Being! Or Nothingness

A Soldier's Funeral

I went to Capt. Sean Sims' funeral mass today.  It was beautiful.  The Bishop was in attendance.  Fr. Dean Wilhelm was the main celebrant.  The Liturgy was solemn and reverent.  The music was beauticul.  Jesu Dulcis Memoria was sung during communion and In Paradesium was the recessional.  In fact, the solemnity of the mass, joined with the solemn civic touches of the Texas A&M Cadet's serving as pall bearers was beautiful.  You would have to be made of stone not to be touched.

Sublime

"The first thing that must strike a non-Christian about a Christian's faith is that it is all too daring. It is too beautiful to be true: The mystery of being, unveiled as absolute love, coming down to wash the feet and the souls of its creatures; a love that assumes the whole burden of our guilt and hate, that accepts the accusations that shower down.. all the scorn and contempt that nails down his incomprehensible movement of self-abasement -- all this absolute love accepts in order to excuse his creature before himself......"

This quote is by Hans Urs VonBalthasar.  It was the last quote on Gerard Serafin's "A Catholic Blog for Lovers."  He has passed away.  May the tender light of Christ shine down on him during his purification, and receive him warmly into that Celestial Kingdom we all await!

New Blog

Check out the new vocation blog:  Ancilla Domini

Jesus Christ is the Fat Lady

I am proud to call Mia Nussbaum (though I call her Mary Margaret) a friend.  We are not great friends, but she is a great woman.  I have always admired her thirst for life, though I doubt I ever had the courage to tell her.  She is, in my mind, the light of Christ.  It's too bad, really, that I never really told her.

Read her account of Dorothy Day here . . .

In her canonization there is strange alchemy -- Christian anarchy gives way to Rome's bureaucracy, degradation to apotheosis. Devotees of her cause wonder if the sharp angles of her life will be dulled by a holy card's lines and if the prayerful act of tax refusal will be cloaked with the innocuous blanket of charity. But the dross of discord may become concordance. It was O'Connor who said that "her abortion should not preclude her cause, but intensifies it" and who preached that Day "saw people turned into tools of commerce . . . the family treated as a marketplace" and knew "that  the Church herself could become . . . a marketplace."

G.K. Chesterton wrote that saints are an antidote to the age. Day was such a pinprick and balm. When blacks couldn't order coffee at Woolworth's, she chose a print of a black man and a white woman embraced by Christ for the paper's masthead. When every vacant lot was a Hooverville, Day chose to be poor, living with "rats  . . . roaches, lice." When stable families moved to the suburbs, Day wrote that heaven was imagined as a city and savored the smell of bread baking in the ghetto's "ash heap."

While others become the monsters they fight, Day did not. As a pacifist she shunned peace activists' destruction of property.  As a mendicant she did not become a materialist in reverse. She delighted in her senses, telling fellow bus travelers to eat "karopecan pie" in Arkansas and Oklahoma. She liked to listen to opera on                 the radio. As an old woman, she wrote, "Woke up this morning with these lines haunting me: 'Joyous, I lay waste the day.' 'Let all those that seek Thee be glad in Thee.'"           

Catholic Workers gave at a personal sacrifice and welcomed strangers as angels unaware. Catherine Doherty, founder of the Friendship House movement, recalled visiting the Worker when there were no extra cots. Day told Doherty that she could sleep with her. Later  that night a syphilitic woman came to the door. When Day told                 Doherty to sleep in the bathtub and took the sick woman into her own bed, Doherty worried that the syphilis would spread. Day replied, "You don't understand, this is Christ who has come to ask for a place to sleep. He will take care of me."

"Jesus Christ is the Fat Lady," J.D. Salinger wrote and Day repeated. She lived and breathed in the Mystical Body of Christ and so joins the company of those blazing, curious witnesses who are transparently good, a few of whom we know to call saints.

I have always loved saints' stories. Nearer than the dark luminescence of God, I see them in rich illustration. There is Francis, naked, in love and dancing, there he is in a cave with blood spilling from his hands, feet, side. There is Claire, chopping her hair; there is Lucy with her eyes plucked out, serving pastries.             

At confirmation I sought out absurd saints -- Dymphna, Elmo, Roch -- being ironic, being cool. Initially I chose Pelagia of  Antioch for her flare. Pelagia, an actress and courtesan, was  known for the fineness of her pearls. One day she rode through  Antioch on horseback, wearing only perfume and her pearls. She passed a synod of praying bishops. The men looked away in horror, save the bishop of Nonnus, who was so taken with her beauty that  the next day he gave a homily that moved many to repentance and  prayer, including Pelagia. Donning the rags of a monk, she climbed  to the Mount of Olives. There she lived in a cave as a hermit  and gave herself a man's name, Pelagius. Known as "the beardless  monk," she lived in austerity and prayed for the life of the world.  Only at her death in 311 did neighboring monks learn that Pelagius was a woman, and an old dancing girl.             

Such stories of radical change are cliché for holy men -- the Augustinian trajectory of sinning one's way to salvation.   The women that the church names as saints, however, are usually nuns and virgin martyrs. Flattened by the press of time they lose their hips and incisive minds. How good, then, to hear of Day, who "read desperately trying to rescue [herself] from the . . . silence," who stayed out all night drinking, who smoked, and lost her temper, who followed a lousy man halfway across the country.             

How good for all of us -- such mercy -- how good for me. My faith was a long time coming, though it came from the start. I found God best dancing until until my bones seemed to slip, like buttons from their slots.             

My friends and I are variously scarred and variously well. I think of the girls I know -- women now -- who are versed in roofies and rape whistles, Planned Parenthood payment options and morning-after drugs. I think of all of us, complicit in each other's failures,  for we have failed each other, and of how right it would be to put on Christ, instead of our game faces.

Homer: Philosopher and Lover of Donuts

Anytime we're talking Simpsons, I'm there.  Philosophy?  I'm there.  Philosophy and the Simpsons?  I'm not only there, you're gonna have to let me stay the night!

How Homer Simpson can enrich philosophy class

The White Stripes: Larger than an Elephant

There's a great interview of Jack White in the Guardian:  Check it out!

AP: Dylan has fought the cult of celebrity from the outset. Is that what makes him such a hero for you? 

JW: I guess I like that about him. It seems like everybody today is so available - ready, willing and available for anything, to be part of a reality show at the drop of a hat. It seems like nobody has any dignity any more. In maybe the last 40 or 50 years, something's really been lost worldwide. They just don't want you to have dignity. It pisses them off. It's like what I was saying before: they don't wanna be told that there's rules. Like, there's no possible way that you could be so dignified, they have to find out something about you that makes you undignified. I mean, you tell me, who's got dignity nowadays who's a celebrity? It's rare, very rare.

AP: Dignity and celebrity are two words that don't really belong in the same sentence. 

JW: Yeah, but they used to. Frank Sinatra was dignified. We don't have a Frank Sinatra, or a Patti Page nowadays. What do we have? Ashlee Simpson instead of Patti Page! I mean, look at those people - like Paris Hilton! Who are all these skanks, man? Little girls are looking up to these girls, and it's so gross. Those girls have no dignity at all, and parents are letting their kids dress up like those skanks. But what else have they got? What are the other choices? Oh well, ha ha ha [laughing angrily at the folly]! Somebody had the nerve to ask me if I wanted to play guitar on Lindsay Lyons's album! Ha ha ha! She's another one of those 16-year-old actresses, and she's making an album! Like, 'NO!' Ha ha ha!

 

Cheaper by the Dozen could land you in jail!

I just watched the 2003 version of Cheaper by the Dozen.  It's a great movie.  Not as cool (counter culturally speaking) as the original, but still a great film.

One thing just struck me though . . . at the end of the movie one of the kids turns up "missing."  He's run away to the train station (surprise, surprise) and all the kids are out combing the neighborhood for him.  One scene shows the Dad giving info to a police office about his son.  At that moment I thought "I'm glad this is a movie, becuase in real life the parents would be arrested for negligence and endangering the life of a child . . . and all because they have 12 children."

Oh, you think I'm overreacting?  Read this!

Epiphanies of Beauty

Barbara Nicolosi over at Church of the Masses has posted the ENTIRE schedule for this weekends conference "Epiphanies of Beauty" hosted by the Center for Ethics and Culture at Notre Dame.

Conferences like this (actually all of the Conferences hosted by the Center for Ethics and Culture) are what I really miss about living near Notre Dame.  It was great to take students to hear brilliant men and women expound on a host of interesting subjects . . . and usually from a Catholic perspective.

If you are near Notre Dame or can get there this weekend, don't miss this conference.  It will be incredible!

Shhhhhhh!

Peggy Noonan rocks the Qasbah . . . take her advice!

Capt. Sean Sims, American Hero

I spent the afternoon today with Capt. Sims' mother.  They are doing ok . . . as ok as you can be in a time like this.  She told me something beautiful.  Last week Capt. Sims (he's front and center in the picture) called them (on the internet) and told them to pray for the soldiers, that they would be moving into another area.  He called to tell his mom that, although out in the field they only get a Catholic chaplain every 6 weeks or so, that very week they had one.  Capt. Sims wanted his mom to know that he had  been able to receive the Body and Blood of Jesus and had gone to Confession.

Saturday they received the fateful call.  Capt. Sims had been killed in the line of duty.  Sadness and darkness.  But what a gift!  That very week, Christ sent him one of his priests!

Anyway, I wanted to share the letter his Dad wrote for TexasBug, a blog run by a friend of the family.  It's a beautiful letter:

My son, the soldier, comes home… for good.

At last report he had left Iraq and was waiting a flight in Kuwait. With luck he will be in Germany today and then on to Texas. By the way, he is called “remains” but I know better. He is my son.

I want to tell you about him. Not because he is so great a guy – although I think so, but because he represents the thousands of sons and daughters America is sending to far away places to secure our peace and our liberties at home.

Captain Sean Patrick Sims, commanding officer of A Company, 2-2 BN, 1st Infantry Division, was killed in action Nov. 13 in Fallujah, Iraq while clearing insurgent occupied buildings. A tough assignment, clearing an urban area. Dirty, dangerous work. Sean lost his executive officer the day before and I read of the deaths of two Marine Captains who were similarly killed in Fallujah.

It is sad when a father must write his own son’s obituary. I don’t know what to say. My son, like others falling in that conflict, was a hero who believed in his mission, his unit, and his men. He also believed leaders should be in the front, leading, not following. And that is how he died. He was well liked and respected by his superiors and the men in his company, who sensed his concern for their well being. He was also concerned about the well being of the Iraqi people and did his utmost to guard them from harm.

Sean was a devout catholic, who lived the tenets of his faith on a daily basis. There is no doubt in our minds that Sean is now in heaven and in the hands of our Lord. We grieve for his loss, which is our loss, but not for his soul. If anything, we ask his intercession on our behalf as he is now much better placed for that effort.

I don’t know what to say or how to describe the sacrifice of your blood for this country. Having served in Vietnam, twice, having a father who spent 36 years as a soldier through two wars, and a brother who served in Vietnam twice and is now 100% disabled from his injuries there, I am encouraged by the awareness of our countrymen for the sacrifices of our children. I am thankful for the realization by our citizenry that freedom is not free.

My son was not a rampant political supporter for any party, although he was probably more Republican by instinct. But he did have an abiding trust and belief in the United States of America. He felt we are a moral nation, steadfast in our principles; this nation does not take its commitment of its sons and daughters to war lightly. But unlike many nations in the world, we do not shirk our duties to commit our blood to just and necessary causes. Because that is what keeps us free.

I think he understood something which seems to have been lost in the debates over weapons of mass destruction and poor intelligence estimates in this particular war. That is that sovereign nations must be held accountable for their actions. We cannot tolerate nations that hide behind borders and provide support to enemies who are intent on our destruction. We can debate on how this war developed and was executed. It can not be debated that nations now look carefully at their responsibility and accountability before providing such support. America has made its statement. If you support terrorism, we will find you and destroy you, whatever the cost.

My son understood this and believed what he was doing was right. But he also believed that you can’t go in and destroy a country and walk away. He was anxious for the insurgents to be quickly defeated so we could start the nation building that Iraq so sorely needs. He chafed at the delays and the debates in implementing aid. He was not a romantic. He understood well the backwardness of the country, the strangle hold of its religion and more challengingly, the social and political pressure of the tribal system. They all looked insurmountable when you add them up. But he had been raised in a tradition of grit and putting one foot forward at a time, so he was not deterred by the challenge. He was faced with a difficult, dirty and seemingly impossible task, but his response was not how do I get out of it but how do I get it done.

I think his sacrifice to his nation can best be summed up in a message I received from a friend expressing condolences for his loss: “His sacrifice was made to keep my family, my sons and my grand children as well as all Americans safe and free and for that we will eternally be grateful.” That’s nice. My son would agree. That’s what he thought he was doing.

In retrospect, the true hero here is his wife, who is left a young widow with a young son to raise. She is a woman of grace, and grit. She will do well by her son and her warrior husband.

regards, tom sims (Col. US Army Retired)

 

Also, I think you should check out what Trying to Grok has to say about the controversy stirred by a BBC embedded journalist who apparently misquoted the NCO, SSG Fitts.  A guy in the field emailed her to shed a little light on it.  You can read it here:  Whoa Whoa Whoa