Not an Ambiguous Option

As Marc expresses, the existence of the Church is not an excuse for something else to happen (he’s written what I’ve been wanting to write, on a different register). There can be no chill about the raison d’être, and any other purposes people dream up are mere interpolations.

Remember, O Israel, the call of thy covenants.

Who Knew Man’s Heart?

Hosanna in excelsis Deo.

There was a time when faith was real,
When it was not itself,
And God did search us, know us then,
When I knew not myself.

And then came introspection’s thoughts,
A mirror to my soul.
Who needs a Chillingworth t’accuse
With scarlet letters’ toll?

בָּרוּך הַבָּא בְּשֵׁם יְהוָֹה

My self-manipulated heat
Was « mene, mene » call’d:
I call’d for water to my soul,
For righteous gardens wall’d.

I know no more what I did seek,
So, Adam, ask me not.
But wait, I do now: Shepherd’s hands,
Which had my marrow bought.

בָּרוּך הַבָּא בְּשֵׁם יְהוָֹה

His wine is in my unclean mouth,
A coal to sinful lips,
For « common » is, he says, no more –
No more, these fictive scripts.

And clean’s as holy as he speaks:
« Forget your labour plan:
I have a fatted calf, my son.
So feast, and heed the banns. »

בָּרוּך הַבָּא בְּשֵׁם יְהוָֹה

© 2009 Lue-Yee Tsang

Your Thought is Not Your Authenticity

‘Such are his words, and sick at heart with immense grief he feigns hope in his expression, but hides his pain deep in his heart’ (talia voce refert curisque ingentibus aeger / spem vultu simulat, premit altum corde dolorem. Aeneid 1.208–9, translation given by David O. Ross in Vergil’s Aeneid: A Reader’s Guide [Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007], 9).

I’m nothing like these epic heroes psychologically: I cannot so feign something without thinking it’s true, even if I must do violence to myself to get there. If I’m torn asunder in grief – oh, it will be known, and you need not speculate.

I note also, you are what you do, not what you intend to do, not even what you think you’re doing – your good intentions cannot save you from your monstrous deeds. The subjective deliberations in your mind between reason and counter-reason, between one emotion and another, and even what you think is your choice, are the construction of your self, not the more authentic ‘you’. In the end, no decision is final until action has actually been taken, for no one can know whether he will change his mind and be made other than he originally intended to be.

If you’re a hypocrite, your actions, and not your thoughts alone, belie your words; if you’re engaged and intend to be married, you may yet break off the engagement; if you’ve given yourself to be catechized in the Way (‘made a personal decision’), you may yet decide at the last that you cannot be baptized into the faith. Our reaction against this, our attempted revolt, is a plea for the illusion of autonomy. ‘Peace, peace,’ they cry, but there is no peace; ‘freedom, freedom,’ but they are everywhere in chains, in the hands of the Accuser.

These also are the issues of authenticity that surround apostasy, which is not predicated on your earnestness or lack thereof.

My God is No Wisp

I once thought God in his beauty could be compared to a crocus or a cherry blossom in the morning, reflecting on the delicate beauty that he had dispersed into the world and seeking to apply the attribute ‘delicate’ to him. Blasphemy. The flower is his Bride, ever dependent and glorious, but he is the Sun. (Don’t worry, I’m not at all denying the kenosis of Christ.)

Dynamis. Agios o Theos, Agios Ischyros, Agios Athanatos, eleison ymas.

Useless Balance

The weakness of ‘balance’: it’s always a superficial analysis.* It reliably gets us nowhere, and it assumes too much.

They offered scant evidence of forethought when they taught the children to ‘strike a balance’ without a way to tell what exactly to balance in the first place. Then, thinking turned into sludge. If you must teach nuance and subtlety and precision, teach that. Just don’t tell people there are no rules, or the balancing acts they attempt will be without rule, without measure, without canon, without any hope of success by any more than mere chance (though ‘chance’, too, is a simplifying abstraction).

‘Balance’ is for the non-thinkers to persist their lazy ignorance and subject all things to their worst judgement under that rubric.

* Except in such cases as Newton’s Third Law of Motion and other things that make reference to literal, physical balance.

A Kyrie for All Saints’ Day

One of the most beautiful Kyries I’ve ever heard, by Tomás Luis de Victoria, from Officium Defunctorum (although the beginning’s been cut, so the first two plainchantings of ‘Kyrie eleison’ are missing). For God to have allowed for sin to mar the world, this must be an adornment to the glory of his redemption.

Now, the day after Reformation Day, I wonder why God purposed for this piece to come out of the Counter-Reformation: perhaps it’s exactly so that greater glory will shine forth when the Church is reformed according to God’s word and once more united. What is fractured will be brought together. God loves his Church: let no man forsake the vision of her glory.

We remember all our brethren who have tasted death and wait for Christ to return in glory to raise us in the Resurrection of the Body. The collect for today from the Book of Common Prayer reads,

O almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord; Grant us grace so to follow thy blessed Saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those unspeakable joys, which thou hast prepared for them that unfeignedly love thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

We wait, and we long to see what we now know by faith. Come, Lord Jesus!

Pervasive Praise

First, I want to say that it would be a great reminder for me to have בעזרת השם (beʿezrat ha-shem: ‘in the help of the Name [of YHWH]’) emblazoned across my door, although I think sometimes it would be cool instead to have lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate (‘all hope abandon, ye who enter in’).

With this in mind: a certain Philologos, writing in an article entitled ‘Public Displays of Piety Are in Fashion, Thank God’, claims that routine reference to God in daily life (‘if God wills’, ‘with God’s help’, ‘blessed be the Name’) has become common among Mohammadans and some Jews but makes a passing remark that such isn’t the case for Christians. I’m wondering why this is so, if it is indeed.

Is it good for a Christian society to be filled with such acknowledgements of God in the hum-drum of daily life?

Abuses in Hallowe’en

What spirit is it in us that we should take pleasure in seeing a man hanged or broken on the rack (or, indeed, given lethal injection)? What are these vicious beasts that we are, that our aesthetic sense is drawn to things of no real beauty? 吾不欲觀之矣。 Harsher is this content than even the harshest, bitterest winter of discontent that we can muster, and the most biting winds of the sharp steppe, for its edge is a cruel grin at once familiar and repulsive.

At the heart of morality and truth lies what is beautiful. Ships are launched from Aulis by the face of Helen; the fields buzz with iron-bearing myriads of locusts while Xi Shi’s beauty has doomed the King of Wu; green envy rises dank in the human soul by the quest for beauty, and knowledge of beauty, and obedience to beauty. And still, if we dismiss the question with de gustibus non est disputandum, we shall have no vision, no light, no God.

We are beggars. This is true. We beg for beauty to burn the bonds that shackle us to our hideous corruption, which has become us both within and without. We look to the east on the third day, on the eighth day. We cannot make our own way to the Tree that rises taller than anything on the earth, which gives juice red and dark like a pomegranate’s, yet only the Tree can make us alive again.

Only its leaves can shade the field named Haqel-dema, in which we sprang out of the earth as warriors spring from sown dragon’s teeth, in which we killed ourselves as we emerged. And then there once was a valley of old, dry bones.

Eric Gill’s John Opening: Textual Word and Picture

Now this is what I’m talking about (click the image for a larger version, and here for information on the book).

A picture is integrated with words as a composed text in this opening of John’s Gospel – so well integrated, in fact, that the two compenetrate and interweave effortlessly, and one is reminded of William Blake. In parallel with the words, the picture of the pre-incarnate Christ with Adam and Eve and the Serpent draws our attention to the connexion between the words of John and the text of Genesis. The presence of the Serpent accentuates the last sentence on the page: ‘And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.’

Aneucharistic Problems

What are the important parts of worship? If I were to be given a nickel every time I asked and didn’t hear a reference to the Eucharist, I could get rich.

If the reason that we downplay the Eucharist is that we want to avoid letting those not yet baptized into the faith know what they aren’t yet able to enjoy, so that we can pretend that holy baptism is a non-essential, we’re indulging in a great wickedness. (I don’t have space here to talk about churches that don’t restrict the Eucharist to the baptized.)

If for this reason, or perhaps ‘in the interest of time’, we then deny baptized believers from receiving the benefits of the Eucharist more frequently than once a month or once a quarter, we’re indulging in greater wickedness. For if this is what we’re doing, even if we’re not administering the Eucharist in a disorderly way as the Corinthians did, we may be despising the Body, not discerning it.

May it never be that the Church diagnoses patients and gives treatment for them on the basis of their own testimony rather than on the testimony of God’s word. I have none of my own say in determining what I need; God has all of it. And God says do this.

Speed and Globalization à Paris

One advantage of a well-used public transit system is that you get to see people giving up their seats for other people on the bus, men for women and women for other women, and then sometimes the venerable lady declines because she’s getting off in two stops. It reminds me that ritual, politeness, whatever you want to call it, need not be a mask (or a masque?).

Though Paris has its share of fast and savagely lawful streets, there are also many streets where the drivers will stop for pedestrians when they sense the pedestrian green light coming on soon.

Maybe it’s the Old World feel. On the other hand, I don’t often see teenagers giving up their seats, and I wonder where this all is coming from. One might be tempted to connect this to the success of McDonald’s in France, attributing this apparent loss of manners to infiltration by the American fast culture, except I hear McDonald’s is actually a place to go out and hang around, not just a place to fill up your estomac with a super-sized order and go.

A complicated globalization. Well, I think Paris is in little danger of becoming the bad things that America is, though it may keep some of those good things that remain in the slower parts of middle America, with good food to boot.

Related Posts:
‘Confucian Virtue and Niceness’, on decency in custom.
‘Louvre Sculpture Viewing’, on taking things a bit more slowly.

Review: From the Inside Out

Here I review Hillsong United’s ‘From the Inside Out’ (2006).

A thousand times I’ve failed;
Still your mercy remains.
And should I stumble again,
I’m caught in your grace.

Everlasting, Your light will shine when all else fades;
Never-ending, Your glory goes beyond all fame.

The first stanza, in my opinion, does an excellent job of pointing the hearer to the comfort of the gospel, an essential thing that often gets left in the dust when sermons begin to sound like marketing schemes selling ‘5 practical ways to improve your relationship with your significant other’ (I’d rather take inapplicable sermons than that kind of Pelagian garbage). This first stanza very well acknowledges that the Christian is simul iustus et peccator (‘at once a righteous man and a sinner’), which is more than I can say for a lot of that stuff that enters our minds from the Christian subculture.

Ecce Agnus (au Curry)

By the way, my Indian restaurant language guess was epic fail. Tamil is the real answer: I realized my mistake when I spied the signs இ and அ, which could only be Tamil. I must have been blind last time. (Oh, and I want to see Sam K. order in Tamil here.)

Second visit, this being one of the sketchier parts of town notwithstanding. Lamb curry and parotta and chai, all for 6€ (~$9.50):

2 parotta: 2.00
1 agneau au curry: 3.00
1 thé masala sucré: 1.00

And this includes the 5.5% value-added tax (according to Wikipedia, ‘the most important source of state finance, accounting for 52% of state revenues’). Think about that: France is run largely on a 5.5% value added tax. Alright, that’s all the econ (political economy, rather) you’re getting out of me today.

The tea was better this time. I felt the sugar less, and the masala spice was definitely there, especially as I saw a bit of cardamom in my cup. It was very relaxing, and I wasn’t particularly interested in leaving, but there was class and all to attend (to).

Definitely spicy. My nose and forehead perspired gently, and I loved the curry (I did forget vegetables), which was boneless, richly flavoured and meaty. And yes, I can see why the waiter, hearing my order, asked, almost in confirmation, ‘Deux parotta?’ One would have been too little for me to handle the curry (and I add that parotta will one day kill me through the cholesterol it feeds me, and next time I’m trying idiyappam). I ate the thing up in 40 minutes. I was well-fed. It was then that I asked for tea.

The address, again:

16 rue Perdonnet, 75010 Paris
Tel: 01 46 07 35 32

When I walked back to the Métro, I passed by a butchery where, through the window, I looked up at a large, hairy hare and two feathered pheasants hung up like a telephone on a pole. Wow. Do they make pheasant curry?

Marginal Focus

What a mathematics book looks like, 17c. style (a page from the 1670 edition of Diophantus’ Arithmetica; bigger picture here):

So now you’re wondering why I’m bringing this up at all, other than my weakness for ye olde beec (that is, old books). Well, I’m merely drawing your attention to the process of canonization. Wikipedia has another image, of that famous margin which was too small to contain Fermat’s alleged proof of his ‘last theorem’:

A commentative gloss moves from the margin (because all the cool kids are into marginalia) into the very body of the text.

P.S. Long live wide margins.

Two, Made One Flesh

So the body natural is ascended to heaven, and his body politic, whose name is Ecclesia, rests on earth. Is the body sacramental the constituting covenantal link uniting the body politic and the body natural?

It seems there was no body politic of the heavenly Jerusalem before Christ was (and is) the state. Hebrews says that Abraham hoped for a city, not that there already was one of which he was a citizen, though he was indeed saved through faith. I think this implies that faith qua faith doesn’t do it even though Christ’s atonement is for all time.

The alternatives remaining are to deny that Abraham was saved by grace through faith or to affirm that something working with faith – the Holy Spirit, we say most simply if we’re reticent – is what unites the Church to Christ. But then, mustn’t this take the form of something objective and visible? Baptism and the Lord’s Supper seem to fit the bill if their efficacy lies in the Holy Spirit and not in man, while the Holy Spirit works ordinarily and supernaturally through them.

But I have another question: earthly kings don’t have this sacramental thing going on, so what’s up with that?