You, a prayerful conversation

Realists, Faith, and Miracles

· Wednesday, 1 Jul 2009, 1 pm · Saint Oliver Plunket, pray for us

Because I once was an agnostic who thought he was a realist, this caught my attention (emphasis added):

It is not miracles that bring a realist to faith. A true realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself the strength and ability not to believe in miracles as well, and if a miracle stands before him as an irrefutable fact, he will sooner doubt his own senses than admit the fact. And even if he does admit it, he will admit it as a fact of nature that was previously unknown to him. In the realist, faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith. Once the realist comes to believe, then, precisely because of his realism, he must also allow for miracles. The Apostle Thomas declared that he would not believe until he saw, and when he saw, he said: “My Lord and my God!” Was it a miracle that made him believe? Most likely not, but he believed first and foremost because he [chose] to believe, and maybe already fully believed in his secret heart even as he was saying: “I will not believe until I see.”

— spoken by The Author in The Brothers Karamazov, Bk 1, Ch 5, “Elders”

It’s not a coincidence that my confirmation saint is Saint Thomas the Apostle. (Should have waited till the 3rd to post this.)

Brothers Karamazov

· Tuesday, 30 Jun 2009, 10 pm · Saint Martial of Limoges, pray for us

There are several books of fiction on the edge my radar that I may someday read. Most of these books have been repeatedly mentioned in various blogs over the years that seemed good based on comments and reviews. I’m very picky about what I read, especially fiction. I finally read one these books last month, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. I was pleasantly surprised that it was better than what many of the reviews lead me to believe. I highly recommend it. (Sorry, no review.)

Another such book that has been highly recommended by many people is The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I’ve had the book in my hands several times at the bookstore, but 800+ pages seemed daunting. I thought I had a decent attention span, but this might be pushing it. Lately, I have been a little sporadic by reading a lot of short stories and books with page counts less than 250. Eight hundred pages is a commitment.

Well, after some research I settled on a translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky and bought a copy of BK. (See this comparison of a couple translations.) I figure if I can read about 150 pages per week, I can get it done before school starts in mid August. But then again, there is no hurry. The thing to remember is to enjoy and be in the process.

Poem With Two Endings

· Tuesday, 30 Jun 2009, 4 pm · First Martyrs of the Church of Rome, pray for us

Say “death” and the whole room freezes—
even the couches stop moving,
even the lamps.
Like a squirrel suddenly aware it is being looked at.

Say the word continuously,
and things begin to go forward.
Your life takes on
the jerky texture of an old film strip.

Continue saying it, hold it moment after moment inside the mouth,
it becomes another syllable.
A shopping mall swirls around the corpse of a beetle.

Death is voracious, it swallows all the living.
Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead.
neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled,
each swallows and swallows the world.

The grip of life is as strong as the grip of death.

(but the vanished, the vanished beloved, o where?)

— Jane Hirshfield

Unpacking the Word Grace

· Friday, 19 Jun 2009, 1 pm · Saint Zosimus, pray for us

I need to unpack the meaning of the words of one sentence from this post:

[G]race is the Holy Spirit Himself acting in our lives.

Grace is not an object, not something that is collected or possessed, not an add-on, not I-It. It is not analogous to a magic spell from God that suddenly helps you see the right thing to do. Grace is a relationship with a subject, a Person, with Reality, I-Thou (and I am the thou to God’s I Am). What I might label as grace is a recognizing of this relationship, an awareness of being open to God and to that moment of Reality.

The choice is always there, to accept or not. Holy Spirit, help me never to say “no” to You. (I have been told that this is a dangerous prayer.)

On Angels

· Friday, 19 Jun 2009, 9 am · Saint Romuald, pray for us

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seems.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice—no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?)
girdled with the lightening.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draw near
another one
do what you can.

— Czesław Miłosz (Czeslaw Milosz)

Because If You Can Convince Me…

· Tuesday, 16 Jun 2009, noon · Saint Richard of Chichester, pray for us

This seems to be the motive for all moral relativists:

Because if you can convince me, then suddenly your beliefs become more real. Right?

The more people you can get to jump on your…train, the more your mission is made. So until you get me to swallow your world and believe what you believe, you’ll never have the kind of faith you want to have. You’ll always have a little bit of doubt. You’ll never know if you’re quite right. You’ll always kind of be wondering if it’s real.

— from the movie, Henry Poole Is Here (a film I highly, highly recommend)