Country music star George Jones passed away last week. That he lived to 81 is astonishing to me. He lived a self destructive life of alcoholism and drug abuse. From the Associated Press Obituary:
When it comes to country music, George Jones was
The Voice.
Other great singers have come and gone, but this
fact remained inviolate until Jones passed away Friday at 81 in a Nashville
hospital after a year of ill health.
“Today someone else has become the greatest living
singer of traditional country music, but there will never be another George
Jones,” said Bobby Braddock, the Country Music Hall of Fame songwriter who
provided Jones with 29 songs over the decades. “No one in country music has
influenced so many other artists.”
He did it with that voice. Rich and deep, strong
enough to crack like a whip, but supple enough to bring tears. It was so
powerful, it made Jones the first thoroughly modern country superstar, complete
with the substance abuse problems and rich-and-famous celebrity lifestyle that
included mansions, multiple divorces and — to hear one fellow performer tell it
— fistfuls of cocaine.
He lived a hard life, and if you look at his features over the years, they must have taken a physical toll on him. But he was probably the preeminent singer of country music. Here's one of his early songs I really dig.
Well in North Carolina, way back in the hills Me and my old pappy had a hand in a still We brewed white lightnin' 'til the sun went down Then he'd fill him a jug and he'd pass it around Mighty, mighty pleasin, pappy's corn squeezin' Whshhhoooh . . . white lightnin'
Chorus: Well the "G" men, "T" men, revenuers, too Searchin' for the place where he made his brew They were looking, tryin to book him, But my pappy kept a-cookin' Whshhhoooh . . . white lightnin'
You can read the rest of the lyrics here. One of his daughters, Georgette Jones, through his marriage with Tammy Wynette, is also a country music singer. I absolutely love this song they did together. I don't know if there's any biographical family history in the lyrics, but it sounds like there might be. It's called "You and Me and Time."
You can find part 1 of my blogs on this biography here, part 2 here, and part 3 here.
One last excerpt from the biography, this time with the
focus on the author.I’ve mentioned that
Sigrid Undset went from an agnostic at best to a Roman Catholic convert in mid
life.She experienced the full
catastrophe of the Second World War, losing her home and her son’s life.There are a number of places in her biography
of this saint from the middle ages she personally speaks from a perspective of
one who has lived through the first half of the twentieth century, suggesting
that we here in the modern world have much to learn from Catherine.I found those passages interesting and worth
noting.
Here is a most moving passage where Undset, starting from
Catherine’s vision of drinking blood from the actual side of Christ,
contemplates the remedy Catherine would proscribe to horrific life of the
modern condition.
In our own lifetime we have learned
to know the smell of rotting corpses on battlefields and in bombed towns; we
know of the stinking sores and boils of prisoners from concentration camps,
where dead and dying were made to lie on beds as wretched as the one Catherine
had chosen for herself.We have poured
out oceans of blood and tears, both of the guilty and the guiltless, while we
hoped against hope that this blood and these tears could help to save a world
reeling under the weight of its miseries.And how little have we achieved of the great things we dreamed!Yet we ascribe it to the confused ideas of
the time she lived in and her own dark vision of Christianity, when Catherine
intoxicated herself on the blood of Christ—that blood which would put an end to
human bloodshed, if only we could agree to receive it as redemption from our
bloodthirsty passions, our insatiable lust for imagined gain for ourselves
projected onto other nations or classes.Indeed, many Catholics think in this way.The strong-willed, brave and strangely
optimistic girl who handled the powerful men of her time so masterfully, who
had an unusual understanding of the characters of the men and women among who
she lived, who succeeded in making peace between many of her unruly townsmen,
who in fact on one or two occasions prevented war, and on many put an end to
bloody feuds—she would answer us as she answered her contemporaries in her
letters and conversations and in the Dialogue:
that the blood of Christ was the only source of her own courage and strength
and wisdom, of her amazing and indomitable joy of living.She would say to us, Drink of it with the
lips of your souls, as the saints in their visions seemed to drink it with
their lips of flesh; assuage your thirst in the love which streams from God’s
holy Heart—then there will be an end to the vain shedding of man’s blood by the
hand of man.In her visions Catherine
saw God’s fire fall from heaven, like a rain of blazing light and burning
warmth: can we really understand anything of her experience, we who have seen
the fire of hate falling from the clouds, who fear in our hearts for the day
when an even more destructive fire, invented by an even more bitter hatred and
more violent passions, shall rain down over us and our children?For us, Catherine would have only the same
message which she brought to her contemporaries, she would know only of the
same remedy for our misery—the blood of Christ, the fire of God’s love, which
burns up self-love and self-will, and lets the soul appear, beautiful and full
of grace, as it was meant to be when God created it.[p.83-5]
For Undset, the remedy that Catherine would offer is the
remedy that all the saints taken in their comprehensive whole offer this age.It is in our bond of a common humanity that
they serve as guide posts for us.The
wars and devastation of our age have shown us that suffering is part of our
condition.It is in our response to
suffering that distinguishes people, but our Catholic faith tells us that
suffering is not to be shunned.
The fact that the saints have been
so willing to suffer, that they often in fact seemed to be in love with
suffering and chose it as their inheritance on earth, is often looked upon by
non-Catholics—that is to say non-Catholic Christians—as incomprehensible, and,
in the eyes of many, extremely unsavory.If God is goodness, if Christ died on the cross to save us from our
sins, why should Christians have to suffer—and suffer not only merely ordinary
opposition, which may have an educational value for the sufferer, but, though
innocent, suffer for other’s sins?One
thing is certain, that all the saints have maintained that they suffer for
their own sins, although we cannot see it otherwise than that they suffered for
the sins of others.It is only among the
saints that we find any who have the right to say, “Nothing human is foreign to
me.”Nevertheless, we may all, at any
given moment, find that we have to suffer for what in our eyes are exclusively
the sins of others.Two world wars, and
their aftermath, spread over almost the whole of the world, should have made
this truth understandable—emphatically understandable—even for the simplest and
most self-satisfied of souls.[p.331]
What the saints show us is that through suffering and a holy
life we can achieve wholeness, “unity with the Origin of life.”Suffering is not wasted; a holy life will
find its reward.
The saints have always known the
power of good is something quite incalculable.When they renounce even pure and harmless happiness on earth, that they
might have none of the hindrances interposed by care for their own or another’s
material needs, in their struggle to achieve unity with the Origin of life,
they knew if He filled them with His grace and mercy, His superfluous
gifts—gifts bringing health and life—would overflow into the lives of other
men—even to people outside the range of their knowledge, beyond their sight and
the field of their activity.St.
Catherine must have felt discouraged when she saw no concrete results of her
efforts for certain individuals, both men and women, through prayer and
attempts at persuasion.But she never
wavered; she gave of herself until her physical life was used up, in a fight
whose final results she was as sure of, as she was sure that she would not see
many victories on the battlefield of this world.But in fact Our Lord has never made any
promises regarding the triumph of Christianity on earth—on the contrary.If we expect to see His triumph here, His own
words should warn us: “The Son of Man, when He cometh, shall he find, think you
faith on earth?”He did not tell us the
answer.[p. 334]
Finally what the saints and Catherine offer us is wisdom, a
wisdom achieved by seeing beyond the material, beyond human constructions,
beyond the human ego.
It is not given to us to know what
Christendom’s final fate on earth will be.The gates of hell shall not overpower His Church, but those who wish to
break out of it have full freedom to do so.The real question is: when the conditional reality which we call the
material world withers away, who will have won real life in all eternity in the
land of the living?Even the people of
our times, who have magnified mankind’s ineradicable trust in the things which
we can see, touch, and enjoy with our senses, and made their articles of faith
out of materialism, self-aggrandizing humanism, collectivism, or whatever one
likes to call it—even they have caught a glimpse of how utterly worthless all
material things are.In light of the
split atoms, solid objects become as it were transparent, evanescent.But who can say how mankind will react to the
new discoveries it makes?We sorely need
the wisdom of the saints.
Has the world changed much since Undset wrote that in the
late 1940’s, post World War II and at the onset of the Cold War?Those wars of devastation have passed, and perhaps
we can breathe a sigh of relief.But the
culture, if anything has deteriorated even further.Nihilism has taken root; self-doubt in our
heritage, in the existence of God, in noble values, in the dignity of the human
person has only expanded.Nazi and Soviet
holocausts may be over but in our very democracies that stand on the ideal of
human rights the slaughter of the unborn go on at holocaust proportions.Undset showed us how Catherine of Siena
emptied her ego into that of Christ crucified.That forgoing of one’s ego is what is sorely lacking today.I don’t know if Undset would be surprised
(probably not) but I’m sure she would have been saddened.
Not sure how old Undset was here, but it’s obviously in
middle age.I particularly like this
photo since it shows her proudly displaying her cross pendent.She was a lovely woman.
If you wish to find more on St. Catherine of Siena, these
links are most interesting:
I’ve mentioned this all encompassing St. Catherine of Siena site, Drawn By Love.
I was at a wedding this weekend, and as in most weddings quite a few of Frank Sinatra's music is played. I love Franky. He's my all time favorite singer in any music genre, truly the finest American singer that I can think of. I can listen to Sinatra all night long. So here's one.
Some day, when I'm awfully low, When the world is cold, I will feel a glow just thinking of you... And the way you look tonight.
Yes you're lovely, with your smile so warm And your cheeks so soft, There is nothing for me but to love you, And the way you look tonight.
With each word your tenderness grows, Tearing my fear apart... And that laugh that wrinkles your nose, It touches my foolish heart.
Lovely ... Never, ever change. Keep that breathless charm. Won't you please arrange it ? 'Cause I love you ... Just the way you look tonight.
We had to go to a wedding in Pittsburgh, and we spent the weekend there. Wed had two double beds in the room for the three of us, and we expected Matthew and his mother to sleep in one and I would get the other. After all my wife makes a snide comment to Matthew that he wouldn't be able to sleep with Daddy's snoring. Nonetheless Matthew chose to sleep with me. After the lights were out and I had turned over with my back to him, Matthew pulls me over and whispers, "Daddy I want to tell you a secret." I kind of half turn back and said, "What?"
He climbed over my shoulder to face me. "I want to tell you that we're friends," he whispered.
"Oh, thank you. Why did you tell me?"
"Because we're going to have adventures together."
"OK," I whispered back. I thought that was a neat male bonding moment.
Next day when he kind of understood what marriage means, he tells his mother rather dramatically that he's "going to marry" her. "You are?" his mother asks. "Then you better go out and buy me a ring as soon as you can."
Pulling out a quarter, Matthew says, "OK. Is this enough?"
Later that night, the night of the wedding we were there to attend, the baby sitter we arranged to take care of Matthew showed up. She was a sweet young lady who was a friend of the bride's family, and she apparently had a nice way with children. Matthew took to her immediately. She baby sat from four-thirty to ten-thirty at the hotel room. When we got back to the room, Matthew had gotten Ellen (her name) to sit with him in his "man-cave." He had taken one of the decorative spreads from the bed and placed it over a table so that it formed a sort of cave (he's done this at home) and placed his stuffed animals in there and invited her in...lol. They had read nursery rhymes and stories and played with alphabet cards. He also made her race back and forth up the length of the room with him. What a little lady's man. When we asked him if he had a good time, he said, "I'm going to marry Ellen."
So there you go. From male bonding to marrying his mother to dumping his parents for a cute chick all within 24 hours.
Well, my mother had her operation on her finger Wednesday. You can read about the need here. All went well. The only hangup was trying to get one of her earrings off. She was to take all jewelery off, but no matter how we tried we couldn't unclasp the right one. The nurse put tape over it, something about it getting too hot during the operation and burning her. I can't say I understand. It had no bearing on the operation.
The operation took under an hour. She went in at 12:25, and I went out to get lunch. I also took a little walk since it was such a beautiful spring day here. I got back to the waiting room at 1:20 and the doctor had gone. He had stuck his head out to look for me and I wasn't there. Mama was in a recovery bay sipping a cup of coffee and looking like she had slept pleasantly. I had them call the doctor for me and he said it all went well. The tendon/ligament (not sure if that's the same thing) had torn and was in need of reconstruction. I think he used that word, but I'm not sure. Then he put pins in to hold it together for the next ten days when he will see her again. We were home an hour later.
Thank you for all those who prayed for her. The finger will be the finger, but my biggest concern was her going under sedation. One never knows with that.
And finally I thank the Lord for this little blessing. His blessings are too numerous to count. Special devotion to the Holy Family on this instance. I'll end with this Thanksgiving Prayer.
Blessed are You, loving Father,
For all your gifts to us.Blessed are You for giving us family and friends
To be with us in times of joy and sorrow,To help us in days of need,
And to rejoice with us in moments of celebration..
Father,
We praise You for Your Son Jesus,
Who knew the happiness of family and friends,And in the love of Your Holy Spirit.
Well, Walt Whitman has been on my mind this week. He was such a good soul. He never had an unkind word for people, even those he opposed. He embraced all people, even those from the South, though he was staunchly against slavery and supported the Union as a nurse to the wounded during the Civil War. Last year I completely read his Death-Bed edition of Leaves of Grass, all 500 plus pages. Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, was his great work that he kept republishing with additional poems. I think there were up to nine editions of publications, with the concluding edition dubbed "The Death-Bed" edition because it went into publication just prior to Whitman's death. With each addition Whitman added and revised the poems, but unfortunately not all the revisions were improvements. Sometimes the original poem is superior. What I really like about Whitman was how he embraced humanity. He loved everyone.
The
proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has
absorbed it.
In his life time he was not appreciated. That really disappointed him. He loved the United States, and you can see that in many of his poems. He was consciously the poet of America, embracing the land, the people, the life-style of his day, and most importantly the particular English language we call the American language. He did for the American language what Shakespeare did for British English and Dante did for Italian. He became our national poet. It took a while, but after his death the country did embrace him as he embraced the country.
By the way, he was frequently photographed in his lifetime. There are lots of great photos of him. It was hard to pick one.
Today April 14th is, if I did my arithmetic correctly,
the 148th anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.That factoid, coupled with Jeanette, my
fellow blogger at J’s Café Nette, writing about her lilac in a recent blogmade me think of the poem I always think
of this time of year, Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”Normally the poem would come to me on its
own, since I can’t help recall it when I see my mother’s dwarf lilac in
bloom.However this year it seems to be
blooming late up here.It’s been a cool
spring and things are behind.No
perfuming blossoms yet, so the poem was out of mind until Jeanette
mentioned it.
You may know that the poem was written on the occasion of
Lincoln’s assassination .Whitman
had developed a profound love of Lincoln since he caught a glimpse of him in
Washington in 1861, totally gave of himself during the Civil War as a nurse to
aid the wounded Union soldiers, and when Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 suffered
a most profound despair.He wrote this
poem as an elegy
for the fallen leader.
The poem is nearly nine pages long in my Leaves of Grass (Whitman’s opus of all
his poetry)
edition, so I’m not going to quote the entire piece.I’ll highlight the major moments and try to
give you an appreciation of its greatness.But you can read the entire poem at my favorite poetry site, PoetryFoundation.
Whitman is not a difficult poet to comprehend.For the most part he tells you exactly what
he means to convey.His symbols are usually
not multifaceted.His genius is in his
language, rhythm, and imagery.The poem
is divided into 16 stanzas with the usual Whitman free verse of irregular meter
and irregular line length.Whitman is
not big on formality.Let’s start with
the first stanza.
1
WHEN lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
An elegy is a poem of a fallen hero with an appeal for
eternal remembrance.Lincoln is the
great star Whitman is quite explicit about it in the second stanza, and lilacs
will be eternally returning at the same time of year in remembrance.Throughout the poem there is a religious
undertone that suggests Lincoln to be a Christ-figure whose sacrificial death brings
new life to the nation.And so Whitman
collects the bloom, the star, and his love into a “trinity.”
Let’s look at the next three stanzas:
2
O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me!
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat,
Death’s outlet song of life (for well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die).
In the second stanza, Whitman connects Lincoln to the star
and his emotional connection.In the
third he fleshes out the lilac bush, pointing out the heart-shaped leaf,
suggesting love, and ending with a very suggestive broken sprig.In the fourth stanza he introduces a new
character, a shy little bird singing.From
other Whitman poems, the little thrush is a stand-in for the poet himself, and
even here it’s not so subtle.The bird “sings
by himself a song,” which echoes Whitman’s famous poem “Song of Myself.”
Stanzas five and six dramatizes the journey of Lincoln’s
coffin from Washington to Lincoln’s home town of Springfield, Illinois, a
procession across the nation which actually happened.Whitman ends the procession with offering
that sprig of lilac he broke to the coffin as people tend to throw flowers into
an open grave.In stanzas seven and
eight Whitman consecrates the death as a sacred death, that Lincoln’s life and
now death was connected to something beyond earth, divine providence.That is why Whitman chooses the falling star to
symbolize Lincoln.
Stanzas nine and ten he returns to the singing bird,
wondering how he shall sing for the fallen man.What Whitman decides on is to let the bird sing of the nation, all it’s
varied elements.In stanzas 11, 12, and
13 he sings of farms and hills and a flowing river, then to Manhattan with its
spires, and then to swamps and prairies.The song—the death song—is knitting the nation together, as the tragic death
of a president can do.
And then we come to what I think is the climatic stanza,
fourteen.Let me cite it all.
14
Now while I sat in the day and look’d forth,
In the close of the day with its light and the fields of spring, and the farmers preparing their crops,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide,
Over the dense-pack’d cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.
Here the land, the houses, the streets, the sea all come
into the song of death, into “the sacred knowledge of death.”Here while holding hands with his companions
Whitman meets “the receiving night that talks not,” or in different words, the universal
providence.The word “companion” is
nicely chosen too.It was originally a
religious word, its Latin origin “com pane,” with bread, or members of the
Christian union of Christ’s breaking of bread.The italics in the poem are the bird’s actual voice, and it’s a prayer
almost in the form of St. Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of Brother Sun.”This little section is so beautiful: “Prais’d be the fathomless universe,/For life
and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,/And for love, sweet love—but
praise! praise! praise!”
In stanza 15 the song alludes to the nation’s recent history
of strife and war.And finally let’s end
with stanza 16 where by Lincoln’s death and through the rising birdsong the poet,
and by implication, the nation now goes forward with heaven’s blessing.
16
Passing the visions, passing the night,
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands,
Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,
Let’s start with my mother being seventy-nine.She’s a strong seventy-nine, but still she’s
actually closer to her eightieth birthday than the one she just passed.She has slowed down since her hip replacement
from four years ago, but still she gardens and walks, and now that my brother
has been away she’s living alone.Living
alone actually gives her less to do because when my brother and his wife are at
her house, she cooks and cleans for them as if she was forty years old and they
were teenagers.She’s one of those
tireless Italian ladies that just need to be doing something.
She lives about a half mile from my house.I stop there every day on my way home from
work, just for five or ten minutes to make sure everything is OK.In the spring and summer she’s usually in the
back gardening, and sometimes digging trenches and moving buckets of dirt.Half the time I shake my head and ask her
why.She just does.Sometimes after digging a trench where rain
puddles up, she’ll redo it if she doesn’t feel like it came out right.Some of our biggest arguments are over what I
see as meaningless heavy labor.She’s incorrigible.She’ll tell me this will be the last time and
I find out she did it again any way.Or
I just catch her at it.
I stopped there last Thursday and no one answered the
door.I knocked and rang the bell for
ten minutes.The side of the house was
nicely raked with dirt turned over.I
used my cell phone to call.I heard her
phone ring.Still there was no
answer.I keep her keys, and so decided
to open the door.I did and called
inside.No answer.At her age I worry about her collapsing and
either being unconscious or incapacitated.I went through each room and she wasn’t anywhere to be found.I sighed.
The next possibility is she walked about a mile away to
where the commercial street resides.There
she could have gone to several stores.Under typical conditions she would have planned walking there and being home
at the time I normally get home from work.But there have been a few times where she didn’t plan that well and was out.Those times I drove toward that commercial boulevard
and found her walking along the way.She
would be grateful for the ride home.So
I drove and didn’t come across her.I
drove back and didn’t see her.I stopped
back in her house—nothing.I drove back
toward the boulevard again and this time I stopped at the little supermarket
where she might be.I walked through
every aisle—nothing.I gave up.I called my wife (at this point I was late
for home) and told her what had happened and that I was on my way home.I got about a block when my cell phone
rang.
“Are you Maria _____’s son?” asked the voice.
“Yes.Where is she?”
“The Emergency Room at Staten Island University Hospital.”
“What?What happened?
”
“Don’t worry.No need
to get worried.She fell.”
“How is she?”
“Don’t get alarmed.It’s scratches and bruises and a dislocated finger.When can you get here?”
“I’ll be right there.Ten, fifteen minutes.”
I called my wife and told her I was headed straight there,
raced over.The Emergency Room was packed and they had
beds in the aisles, and I found her in a bed in an aisle.She looked rather comfortable laying
there.Her right hand was wrapped and
she held it up.The doctor was happy to
see me.My mother doesn’t speak enough
English to really understand everything.I guess they understood her since communication of pain is rather
easy.She had been there at least three
hours.
So what happened?She
had been raking the backyard and needed to put down grass seed.She had walked to that commercial boulevard to
the hardware store and bought grass seed.When she was just a few blocks from home she just fell.She’s not sure why, but she fell forward
catching herself with her hands and apparently also taking the blow with her
chest.A couple living nearby saw her
fall, tried to help her up, but decided to call an ambulance.They even checked up on her at the
hospital.
Her chest hurt all the way around.They did an EKG and chest x-rays.Her heart was fine and no ribs were
broken.She had scratches and bruises on
her hands and legs.The tips of several
of her exposed fingers had band-aids.She
was grateful (with a weird sort of pride) that she did not scratch or hurt her
face.Her right hand had a splint with
bloody bandages.The doctor said she
dislocated at the mid knuckle.She came
in with the finger bent in the middle literally at a right angle outward.Yikes.They had straightened it, and now they were going to stick it back into
the knuckle.When they unwrapped it I squirmed,
especially my face.The finger was
swollen double the size, the color of the skin looked pale grey, and there was
a slit down the inside that you could see into the finger.The doctor shoved the front half of the
finger into the back half.It wasn’t
going in right, so they needed to do it several times.Finally they got it in, then x-rayed again,
and then when they were happy, stitched the gaping wound.
They finally let her out around eight o’clock with a follow
up with a hand surgeon.As I helped her
with her coat, which had been lying on the hospital bed beside her, I noticed a
plastic shopping bag that was underneath the coat.I looked in the bag and it was a big bag of
grass seed.LOL!She still had the bag all this time,
ambulance ride and all.The white plastic
was smeared with blood.
You would think that would be the end of the story, but
no.I checked in on her the next day,
and there she was in the backyard, smeared with dirt, her right hand full of
bandages and inside a plastic bag to prevent it from getting dirty.“What the hell are you doing?” I
screamed.“I can’t believe you’re doing
this.”“I had to get the seed down,” she
explained.“It’s going to rain tomorrow.”And then she asked me to help her with her ice
pack.We walked inside and she sat
down.I assumed she had an ice pack
inside the bag around her hand.But she
lifted her pants leg up and had a wrap with ice around her calf.
“Is it swollen?” she asked.
It was slightly swollen.“What happened here?”
“A dog bit me.”
“What?”
“A little dog.It bit
me.”She extended her arm and with her
other hand showed the length of the dog to be from her fingertips to the mid
forearm.“A little dog.No bigger than a rat.It bit me?”
“Where was this?In
front of the house?”
“No.”
So here’s what happened.She walked back to the spot where she had fallen the day before.For what reason, God knows.To see if her blood was still there?To see if there was something in the sidewalk
that caused her to fall?She really didn’t
have an answer.While she was looking at
the concrete floor at the very spot she fell this little dog on a leash,
possibly on one of those extendable leashes, squirted up around her leg and bit
her calf.At the very spot she fell…LOL.
The dog’s owner was apologetic and what-not.But here she was now with a swollen leg and
two little fang piercings.My first
thought was, do I need to take her to the hospital?I was pretty sure she had a tetanus shot in
the last ten years, but could the dog possibly be rabid?Given the dog was with the owner and on a
leash, I figured it was fairly unlikely it was rabid.I did not want to go to the hospital
again.I put an antiseptic on the bite
marks, put a band-aid on that, and wrapped the ice pack again.I looked at her.“What is going on with you?”I had my hands up, almost appealing to
God.She had an embarrassed smirk on her
face.“I don’t know.”
So in the last week we met with the hand surgeon and she
will need an operation on the finger.The front part of the finger won’t stay correctly.He will have to put pins in and reconstruct (I
think) the tendons.The operation will
be on the 17th.But since
then we’ve had pre-op testing, medical clearences from her general doctor and
from a cardiologist.Oy vey.
Here's a picture of my mother in her garden from several years ago. As you can see, she's into her gardening.
It's been such a hard week. Besides working late and taking work home, work has been a drag. And then at the end of last week my mother broke and dislocated her finger, which will require an operation. So it's been hectic and busy and stressful. Through it all I have one hiding place.
I love this song, and I love most of John Michael Talbot's music. If you've never heard his music, here's his home page, and I know you can sample a lot of it on Youtube. I think he looks better with the shorter hair and beard, but I guess that sort of thing doesn't matter to him. ;)
I can never make up my mind on who's the greatest composer between Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. I guess it depends which one's work has been in my ear. Leading up to Easter our local classical radio station, WQXR, 105.9 FM, presented Bach's complete works in about ten days of play time, calling the event Bach 360. I had been sick of talk radio ever since the election, and so I've had WQXR on in the car. During the Bach 360, every time I got in the car it felt like I was in heaven. I love Johann Sebastian Bach.
Here is his Gloria in excelsis from his Mass in B Minor. Now I don't know why a German Lutheran would write a mass in Latin. Honestly I know very little about the Lutheran liturgy, but if the Mass in B Minor is any indication, it appears to have a very similar form as the in the Latin rite. Hope you enjoy this piece of heaven.
Director: Karl Richter and the Munich Opera Bach Orchestra
This needs a little preface.Matthew had been in a class (pre-pre-school) of three year olds that was
mostly boys.I think it was four or five
other boys and one girl.I don’t know if
that fact is very significant.Perhaps the
fact that the teacher did not seem to control the class that well is much more
significant.I visited the class once
and was totally not impressed of her presence or command of the class.As far as I could tell from that one hour
there was not much structure.The kids
raced about and played with whatever they took, possession being the rule as to
who got to play with what.I could sense
that could lead to problems, but it didn’t while I was there, and I don’t think
that is the root of the current problem either.It was a sign, though.
Don’t get me wrong.It wasn’t a bad class.The
teacher, Miss Melissa, is young, dressed rather common that day, probably isn’t
paid that much for this level, but the kids were happy.Matthew has been in the class since August (I
think) and the kids are all friends.They are rambunctious and Matthew picked up some bad manners at
first.But the kids all hug each
other.I’m not sure how much he’s
learned, but I’m not sure how much he’s supposed to have learned at this
level.He knew his ABC’s and numbers
already, and I’d have to say now he’s infallible with them.Other than improving on what he already knew,
I don’t know what exactly he’s learned.
A few weeks ago Miss Melissa said that she thought Matthew
was going to be a perfectionist, not so much as a compliment, but just because
he insists on doing things himself.He’ll
start doing it and then, when it doesn’t turn out as quite it should, he wants
to move on to something else.He gets
frustrated.Then we were told his
writing of the alphabet (calligraphy) was behind the other kids, and he didn’t
want to do it anymore.He was
refusing.Now the other kids are all I
think in class five days a week, full days.This amounts to day care for them while the parents work.Matthew is only there three days a week for
half days.Obviously he’s not going to
be at the other kid’s level.
And then last week we were told that Matthew doesn’t want to
do the school projects.The school
projects amount to gluing things together as a little craft.When he gets frustrated and stops he starts
to cry.He told my wife last week that
the other kids call him “cry baby.”My
wife verified this with the teacher, and she said they do.Something was going on because it reached a
point where Matthew on Tuesday was refusing to go to school altogether.Wednesday he was crying when my wife dropped
him off.She spoke to the administrator
and asked he go into another class.
I was reluctant to make the switch.After all Matthew has to learn how to deal
with different types, and he’s got to toughen up.He can’t quit just because he’s called
names.Thursday he was put into another
class with fewer boys.The following
are email exchanges I had with my wife.
From: Mrs. Manny
Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2013 9:35 AM
To: Manny
Subject: Matthew
Matthew actually looked forward to going to school this morning. Brought him to
his new classroom and right away you can tell how mellow it is compared to his
other class. He gave me no problem at all, not even a whine. Gave me a kiss and
off he went to play. His new teacher Miss Vicki is the total opposite of Miss
Melissa. Even Vicki told me that the boys in Melissa's class are a rough bunch.
From: Mrs. Manny
Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2013 1:29 PM
To: Manny
Subject: Matthew
Today went very well. Matthew likes his new class and teacher. When his new
teacher asked him if he wanted to stay in her class Matthew responded with a
yes and gave her a hug.
This coming Sunday is Divine Mercy Sunday. This song is just too moving to not post for the occaision. Annie Karto has such a delicately beautiful voice.
Divine Mercy Flood My Soul
by Annie Karto
I knelt before Him one stormy night
His Face was adorned in a golden light
I felt so unworthy, I want to run and hide
But His gaze was so intense I felt paralyzed
Divine Mercy
like a river, oh, flood my soul
wash me clean, and make me whole
Divine Mercy
like a river, oh, flood my soul
wash me clean, and make me whole
I found the lyrics here, if you wish to read the rest of them.
You can find part 1 of my blogs on this biography here and part 2 here.
Catherine of Siena has been proclaimed a Doctor of the
Church, which is an honor based on a saint’s extensive writings that promote
the doctrine or explain theology or reflect great sanctity.In her short life Catherine wrote almost four
hundred letters (381 to be exact, taking up four volumes in collection) known
to have survived, a book of prayers, and a book on her mysticism and spirituality
simply called Dialogue.I’d like this excerpt to give a sample Catherine’s
writings, both to display her theology and her writing style, as showcased in
Undset’s biography.
First, here’s a little bit on Undset speaking about
Catherine’s language.
Catherine always wrote in Tuscan,
her native tongue.It is impossible to
give any proper idea of her style in translation—she has complete mastery over
the music of the Italian peasant language, whether she is tenderly admonishing
a soul whose welfare means just as much to her as her own, describing her
heavenly visions, or threatening with the wrath of God; whether she is advising
powerful lords or ordinary people, laymen or monks in cases concerning the fate
if people and countries, or private people’s everyday difficulties.But because her soul was filled with the love
of Christ and belief in Him, her interest for everything human was bathed in
faith; to use her own analogy, as the swimmer under the water only sees what is
in the water, or what can be seen through the water, so she sees everything
through her faith.But in our time and
the language of our time the expressions we use for religious emotions and
religious experience have become worn out and meaningless; words which in
Catherine’s language are as shining as new-minted gold, become, when repeated
by us, worn-out coins, which have gone out of circulation.Catherine speaks of Virtù, and for her the
word retains its full weight; it means a vital and powerful pursuit of high
ideals.“Virtue in English has no
connection in the popular mind with capacity, capacity for goodness; we think
of virtue as something slightly sour, weak and boring.Catherine’s eternal cri du coeur, “Gesù Dolce—Gesù Amore,” is filled with very
different associations from those which occur to us when we read “Sweet Jesus,
Jesus Love.”A sweet Jesus, a lady
Jesus; Jesus-Love—a substitute or sublimation of sexual love.In Catherine’s language and when she lived,
sweetness was also a name for strength, for all that is good and at the same
time gentle and merciful.That goodness
must also at times be hard and aggressive, no one knew better than
Catherine.For her and her
contemporaries, even for the hosts of people who in practice tried to forget it
or deny it, it was acknowledged that “Amore” love, is fundamentally an
expression for the connection between God and the soul of man.[p.190-1]
The phrase “Gesù Dolce—Gesù Amore” was her favorite way to
address our Lord, and apparently she used it to sign off many of her
letters.I’m so enamored (pardon the
pun) with that phrase that I’ve begun to use it in one of my prayers where I
address Christ.Here is a sample letter,
this letter to Pope Gregory XI to take responsibility like a man or the Church
of Christ would continue to suffer.
As usual she begins her letter in
the name of Jesus Christ and gentle Mary, and addresses herself to the Pope as
her dearest and most worthy father in Jesus Christ.For herself she has chosen the title of God’s
servants’ servant and bondswoman—it is reminiscent of the Pope’s traditional
signature, “the servant of the servants of God.”She describes her longing to see him standing
as a fruitful tree, loaded with noble fruit because it is planted in good
earth.But if the tree is not planted in
this good earth, which is self-knowledge—the knowledge that we are nothing,
existing only in Him Who Is—the tree will wither.The worm of egoism will eat up the roots, for
he who loves himself feeds his soul with mortal pride, the principle and origin
of evil in all men, in those who rule and those who must obey.A man who has become the victim of self-love
becomes indifferent to sins and faults among his subordinates, for he is afraid
to annoy them and make them his enemies.Either he attempts to punish them so halfheartedly that it is useless,
or else he does not punish them at all.In
other words Catherine tells the Pope that in the last resort it is he who
carries the whole responsibility for the terrible abuses which are draining the
life of the Church, even though according to human reckoning he may be a fine person
with many good qualities…”If the blind leads the blind both fall into the
abyss; doctor and patient hurry to hell together.”The kind of mercy which is due to self-love
and the love of friends, relations, and temporal peace is in fact the worst cruelty,
for if a wound is not cleansed when necessary with the red-hot iron and the
surgeon’s knife, it festers and finally causes death.To apply salves to it may be pleasant for the
patient, but it does not heal him.Love
your neighbor for Jesus’ sake, and for the honor and glory of His sweet
name.“Yes, I could wish you were a good and
faithful shepherd who was willing to give a thousand lives if you had them, for
the glory of God and the salvation of His creatures.Oh, my beloved father, you who are Christ on
earth, imitate the Blessed St. Gregory.You can do what he did, for he was a man as you are, and God is always
the same as He was.The only thing we
lack is hunger for the salvation of our neighbor, and courage.But to arouse this hunger in ourselves, who
are nothing more than barren trees, we must graft ourselves to the fruitful
tree of the cross.The Lamb who was
slaughtered for the sake of our salvation still thirst—His desire for our
salvation is greater than could be shown by His suffering—for His suffering is
without end, as is His love.
“…Have courage Holy Father, no more
indecision, raise the banner of the holy cross, the fragrance of the cross is
what will bring you peace.”“Forgive me,
Father, for all I have said to you.The
tongue speaks of that which fills the heart”…
Finally she talks of the
forthcoming nomination of cardinals, and warns him he must choose those men who
are most worthy, otherwise he need not be surprise if God punishes him.For the Dominican order, which is to have a
new Master General, she begs him to chose a pious and virtuous man, “for that
is what our order needs.”She ends by
asking humbly for his blessing and forgiveness for all she has dared to write.“Sweet Jesus, Jesus Love.”[p.187-9]
I love her use of what would today be called folksy maxims:
the blind following the blind into the abyss, a wound that is not cauterized
and cut clean will lead to death, applying salves may be pleasant but it will
not heal.Her language is very vivid,
charged with simile (the Pope needs to be a fruitful tree) and then extends the
simile almost in the manner of Homer (the tree needs to be planted in good
earth or the worm of egoism will destroy the roots).And of course her outspoken is at the very
core of her identity.Who has the
audacity to tell the Pope to have “courage”?
Finally her great work, Dialogue,
should be described and sampled, and Undset does that in a whole chapter.I can’t copy an entire chapter, but I’ll try
to give a taste of it.
Catherine calls the manuscript “the
book” or “my book.”It was Raimondo who
first gave it a title and called it the Dialogue.The first Latin translation, by Critofano di
Gano Guidini and Stefano Maconi, had been called by the translators the Book of Divine Learning.Since then the various translations and
unprinted editions in several different languages have gone under several
names…The undercurrent beneath the waves of shifting ideas in these
conversations between the Eternal Father and her whom He calls His very dear
daughter, and His much loved child, is the belief in God’s mercy.With her heart crushed by compassion
Catherine begs for mercy—for all this world which sin has laid waste, for all
Christians and heathens and the infidel too.And finally, when the Eternal father compresses all He has taught His
daughter into a few sentences, He says: “I have told you that I will show the
world mercy so that you can see that mercy is the sign by which I am known”…
In the Dialogue the Lord repeats for Catherine all that he has taught her
before of the knowledge of God and the knowledge of one’s own ego and the way
to perfection: “Your service of no use to Me, it is by serving your neighbor
that you can serve Me.”The soul which
has once experienced the bliss of being united with God in love, which has
reached the point where it only loves itself in God, will expand and embrace
the whole world with its love.Once it
has won for itself the virtue which brings a life of grace it will work with
the utmost zeal to help its neighbor.But this is an inner virtue; outward action, physical work, diligent
penitence, self-chastisement and all kinds of self-denial are nothing more than
the tools of virtue—God is not interested in them for themselves.On the contrary—they can be an obstacle on
the way to perfection if the soul begins to love penitential exercises for
their own sake.One must do penitence
from love, with true humility and perfect patience.And it must be done with understanding, that
is to say with a true knowledge of God and one’s own self….[p.262-4]
It seems that Catherine is taking us on a journey, and the
journey is inward toward her mystic visions.She seems to be suggesting the notion of Divine Mercy centuries before
St. Faustina.The visions rely on a
complex imagery and symbolism, such as one of her favorite images, the
swallowing sea.
When she saw that she had been
given a new and deeper understanding of the love which caused the redemption by
Christ Crucified, Catherine was filled with holy joy and prayed again for the
whole world—although if the Holy Church should regain the outward beauty which
is an expression of its eternal inner beauty, the whole world would be saved…So
when mankind had rebelled against God it immediately rebelled against itself;
the flesh rebelled against the spirit and mankind drowned in the dark and
bitter waters of sin…Man thinks it is the things he loves which float, but in
reality it is he himself who is swept by the stream towards the end of his
life.He would like to stop, to keep his
hold of this life and the things he loves, so that they are not washed out of his
reach.He reaches out blindly to
whatever he happens to touch, but cannot tell the difference between valuable
and the valueless. Then comes death and
takes him from all he loves…
God made a bridge over this abyss
when He gave the world His Son.For God,
who created us without our having anything to do with it, demands of us that we
should work with Him for our salvation….[p.264-5]
The symbol of the bridge (God’s grace) becomes further
complicated as it intertwines with the symbol of light as the path to God.
But because it is through the grace
which God gives us that we are able to work with Him for our salvation,
Catherine prays for light.This too she
is given, and then she sees how one can receive and increase the grace God
gives freely.It is the old teaching of
the mystics on the Via Purificativa,
the way to cleanse the soul, the Via
Illuminativa, the way to enlightenment of eternal truths, and the Via Unitiva, the way to unification with
God in love.[p.266]
Does the bridge become transformed into a bridge of
light?I’ve perused the Dialogue itself (here, free on the Internet),
and I have to admit it is hard to follow.Her imagery shifts fluidly, too fluidly, and her symbols seem to be
built on top of each other.She violates
several rules of rhetorical clarity, but what she loses in clarity she gains in
poetic vision.She writes (actually
mutters while in mystic transcendence and someone else is writing it down) like
a complex modern poet, symbols morphing into symbols.
She develops the bridge symbol in
several ways.The soul steps onto the
bridge by three steps.Sometimes,
according to her, the steps mean the three grades of intimacy with Christ,
which are also expressed by the kiss on His feet, the kiss on the wound in His
side, and the kiss on His mouth.Then
she lets the three steps mean three stages toward perfect union with God:
slavish fear of God’s punishment is what leads most souls to the bridge.The next step is the faithfulness of a
servant who follows his kind lord through love, even though this love is still
imperfect, because the servant of his reward—the blessedness which God gives
His faithful servants.This leads to the
third step, where the soul loves God with the love of a son—for what He is, not
for His gifts.At another time, the
three steps become a symbol for the qualities of the soul—memory, intelligence,
and will.With an interpretation,
entirely her own, of a phrase in the Bible, Catherine declares that when these
three qualities of the soul run together in the desire for unity with God,
Christ will fulfill His promise: “When two or three are gathered in my name, I
am among them.”[p.266]
Undset describes that the structure of the work is not
linear in progress, but rhythmic, as the sea. The book was written in four or five days,
the divisions into chapters and sections by others subsequent to the
transcription.
The contents of the book came from
Catherine’s lips during a series of visions and take the form of thoughts which
are often repeated or which reappear constantly in new forms.Her mind is like the waves of the sea which
break inwards over the same problems and then wash back again, then break
again.The comparisons and symbols, some
of them old favorites from earlier visions and letters, are repeated or given
new meaning.No translation can do
justice to the beauty, tenderness, and pathos she expresses in her lovely
Tuscan dialect, and which have made the Dialogue
one of the masterpieces of Italian literature as well as a milestone in
Catholic thinking.[p.267-8]
Finally if you want to hear Fr. Thomas McDermott speak about Catherine's writings, you can watch his interview on EWTN's Bookmark.
