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.”
INFJ
November 3, 2007 at 11:34 am | In 9 to 5, life | 1 CommentWe are having an all-day staff retreat assessing working styles this coming Wednesday and as the instigator/organizer, I feel reponsible for making sure it goes well. Part of that is framing it, providing an introduction, and it is important to consider possible reservations people bring with them, spoken or not. For starters: There is never a good day in a busy department to take an entire day away. So why are we here? What do we hope to accomplish? I will try to convince all of us (myself included) that this is a necessary stepping away from the ‘tyranny of the urgent’ in order to reflect.
“Send him an email, and ‘cc’ God”
November 3, 2007 at 11:31 am | In 9 to 5, life | Leave a CommentSomeone needs to do a manual on email communications. MOST OF US KNOW BY NOW THAT USING ALL CAPS IN AN EMAIL COMES OFF AS SHOUTING, and is generally not advisable unless that’s what you intend. What kinds of relational disasters can occur when a message that should have been a “Reply” is inadvertently sent “Reply All”? And what kinds of power-plays (veiled threats, intimidation, tattling) are revealed, in certain situations, by whom you “cc”?
Exercise ball (blue)
November 3, 2007 at 11:23 am | In 9 to 5, life | 2 Comments
The pink 65 cm. exercise ball I was using as a desk chair developed a slow leak so I bought another one. It came with a DVD featuring a frighteningly perky-looking Exercise Lady. The ball takes forever to inflate with the toy plastic pump they provide, so I’ve been doing it a little at a time and feel slightly self-conscious about the heavy-breathing noises the pump makes—one of those times you hope no upper-level administrator is striding down the hall about to pay a visit. Other examples (purely hypothetical, of course): when everyone’s down on the floor playing with the brand-new puppy someone smuggled in to show off. Or when you have just forwarded a funny YouTube clip (e.g., “Dog Afraid of the Water”) to your coworkers and the chain-reactions are erupting all down the hall. Or when (fill in the blank)…
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