A few words about conversation
December 26, 2007 at 6:03 pm | In Art, faith, life | Leave a CommentIt’s the time of year for gatherings and we have been to two in particular where the conversation was a feast. The first was at an artist’s studio where half a dozen of us had been invited to see some large works in progress, all of them meditations on the relationship between Jesus and his mother. Our talk was a journey, an “assay”—the word from which our more specifically literary term “essay” is derived—meaning a foray, a setting out in a search for understanding. None of us dominated—it was like a volleyball game in which personalities are subsumed in the common task of setting up the ball so it can be whacked over the net by whoever happens to be in the right position to do so at the moment. Our volleys included the gospel of John, T.S. Eliot’s seminal essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Rothko’s colors, John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction, the mathematician Godel—but this is just what I happen to remember; there was lots more.
The second was at a graciously appointed home in Boxford—seven of us gathered around a table feasting on salmon, risotto, salad and conversation that ranged from Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Sheridan, WY, some years ago (her emissary asked if it would be possible to remove all rifles from all pickup-truck rifle-racks in Sheriden for the duration of her visit; it was simply not possible), to our various Myers-Briggs types (Beth and Mark are complete opposites; Beth gave an interesting answer to my question of what their mornings were like). We also talked about growing up with one or more alcoholic parents, and how it forms one’s understanding of “normal.” I said I had not known until I was an adult that the bathroom towel closet was not a “normal” place to keep the vodka. True enough, but on the way home I realized I’d left out the rest of the story, which is that following a car accident and textbook near-death experience in 1974 my mother sobered up and devoted much of the rest of her life to devising programs for recovering alcoholics. She passed away April 19, 2003, on Holy Saturday, which also happened to be her 75th birthday. Here’s to you, Mom.
Our New Pet Roomba
December 25, 2007 at 10:39 pm | In life | Leave a CommentA “Roomba” is a robotic vacuum cleaner made by iRobot. We received one this morning from our youngest son and it was an immediate hit. We put it (him? her?) to work cleaning up cracker crumbs and pine needles in the living room, and began brainstorming YouTube possibilities, only to find out (of course!) that others had beat us to it. Check out “Roomba Robots Fighting”:
Tradition as “audacious creation”
December 1, 2007 at 10:33 am | In faith, theology | 4 CommentsGood words on tradition from two brothers in the faith—one gone to Glory, the other still soldiering on:
“Being faithful to tradition most definitely does not consist…[in] literal repetition and transmission of the philosophical and theological theses that one imagines lie hidden in time and in the contingencies of history. Rather, being faithful to tradition consists much more in imitating our Fathers in the faith with respect to their attitude of intimate reflection and their effort of audacious creation, which are the necessary preludes to true spiritual fidelity.”
—Hans Urs von Balthasar, Presence and Thought: an Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa (Ignatius, 1988), p. 12.
“In his essay, ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’ (in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, Cambridge UP, 1986), the 20th-century German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer states that tradition is not so much a matter of conservation as transmission, and that every act of transmission necessarily involves a corresponding act of translation. The conservative mood is therefore not necessarily the best mode for continuance of any given tradition and in fact may undercut or truncate that tradition by its very refusal to ‘translate’ it into meaningful terms for a current generation of participants. In other words, hanging on too tightly to a particular iteration of a tradition will cause it to arrive stillborn in the next generation.”
—Bruce Herman, Lothlorien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts, Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts. From “Teaching in Tongues: Christians, Art Pedagogy, and Postmodernity,” a paper presented at the conference, “Art Education, Religion and the Spiritual,” at the School for the Visual Arts, New York, October 2007.
Little altars
November 30, 2007 at 12:17 am | In faith | Leave a Comment
“We want to be men and women who love and worship God, but we also want to protect a little corner of our inner lives for ourselves….When we begin to think about living and thinking always in God’s loving presence we experience the immediate temptation to select carefully the thoughts that we bring into our conversations with God and the ones we reserve for our own private time… .This withholding from God of a large part of our thoughts leads us onto a road that we probably would never consciously take. It is the road to idolatry. Idolatry means the worship of false images, and that is precisely what happens when we keep our fantasies, worries and joys to ourselves and do not present them to the Lord of our hearts. By refusing to share these thoughts, we limit our own healing, erecting little altars to the mental images we are withholding from the divine conversation….”
Henri Nouwen, Clowning in Rome, 1979
Norman Mailer, requiescat in pacem
November 11, 2007 at 1:21 pm | In books, theology | Leave a Comment
Paula, posting in Fr. Kendall Harmon’s blog, titusonenine: http://www.kendallharmon.net/t19/index.php/t19/article/7513/#comments
“Here are comments by interviewer Christopher Lydon about Mailer: ‘ . . . fundamentally The Castle in the Forest seems to me an exercise in theology, a confirmation, finally, that there’s a believer inside Norman Mailer—original, but recognizably sprung from the Jewish and Christian traditions, and almost systematic.’ And this: ‘ . . . his edge in the competitive struggle with the secular storytellers of his generation is precisely this taste for metaphysics and theology.’ http://www.radioopensource.org/norman-mailers-long-view/
Guess I’ll have to go read The Castle in the Forest.
The NYTimes obit: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/books/11mailer.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Orvieto 11 . 8 . 2007
November 9, 2007 at 5:14 pm | In Art, life | Leave a CommentAlways nice to have a poem show up in your inbox. This is from a professor friend who recently returned from Orvieto, Italy, home base for the Gordon in Orvieto program, which recently moved its digs from one convent to another (if you can read Italian, here’s a local account of the move: http://www.orvietosi.it/notizia.php?id=12494) :
Orvieto 11 . 8 . 2007
breath of your umbrian valley is always rising along these cliff walls
carrying the scent of charcoal fire and baking bread,
source of life here, along with oil, pasta,
and wine
pattern of olive groves and vineyards crossing themselves
in reverence, all grow in this ancient green-gray soil (offering
its life to them, never exhausted
in giving)
street-stones fan-like, outstretched to receive our feet and wheels
yield sounds that have echoed in these alleys for ages,
etched with each washing and wearing, black like
Etruscan pottery
duomo, your crown, surprises me each time I round a street expecting
more of your cadenced rooflines to frame my vision,
yet finding that jewel instead, its face pressed against the night’s
velvet sky
your people are like you, parochial yet magnanimous, small but expanding
always to include the stranger who once laid siege your walls,
seeking to steal what is freely offered to one in need
(like me)
Bruce Herman
Lights on Rte. 1
November 8, 2007 at 1:38 am | In Art, life | Leave a Comment
My daughter, Mary, “scribbling” with her camera on her way home last weekend. I feel compelled to add that she was the passenger, not the driver.
Actually INFP
November 8, 2007 at 1:20 am | In 9 to 5 | 2 CommentsStaff retreat at Adelynrood Retreat and Conference Center in Byfield, Mass., next door to what used to be Governor Dummer Academy, recently (and wisely) renamed The Governor’s Academy. It was a gorgeous fall day and I was dangerous driving up Rte. 1A this morning, gawking at color. The salt marsh spread out forever like some kind of apocalyptic wheat fields.
So I’m an INFP and not an INFJ, after all. I never took the real thing before anyway, just the Cliff’s Notes version online, a kind of parlor game. INFP totally makes sense—especially makes sense of the piles of papers that accumulate on my floor because I cannot seem to file them, and of my constant struggle to obey the earnest bulleted lists of “to dos” I (or an alter-ego) print up for myself each day.
It’s important to resist the urge to treat this four-letter acronym as something like an astrological sign. It’s a sign, yes, but signs are just marks on wood or paper pointing us to the Real Thing.
I am at a loss to explain the hula hoop part of the workshop, though. You really had to be there.
A Strange Character
November 8, 2007 at 1:17 am | In faith, theology | Leave a Comment“Why did Jesus of Nazareth do the things he did? What was happening to the world when he sat down to eat with a sinner or gave himself over to the cross? Christian theology ruminates over such questions because they are so richly and imponderably mysterious. The theologian who explores the full reality of Jesus Christ is journeying through strange country.”
Mark McIntosh, Christology from Within: Spirituality and the Incarnation in Hans Urs von Balthasar (U. of Notre Dame Press, 2000).
And here’s a fine essay on von Balthasar: http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2005/jcihak_hubapol_may05.asp
Drafts Y & Z
November 8, 2007 at 1:16 am | In Writing, life | Leave a CommentI have recently divided one novel into two. The first I have handed off to my daughter for now, as raw material for a class she’s taking in screenwriting at the New School in NYC. That story (boy having a psychotic break escapes from his psych ward and ends up on a freeway bridge in downtown L.A. with an important message he is hoping will be captured by TV cameras and broadcast to the world before it is too late) is inherently more cinematic than the second part, involving a different set of characters. That part begins like this:
“She continues to hope that her younger brother, Ted, is still alive. Her best-case scenario has him a cloistered monk in a cliffside cell somewhere. It’s a romantic notion but not inconceivable—Ted in secrecy and solitude, pouring out his life in prayer for the world. He would be happy doing that. As a little boy he’d wanted to be an architect, and maybe he ended up a builder after all, but a different sort: one who has traded rebar and I-beams for the inner geometry of the Kingdom of God. Its own forces and vectors, its many mansions.
“The overwhelming likelihood, however, is that his bones lie somewhere between the western border of Cambodia and Phnom Penh, buried or not. She imagines a team of archaeologists coming upon a pile of skeletons in a mass grave a hundred years from now, five hundred—and Ted’s remains somehow standing out. He had soft tooth enamel and a mouthful of silver, the one thing that might distinguish him from the Cambodians with whom he fell. Or someone, against all odds, might note a truncated left pinky finger and wonder what had happened to make it so.”
Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.
