So much for einmal ist keinmal.

I've been feeling a good deal of déjà vu lately.

"Everything comes in stories...."

"...But to those who can't see it yet, everything comes in stories, creating readiness, nudging them toward receptive insight." 

.... He continued, "Do you see how this story works?..." (Eugene Peterson, The Message)

You can feel Hauerwas smiling.

A Song Himself

Christ was the king of all kings, Brendan said from MacLennin's knee. He was the wizard of all wizards. He turned water to beer easy as breathing. When he commanded the foaming waves to lay flat, they laid flat. He straightened the bent legs of cripples out and peeled the blue milky scales off the eyes of the blind. When he called out of the darkness the first light as ever was, the morning stars sang together at the sweet ring of it and all the sons of heaven shouted for joy. 

"Ah well, he was a bard then," MacLennin said. It was the part about Christ's voice that struck him hardest. 

"MacLennin, he was so mighty a bard his songs have ravished the hearts of men from that day on," Brendan said. "He was a song himself you might say. King Christ is a song on the lips of the true God." (Frederick Buechner, Brendan)

Commemorative Potpourri

I've decided to commemorate my birthday by revisiting some of my favorite books from my 16th year. Not every book will be included – some are in Davao (Chaim Potok's The Chosen and C.S. Lewis' God in the Dock and Space Trilogy, for example) and others I haven't highlighted at all. I wanted to include some snippets from James Smith's Desiring the Kingdom, but I can't find it. I also wanted to insert some lines from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," but I can't claim to understand it. It just feels like a poetic (no pun intended) middle finger to anybody who doesn't have an English degree. Quotes from Kristin Lavransdatter are a couple of blog posts down.
Anyway, here are the quotes:

 Quotes from G.K. Chesterton, the most quotable English author:

"My chief objection to a quarrel is that it interrupts an argument."

"Neither modern science nor ancient religion believes in complete free thought. Theology rebukes certain thoughts by calling them blasphemous. Science rebukes certain thoughts by calling them morbid." Orthodoxy

"The cross cannot be defeated, for it is Defeat." The Ball and the Cross

"Obviously one should not trust any God that one can improve on."The Ball and the Cross

"Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak." The Innocence of Father Brown

"'I am an atheist,' he said, in a stifled voice. 'I have always been an atheist. I am still an atheist.' Then, addressing the other's indolent and indifferent back, he cried: 'In God's name what do you mean?' 

And the other answered without turning round: 'I mean nothing in God's name.'" The Ball and the Cross

 "And he who will not climb the mountain of Christ does indeed fall into the abyss of Buddha." Saint Thomas Aquinas (which may be why some Christians have said that if they weren't Christians they would be Buddhists. I for one believe one of James Sire's implicit arguments in The Universe Next Door, that if I weren't a Christian, I would essentially be a nihilist.)

"The good painter has skill. It is the bad painter who loves his art. The good musician loves being a musician, the bad musician loves music." Tremendous Trifles

"The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost." Tremendous Trifles ("You don't know about real loss, 'cause that only occurs when you've loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much." - Sean Maguire in Good Will Hunting)

"[I]f you do lie in bed, be sure you do it without any reason or justification at all." Tremendous Trifles

"'Man,' I said, 'who are you that you should not believe in fairy tales?'" Tremendous Trifles

"Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it – because it is a fact." Tremendous Trifles

"Fairy tales... are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon." Tremendous Trifles

"... he who has most most sympathy with myths will most fully realise that they are not and never were a religion, in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a religion.... though they provide a man with a calendar they do not provide him with a creed. A man did not stand up and say, "I believe in Jupiter and Juno and Neptune," etc., as he stands up and says 'I believe in God the Father Almighty.'" The Everlasting Man

"He did not talk about the books he had written; he was far too much alive for that. He talked about the books he had not written." Tremendous Trifles

"Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it." Tremendous Trifles

"We have enough strength for politics and commerce and art and philosophy; we have not enough strength for play." Tremendous Trifles

"I had a notion of a man perpetually spinning round on one foot like a teetotum [a top] in the effort to find the world behind his beck which continually fled from him. Perhaps this is why the world goes round. Perhaps the world is always trying to look over its shoulder and catch up the world which always escapes it, yet without which it cannot be itself." Tremendous Trifles

Quotes from theological books: 

"It is completely forgotten that if Christ had been only a man and had been regarded only a man by Peter, Peter would not have denied him."- Soren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity

"[T]o be a Christian, to truly belong to Christ – when Christ truly is who he claims to be – to be a Christian must indeed be the highest. humanly speaking, for a human being. And then that truly to be a Christian is to mean, in the world, to human eyes, to be the abased one, that it is to mean suffering every possible evil, every mockery and insult, and finally to be punished as a criminal!" - Soren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity

"If the beauty of Christ and the beauty of the new creation is to be characterized as 'perfection,'...this must be... a perfection that can accommodate scars. The perfection of the kingdom of God is not the airbrushed sheen of the fashion magazine." - Steven R. Guthrie, Creator Spirit

"Stories are lived before they are told–except in the case of fiction." Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, quoted in Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader

"The first task of Christian social ethics... is not to make the 'world' better or more just, but to help Christian people form their community consistent with their conviction that the story of Christ is ta truthful account of our existence. For as H.R. Niebuhr argued, only when we know 'what is going on,' do we know 'what we should do,' and Christians believe that we learn most decisively 'what is going on' in the cross and resurrection of Christ." - Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader

"Jesus' cross... is not merely a general symbol of moral significance of self-sacrifice... that it is better to give than receive. Rather, the cross is Jesus' ultimate dispossession through which God has conquered the powers of this world. The cross is not just a symbol of God's kingdom; it is that kingdom come." - Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader

"To be a disciple of Jesus is not enough to know the basic 'facts' of his life. It is not enough to know his story. Rather, to be a disciple of Jesus means that our lives must literally be taken up into the drama of God's redemption of this creation." - Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader 

Miscellaneous quotes:

"Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself." - Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos

 "It is one thing to write The Sound and the Fury, to achieve the artistic transcendence of discerning meaning of the twentieth century, then to finish, then to find oneself at Reed's drugstore the next morning. A major problem... not solved but anaesthetized by alcohol.  

It is something else to listen to a superb performance of Mozart's Twenty-first Piano Concerto, to come out at the end of it, to walk out into Columbus Circle afterwards. At best, a moderately sustained exaltation; at worst, a mild letdown." - Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos

"'This shall not be wasted,' he muttered, and hurled [a firkin of wine] against the nearest of his foes, crushing two of them and tripping up several others who fell over their bodies." - Frans G.Bengtsson, The Long Ships

"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in." - Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

"It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end." - William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

"In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you sleep, what are you." - Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

"My mother is a fish." - Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

"One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too." - Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

"I've studied now Philosophy/ And Jurisprudence, Medicine, - / And even, alas! Theology, -/ From end to end, with labor keen;/ And here, poor fool! with all my lore/ I stand, no wiser than before..." - Goethe, Faust (Faust's lament does not reflect my own thoughts. It just gave me a chuckle.)

"... [I]f we are not to fail in our endeavour to determine the value of philosophy, we must first free our minds from the prejudices of what are wrongly called 'practical' men." - Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

"O, come all you Roman Catholics/ That never went to mass..."- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (O, come all you Protestants/ Who never knew Luther.)

"–Are you annoyed? he asked. 

–No, answered Stephen.

–Are you in bad humour?

–No.

–CREDO UT VOS SANGUINARIUS MENDAX ESTIS, said Cranly, QUIA FACIES VOSTRA MONSTRAT UT VOS IN DAMNO MALO HUMORE ESTIS." - James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"–PAX SUPER TOTUM SANGUINARIUM GLOBUM." - James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"–And is that why you will not communicate, Cranly asked, because you are not sure of that too, because you feel that the host, too, may be the body and blood of the son of God and not a wafer of bread? And because you fear that it may be?

–Yes, Stephen said quietly, I feel that and I also fear it.

–I see, Cranly said.

...

–I fear many things: dogs, fire-arms, the sea, thunder-storms, machinery, the country roads at night.

–But why do you fear a bit of bread?

–I imagine, Stephen said, that there is a malevolent reality behind those things I say I fear." - James Joyce,  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"'... I wonder what you think of Joyce, Father?' 

The priest lifted his chair and pushed closer. 'You'll have to shout,' he said. 'Blind in one eye and deaf in one ear.' 

'What do you think of Joyce?' Asbury said louder. 

'Joyce? Joyce who?' asked the priest. 

'James Joyce,' Asbury said and laughed. 

The priest brushed his huge hand in the air as if he were bothered by gnats. 'I haven't met him,' he said." - Flannery O'Connor, "The Enduring Chill"

"'... Ask [God] to send the Holy Ghost.' 

'The Holy Ghost?' Asbury said. 

'Are you so ignorant you've never heard of the Holy Ghost?' the priest asked. 

'Certainly I've heard of the Holy Ghost,' Asbury said furiously, 'and the Holy Ghost is the last thing I'm looking for!' 

'And He may be the last thing you get,' the priest said..." - O'Connor, "The Enduring Chill" (archetypal O'Connor)

"I purposed in spirit when I mounted the ocean,/ I determined to do or die." Beowulf  (quoted by an indecisive teenager)

"... gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe." - Albert Camus, The Stranger (The only primer on existential nihilism you'll ever need to read.)

This whole essay.

"But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that encahanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing." - A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner (I shed quite a few tears at the end of this book, many more than I did when I finished Winnie-the-Pooh. I felt a something similar at the end of Dead Poets Society, but Pooh Corner effects more a nostalgic longing.)

Quotes on stories, reading, and writing:

DONALD RAY POLLOCK: And so when I started out I also didn't know too much about how to begin, and so I would type out stories that I liked on a typewriter.

SCOTT SIMON: You mean type other stories out?

POLLOCK: Yes, type other writer's stories.You know, I'd never been in a writing workshop or anything and I–you know, it just seemed to be a way to get closer to figuring out how other writers did what they did. So I did that quite a bit.

...

SIMON: What would you learn by typing?

POLLOCK: I think one of the principal things I learned from typing the stories out was how dialog works. Also just, you know things about structure and you know, I could read a story, but I really wouldn't see how it worked until I got closer to it. (Dialogue quoted in Steven R. Guthrie, Creator Spirit. I once tried to do this, typing out short stories by other authors.) 

"The poem is more something we find than something we make." - Mark Doty

"To read well, we must become as little children." - Peter Leithart, "Authors, Authority, and the Humble Reader" 

"Though fiction creates its own world, the book also is an objective presence in our world; the world becomes flesh and dwells among us, and the question must be asked whether this incarnate word is doing mischief or good." - Peter Leithart, "Authors, Authority, and the Humble Reader"

"The whole poetic or artistic or mythic phenomenon that we find when we look at the history of human imagination represents, I think the search for perfection.... We all have imaginings of it (some poets would urge that we have memories of it). Perfection hounds us remorselessly. It stands over against every experience we have of nostalgia, frustration, and desire....

Politics, medicine, ecology, and jurisprudence are our efforts to repair the damage.... When we've been allowed to take time from our plowing and fighting and brushing our teeth, we have tried to say something about perfection and our experience of the discrepancy that we feel between ourselves and perfection.... 

... We are driven by who knows what -- maybe it's the Holy Ghost -- to complain about this discrepancy, to oppose it, and to transcend it.... Myth is one version of this effort." - Thomas Howard (brother of Elisabeth Elliot), "Myth: Flight to Reality"

"... we have decided (sometime in the Renaissance it was and we finished the job in the eighteenth century) to recreate the world. It's a very small one now, limited as it is by microscopes and telescopes and computers, and asphalts parking lots at MacDonald's hamburger stands. And it's a horror. It is, above all, boring, for mystery has fled from it. We have announced to anyone who cares to listen -- and somehow one imagines that angels and elves aren't that enthralled by the information -- that we can explain everything....

By the eighteenth century the myth became sovereign that the analytic and rational capacity is absolutely adequate for unscrambling the mystery of the universe. Somewhere in the process the gods fled. The irony is that in the very effort of modern art to disentangle human experience from the transcendent, human experience turned to ashes." - Thomas Howard, "Myth: Flight to Reality"

"Once upon a time" is no time.... In reality... it means "at all times, in all places." - Erik Christian Haugaard, "Portrait of a Poet: Hans Christian Andersen and His Fairy Tales"

"God... sent the human race what I call good dreams. I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has given new life to men." - C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

"... if one only reads Great Books one can never know what a great, as opposed to an ordinary, book is..." - Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind 

"But then I suppose that the converse must be true as well, that if one only reads ordinary books, one will never know what a Great Book is." - the author of this blog post

Accende Lumen Sensibus

This morning I decided to listen to the Latin hymn "Veni Creator Spiritus." The hymn is a prayer to the Holy Spirit asking that He visit our minds, fill our hearts with divine grace, and kindle a light for our senses. The melismatic Gregorian chant conveyed a warm, organic, spiritual feeling. Unbeknownst to me, "Veni" was a prelude to a greater piece of music, one which would fulfill the prayer of the hymn: Mahler's Symphony no. 5.

Yes, I listened to all 70 glorious minutes.

There is an ineffability about music; whatever I will say in this post will fall terribly short of what I intend to convey. In fact, this is the greatest difficulty of talking about music. There's a sort of cliche that music "says the unsayable," or that "music reveals to a man an unkown realm... a world in which he leaves behind all precise feelings in order to embrace an inexpressible longing (E.T.A. Hoffman, "Beethoven's Instrumental Music," quoted in Steven R. Guthrie, Creator Spirit)," or yet: "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture"; or, in the words of composer Aaron Copland (who happened to be a good friend of conductor Leonard Bernstien): "Is there a meaning to music? My answer would be 'Yes.'... 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No.'" Nevertheless, this is a blog post, and I must use words  – I can't dance for the life of me.

What I wish to focus on is the fourth movement of the symphony, the famous Adagietto:

Watch the video. You won't ever regret it.

 This movement is unusual for a symphony, since it employs only the strings and a harp. Like Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, the Adagietto is associated with sadness and death, Mahler's piece having been conducted by Bernstein during Robert Kennedy's funeral Mass and Barber's having been broadcast over and played at the funerals of such figures as Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, and Princess Diana, and the two pieces also bear musical similarity. However, some recent studies indicate that Mahler never intended to convey feelings of melancholy. Rather, Mahler wrote the Adagietto as a love letter to his eventual wife, Alma Schindler. Mahler certainly didn't intend to have the movement push thirteen, fourteen minutes, since at the 1904 premiere of the symphony the Adagietto was played in seven minutes under his baton. Perhaps a reason for the gradual slowing of performances of the piece is that the piece, marked adagietto, a term which denotes a faster tempo than adagio, is also confusingly marked "Sehr langsam" (very slow) and in the score there are musical directions like "zurueckhaltend" (held back) and "zoegernd" (hesitantly).  (The difference between Elgar's 12-minute recording of his Serenade for Strings and the longer recordings of later conductors is a similar phenomenon, although Elgar's take on his famous Larghetto clocks in at the standard six minutes.)

But enough about the technical details. The Adagietto under Bernstein's baton is the most beautiful experience I've had with a piece of music in a long time. By the end of the video, I had experienced that "inexpressible longing" which music accomplishes in a musician or listener, and in the inevitable subsequent letdown I was walking as if in a trance, breathing heavily, shaking my head intermittently, and wiping tears that rimmed my eyes. The last time I had experienced something similar with a piece of music was when I listened to Eric Whitacre's "The Seal Lullaby"; the last concert piece that brought me to tears was the under-appreciated "Adagio di molto" from Sibelius' Violin Concerto. To be honest, I had listened to this piece multiple times before but was never greatly affected; in fact, the delayed effect of a music piece happens fairly often with me: Bach's solo violin sonatas and concertos, Brahms' Violin Concerto, Beethoven's late string quartets, and Shostakovich's quartets all took some time in affecting me (they aren't "cheap shots" like the banal Canon in D, the overly sentimental Meditation from "Thais," or the excessively bombastic finale of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, which I have to admit is still an awesome work regardless).The Adagietto has to be one of the closest copies of Plato's form of Beauty. The Adagietto conveys a greater sense of warmth, organicity, and spirituality than does "Veni Creator Spiritus," at least to my ears. Of course, they are two extremely different works – one is a concert piece, the other a sung prayer – but to me they related to each other by the Adagietto being the answer to the prayer that the Spirit  "visit our minds, fill our hearts with divine grace, and kindle a light for our senses." Experiences like this are what make music worthwhile (or what makes life not "a mistake," as Nietzsche would have it). "The world is charged with the grandeur of God," Gerard Manley Hopkins says; I think Mahler's Fifth is charged with just a bit more of God's grandeur.

(As I wrote this, Mahler's Eighth was playing in the background. It may be charged with even more grandeur.)

The Gospel According to Sigrid Undset

Kristin Lavransdatter is undoubtedly one of the best works of fiction I have ever read. It chronicles the life of a girl in middle-ages Norway from her childhood to her death. A pretty unappealing narrative prima facie, I know; but in the sprawling, sometimes dark storyline underlies a coherent tale of dramatis personae -- emphasis on dramatis. It's like Shakespeare in prose: that good, unless you dislike Shakespeare.
The Norway of Kristin Lavransdatter's time was a country of Catholicism, mingled with a bit of pagan superstition (having lived in the Philippines for the majority of my life, I find much to relate with), and the driving force of the story is (to over-simplify) sin. These lead to magnificent lines of dialogue about guilt and confession. Some lines induced those "chills-down-your-spine" that make reading worthwhile. And I quote (from Tina Nunally's wonderful translation):

"Kristin," the priest tried to lift her face, "you mustn't think about this now! Think about God, who sees your sorrow and your remorse. Turn to the gentle Virgin Mary, who takes pity on every sorrowful –"
"Don't you see? I drove another human being to take her own life!"
"Kristin," the priest said sternly. "Are you so arrogant that you think yourself capable of sinning so badly that God's mercy is not great enough?..." (page 381)

"Help me, Gunnulf," begged Kristin. She was white to the very edge of her lips. "I don't know my own will."
"Then say: Thy will be done," replied the priest softly.... (page 467)

"... I understood that the torment of God's love will never end as long as men and maidens are born on this earth.... And I was afraid of myself because I, an impure man, has served at his altar, said mass with impure lips, and held up the Host with impure hands. And I felt that I was like the man who led his beloved to a place of shame and betrayed her."
... "I can't, Gunnulf, I can't – when you talk like that, then I realize that I can never..."
...
"Kristin. You can never settle for anything less than the love that is between God and the soul." (page 472)

(Kristin's mother:) "What did you think... when you found out that Kristin and I – the two people you held dearest and loved the most faithfully – we had both betrayed you as much as we possibly could?"  

(Kristin's father:) "I don't think I thought much about it."

"But later on, when you kept thinking about it, as you say you did..."  

"I thought about all the times I had betrayed Christ." (page 578)

There are more, similar passages in the remaining 600 pages of the book. I also have to say that passages like these aren't the bulk of the book. There are narratives and dialogues of adventure, romance, humor, and  (what else?) politics. All part of a balanced diet.

Snapshot

I woke up this morning, picked up my phone, and on it read a bit of Chesterton's Saint Thomas Aquinas, after which I ate breakfast, and, while drinking coffee, read the first chapter of David E. Holwerda's Jesus and Israel, then started my application to UChicago, and to end the first half of the day I scrubbed the bathroom floor (for the first time in my life). My forearms are still throbbing.

I don't know why I wrote this down. Maybe it's because I excessively desire the life of the mind and so often get slapped in the face by the life of the body.

Thanks for nothing, Marcion.