The Virtual Oratory

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

August 9 Notes

I realised today that has been 50 years since I starting reading Edith Stein or reading about her thanks to the excellent small library at Sacred Heart Church Punahou in Hawaii where the Maryknoll Fathers had stocked the parish office with books and Fr. Cy Gombold had put in a first class magazine and book rack at the back of the church. A reader at that rack or in that little library was ready for Vatican II.

The Science of the Cross and a biography were in the parish library. I had started on German as a 6th grader, read Ann Frank's diary in 7th grade, and attended synagogue worship at Temple Emmanuel thanks to my mother's friendship with Judge Levinson who was also the father of a classmate. The synagogue was a stunning experience. Excellent homily, choir, and of course fully biblical prayers. If I could have I would have continued there on Friday nights and then to Mass. Edith Stein always went to Temple with her Mom when she visited back home and was better at it as a Catholic than she had been as the drifting into agnosticism high school student.

Her letters to some philosopher friends are now published in German and in French. Should I hold out for an English translation?

The Carmelite publications have her excellent Life in a Jewish Family as well as nearly all the essays that are easily accessible, and some tough going but rewarding philosophical work. I think  of her as part of the German philosophical schools that encouraged a sense of awe, contigency, and mystery. As a Carmelite she is also a part of a family that very often was encountered by the Oratorians and encouraged. Both are houses of prayer, small, and usually urban. The Roman Carmel looks to St Philip Neri as its "grandfather."

St Edith Stein, pray for us.

From "Sabbatical Book Letter to David Valtierra 1989-1990." (David's dates are, of course, 1947-2010.

From Pascal's Pensees...(noted Oct 21, 1989)

How is it that a lame man does not annoy us while a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight, while a lame mind says that it is we who are limping. But for that we should feel sorry rather than angry. (98/80).

Description of a human being. Dependnece, desire for independence, needs. (78/126).

Let each examine their thoughts; each will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.

(47/172)

This page is Australia (earlier entries are below) dated Oct 5, 1989. The page has a circle with the name of Les Murray an Australian poet. Look himself up...a contrarian and a Catholic.

Anyway here are the three entries on that page

Company

Where two or three

 are gather together, that

 is about enough.

INCORRIGIBLE GRACE

St Vincent de Paul, old friend,

my sometime tailor,

I daresay by now you are feeding

the rich in heaven.

SENRYU

Just two hours after

Eternal Life pills came out

someone took 30.

August 1989...Chicago, Berkeley, Honolulu

The first part of the great leap.

No matter what their class or rank, those born in the Pure Recompensed Land of the Great Vow will attain, at one bound and in the fraction of a moment, the Highest Perfect Wisdom. Hence this is called the Crosswise leap.

---Shinran Shonin,

Kyogyo shinsho, II, 73

September 1989...Kyoto

Heart of Faith

Shinjin

shin...composed of character for person

standing behind words from mouth. combined with shin or human heart.

heart of faith=person whose heart is behind their words/concepts.

***

I remember Robert Bellah's lecture in the early 70s on earth and sky religions---"at home" and "not at home", "mother and father".

So he said, being an expert on religion in Japan, that the Japanese were masters of the "not-at-home" religious sense.

Here is a quotation with that reality:

'like the dew on the morning glory is a person and their house. Who knows which will survive the other?"

from "Ten Foot Square Hut", Kyoto, 13th century.

===

Nara, Japan at the Chugu-ji and standing in front of the Kannon: mercy smiling like love.

---

Last day in Kyoto, September 30, 1989

Poem by Santoka

For once, both futon and the night

were long enough: deep sleep.

Futon nagaku yoru mo nagaku nesete ita daite.

Here are some notes made by Fr. David Valtierra decades ago. They fell out last week from a notebook. They probably are from the 1970s when William Sloane Coffin visited Berkeley. They are dated June 20. No year!

Coffin to Seminary students---

* The primary question no  longer is, 'What can I do to be saved?' The primary question today is, 'What must we all do to save God's creation?"

* churches have retreated into a pygmy world of private piety

*our task is 'not to live and live let live, but to  live and help live

*no one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another"

*There are two reasons to fight evil: the first, to change it, and the second, to make sure it doesn't change you.

+++

The above duplicates the notes as DV wrote them

The ritual for infant baptism in the western Church and the funeral Mass are quite related. So I write on p. 8:

So at baptism we receive the white garment, the sign of new creation, which comes with the admonition that the dignity we receive at baptism be brought---with the word and example of family and friends---into the everlasting life of heaven. In the same way, the last white garment we receive will be the pall covering our coffin. Rich or poor, expensive or not so expensive, the coffin get hidden under the white covering, a sign of our baptism. We are, by baptism, all equal, all hidden in Christ. 

 +++

Michael Lewis wrote The Big Short as a former investor for Salomon Brothers. Here and in such as the earlier   Liar's Poker (#1 best seller), he details what happens when thou shalt not steal and thou shalt not bear false witness gets chiseled out by chiselers. It is a story that any Augustinian would recognize. The book cannot keep up with the headlines so an index would have been helpful as names appear and re-appear as the facts emerge. Whatever the crash was, it was not a "perfect storm." It was a human and sinful atrocity. Lewis's book is the most helpful I found and I highly recommend it.

Our church leaders have led us into a swamp. There is now talk about the need for more transparency which is a way of saying that there is a lot of lying going on. Until that is corrected in the church no solutions are possible. Ordaining married men or allowing women in will not automatically change anything. So...here are two books that will help.

 The Jesuit John W. O'Malley has a paperback What Happened at Vatican II that appears to be just a history of the Council. In the light of the scandals it is instead the history of missed opportunities that have now gone on to haunt us.

The English theologian Nicholas Lash Theology for Pilgrims is one of the finest books on Church that I have had the privilege to read. It is scholarly and takes some effort, but only here and there. He has the English dislike of jargon so there are no technical terms. The foot notes might be daunting but with the help of the internet you can check things out very fast.

Both books are brain food as well as support for stout hearts.

+++

Christopher Buckley, author of Thank You for Smoking, has a light, very light, satire on politics called Supreme Courtship. The idea is that a cornered president who has had two Supreme Court nominees turned down(insufficient sniffles while finishing To Kill a Mockingbird), nominates a TV judge, a real judge but who has gone on TV and is extremely popular and because she is very bright and verbal out fences all the opposition and gets the job. I suppose an insider will pick up all the references but it is intelligent comedy made funnier by the actual plausibility, cf. governors of California and presidents. 

 Marilynne Robinson,an esteemed novelist wrote this in a book of essays that would make good Lenten reading:

"So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention. In certain contexts the improbable is called the miraculous.

What is eternal must always be complete, if my understanding is correct. So it is possible to imagine that time was created in order that there might be narrative -- event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement.

A word, a phrase, a story falls on rich or stony ground and flourishes as it can, possibility in a sleeve of limitation. Certainly time is the occasion for our strangely mixed nature, in every moment differently compounded, so that often we surprise ourselves, and always scarcely know ourselves, and exist in relation to experience, if we attend to it and if its plainness does not disguise it from us, as if we were visited by revelation." -- Marilynne Robinson, "Psalm 8", from "The Death of Adam"

+++

 BORN CATHOLICS "assembled" by Frank Sheed was a great comfort as I sat in a large room with only a fridge, an easy chair and unwatchable old television set in a wreck of what was once a grand old rectory in a parish that had seen better days but had once done everything just right but nevertheless suffered big losses. Here are some insights by a few of the authors of these short essays: Jean Charlot the Mexican French artist who came to live in Hawaii which he loved and where he was loved is featured and he strikes home with a penetrating, short analysis of the priests, the purple faced, sweaty alcoholic priest in a run down village church in France, the Indian, black blue skinned priest in a Mexican village, and the American priests who love to look and sound like American businessmen but who are really miserably paid and living (like me!) in rather sad and sorry places. Only their suits looked good (and I don't have even that.).

Then there is Maisie Ward talking about the Latin Mass when it was said facing the people and in dialogue form...the people making the responses...remember the Mass in those days was not only in Latin but silent...saying that it became something more than "machinery for producing Communion."

And for those who romanticize a non-existent time when religious education produced Catholics who "knew" their faith there are a number of essays about the poor religious instruction that produced truncated, dried out, misapplied bits and pieces of medieval thought mixed with devotional oddities.

These writers  were not grinding axes, trying to "get" their old teachers. Instead, we see that Catholicism has a been a visual, emotional affair too often and the grand vision left unassimilated. Nevertheless, despite inept authority even then, poor teachers, there were grand moments when the great vision of Catholicism challenged even the best and the brightest...and the most articulate. Certainly those are the kind of Catholics who wrote these essays. 

..

 Newman and Nicholas Lash's Theology for Pilgrims

I wonder if what Newman predicted might happen to shake us up in the Roman Church might now be happening... I view with equanimity [Nov. 1866]  the prospect of a thorough routing out of things at Rome--not  till some great convulsions take place (which may go on for years and years, and where I can do neither good nor harm) and religion is felt to be in the midst of trials, redtapism will go out of Rome, and a better spirit come in, and Cardinals and Archbishops will have some  the reality they had, amid many abuses, in the middle ages. ...[now ] we are shrinking into ourselves, narrowing the lines of communion, trembling at freedom of thought.

in LASH p 267.

The work that HW did on Newman included the Catholic preface to his Anglican work called the Via Media. In that preface Newman acknowledged that he had answered one of this two objections as an Anglican against the Roman Church...doctrines had developed not been corrupted...but he had never answered his second objection to Rome and that was the official approbation of abuses. By official he meant not just the corruptions of individuals or the superstitions of a certain broup, but by officers of the Church in administration and through policy. In fact, he acknowledged that the abuses were real and said that they reflected the reality of a Church that had not the purity of a sect and that Matthew 13 made this clear.

In the preface he wrote: "It is so ordered on high that in our day Holy Church should present just that aspect to my countrymen which is most consonant with their ingrained prejudices against her, most umpromising for their conversion; and what can one writer do to counteract this misfortune?" Indeed what can any writer do? I had a chapter on this in my Praying with Newman but the editors...without my permission...cut it out. Too bad...a couple of years later Boston broke out and then led the parade we have been hit with ever since.

 +++

David Valtierra made these notes in his copy of Dante. I put them not only because they honor Dante but because they also give us an idea of what in Dante struck David.  [Huse translation].

From Canto 3 of the Inferno:

This miserable fate afflicts the wretched souls of those who lived without infamy and without praise. They are joined with that choir of wicked angels who were neither rebellious nor faithful to God, but for themselves. 

From Canto 5 of the Purgatorio:

The devil, desirous of evil, combined ill will with intelligence, and moved the mists and winds through a power given him by his nature. 

From Canto 5 of the Paradiso :

 The greatest gift that God made through his liberality in creativing and most conformable to His goodness was free will, with which intelligent creatures, all and severally were and are alone endowed....

For, in establishing a pact between man and God, a sacrifice is made of this treasure I speak of, and by its own act. 

+++ From David's notes in his Plato ...CRITO...

Then, my good friend, we must not consider at all what the many will of us, but only the expert in justice and injustice, and what he will say, the one, and truth herself.

...Not even, when wronged, wrong in return, as the many think, since we must do no wrong at all.

...Then listen to us, Socrates, who reared you you: do not value children or life or anything above the right... 

 *******