7 Quick Takes Friday (Vol. XIV)

 

--- 1 ---

I have a package of bucatini at home and some bacon in the fridge.  Hmmm.... I'm thinking Bucantini all' amatriciana for dinner Saturday night.

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The weather this past weekend was perfect -- bright, sunny, cool, low humidity -- and as I was walking to the bus stop after Mass Sunday morning, this flower and some of his friends greeted me in the beds of the local community garden along the sidewalk.  The first picture is the original, taken with my iPhone 4 camera.  The next two are of the same picture, but with the color adjusted using the Color Splash app for the iPhone.  (Please note that I'm not being compensated in any way to mention or write about this app.)  

What do you think?  As I wrote last week: I tend to see the parts before the whole.  Even when I see the whole, the parts are what shimmer and gleam the most before me.

--- 3 ---

A hat-tip to Heather King for this poem:

"Sea-Fever" 

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

-- John Masefield

--- 4 ---

The lovely weather of the weekend and the first part of the week gave way to a heat wave the last several days -- the first of the summer!  Time for a little Martha & the Vandellas to kick off the season!

--- 5 ---

At left: G.K. Chesterton with his wife, Frances.

G.K. Chesterton always makes me laugh out loud, his mirth and humor overflowing in every line he wrote and spoke.  I recently bought the re-released edition of his first published anthology of essays, The Defendant and have been enjoying one or two of them every evening right before bed.  

From the introduction onward, I couldn't stop snorting and chortling over his brilliant turns of phrase and imagery, but also marveling at the profundity his essays.  There's something very... Catholic and Thomist about these pieces, even though they were written twenty years before Chesterton's conversion to Catholicism.  

This excerpt, from the second-to-last and last paragraph of the essay "In Defence of Nonsense," struck me the other night when I read it, and I wanted to share it with you, in the hopes that you'd be moved to read the whole of it, and the remainder of The Defendant as well.  

...Religion has for centuries been trying to make men exult in the 'wonders' of creation, but it has forgotten that a thing cannot be completely wonderful so long as it remains sensible. So long as we regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably created for a giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats, to the astonishment of the park-keeper. Everything has in fact another side to it, like the moon, the patroness of nonsense. Viewed from that other side, a bird is a blossom broken loose from its chain of stalk, a man a quadruped begging on its hind legs, a house a gigantesque hat to cover a man from the sun, a chair an apparatus of four wooden legs for a cripple with only two.

This is the side of things which tends most truly to spiritual wonder. It is significant that in the greatest religious poem existent, the Book of Job, the argument which convinces the infidel is not (as has been represented by the merely rational religionism of the eighteenth century) a picture of the ordered beneficence of the Creation; but, on the contrary, a picture of the huge and undecipherable unreason of it. 'Hast Thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is?' This simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality as it is the basis of nonsense. Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook. The well-meaning person who, by merely studying the logical side of things, has decided that 'faith is nonsense,' does not know how truly he speaks; later it may come back to him in the form that nonsense is faith.

-- G. K. Chesterton, "In Defence of Nonsense," The Defendant, second edition, London, R. Brimley Johnson, 1902

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I'm smiling to myself as I get down to this sixth "Quick Take."  This week's offering is proving to be anything but quick! Yes, friends and readers, as you've likely already figured out: I am verbose, wordy, garrulous, prone to logorrhea.   And -- as in print, so in life.

What do you do, readers, to practice charity and moderation of the tongue and pen?  Always looking for good suggestions, so feel free to comment away below.

For myself, I find this practice to be helpful: before writing or speaking anything, I try to stop and ask myself three questions: 

1.) Are these words humble? 

2.) Are these words charitable? 

3.) Are these words an improvement upon silence?  

The words must meet all three criteria, ideally, before being uttered or written down... though oftentimes I use vanity as an excuse for being lax in enforcing these.  Even if the words do meet these criteria, I am increasingly agreeing with the advice given by one of the Desert Fathers (I can't remember which one) to avoid unnecessary speech, even when it is charitable and humble.

Still, the vices and bad habits of a lifetime are not conquered overnight, though with a bit of humor and some humility, we put off the old man and don the new.

--- 7 ---

At right: "Dormition of the Theotokos" (1392), by Theophan the Greek.

Oh! I forgot to mention the outing to the Museum of Russian Icons last weekend!  What an amazing place! The collection is amazing, and the reuse and adaption of old and new spaces to shape and house the collection is just fascinating. 

I think my favorite icon was a tiny panel on a portable iconostasis, perhaps about 3 inches by 3 inches in dimension, something along the lines of the icon at the right.  It showed the Dormition of Our Lady, what in the Latin Church is called the Assumption.

Standing over the sarcophagus holding Our Lady's body was Christ, holding Our Lady in His arms as a swaddled infant, a brilliant reversal of the traditional imagery of Our Lady and the Infant Christ, as well as a wonderful point of theology -- as Our Lady gave birth to Christ, so now Christ gives birth to Our Lady (and ultimately the Elect) into Eternal Life. 

I hope I've gotten that theology right.  Please correct me if I've gotten it wrong.

If you are interested in icons, I highly recommend a visit to this museum, should you ever be in central Massachusetts.  You don't be disappointed, I think.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!