The Virtual Oratory

NOTES are part of Fr. Hal Weidner's reading notebook. It will be regularly updated.

From a reading notebook kept in the late 1960s...found in a box of library books shipped to St Benoit...

Life consists in giving up the state of availability. Mere availability is the characteristic of youth faced with maturity. Youth because they have not yet anything determiniate and unevocable are everything potentially. Herein lie their charm and insolence. Feeling that they are everything potentially, they suppose that they are everything actually.

Ortega y Gasset In Search of Goethe from Within...

++This went into my notebook probably as a warning to myself when I was 21.

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For He is a most holy and merciful Lord, and loves the human race.

Irenaeus, Against the Heretics xviii, 6.

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It is better to be silent and be, than to talk and not be. It is good to teach, if the speaker does so. So there is one teacher, who spoke and it was done, and even what he did silently was worthy of the Father. If you really possessed the Word of Jesus, you could hear even his silence, so that you may be perfect, so that you may act through what you say and be known through your silence.

Ignatius of Antioch, letter to the Ephesians, 15

and then this in the same letter, section 19:

And the maidenhood of Mary was hidden from the ruler of this world, as were her giving birth and likewise the death of the Lord---three secrets to be cried aloud,which yet were accomplished in the silence of God.

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 The Holy Spirit is not at work only in durable institutions which last through the centuries, the Spirit is at work also in ventures that have no future, which have always to be begun again. 

Jacques Maritain in the preface to Raissa's Journal.

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For God is neither devoid of power nor of justice, who has afforded help to the human race and restored it to its own liberty.

Irenaeus, Against the Heretics, XXIII, 2.

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And thence it comes about that in the case where we are speaking of human beings, it is said to be necessary to know them before we love, and this has become a proverb; but the saints on the contrary when they speak of divine things say we must love them before we know them and that we enter truth only by charity; they have made this one of their most useful maxims.

Pascal

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Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.

T.H Huxley, Origin of Species, 1860...

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For it is owing to their wonder that human beings both now and at first began to philosophize...

Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 2

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We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course, there are no questions left and this itself is the anwswer. There are indeed things that can be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.5, 21-22

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There are few things we state properly, and many that we speak improperly, but what we mean is understood.

Augustine, Confessions XI 20

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If you promote hope, you become a promise of whom much is expected.

Fr. Delp...Jesuit executed by Hitler.

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God is the glory of the human race...and the human race is the receptacle of all God's wisdom and power. Just as physicians are known by their patients so is God also revealed by the human race.

Irenaeus, Against the Heretics, XX 2

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Reality is the sacrament of command.

Bonhoeffer.

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It is only in living completely in this world that one learns to believe.

Bonhoeffer

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A skilled worker leaves no traces.

Japanese proverb.

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For by teaching, one learns more; and in speaking, one is often a hearer along with the audience.

 Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, I 1

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It is not only insufferable arrogance to think that one can begin theologizing in sovereign disregard of this history; it is also extremely uneconomical. It seems rather a waste of time to spend, say, five years, working out a position, only to find that it has already been done by a Syrian monk in the 5th century. The least that knowledge of religious traditions has to offer is a catalogue of heresies for possible home use. 

Peter Berger, Rumor of Angels, p. 78.

 Summer Books including oldies for the celebration of American Independence...[note the website host...YAHOO...had a lot of problems and made posting very difficult. We hope that is all over now and you will get a regular updated Virtual Oratory.]

The library of America published two volumes THE DEBATE on the CONSTITUTION...all original documents and it is not hard to understand and, in fact, it reads like a newspaper today...SAME issues only in depth. It was not that the Founders did not see the problems but human nature and economics blocked a lot of actions and even at times words. Good the summer. In small selections too so you can put it down before you get a sun burn.

The goldie moldie Samuel Elliot Morison's Oxford History of the American People...one BIG book or three small ones is very readable. Try the 1789 section (part 2) on the Constitution and the early struggles for a good read that is practical today.

 The HBO series on John Adams takes short cuts but leaves a good impression about what the emotional and political costs to the founding amounted to. Otherwise there is David McCullough's JOHN ADAMS written in golden prose and the much older plainer, shorter Catherine Drinker Bowen JOHN ADAMS and the AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 

Perry Miller's classic AMERICAN THOUGHT you can get used or probably out of the library. It goes from the Civil War to World War II but the more things change, they stay the same. You will get a lot of light on today from this oldie.

Another white bearded book is F.O. Matthiessen's AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, the burst of creativity in Emerson and Whitman. I cannot see the lilacs on the mainland USA blooming in April without thinking of Whitman. 

For Catholics and Christians in general, now that we do not have a Catholic running for president, we can calmly look back at the Jesuit John Courtney Murray WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS, CATHOLIC REFLECTIONS ON THE AMERICAN PROPOSITION as points for calm reflection. He and Cardinal Spellman were the architects of the VATICAN II statements on Religious Liberty. 

The wars in the Middle East have almost vanished from the news but still go on. Reading about the ordinary soldier, the ordinary hero, is good spiritual reading. Stephen Ambrose, CITIZEN SOLDIERS, remains a classic. He believed that the American soldier on the ground was the very essence of the American character and for that reason we were able to beat a machine like the Nazi Army.

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For poetry people, there are two short books on Jessica Powers, now dead, a Carmelite American poet. WINTER MUSIC, A LIFE OF JESSICA POWERS by Dolores R. Leckey treats her life context which stretches from the artists circles 60 years ago to the Carmel through Vatican II. Bishop Morneau, MANTRAS FROM A POET, JESSICA POWERS, takes short lines from the poems and makes a good day of prayer with them. 

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Simone Weil continues to fascinate...GRAVITY and GRACE is still in print...written by the Jewish French writer who died in World War II England, an exile but powerful figure for French Resistance. Her mystical experience of Christ led her to the brink of the Church but she felt she had to stay out with all the other souls close to but not in the Church. Gabrielle Fiori wrote SIMEONE WEIL an INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY and David McClellan wrote UTOPIAN PESSIMIST, the Life and Thought of Simone Weil. 

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 NEW BOOKS last spring

This column has been erased three times by moving the

cursor so it will stay like this...lucky large print!!!

Russell Shaw has written Nothing to Hide...about secrecy and communication in the Church. He has impeccable conservative credentials...the publisher is Ignatius Press. He was the media rep for the American Bishops.

He says about the issues raised..."A kind of inverted logic often enters into the discussion of these questions. The Church is a communion, not a political democracy, it is said; therefore openness and accountability do not count for too much in the Church. But the argument should go the other way around; therefore openness and accountability are even more important in the Church than they are in a democracy."

As an insider, he has the comments of many bishops, their fears and frustrations with themselves and the media as well as the history of the disastrous results of trying to keep things secret.

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Rowan Williams is the brilliant pastoral Archbishop of Canterbury and he has written a small book TOKENS OF TRUST as an introduction to Christian belief. (Westminster, John Knox Press). My copy is hard back.

The book opens with the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed and then proceeds with these chapters:

Who can we trust?

The risk of love

A Man for All Seasons

The Peace Dividend

God in Company

Love, Actually

...There is beautiful art work though a bit small...you will need a magnifying glass if you are of my vintage.

Here are some of the side bar quotations:

The most truthful image we can have of hell is of God eternally knocking on a closed door that we are struggling to hold shut.

...We have a future with God as persons, no less.

...What badly needs to be recovered now is the sense that the Bible is to be read in company.

...A well functioning Christian community is one in which everyone is working steadily to release the gifts of others.

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Ron Hansen has a "novel" called EXILES...he is the author of a highly recommended novel called Mariette in Ecstasy. This is not quite a novel but it is very good because it introduces us to the great enigmatic Victorian Jesuit poet (how's that for adjectives?) and his masterpiece about a shipwreck...the Wreck of the Deutschland.

Few will sit down and read a biography of Hopkins but there will be people who can tackle the life and loves of this strange lovely man by reading something not so long, very accessible, and well written.