Levavi oculos meos in montes

I just found Regina Doman's substack , called Culture Recovery Journals , which she started back in July 2023 .    She writes :  Several years ago, I experienced a sharp longing for a more unified life. I was in the throes of welcoming new technology into my home, hoping it would help harness the countless needs of my business and growing family, but instead of the promised simplicity and streamlining, I began to feel my life fragmenting. She mentions that in order to re-integrate, she began to journal:  These journals, which I began in 2016 and begin publishing today, are the fruit of my self-diagnosis. Not only was I fragmented, but I discovered our culture was fragmented, and those fragments had begun to polarize at a disturbing clip. I began questioning how I could knit them back together, picturing the exercise as lashing so many barrels from a shattering shipwreck together, like the Swiss Family Robinson.  This relates to a process I went through and menti...

 I wonder if everyone's story of conversion has a little bit of eucatastrophe to it, a bit of what Tolkien called  " a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief"?   It is, he also says, "a sudden and miraculous grace".... something that might not have been, that doesn't deny the reality of sorrow and hardship, but goes far beyond it. He wrote in one of his letters :  I was there led to the view that [eucatastrophe] produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives – if the story has literary 'truth' on the second plane (....) – that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made.  I just finished reading another Communio article, this one called  Newman's Essay on the Development of ...

 It won't be long until Lent.  At the Benedictine abbey where we went to Mass yesterday, it was Septuagesima Sunday  -- and Lent points out the importance in a Christian life for regular conversion.   It's not just a one time thing.   Conversion comes from the Latin conversio, meaning “to turn around.” In the New Testament, the Greek writers used the word metanoia, meaning a change of heart, particularly toward repentance. Conversion involves both turning away from a past life and turning toward God, resulting in an interior transformation of the person. Conversion can mean turning from sin to repentance, from laxity to fervor, from unbelief to faith, from error to truth.  What is Conversion? ( Wiktionary  has more on the etymology and present day variety of uses of the word.). The similarity between the Latin "versio" or turning in that word and the Greek "strophe" or turning in the word eucatastrophe is interesting.     Euca...

"Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.". The Hobbit    Communio is a Catholic journal for present-day ressourcement thinkers .   If you follow the link you can see a bit about its history and focus.   Some though not all of its articles are available for reading free in pdf form.    I had read about ressourcement theology in books about Vatican II but hadn't known it was still a thing until I started reading Larry Chapp's blog .   That link takes you to one of his posts about his personal background in theology.  All this is a rather indirect road to what I was going to say, that yesterday I read a Communio article by Ian Ker called Newman, the Councils, and Vatican II    The article made the point...

" And then there was the Shire-folk. I began to have a warm place in my heart for them in the Long Winter, which none of you can remember. They were very hard put to it then: one of the worst pinches they have been in, dying of cold, and starving in the dreadful dearth that followed. But that was the time to see their courage, and their pity one for another. It was by their pity as much as by their tough uncomplaining courage that they survived. I wanted them still to survive. But I saw that the Westlands were in for another very bad time again, sooner or later, though of quite a different sort: pitiless war. To come through that I thought they would need something more than they now had. It is not easy to say what. Well, they would want to know a bit more, understand a bit clearer what it was all about, and where they stood. They had begun to forget: forget their own beginnings and leg­ends, forget what little they had known about the greatness of the world. It was not yet gone, ...

Today is St Francis de Sales' feast day.    He is one of the saints that is important to our family -- a favorite of mine, and the confirmation patron of one of my sons.   If we are talking about eucatastrophe, which we are as the operating idea of this blog, his life is a good historical example. Born in the half century after Christian Europe was split into conflict between Catholics and Protestants, he was two months premature, the oldest of six sons.   In those days of high infant mortality, his very survival seems like one of the first "turns" (eucatastrophe means sudden turn with a view to the happy nature of the turn).   Then there was the fact that he was trained as a lawyer, and became a priest against the desire of his father.   Then the prodigious work he did in a relatively short lifetime (55 years if my math is correct).   His focus was on "devotion" whatever your state of life and he was especially gifted in gent...

 "There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something… You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.". The Hobbit In the last couple of hours, I've been browsing through some of my older homeschooling writing.    This is something I do infrequently, usually in January, for some reason.  Something to do with new starts, perhaps? Anyway, reading one's past writings is perhaps one of the best ways to reflect on what one wants to do in the present moment.    And really, what it comes down to is that I want is to write things I will want to read sometime in the future.    A blog is uniquely suited to the goal of reaching out to others and not least to one's future (and analogically, past) self.    It's probably not the only way to do it, and it obviously has some constraints.   Before blogging, email groups were my favorite media for that kind of thing.  ...