Truth .. Into Great Silence

The hive has been greatly disturbed. The MSM is busily filling the air with droning reports. The blogosphere is humming with this pet theory and that (and that and that and that). Youtube video clips hum and fly before your eyes. Bzzzzzzzzz!

Simply the best and quite nearly only interpretive voice to bring coherence to the carnage at Fort Hood spoke several months prior to it occurring:

We are witnessing a new stage in the escalation to extremes. Terrorists have conveyed the message that they are ready to wait, that their notion of time is not ours. This is a clear sign of the return to the archaic, a return to the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, which is significant in itself. But who is paying attention to this significance? Who is taking its measure? Is that the job of the ministry of foreign affairs? We have to expect a lot of unexpected things in the future. We are going to witness things that will certainly be worse. Yet people will remain deaf.

On September 11, people were shaken, but they quickly calmed down. There was a flash of awareness, which lasted a few fractions of a second. People could feel that something was happening. Then a blanket of silence covered up the crack in our certainty of safety. Western rationalism operates like a myth: We always work harder to avoid seeing the catastrophe. (emphasis added) We neither can nor want to see violence as it is. The only way we will be able to meet the terrorist challenge is by radically changing the way we think. Yet, the clearer it is what is happening, the stronger our refusal to acknowledge it. This historical configuration is so new that we do not know how to deal with it. It is precisely a modality of what Pascal saw: the war between violence and truth. Think about the inadequacy of our recent avant-gardes who preached the nonexistence of the real...

The work to be done is immense. Personally, I have the impression that this religion has used the Bible as a support to rebuild an archaic religion that is more powerful than all the others. It threatens to become an apocalyptic tool, the new face of the escalation to extremes. Even though there are no longer any archaic religions, it is as if a new one had arisen built on the back of the Bible, a slightly transformed Bible. It would be an archaic religion strengthened by aspects of the Bible and Christianity. Archaic religion collapsed in the face of Judeo-Christian revelation, but Islam resists. While Christianity eliminates sacrifice wherever it gains a foothold, Islam seems in many respects to situate itself prior to that rejection (emphases added)..MORE>>

Girard's mimetic theory is the hermeneutic for understanding human violence par excellence. It is a shame that it is cast into the "blanket of silence" of Western rationalism where men walk on it and do not know what treasure they unwittingly reject.

And while there are few - a very few - who seem to comprehend Girard's work without straying into using mimetic theory to bolster their own agendas, it sure makes living in these troubled, sinful times more tolerable for me.

Which in turn makes it easier to engage in the vital work of Marian chivalry.

Don't Take Every Assignment

Forgive me, but prior to my diagnosis of kidney cancer - an opportunity that my brother-in-arms, Aramis, here at the 4Ms experienced five years before me - I wrote many a thing like this. Preached them, too, I'll be bound, from a Protestant pulpit and at many a funeral. The, "Ah yes, the Christian faith says death is swallowed up in victory thanks to Saint Paul sort of thing. Hallelujah and right on, brother."

It is like a Vietnam vet friend of mine who told me once that bravery isn't being fearless in the face of live rounds. (He had buddies die, literally, on the left and on the right of him.) The guy who doesn't feel fear doesn't have the right circuitry. Bravery is feeling the fear and doing the right thing, anyway.

Anyone who denies this is a liar and the truth is not in him.

Allow me to say that it is several existential levels away from having your internal organs removed and having the joys of chemotherapy. This isn't resentment. It is merely saying that because one has a favorable reputation for writing in some areas of Catholic truth, one shouldn't assume that one's prowess and wisdom extends into all other areas; particularly when our old friend Mort comes calling up close and personal.

Jesus said to them, 'Peace be with you.' What is this peace?

The sign of peace from The Magnificat Nov 2009.

Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, ‘Peace be with you’” (Jn 20: 19). What is this peace?

Christ’s Easter gift of peace is the restoration of whatever was lacking in our relationship with God because of sin. The breach we wrought because of our disobedience has been repaired by Christ’s peace. When Jesus speaks this peace he reveals that we possess a new way of looking at reality that goes beyond our natural abilities, preconceptions, and weaknesses. All that is required to live in friendship and harmony with God is bestowed upon us in Jesus’ Easter gift. This peace reconciles us, rehabilitates us, refashions us. It defuses what divides us and pacifies passions. This peace dispels impediments in our life. It imbues us with a new way of seeing and thinking. It graces us with supernatural power, strength, newness, life. It blesses us with wholeness, tranquility, unity. “(His) Peace is the answer to those primordial longings which make up the desire for happiness in every human soul” (Servais-Théodore Pinckaers). - Peter John Cameron, OP

Difference between joy and suffering becomes tenuous

From “The Grain of Wheat” by Hans Urs von Balthasar

The more we come to know God, the more the difference between joy and suffering becomes tenuous; not only do both things become engulfed in the One Will of the Father, but love itself becomes painful, and this pain becomes an irreplaceable bliss.

Purgatory: perhaps the deepest but also the most blissful kind of suffering. The terrible torture of having to settle now all the things we have dreaded a whole life long. The doors we have frantically held shut are now torn open. But all the while this knowledge: now for the first time I will be able to do it - that ultimate thing in me, that total thing. Now I can feel my wings growing; now I am fully becoming myself...

In some way this reminds me of St Francis and his teaching of perfect joy.

Eden on A Little Guide for Your Last Days

What will probably be seen correctly as an ignoring of Our Lord's injunction not to let your left hand know what your right is doing (Mt 6,3), yet apropos of All Souls Day, here is Dawn Eden's latest at Headlinebistro.com:

Catholic Convert, Cancer Patient, Pens Little Guide for the Dying

by Dawn Eden

News stories about health issues often note fluctuations in “mortality rates,” but, as writer James Taranto often observes, except for one notable exception, the mortality rate in fact remains stable at 100 percent.

That all of us must die is modern society’s most inconvenient truth. One of the few bulwarks of the culture that acknowledges it is the Catholic Church, but, even so, when was the last time you heard a homily on mortality?

My friend Jeffry Hendrix, who was a Methodist pastor before being received into the Church in 2001, was reluctant to think about the “last things” – until the day he learned he had bladder cancer. The shock of the news caused the 55-year-old husband and father to explore the meaning of Catholic teachings on suffering and death. Now, a year and a half later, he is the author of the first self-help manual for terminally-ill pewsitters since St. Alphonsus Liguori’s Preparation for Death. A Little Guide for Your Last Days (Bridegroom Press) has earned praise from the likes of Mark Shea, Joseph Pearce and Father Dwight Longenecker..MORE>>

Personhood USA Project

Via our mentor, educator, and pal, Gil Bailie, the 4Ms bring and recommend for you, gentle reader:

The Personhood Movement from Personhood USA on Vimeo.

All Souls Day - November 2

A concise compendium for the curious and those who want or need an at-a-glance reminder of the mercy of our triune God: Monsignor Charles Pope's Purgatory – Biblical and Reasonable.

Planet Narnia AND the GMSM

If one finds a near-inexplicable despair in the anthropological insights of René Girard's mimetic theory, it is quite understandable. (All right, perhaps not so much despair, but a heavy, Saturnine despondency.) Girard's explication of the undeniable realities of human fallenness - realities to all except those so far under the waters of denial, hubris, or naïveté can't possible reach the air of truth - flesh out the Church's doctrine of Original Sin with tonic clarity. In what seems a "unified field theory," one can reach the end of mimetic theory feeling as though one has in the darkness traversed the totality of the air-tight, light-proof gestalt of human existence, and now one has no recourse but to sit down and wait the coming end in a morbid awareness of all of humanity's broken, dismal, satanic realm.

Of course, Girard himself, if one takes a look at his own life, would deny this. Clearly, he has put his "eggs" in a different "basket" than either a Qohelethian nihilism or an existence of using mimetic theory to some sort of "will to power" (some do both, as you know).

So it has been my good fortune - or Providence, rather - to come upon an Elfstone in my path. It is a book written by an Anglican priest and published by Oxford entitled, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis.

It is as though the facts of our baneful existence as a race of beings has had an antidote, a bright-shining counterpart (as Girard insists) that existed with strength and vigor, has been under our noses all along, stifled by the spirit of our age. But this counterpart is not quite so dead as unacknowledged, not so gone but merely forgotten, not crushed and gone forever but merely awaiting a too-long winter's exit and fulfillment of heart's desires.

Michael Ward has thematized something that not only Western culture needs desperately, but also individuals' hearts and souls and spirits. It is not the antidote to Girard's realism but a necessary companion, and just as helpful to Catholic magisterial truth, goodness, and beauty.

I Need a Hero - The Dancing Inmates

Hey, help me out here, is this some kind of dance number or what? Check out this prison story.



Is it real? Well, check their song out HERE or view this 20 minute documentary, Jailhouse Rock or Holy Mass Officiated By His Eminence Cardinal Ricardo Vidal.

The Fun Theory

How far can you take the fun theory? Will it work getting more people to Sunday Mass? Don't get me wrong, the more reverent the worship services the better so I am not at all keen on some "fun theory" to get people to Mass. Yet you know there are a bunch of people on church committees who have invested in all kinds of "fun theory" trying to get a few more people in the pews.

So what? Big Deal.

Damien Thompson is sick of being pestered by “infants dressed as vampires, demanding presents.”

Aww.. Well, just shut off the porch light, draw the curtains, and hope - hope - no one plays a "trick" on you. Better yet, read The Drama of Hallowmas, get out the candy corn, and turn on the porch light. Trick or Treat, Limey!

Fr. Barron comments on the Vampire craze

Some interesting themes touched on by Fr Barron.

On The Frontlines

On The Frontlines
One of the medics interviewed is a son of my very close friend and doctor. Constant prayers are requested for a safe return home of our daughters and sons as well as an end to this conflict.