Fencing Bear at Prayer

There's a dream I've been having a lot lately that seems to be wanting to tell me something fairly specific, but I'm not sure yet what it is. I'm at home, but it's not really our home, not, that is, the apartment where my family and I live now. Nor is it a place that I have actually lived in before. But I know that it is our home, except that it is not an apartment, but a house. In the dream, we've been living in the house for some time and it is full of our things. But when I start moving around in the house, I discover that it has more rooms--many, many more rooms--than I had previously realized. I am always surprised by these other rooms, but I also know in the dream that they have been there in the house all along. Sometimes they are empty, just carpet and bare walls; at other times they are full of furniture, often quite old-fashioned furniture. Typically the house feels like it was built sometime in the 1920s or thereabouts, with lots of built-ins. ...

Let's see if I can actually make these "quick" today.* 1. Sitting at my desk this morning, I remember this day eight years ago . I had just finished writing the acknowledgments for my first book, in preparation for sending the manuscript off to my publisher in New York. I called my husband (or maybe he called me, I can't remember) to tell him, and he said, "I'm not sure I should tell you this, but the World Trade Center Towers just fell down." I didn't believe him until I saw the first image of people covered with dust. Needless to say, I spent the rest of the day in tears, horrified at the thought of how many people must have died as the buildings collapsed. It was only partially a relief (if a relief at all) to learn that it was not 40,000, but "only" around 3,000. All I can still think now is what a terrible way for all those innocent people to die. R.I.P. 2. Psalm for the day: "And the daughters of Judah rejoiced: because...

I have no idea why writing should be so difficult. See? Here I am, doing it right now. Write, write, write. Nothing to it. I've had these opening lines running through my head now for the better part of an hour, just waiting to get to the keyboard so that I could write. Write, write, write. And yet, I am in knots over trying to get back to work on my book today. I wonder what it would be like not to have this compulsion to write. How peaceful it would be, simply living through the day, no urge to pull out the notebook and scribble something down, no need to make note of something that simply demands to be written and won't let me go until I give it form. It's like a hunger or an addiction: if I don't write, I just feel worse and worse, snapping at my family, angry at the world. Conversely, the relief at getting the words down on the page! It's like I can breathe again, the burden lifts and the day opens out into possibilities. It's an illusion, of c...

It seems wrong that God should be so difficult to hear. This is, after all, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, the single and supreme first Principal, the Ground of all Being we're talking about. Shouldn't it be, well, more obvious that God is trying to talk to us? Some thunder and lightning, maybe an earthquake or volcano, a whirlwind: that would get our attention, wouldn't it? But, instead, nothing. Silence. An absolute absence of anything even remotely resembling a voice. I know, I've been listening. Or, at least, trying to. Sitting there, day after day in my centering prayer , trying to hear...what? Something other than the continuous rush of my own thoughts. Something other than myself talking to myself. But instead there's been nada. Zip. No contact. What did I expect? Truth to tell, not much, really. Which is not to say that I don't have hopes. Wouldn't it be nice, just once in my life, to have the feeling of being touched by God? Of...

(click to enlarge) P.S. In case it's not clear, they're talking about me. Maybe. You never know. Maybe I just want them to be talking about me.

How do you know when you've found your life's work? You'd think I'd know by now. Why then am I so assailed by doubts? About whether I'm doing the research that I should. About whether I'm writing the book that I should. About whether I should be in academia at all. I'm told that this angst is a familiar predicament for those who have recently gotten tenure . Given that I have had tenure now for nearly eight years, I must be a late bloomer. Either that or I'm peculiarly thick-headed. An accident of my youth ? I was always--well, always after about age 10--a good student. Going to graduate school seemed the thing to do. And I did have so many things that I wanted to learn. I know many of them now , and yet I'm still unsatisfied. Has it simply gotten too easy? Too familiar? It's not really that the challenge is gone. I still find writing frustratingly difficult . And there are still so many things that I want to find ways to say. ...

So I'm not sure in the end whether I have an answer for Badger or not. On the one hand , removing religious artifacts (cult statues, devotional images, liturgical utensils, and the like) from their original cultic, devotional or liturgical settings would seem to negate any possibility of their having a specifically religious, as opposed to aesthetic, effect. But, on the other , what effect we experience when looking at such objects seems to depend to a large extent on what we expect to experience, particularly when the principal effect is interpretive rather than purely sensory. That is, unless religious artifacts really are objects of intrinsic power that can act on us independent of our intentions, it is to a large extent up to us whether they affect us. From this latter perspective, it would seem that it doesn't really matter where we encounter religious artifacts. Rather than being the reason for our reactions, their settings should in fact be seen more as a consequence th...

My 13-year-old son: "You can change that little icon that you get for your blog on your navbar, you know." Me: "How?" My son: "Google it." Me: "Google what? You can't just Google anything. I don't even know what it's called. You mean the little square icon?" My son: "Just type that." Me (sure that this isn't going to work): "Okay." Types "how do you change the little square icon on blogger blogs," and the second hit is: " Add Favicon Icon To Blogger Url ." Me: "Well, knock me over with a feather, it worked!" (or words to that effect). "What should my design be?" Design conference with son produces l337 image par excellence, rendered by same son in proper 16x16 pixel format. Intervention by husband enables image to be saved without going all fuzzy. Advice from Blogger Buster and Blog Adviser shows how to insert l337 image into blog template...and viola! [Sad face. ...

More "quick takes" at Conversion Diary . 1. Life lesson for the week: cereal, specifically Grapenuts, really does taste better with milk . And no, it doesn't help to add the blueberries. It still tastes foul without the milk. Is it the sugar or the fat that's missing? 2. Thought for the week: most people believe that sin is real, they just don't believe that the things they do are sins . 3. Juxtaposition for the week: William H. Gass's review in Harper's (August 2009) of Richard J. Evans', The Third Reich at War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2009) with Henry Suso's meditation on the punishments of Hell in his Wisdom's Watch Upon the Hours , trans. by Edmund Colledge (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994). Which is worse: imagining a place in which "cruel judges, unjust rulers, clerics greedy for filthy lucre, lascivious monks, violent laymen, shameless women, dancing girls and streetwalkers and all the oth...

Here's something else I don't understand: why should men, who presumably want to feel loved by God just as much as women do, necessarily imagine God as masculine or male ("He") unless they imagine themselves as men loved (erotically) by a man or (as in the tradition of commentary on the Song of Songs) as a woman ( sponsa ) loved by her bridegroom ( sponsus )? I've tried for years to get my head round this, particularly after spending far too much of my time in college reading feminist theologians like Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Ruether , who seemed convinced that having images of God as Father was almost by definition a Bad Thing because, you know, the only reason that all those men over the millennia imagined God as Male was to oppress women. How , exactly? If men are imagining God as male because they want an Authority Figure, doesn't this mean that they are imagining a God that will oppress them, too? Or is it just that they wouldn't take orders...

It seems presumptuous. I couldn't possibly ask. No, there is no way that the Song of Songs, God's song of love to his people, the song of the soul and the Church, the song of Christ and Mary's love, could possibly be written for me. About me. Have anything to do with me. Such love is not for the likes of me, so dumpy and inelegant, self-conscious and inept. Others, yes, of course: God loves everyone, just not me. But still this song, this song of love, could not possibly have anything to do with me. Why am I so certain about this? It's not that I feel particularly sinful, no more than I imagine others must feel. Okay, yes, I do feel sinful, but that is still no reason not to believe that God loves me. God is merciful, God wants to love me. God loves me no matter what. No, I'm really having a hard time believing this. Nobody loves like that; there's always a catch. Do I really believe that? I'm not sure there's a catch in my love for my ...

"Nothing could be more alien to contemplation than the cogito ergo sum of Descartes. 'I think, therefore I am.' This is the declaration of an alienated being, in exile from his own spiritual depths, compelled to seek some comfort in a proof for his own existence (!) based on the observation that he 'thinks.' If his thought is necessary as a medium through which he arrives at the concept of his existence, then he is in fact only moving further away from his true being. He is reducing himself to a concept. He is making it impossible for himself to experience, directly and immediately, the mystery of his own being. At the same time, by also reducing God to a concept, he makes it impossible for himself to have any intuition of the divine reality which is inexpressible. He arrives at his own being as if it were an objective reality, that is to say he strives to become aware of himself as he would of some 'thing' alien to himself. And he proves that the...

(click to enlarge--you may need to!) I spy... One bug, five crowns, six cloudy skies, Six elephants with trunks raised high. Three gods, four bears, six hearts, eight books, And waters twain for those who look. One lofty badge names Jacob’s wife, While thirteen crosses bring new life. Our Ladies number twenty-one And once they’re counted you are done.* *For extra credit you may find A few more things of the same kind. --With thanks to my son for help with the poem [Posted, in haste, from the Albuquerque airport!]

The "quick takes" fest continues over at Conversion Diary . 1. Yesterday my son and I "discovered" San Miguel Mission , the oldest church in continuous use in the United States . Well, at least it is the oldest in the territories now included in the United States, but of course it was founded long before the "United States" ever existed. Today it is a mission church without a parish, but it has stood on this site since 1610, despite having to be rebuilt and repaired more than once over the centuries. As if its sheer antiquity were not enough, it is even said (at least, according to the guidebook at the church) to be haunted by a wide variety of spirits. Visitors over the years report seeing a woman in white kneeling in tears at foot of the altar, a tall priest dressed in a black cassock, six Indians walking together across the front of the chapel, and several children running up and down the aisle, laughing and singing "with delight as only child...

Hypothesis : Some artifacts provoke in their viewers a strong devotional or religious response whether this is the artist’s original intention or not. Sometimes these artifacts are especially well-crafted, but not necessarily; they may even be mass-produced or machine-made. It is therefore arguable whether it is the object itself or the person or things depicted in or by the object to which viewers respond, although in most cases it would seem to be some combination of the two. Significantly, however, such a response does not seem to depend on the location or setting in which the objects are encountered. They may be in a shop, out in the open, in a shrine, or in a museum. Regardless, it is possible for viewers to be struck by a sense of devotion or awe, at which point viewers tend to do (or want to do) a number of things. They may want to buy the objects and take them home; they may want to touch them or ornament them in some way; they may want to give them things, like food or...