Levavi oculos meos in montes

  "One of the great purposes of Vatican II was to vivify the religious life of the faithful, to permeate their lives with the Christian revelation." Chapter V:  Vivification of Religon   The term Dietrich von Hildebrand uses in opposition to vivification is "ossification".   Vivification is an odd Latinate word.   In the Divine Office we pray Vivifica, meaning we asked that we be enlivened or "quickened".   Quicken is the term we still use for the flutter of new life a mother feels when an unborn baby is early in the second trimester.   Ossification means turning into stone or something else hard and insentient.   Ossification is a danger for any institution insofar as it is human.  The distinction between the Church and other organizations is that the tendency has always been overcome by continual renewal. Here are some examples of a "legalistic and formalistic" approach which Hildebrand gives.  These probl...

"By and large, progressive Catholics represent a mere reaction to the narrowness and legalism of a former age. This reaction is all the more false and evil because the kind of change called for in the Church today is mainly the completion of an incomplete truth or the replacement of an ambiguous formulation by an unequivocal one. We have seen that truth is above a wrong thesis and antithesis, and not a mere synthesis of them; and that is is above a wrong action and an equally (or more) wrong reaction, and not the mean between them. Therefore it is all the more naïve to believe that the truth consists in a reaction to past errors." This is from Chapter IV of Trojan Horse in the City of God, called False Reactions .    Hildebrand is following up on his points about Hegelian dialectic in Chapter III.    He is reinforcing his point that truth is ABOVE errors or incomplete truths, not a reaction to them.  Though the days when progressivism was simply a reaction to...

[P]eople at different historic periods are more or less sensitive to signs as such. Some people are deaf or blind to non-verbal signals.–Mary Douglas  I've started reading a book called Natural Symbols by Dame Mary Douglas .   I heard about this book several years ago from James Hitchcock in Recovery of the Sacred .    He wrote in his 1974 preface: The "success" of a liturgy cannot be judged simply on the basis of the subjective reactions of the participants. Liturgies can be rendered "effective" in a variety of ways which do violence to the fundamental meanings that Catholic liturgy is supposed to convey. It is partly by a failure to attend to meanings as well as to forms that the present condition of liturgical confusion has been allowed to develop. The author is by profession a historian, not a liturgist or an anthropologist. Much of the thought contained here was originally stimulated by a historical investigation into the folk religion of Elizabethan Englan...

 It may not have become obvious yet, but this blog is about the contemplative life.   Specifically, how does a contemplative life look for a layperson ?    Should it be a thing at all?  If so, why? Eucatastrophe and contemplation are closely connected, it seems.   I found a PDF article called Medieval Realism and Mythopoiea making this point.  Under the surface of how things look, there is how they really are, which is never reducible to appearances though neither is it separate from them.  Rather, appearances, phenomena, are our entry point.   Tolkien's tale Leaf by Niggle  deals with this entry point, if I remember correctly.  I have not read it in a long time.  Sub-creation is a participation in the thoughts of the Creator through mimesis.    Aquinas says : Now contemplation of the truth befits a man according to his nature as a rational animal: the result being that "all men naturally desire to kno...

Utopia used to be a thing.    Thomas More coined the word, which  was a Greek neologism -- "u" meaning "no" and "topos" indicating a place .    Though More's work seems more like an entertaining thought experiment than anything else, like Gulliver's Travels and other such fictional commentaries, a small genre of works in the 19th century summed up Western civilization's secular optimism that the human race was greatly gifted and that they would be able to progress to a state of earthly happiness.   When did the first dystopias start appearing?  Though some consider Mary Shelley's The Last Man to be the original one, and others HG Wells' The Time Machine, it looks like Zamyatin's We  might be the progenitor of dystopian novels as such; it was a Russian work first published in English shortly after the Communist Revolution.    It seems to me that the Church's documents in the 1950's and on through the early 80's were the ...

“I should like to save the Shire, if I could - though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don't feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.” The hobbits come to mind when I think of Cardinal Jean Danielou's term  "church of the poor" .   A couple of years ago I read a book of his called  Prayer as a Political Problem .     In it, he makes the point that the Church founded by Jesus is open to all and the only qualification is faith.   It didn't matter if you were a Pharisee or a prostitute, a tax collector or a centurion.    He writes: "The problem, therefore, is to ask what conditions make a Christian people possible. ...

 But even as the gate fell, and the Orcs about it yelled, preparing to charge, a murmur arose behind them, like a wind in the distance, and it grew to a clamour of many voices crying strange news in the dawn. The Orcs upon the Rock, hearing the rumour of dismay, wavered and looked back. (The Two Towers, Helm’s Deep)  - The Wind in the Wilderness We are in the season of eucatastrophe and evangelium now.     Most battles probably have a moment when the tide has turned, but there is still fighting and cleaning up and counselling to be done.   Liturgically, this season is like that; and indeed the past two millenia are like that.   The liturgy is a recapitulation and re-presentation of this truth. Bishop Erik Varden writes : Basically, the Church tries to get us to live within the whole story all the time, to go beyond a merely linear conception of time. To follow the liturgy is to develop a capacity for synchronicity, the closest we get, this si...