bearing blog
bear – ing n 1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4 pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].
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A good day to read Finslippy.
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Harriet Miers: Bad Writing.
Jim Lindgren of the Volokh Conspiracy posts some excerpts from Harriet Miers’s writings and observes,
We all make typographical errors… but her writing has that airy feel of someone trying to sound important by regurgitating empty platitudes… Note the incorrect comma in the last sentence and the plodding first sentence….
[I]f these are representative examples of Harriet Miers’ writings, she will be among the least able writers to serve on the Court in recent years. In my opinion, the majority of students whom I supervise for independent senior research projects at Northwestern Law write better prose than the passages published in the Texas Lawyer under Harriet Miers’ name.
These are serious and substantial arguments against Miers’s confirmation, right down to the last comma. Imprecise writing — yes, even imprecise punctuation — signifies imprecise thinking, or laziness, or both.
(And yes, I know that the standard rule is to write Miers’ confirmation, not Miers’s confirmation. I prefer the latter, as do Strunk and White; Miers is not the plural of Mier. We don’t write the dress’ hem or the Mass’ conclusion or Minneapolis’ mayor, do we? Perhaps someday the rest of the English-speaking world will come around and see it my way.)
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Want erectile dysfunction? Ride your bike.
New studies indicate the traditional bicycle saddle is worse than previously thought.
OK, I want one of these for Christmas now.
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I’m “Upbeat.” What are you?
Take the 2005 Political Typology Test. It must be scientific, ’cause the Pew Research Center is promoting it, and I hear about them on NPR all the time!
I bet you thought I was a "Pro-Government Conservative." Not so!
Upbeats express positive views about the economy, government and society. Satisfied with their own financial situation and the direction the nation is heading, these voters support George W. Bush’s leadership in economic matters more than on moral or foreign policy issues. Combining highly favorable views of government with equally positive views of business and the marketplace, Upbeats believe that success is in people’s own hands, and that businesses make a positive contribution to society. This group also has a very favorable view of immigrants.
I admit, it’s not what I expected. On the other hand, I am generally cheerful.
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Glasses.
Rich Leonardi criticizes the Archdiocese of Cincinnati’s stemware.
Exhibit A is the quotation from the rules of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacrament:
The Bishops’ Conferences have the faculty to decide whether it is appropriate… for sacred vessels [i.e., chalices and ciborium — the containers that hold the Eucharist] to be made of other solid materials …. It is strictly required, however, that such materials be truly noble in the common estimation within a given region, so that honour will be given to the Lord by their use, and all risk of diminishing the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharistic species in the eyes of the faithful will be avoided.
Reprobated, therefore, is any practice of using for the celebration of Mass common vessels, or others lacking in quality, or devoid of all artistic merit or which are mere containers, as also other vessels made from glass, earthenware, clay, or other materials that break easily. This norm is to be applied even as regards metals and other materials that easily rust or deteriorate."
Exhibit B is a photograph of Archbishop Pilarczyk presiding over Mass, an array of plain wineglasses before him. "Pottery Barn" indeed, or maybe Target.
Bottom line: Place the Eucharist in noble, not ignoble containers. The Gospel may be a "treasure in earthen vessels," (2 Cor 4:7) but the Eucharist is not. Glass isn’t allowed because it can break. Will someone please tell me why on earth anyone would bother flouting this rule? It isn’t cost; spending priorities maybe, but not cost.
Are Catholic pastors ashamed to use rich stuff, scandalized by the thought that someone will criticize us because we didn’t sell the chalice to give to the poor? Goodness, I’m not a proponent of skimping on Church art in general — why should we come to a place of tasteful emptiness when we are called to the fullness of life? — but if you’re going to pare down, don’t do it with the Eucharist itself. It’s the most important stuff in the building and the containers that hold it ought to indicate: here be the Holy of Holies. If you’re going to do that, would it not be pretty powerful to have a generally spare Church with an exquisitely carved, lovingly detailed Tabernacle and sacred vessels.
Maybe the liturgist thinks it’s more meaningful for the people to be able to see the liquid in the glass, when it’s raised up during the Consecration. I am not sure why this should matter. It looks like wine. Traditionally the appearance of the stuff, namely its persistent refusal to look like what we say it is (with a few notable exceptions), tends not to help us have faith in the Real Presence.
UPDATE. "Papa Ratzi" and his commentors discuss this in the comments to this unrelated, and very funny, post:
Thank you for your kind offer, but I already have a ‘classic’ refrigerator in harvest gold. Perhaps your mother could donate hers to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and then use the second collection at Mass to purchase metal chalices to donate to the Archdioceses of Cincinnati or Los Angeles; apparently those regions are suffering from a severe metal shortage and have to use glass goblets for Mass. [–Papa]
Dear Papa, we had a metal shortage here too before we got a new parochial vicar. Suddenly, the shortage abated and we haven’t had an issue since. The parochial vicar must have had connections to the metal business. [–Linda]
The curious shortage in precious metals affecting parts of the United States is indeed a very unusual thing. It seems that the problem is that many of the priests of a certain age do not realize that precious metals are generally found in deep and dark places, like say, mines or the cupboards in the sacristy.
Instead, they seem to be under the illusion that precious metals are to be found at their local Pier-One Imports, and when they can’t find gold chalaces there the silly things pick up tea cups or class goblets or wooden cups or some such silly thing.
Perhaps an apostolic letter "Looking For Gold In All the Wrong Places" could be issued on this topic. It has happened from time to time that priests who look find that perfectly suitable chalaces are sitting right in their own sacristy cupboards if they only look. [— DarwinCatholic]
Nice.
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Justin Martyr.
Part of a series.
Justin Martyr (100-165) is also called Justin the Philosopher, at least by Encyclopedia.com, and if you scan through the several works that are reliably attributed to him, as well as others that are plausible but not certainly his, it is easy to see why. His work is full of references to Greek culture, mythology, and literature.
The Catholic Encyclopedia calls Justin Martyr the best-authenticated Christian writer of the second century.
Here’s a bit from Chapters 109 and 110 of the Dialogue with Trypho, in which Justin quotes Micah 4:1-7 and then explains it.
This is as follows:
"And in the last days the mountain of the Lord shall be manifest, established on the top of the mountains; it shall be exalted above the hills, arid people shall flow unto it.
"And many nations shall go, and say, Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and they shall enlighten us in His way, and we shall walk in His paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
"And He shall judge among many peoples, and shall rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into sickles: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
"And each man shall sit under his vine and under his fig tree; and there shall be none to terrify: for the mouth of the Lord of hosts hath spoken it. For all people will walk in the name of their gods; but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever.
"And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will assemble her that is afflicted, and gather her that is driven out, and whom I had plagued;
and I shall make her that is afflicted a remnant, and her that is oppressed a strong nation. And the Lord shall reign over them in Mount Zion from henceforth, and even for ever."
And when I had finished these words, I continued: "Now I am aware that your teachers, sirs, admit the whole of the words of this passage to refer to Christ; and I am likewise aware that they maintain He has not yet come; or if they say that He has come, they assert that it is not known who He is; but when He shall become manifest and glorious, then it shall be known who He is. And then, they say, the events mentioned in this passage shall happen, just as if there was no fruit as yet from the words of the prophecy.
O unreasoning men! understanding not what has been proved by all these passages, that two advents of Christ have been announced: the one, in which He is set forth as suffering, inglorious, dishonoured, and crucified;
but the other, in which He shall come from heaven with glory, when the man of apostasy, who speaks strange things against the Most High, shall venture to do unlawful deeds on the earth against us the Christians, who, having learned the true worship of God from the law, and the word which went forth from Jerusalem by means of the apostles of Jesus, have fled for safety to the God of Jacob and God of Israel;
and we who were filled with war, and mutual slaughter, and every wickedness, have each through the whole earth changed our warlike weapons,–our swords into ploughshares, and our spears into implements of tillage,–and we cultivate piety, righteousness, philanthropy, faith, and hope, which we have from the Father Himself through Him who was crucified;
and sitting each under his vine, i.e., each man possessing his own married wife. For you are aware that the prophetic word says, ‘And his wife shall be like a fruitful vine.
Justin’s point: Prophecies of the Messiah that point to a coming into glory are not inconsistent with the ignoble death of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross, because a second advent is expected. The prophecy of swords and ploughshares and so on has already come to pass, because already in the mid-second century, people of multiple nations — including those historically at war — have heard the Good News and come to believe, becoming unified in Christ.
Here comes a passage that moves me.
Now it is evident that no one can terrify or subdue us who have believed in Jesus over all the world. For it is plain that, though beheaded, and crucified, and thrown to wild beasts, and chains, and fire, and all other kinds of torture, we do not give up our confession; but the more such things happen, the more do others and in larger numbers become faithful, and worshippers of God through the name of Jesus.
It’s true: the persecutions of the early Church were great, and they began with the Apostles themselves. All met ugly deaths at the hands of people who hated their message.
It would not be truthful to say that I converted because of the witness of the martyrs — I did not learn about them until much later — but truly, no other body of facts strengthens my faith more in times of doubt than the historical knowledge of what happened to Peter (crucified under Nero), Andrew (crucified), James son of Zebedee (killed by Herod Agrippa I), Jude Thaddeus (martyred in Persia), Philip (martyred in Phrygia), Bartholomew a.k.a. Nathanael (flayed in Armenia), Paul (beheaded at Rome), etc. Going to your death because you insist that your story is true is, in my opinion, a pretty strong argument against your having made it up, no matter what the reason is for your alleged fabrication.
Justin seems to think that Christianity’s survival of the martyrdoms is also evidence of Divine blessing.
For Just as if one should cut away the fruit-bearing parts of a vine, it grows up again, and yields other branches flourishing and fruitful; even so the same thing happens with us. For the vine planted by God and Christ the Saviour is His people.
But the rest of the prophecy shall be fulfilled at His second coming. For the expression, ‘He that is afflicted [and driven out],’ i.e., from the world, [implies] that, so far as you and all other men have it in your power, each Christian has been driven out not only from his own property, but even from the whole world; for you permit no Christian to live. But you say that the same fate has befallen your own nation. Now, if you have been cast out after defeat in battle, you have suffered such treatment justly indeed, as all the Scriptures bear witness; but we, though we have done no such [evil acts] after we knew the truth of God, are testified to by God, that, together with the most righteous, and only spotless and sinless Christ, we are taken away out of the earth. For Isaiah cries, ‘Behold how the righteous perishes, and no man lays it to heart; and righteous men are taken away, and no man considers it.’
In case you didn’t guess from the name, Justin was martyred too. Marcus Aurelius’s handiwork.
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More desecration.
Strange story from Decatur, Alabama: Church-service assault.
After communion at the 11 a.m. Mass, a man and woman came forward, screaming.
Then, to the shock and horror of the Rev. Joe Culotta and his congregation, the man turned over the cherished century-old marble altar. It tumbled down the steps and smashed onto the floor, ripping up carpet in front of the first-row pews.
Four people, all in their twenties, were arrested.
"They were screaming something about Catholics worshipping idols and other things…."
The priest speculated that the attack was a response to this article about saints’ relics that appeared in the local paper yesterday. A relic of St. Pius X and one said to be of St. Ursula were installed under the altar. It’s unclear from the two articles whether the relics were damaged in the attack.
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This is my new favorite stuff.
<homer simpson>
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How school is going.
Oscar, age 5, has been "doing schoolwork" for a while now. We started Saxon Math K in January, mainly because I thought it would be a good idea to get myself used to sitting down a few days a week at the table with him. Now we’re a few lessons away from finishing the "Purple Book." He’s got a vacation coming up — going to spend a week with Grandma and Grandpa — so we’ll finish the book up, give him a couple weeks off, and start the "Green Book" when he comes back, a month from now.
I’ve made up my mind to move pretty swiftly through it. The gently plodding, repetitive, scripted nature of Saxon was reassuringly easy for us as we got comfortable with Doing School, but I think now that we have the routine down, Oscar can go a little faster. Maybe not double-time, but certainly more than the prescribed four lessons per week.
I don’t remember how long we’ve been working on reading. Months. Oscar can decode pretty well, as long as the words only contain spellings he has been taught. He’s learned one spelling for every common phoneme in the English language, and can read just about any word that uses only those spellings. That part went pretty fast and he was excited about it.
It swiftly got painful as soon as I broke the news to him that well, we have more spellings for all of these sounds, and some of the spellings could represent several different sounds, and there’s no easy way to tell in advance which combination is right.
I think that he’ll feel positive about it again as soon as he starts to notice that he can decode the words by trying the different possibilities. When, faced with words like "hive" and "give" on the same page, he whines, How do you know which sound it is? and I answer, After you have been reading for a while your brain will figure it out, I don’t think he believes me. But I know his brain will figure it out. I just hope that he doesn’t feel too miserable in the meantime.
Although he is chronologically in kindergarten, I don’t really think of where he is in terms of grade level. I have adopted the so-called "classical" model in my head, and am thinking, instead of kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and so on, of the Trivium: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic. (Here’s the famous Dorothy Sayers essay on it.)
Oscar isn’t up to grammar yet. He’s in pre-grammar, or preparatory: a chunk of lifelong learning that began when he was two or three, after he learned to talk, and will last until somewhere between age seven and nine. The only academic goals of this chunk of his life: learn to read, and learn to add and multiply. I’ve also set the goal of reading all the stories in the children’s Bible to him this year. That leaves lots of time for singing, exercising our bodies, reading aloud, going to the zoo, that sort of thing. And of course making beds, sweeping the floor, visiting friends, cooking dinner.
Living, in other words. Keeping the priorities straight is an important thing for me to learn, too, as we go along.
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SCHOOL ROOM.
The homeschool kindergarten looks very, very different from the institutional kindergarten. At first glance the environment seems far poorer. For example, the environment is not gaily decorated with pumpkins in October, paper snowflakes in January, pastel eggs and construction-paper flowers in April.
But if you pause to think about it, a lot of the stuff in an "ordinary" kindergarten is artificial, put there to make up for the absence of the real thing. If my kids and I want to have a palpable sense of the change of seasons, we don’t cut out paper pumpkins. We go outside.
I remember the sturdy toy kitchen in my kindergarten classroom twenty-five years ago, with its wooden toaster that had a hidden spring in it to pop up two slices of wooden toast. I have no such toy kitchen in my homeschool classroom. However, my children have been known to make toast from time to time. They butter theirs, and jam it too, and eat it hot.
I have been thinking about the homeschool environment a great deal lately, because I have had a great opportunity land in my lap this year: we are to build a new house in the city. We always hoped we’d be able to build a house of our own design someday, but we never expected to have the chance to do it so early in our family’s life together. So when it came time to draw floorplans, we put in a "School Room." There it is on our final draft: SCHOOL ROOM, among the more normal labels like KITCHEN, LINEN CLOSET, and BATH #2. (We carefully arranged it so it might someday have a mythical resurrection as FORMAL DINING ROOM, just in time for resale.)
SCHOOL ROOM is adjacent to LIVING ROOM and separated from it by pocket doors. It has two tall cabinets that flank a south window, beneath which is a length of base cabinet, like in a kitchen. The west windows, three of them, look out on the street; I imagine that my children and I will watch the school buses go by. There will be a table and chairs. There will be a comfortable curl-up-and-read chair. Beyond that I have not imagined.
Will I hang schooly-things on the walls, like maps and alphabet strips? Frame the kids’ artwork? Oscar has a school desk (attached chair, hinged top) that I found abandoned by the side of the road and lugged home; will that go in there? Will we water plants on the countertop? Will we install racks for books? How will we spend our time in there? I don’t know, but it’s exciting.
It strikes me that in moving to a SCHOOL ROOM, we are changing, a little, the manifestation of our philosophy. If there is a SCHOOL ROOM, does that mean SCHOOL is something special that deserves a special ROOM to do it in? Maybe it’s better to have learning be a normal, everyday, every-minute-of-every-day part of family life. But then, eating is also a normal, everyday part of family life, and many homes have a DINING ROOM. The point of DINING ROOM is to create a pleasant atmosphere that is particularly well suited to dining; it’s not to make DINING into a different sort of activity (although if that is your goal, having a DINING ROOM ordered toward that goal will undoubtedly help).
So SCHOOL ROOM should be. It’s important for me to remember, as I furnish the place, that it’s above all part of my home, and the point is to create a pleasant atmosphere that is well-suited — not just to learning, reading, writing, studying — but to learning at home, reading at home, writing at home, studying at home.
That’s different from doing it in a school or office. What a lovely challenge!
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A rare luxury.
Every Saturday morning, I am free for a couple of hours. Mark is still asleep with the kids when I sneak out. I get to the restaurant just as it opens, 7 a.m. sharp. I have breakfast — alone. I leave the restaurant and go to a coffee shop, where I can access free wireless, and I do a little bit of paid work, technical editing mostly. I go home at lunchtime.
Today, I have no work to do. Wow! Here I am, fed and with a full, still-hot mug of dark roast at my elbow, and… I can read. I can blog. I can sit here with a silly grin on my face and just look around.
I won’t stay long. Mark has lots of work he can do on the house, getting it ready for sale. I can be helpful if I go home to keep the kids occupied while he paints the spare bedroom. But I think I’m going to enjoy it for just a little while.
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Tertullian vs. C. S. Lewis.
Part of a series.
Today I wonder: Is it better for Christians to emphasize that God is exceedingly merciful and generous and might allow everyone to be saved, or is it better for us to emphasize that the only way we know to salvation is narrow?
I’ve been going roughly from earlier to later writers in this series on the early Christians, but I’m jumping ahead to Tertullian (160-230) today, because I came across a passage just this afternoon I wanted to discuss. From his On the Resurrection of the Flesh:
Now such remarks have I wished to advance in defence of the flesh, from a general view of the condition of our human nature. Let us now consider its special relation to Christianity, and see how vast a privilege before God has been conferred on this poor and worthless substance.
It would suffice to say, indeed, that there is not a soul that can at all procure salvation, except it believe whilst it is in the flesh, so true is it that the flesh is the very condition on which salvation hinges. And since the soul is, in consequence of its salvation, chosen to the service of God, it is the flesh which actually renders it capable of such service.
The flesh, indeed, is washed, in order that the soul may be cleansed; the flesh is anointed, that the soul may be consecrated; the flesh is signed (with the cross), that the soul too may be fortified; the flesh is shadowed with the imposition of hands, that the soul also maybe illuminated by the Spirit; the flesh feeds on the body and blood of Christ, that the soul likewise may fatten on its God. They cannot then be separated in their recompense, when they are united in their service.
Those sacrifices, moreover, which are acceptable to God — I mean conflicts of the soul, fastings, and abstinences, and the humiliations which are annexed to such duty — it is the flesh which performs again and again to its own especial suffering. Virginity, likewise, and widowhood, and the modest restraint in secret on the marriage-bed, and the one only adoption of it, are fragrant offerings to God paid out of the good services of the flesh.
Lovely bit of writing, isn’t it? Well, what caught my eye (technically, ear, since I heard it on Mark Shea’s bit on Relevant Radio) today was the bit I’ve highlighted in bold/underline.
The reason I took notice of it is that I just finished re-reading, for probably the fifth or sixth time, C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. In this short work, a narrator "dreams" that he accompanies a tour bus ride out of a dreary Hell into the foothills of Heaven. There blessed spirits come to meet the grumbling, suspicious travelers and attempt (mostly unsuccessfully) to convince them to stay and journey deeper into Heaven with them.
Lewis’s main point is really that Hell is something we actively choose rather than something chosen for us. Still, this and other works make it clear that he considered it possible that God gives souls a chance to choose after death. Tertullian, on the other hand, emphatically insists that we must make our choice "whilst in the flesh." And so did most Christian writers throughout history, if I’m not mistaken. But Lewis isn’t the only one I’ve heard venture a guess: maybe we get a chance after death, when everything is much clearer.
I think we all want to believe in, and speak about, a God who gives humans every imaginable chance of salvation. I know I want to believe in that myself! It is so very hard to love a God who seems capricious and punitive. And it is so hard to convince unbelievers that a God of that sort is worth believing in. We want to paint Him in the best possible light. And we want to paint ourselves and our Church in the best light too: If we say our God might not accept this person as he thinks and behaves, then we fear we will be seen as not accepting the same person. So for these and other reasons, we project the most generous conditions of salvation that we can out to the world.
So, take this simple formula as an example: Outside the Church there is no salvation. Well, that used to mean something quite straightforward: You’ve gotta be a baptized Christian, preferably a Catholic, to make it to heaven! Nowadays we don’t say that. We say things like: Well, we don’t know for sure that you have to be explicitly a member of the Church to be saved. All we know is that salvation comes through the Church; if you are saved it is due to the saving work of Jesus Christ through the Church, whether you know it or not. God can save whoever he wants, after all.
This sounds good. It makes God sound nicer than the old interpretation did. I hope that it leads more people to feel a welcome that leads them to become believers.
Still, though, might it be safer to believe that the gates of salvation are narrower than that? I am not sure. We have actual promises of Christ in the Gospels that if we participate in the life of the Church as faithful members, we will be saved. There are no other kinds of promises. The possibility that non-Christians can be saved somehow is left open, yes. But there are no other kinds of promises.
I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. (John 3:5)
I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. (John 6:53)
Tough call. When you get down to it, all kinds of possibilities are open, but we only know of one Way that is certain.
And it’s a tough call, too, when it comes to that whole "can-you-choose-after-death" question, the one that Lewis struggles with in TGD. I heard a priest speculating in a homily once — to his credit, he did make it clear that it was only speculation — that perhaps we all get a moment of perfect clarity in the instant after our deaths, and it is with that perfect clarity that we are given the moment to choose God or not-God. He wanted to believe in a God that would give everyone equal opportunity to say Yes or No.
Lewis didn’t come up with the main idea in TGD; the refrigerium, or excursion from Hell, is an old idea. And he tries to reconcile Protestant and Catholic notions to it, uniting it with ideas of Purgatory and even of predestination, by appealing to the idea that in eternity a particular moment "contains all moments," all choices. But in any case, Lewis’s vision is far more liberal than Tertullian’s. If Lewis is right, then we have a chance to move the pieces after the game is over; if Tertullian is right, we do not. Yet Lewis is likely to convert more people of the modern mindset; does Tertullian have any appeal at all anymore?
What is the solution? Maybe it is simply that we project the generous version of events to the world, and then hold ourselves and each other — all of us already within the Church — to the higher standard. Bait-and-switch? I don’t know. But once we become aware of the kinds of demands that Jesus makes of us in the Gospels, and once we believe He is who He says He is, can we really take any chances?
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- Boundaries and whom to set them with.
- Neighborliness.
- Seventeen years later (part II): looking back at a series I wrote about “Gains.”
- Seventeen years later: Looking back at a series I wrote about “Gains” .
- The sudden sensation of “the good life,” part II: what do they all have in common?
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