH ("I AM HE Who Is, "I AM WHO AM" or "I AM WHO I AM"), God says who he is and by what name he is to be called. This divine name is mysterous just as God is mystery. It is at once a name revealed and something like the refusal of a name and hence it better expresses God as what he is — infineitely above everything that we can understand or say: he is the "hidden God," his name is ineffable, and he is the God who makes himself close to men.

CCC 206, Catechism of the Catholic Church

This is both illuminating and mind blowing to consider. I've been reading a section of the Catechism every day during my afternoon prayer and it's chock full of good lectio divina material.

Blossoming Tree

A blossoming tree on the beach of the Mediterranean Sea Straits
between the Aegean Sea and the Sea of Marmara.
Edward B. Gordon

A Divine "Punishment"

A divine 'punishment’ is also a divine 'gift’, if accepted, since its object is ultimate blessing, and the supreme inventiveness of the Creator will make 'punishments’ (that is changes of design) produce a good not otherwise to be attained...

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

I'll never forget reading the interview where Stephen Colbert talked about this:

He was tracing an arc on the table with his fingers and speaking with such deliberation and care. “I was left alone a lot after Dad and the boys died.... And it was just me and Mom for a long time,” he said. “And by her example am I not bitter. By her example. She was not. Broken, yes. Bitter, no.” Maybe, he said, she had to be that for him. He has said this before—that even in those days of unremitting grief, she drew on her faith that the only way to not be swallowed by sorrow, to in fact recognize that our sorrow is inseparable from our joy, is to always understand our suffering, ourselves, in the light of eternity. What is this in the light of eternity? Imagine being a parent so filled with your own pain, and yet still being able to pass that on to your son.

“It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.

I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

Joel Lovell, GQ

It's worth thinking about as you trace back through your own life.

Making Christians Not Mathematicians

Nowhere in the Gospel do we see that the Lord said: "I am sending you a Paraclete who will teach you about the course of the sun and the moon." For He wanted to make Christians not mathematicians.

St. Augustine

Because even waaay back in the day, people were trying to pick apart the Bible because the science didn't look right to them. Some things never change.

Helen Hyde

Helen Hyde

Helen Hyde was the artist who gave us the painting from last week, Moonlight on the Viga Canal. I love the sense of style in this photo as well as her winning expression. Click through the link to read more about her fascinating life and the way she concentrated on Japanese influenced art.

I do not approve of guys using false pretenses on dolls ...

Personally, I never cricize Miss Beulah Beauregard for breaking her engagement to Little Alfie, because from what she tells me she becomes engaged to him under false pretenses and I do not approve of guys using false pretenses on dolls, except, of course, when nothing else will do.

Damon Runyon, It Comes Up Mud

How's that for an opening sentence?

This one's for Rose whose birthday is today. She  hasn't read anything by Damon Runyon that I know of, but her love for the movie Guys and Dolls exposed me to his world ... which led to me reading his stories.

May

May, Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry

The May jaunt, a pageant celebrating the "joli mois de Mai" in which one had to wear green garments known as livree de mai. The riders are young noblemen and women, with princes and princesses being visible. In the background is a chateau thought to be the Palais de la Cite in Paris.

University of Chicago

The Pastry Cook

The Pastry Cook by Joseph Bail

Nature and the contradictions of contemporary secularism

One of the contradictions of contemporary secularism is its worship of nature, on the one hand, and its call for radical liberation from nature, on the other. We are told to eat organically, limit our carbon footprint, protect wild spaces, take public transportation ... We are also told we can choose if we are a male or a female (or something else entirely), that there are no natural differences between the sexes, that we can have intercourse without thinking about reproduction, that babies in wombs are not human life (unless they become "chosen"), that it is "ableist" to distinguish—physically, not morally— between abled and disabled human bodies ...

Christopher Kaczor & Matthew R. Petrusek
Jordan Peterson, God, and Christianity

This is so obvious that I feel really silly for not ever noticing how shockingly bad are the contradictions  of believing both points of view simultaneously. I know many people do so and we are often bombarded by popular opinion supporting any and all of these ideas without ever noticing the logical inconsistencies.

I myself probably would if not for the grace of becoming Catholic and having my feet planted in age-old truths with thousands of years of logic behind them.

Bear Boy

Bear Boy, Remo Savisaar

Mei (May)

Mei, Theo van Hoytema

Jordan Peterson, God and Christianity: The Search for a Meaningful Life

A very kind blog reader sent me this as an Easter gift. Honestly the best thing about it was the really nice note that was included.

I dipped into Jordan Peterson's video series a while back to see what all the fuss was about and found his reasoning very compelling. I was interested that a Jungian psychotherapist seemed to draw all the right conclusions from a close reading of the book of Genesis. Naturally, I've seen many references to Peterson and liked the idea that he has particularly caught the attention of young men who look to his insights for guidance in their lives. In our age of "diversity" this group has been almost deliberately overlooked.

Most of all I wondered how Peterson's conclusions stacked up against a Christian reading of the same scripture and traditions. I wasn't so interested in that question that I was going to watch all of his presentations though. That is why I was delighted when this book came out which does just that. It lived up to its promise in spades.

The authors go through Peterson's 12 rules of life from the book of the same name, look at his reasoning and conclusions, and then compare them to Christian thought. It is amazing how much Peterson gets right, showing that if one has a logical, well trained mind then scripture is not an archaic, impenetrable text as some critics allege. 

More than anything, I admire Peterson's dedication to following lines of thinking through to their logical conclusion, even when it leads to some hard truths. When his thinking goes astray, it is because he is not taking God into the equation, as the authors show time and again.

This makes for fascinating reading. Not only do we see the truths of Christianity from an outside view, but we see where Christianity provides the fullness of truth when God is included (as, indeed, he must be). The authors also take a look at Peterson's later book Beyond Order. Finally, there is a transcript of a 2019 conversation between Peterson and Bishop Robert Barron which makes a perfect ending.

Highly recommended.

Introduction to the Spiritual Life by Brant Pitre

This is a simply excellent book. I thought that Brant Pitre was going to cover the various forms of prayer from easiest (vocal) to most difficult (contemplation and meditation). And there would be some great quotes from Church Fathers along the way. At the most basic, I was correct. However, there is a lot more to it that turns this from an informative book into an inspirational one.

As he loves to do, Pitre is tracing the roots of practices and understanding from Judaism to Jesus to the Christian spiritual classics. This, of course, gives the reader depth and context which in itself is eye opening. However, as each section ends in the classics, we are given solid advice about how to apply ourselves to each particular step of the spiritual life.

That is what this book is all about, after all, the spiritual life. It ranges from forms of prayer to major temptations, from spiritual exercises to the seven capital sins, from how to meditate on scripture to how to hang on when nothing seems to be working (that's called the dark night of the soul).

All along the way,  remedies are offered for all the pitfalls in our way. For example the three major temptations of pleasure, possessions, and pride bring with them discussions of fasting, almsgiving, and prayer. The seven capital sins are each accompanied by a look at the corresponding virtues we can acquire to help in our spiritual struggles.

I found myself unable to put this book down as I recognized my own struggles in the pages and picked up the little tips that already have enriched my prayer life. This is an accessible yet rich book that will reward Christians with many layers for reading and rereading. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Moonlight on the Viga Canal

Moonlight on the Viga Canal – a color woodcut made by Helen Hyde in 1912

Amezaiku Goldfish

Amezaiku goldfish by Shinri Tezuka

 

Yesterday, we saw a painting featuring a Japanese candy seller working on a piece of Amezaiku candy. Wikipedia says:

Amezaiku (飴細工) is Japanese candy craft artistry. An artist takes multi-colored mizuame and, using their hands and other tools such as tweezers and scissors, creates a sculpture. Amezaiku artists also paint their sculpted candy with edible dyes to give the finished work more character. Animals and insects are common amezaiku shapes created to appeal to children. Intricate animal characters are created with expert speed. Some amezaiku artists are also street performers who perform magic tricks and tell stories along with their candy craft entertainment.

When the Bible was chanted by the heralds of God

Who thinks, as he thumbs the closely printed pages, of the time when these words and sentences were not fixed in cold print but chanted or intoned to audiences by the voices of the heralds of God? ...

To understand properly how the bible arose, we must forget the habits we have acquired as modern men and members of a paper civilization. Reading and writing have become such automatic operations that it is difficult for us to realize that some societies have been able to manage almost entirely without them. Our memory has become bloodless and barren, and our faculties of improvisation have more to do with mere words and rhetoric than with poetry and prophecy. In ancient Israel, right up to the time of Christ, it was very different. The ability to speak with fluency, art, and a gift for aphorism was the mark of those who today would be "writers." The trained memory was a superb tool. "A good disciple," said the Jewish scribes, "is like a well-made cistern; he does not let a single drop of his master's teaching escape."

Henri Daniel-Rops, What is the Bible?

The Ameya (Candy Seller)

 

The Ameya, Robert Frederick Blum

Wikipedia tells us: Done in oil on canvas, the illustration depicts a Japanese candy maker (practicing the art of Amezaiku) at work.

Tomorrow I'll have a picture of a truly amazing piece of Amezaiku.

All our trials can become Jesus' trials if we but allow it ...

All our trials can become Jesus' trials if we but allow it, since he has anticipated, condensed and overcome them all in his own temptations. He has "foresuffered" all. We overcome our temptations only by seeing them primarily as his own and ourselves as the ones who wait by his side during the battle. ... in each new trial he undergoes, he reveals to us a new aspect of the holiness, fidelity, and goodness of God in man.

Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis

That's one of the things I love most about Jesus — there's nothing I'm facing that he didn't face first.

Still Life with Mushrooms

 

Still Life with Mushrooms by Firmin Baes

Worth a Thousand Words: Vase and Flowers

Vase and Flowers, Emil Carlsen