Holy Week: Wednesday

IN a valley of this restles mind
I sought in mountain and in mead,
Trusting a true love for to find.
Upon an hill then took I heed;
A voice I heard (and near I yede)
In great dolour complaining tho:
See, dear soul, how my sides bleed
Quia amore langueo.

Upon this hill I found a tree,
Under a tree a man sitting;
From head to foot wounded was he;
His hearte blood I saw bleeding:
A seemly man to be a king,
A gracious face to look unto.
I askèd why he had paining;
[He said,] Quia amore langueo.

I am true love that false was never;
My sister, man's soul, I loved her thus.
Because we would in no wise dissever
I left my kingdom glorious.
I purveyed her a palace full precious;
She fled, I followed, I loved her so
That I suffered this pain piteous
Quia amore langueo.

My fair love and my spouse bright!
I saved her from beating, and she hath me bet;
I clothed her in grace and heavenly light;
This bloody shirt she hath on me set;
For longing of love yet would I not let;
Sweete strokes are these: lo!
I have loved her ever as I her het
Quia amore langueo.

I crowned her with bliss and she me with thorn;
I led her to chamber and she me to die;
I brought her to worship and she me to scorn;
I did her reverence and she me villany.
To love that loveth is no maistry;
Her hate made never my love her foe:
Ask me then no question why—
Quia amore langueo.

Look unto mine handes, man!
These gloves were given me when I her sought;
They be not white, but red and wan;
Embroidered with blood my spouse them brought.
They will not off; I loose hem nought;
I woo her with hem wherever she go.
These hands for her so friendly fought
Quia amore langueo.

Marvel not, man, though I sit still.
See, love hath shod me wonder strait:
Buckled my feet, as was her will,
With sharpe nails (well thou may'st wait!)
In my love was never desait;
All my membres I have opened her to;
My body I made her herte's bait
Quia amore langueo.

In my side I have made her nest;
Look in, how weet a wound is here!
This is her chamber, here shall she rest,
That she and I may sleep in fere.
Here may she wash, if any filth were;
Here is seat for all her woe;
Come when she will, she shall have cheer
Quia amore langueo.

I will abide till she be ready,
I will her sue if she say nay;
If she be retchless I will be greedy,
If she be dangerous I will her pray;
If she weep, then bide I ne may:
Mine arms ben spread to clip her me to.
Cry once, I come: now, soul, assay
Quia amore langueo.

Fair love, let us go play:
Apples ben ripe in my gardayne.
I shall thee clothe in a new array,
Thy meat shall be milk, honey and wine.
Fair love, let us go dine:
Thy sustenance is in my crippe, lo!
Tarry thou not, my fair spouse mine,
Quia amore langueo.

If thou be foul, I shall thee make clean;
If thou be sick, I shall thee heal;
If thou mourn ought, I shall thee mene;
Why wilt thou not, fair love, with me deal?
Foundest thou ever love so leal?
What wilt thou, soul, that I shall do?
I may not unkindly thee appeal
Quia amore langueo.

What shall I do now with my spouse
But abide her of my gentleness,
Till that she look out of her house
Of fleshly affection? love mine she is;
Her bed is made, her bolster is bliss,
Her chamber is chosen; is there none mo.
Look out on me at the window of kindeness
Quia amore langueo.

My love is in her chamber: hold your peace!
Make ye no noise, but let her sleep.
My babe I would not were in disease,
I may not hear my dear child weep.
With my pap I shall her keep;
Ne marvel ye not though I tend her to:
This wound in my side had ne'er be so deep
But Quia amore langueo.

Long thou for love never so high,
My love is more than thine may be.
Thou weepest, thou gladdest, I sit thee by:
Yet wouldst thou once, love, look unto me!
Should I always feede thee
With children meat? Nay, love, not so!
I will prove thy love with adversitè
Quia amore langueo.

Wax not weary, mine own wife!
What mede is aye to live in comfort?
In tribulation I reign more rife
Ofter times than in disport.
In weal and in woe I am aye to support:
Mine own wife, go not me fro!
Thy mede is marked, when thou art mort:
Quia amore langueo.

GLOSS: yede] went. het] promised. bait] resting-place. weet] wet. in fere] together. crippe] scrip. mene] care for.


anonymous, 15th cent.

Holy Week: Tuesday

PRIME


Simultaneously, as soundlessly,
Spontaneously, suddenly
As, at the vaunt of the dawn, the kind
Gates of the body fly open
To its world beyond, the gates of the mind,
The horn gate and the ivory gate
Swing to, swing shut, instantaneously
Quell the nocturnal rummage
Of its rebellious fronde, ill-favored,
Ill-natured and second-rate,
Disenfranchised, widowed and orphaned
By an historical mistake:
Recalled from the shades to be a seeing being,
From absence to be on display,
Without a name or history I wake
Between my body and the day.


Holy this moment, wholly in the right,
As, in complete obedience
To the light's laconic outcry, next
As a sheet, near as a wall,
Out there as a mountain's poise of stone,
The world is present, about,
And I know that I am, here, not alone
But with a world and rejoice
Unvexed, for the will has still to claim
This adjacent arm as my own,
The memory to name me, resume
Its routine of praise and blame
And smiling to me is this instant while
Still the day is intact, and I
The Adam sinless in our beginning,
Adam still previous to any act.


I draw breath; this is of course to wish
No matter what, to be wise,
To be different, to die and the cost,
No matter how, is Paradise
Lost of course and myself owing a death:
The eager ridge, the steady sea,
The flat roofs of the fishing village
Still asleep in its bunny,
Though as fresh and sunny still are not friends
But things to hand, this ready flesh
No honest equal, but my accomplice now
My assassin to be, and my name
Stands for my historical share of care
For a lying self-made city,
Afraid of our living task, the dying
Which the coming day will ask.


Horae Canonicae: Prime, W.H. Auden

Holy Week: Monday

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jaggèd, like an old man's mouth drivelling, beyond repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind
over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.


Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy

but speak the word only.



- Ash Wednesday: III, T.S. Eliot

The Eucharist and Mass Media

I agree with nearly every word of this essay.

Denys the Areopagite and the Doctrine of Analogy

"For Denys, the visible world, although it is infinitely less than God, in a very real way actually manifests Him and shares profoundly in His Goodness. This is because all beings are from Him, even down to the least that can be perceived by the senses. All of the particulars of every sensible creature, therefore, find their source, ultimately, in Him: 'the reality is that all things are are contained beforehand in and are embraced by the One in Its capacity as an inherent unity.' (DN980b) There is then, not only a unity - which is really a super-unity (huperenomenon)- of the Divine Names in the One, but even a unity of all beings in all their particulars in this same One. Denys is very clear on this."

- William Riordan, Divine Light: The Theology of Denys the Areopagite

Civil Religion

“I definitely asked the Lord to help me today...I asked Him, ‘Can I be the guy to win this game?’ ”
- Santonio Holmes

Our pro-life president

http://www.lifenews.com/nat4757.html


http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090121/pl_nm/us_obama_regulations

http://lifenews.com/nat4893.html

http://www.twincities.com/ci_11856742

W.H. Auden and the Imago Dei

"With Auden's turn to Christianity after his emigration to the United States in 1939, his poetic theory took on a vocabulary drawn less from psychology and more from theology. But he consistently described poetry in ways that suggest he saw it as modelling a non-coercive love only theoretically possible in social bonds or actual personal relationships. 'In a successful poem,' he wrote in 'The Virgin and the Dynamo,' 'society and community are one order and the system may love itself because the feelings which it embodies are all members of the same community, loving each other and it.' (DH, p69). Behind this proposition would seem to be the notion that poetic form can exemplify a reconciliation of human sameness and difference through its negotiation of the semantic multiplicity of language itself and the emotional multiplicity of the poet. Were such patterned arrangements carried out in society, Auden acknowledges, the result would be totalitarianism, but precisely because art is gratuitous - pointless, unnecessary - it provides what he calls an 'analogy' to 'paradise' or 'the forgiveness of sins.' Poetry, in other words, is an emblem of what Auden liked to term 'the City' in Augustine's sense - the City of God. Such verbal and emotional orders, however, are radically at odds with modernity, which the later Auden habitually attacks for the destructive sameness compelled by totalitarian systems and capitalist mass culture. Poetry's voice may amount to no more than that of a 'suburb of dissent,' but it marginality makes possible an intimacy that modern mass society would not otherwise tolerate. Ultimately, for Auden, Eros and Agape seem to merge in his views of poetry. In Secondary Worlds (1968), he defined poetic meaning as 'the outcome of a dialogue between the words o the poem and the response of whoever is listening to them,' a deeply interpersonal process yielding 'the kind of knowledge implied by the biblical phrase "Then Adam knew Eve his Wife": knowing is inseparable from being known' (SW, p.114). From this angle, all poetry can be read as love poetry, for all poems bear the potential for intimate self-revelation, by both poet and reader.'

- Richard R. Bozorth, "Auden: Love Sexuality and Desire." From the Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden


I recently had a fruitful exchange with the Ochlophobist on the topic of Auden's poetry, and after reading this essay, I am even more convinced that the Ochlophobist's insights on Auden are correct. Bozorth's thesis is itself not particularly interesting - he spends most of the essay exploring Auden's career through the lens of gay/lesbian studies, and ends up expressing deep confusion over the tension between Auden's semi-public homosexuality and his persistent attitude that "homosexuality was psychologically or morally suspect." But I find it interesting that even through such distorted lenses, Bozorth seems to glimpse the deeper aesthetic that drive's Auden's work, particularly in his concept of poetry's gratuitousness and its capacity for revelation. Pace Bozorth, however, I would argue that for Auden, poetry is gratuitous, not because it is pointless or useless, but because the Latin root of 'gratuitous' points us towards an object which can help us ascend to a higher plane than the visible and material, perhaps even to that Augustinian City which Bozorth invokes. Similarly, I would argue that for Auden, poetry succeeds not because it is a revelation of the Self, but because it reveals the human person. I am fascinated by Auden because I think he sees in the human person a glimpse of the imago dei, and the entire story of Creation contained therein. Thus Auden sees clearly the modern distortions the imago as well as the possibility of its redemption, via the ascent of eros into agape that Bozorth describes. In his poetry and apparently in his life also, Auden captures the tension between the reality of that distortion and the possibility of that redemption which characterizes human existence this side of the Eschaton. It is this tension that Bozorth cannot see, and which causes him such critical confusion. It is also what makes Auden a deeply Christian poet and worthy of regular reading.

Ross Douthat on RJN

"Every young writer, I imagine, has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being slightly over one's head. Mine was First Things. I don't know exactly when my family began subscribing, but I know it was before we became Catholics - and I know that long before I could quite figure out exactly what, say, Rene Girard meant when he talked about mimesis and the crucifixion, I was reading Neuhaus' sprawling "Public Square" column every month. I would call it a proto-blog, that feature, with its mix of long and short material, and its cover-the-waterfront feel, but that does it an injustice: The very best bloggers strain and fail to achieve the mix of range and rigor that seemed effortless for Neuhaus, and the ease with which he moved between esoteric theological disputes and the latest culture-war fracas. Richard Dawkins likes to say that Charles Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Month after month, issue after issue, Richard John Neuhaus - through his writing, and also through the writers he cultivated - demonstrated to my adolescent and early-twentysomething self that it was possible to be an intellectually fulfilled Christian."


My sentiments exactly.

Richard John Neuhaus 1936 - 2009

There simply are not enough words, and if there were, I could not put them in the right order, to fully express the intellectual and spiritual debt which I owe to Fr. Neuhaus. It sounds strange to say such a thing about a man I never met, but it is nonetheless true. Looking back, I can see that it was my regular encounter with his work in First Things that started to prepare me for my intellectual and spiritual journey into the Church. It seems ridiculous to think that reading a public policy journal could lead one into the greatest spiritual adventure of one's life, but there it is. I do not see how I would have been reconciled to the Church had Father Neuhaus not been such a faithful servant in the tasks of public life to which he was given. Earlier tonight I put my three sons to bed and it gave me pause to wonder at how different it all could have been had I not absorbed the joyful sense of spiritual and intellectual adventure that permeated Fr Neuhaus' writing. It was from Fr Neuhaus that I first glimpsed the deep beauty of the Catholic teaching on the married state, and of the joy that comes from faithfully living one's vocation in life. It was from Fr Neuhaus that I learned to appreciate the simple and humble blessedness that comes from spiritual fidelity to one's state in life, be it great or small. And as a man given to deeply-held prejudices and hasty judgments in intellectual discourse, I learned from Fr Neuhaus the virtue of the old Thomistic saw - "Seldom affirm, never deny, always distinguish." Requiescat, RJN.

Mother of God

For the most part, I think the various critiques of the Ordinary Form of the mass made by traditionalists are silly and overblown. But every once in a while, I encounter liturgical errors that are downright preposterous, and I start to wonder if there isn't something more to their argument. Today's solemnity supplies a good example:

From the concluding prayer at today's mass, the 1973 ICEL translation is as follows:

Father,
as we proclaim the Virgin Mary
to be the mother of Christ and the mother of the Church,
may our communion with her Son
bring us to salvation.


Now the entire purpose of today's mass was to celebrate the title "Mother of God," a theological formula explicitly affirmed in contradiction to the Nestorian title "Mother of Christ." Ending a mass dedicated to a specific orthodox theological formula by invoking the precise opposite of that formula is very, very bad liturgical form, to say the least. One's sympathies for the SSPX begin to warm ever so slightly....