A Poem Draft

Rain Outside My Window

How lovely is the patter
of the rain outside my window,
an ever-changing pattern
like the life its grace inspires!

When I hear the rainfall,
I feel nothing is against me;
my heart leaps up within me
and to higher things aspires.

Love and Emotion

Today is the feast of St. John Paul II, also known as Karol Wojtyla. From Love and Responsibility:

Emotional subjectivism makes us susceptible to the suggestion that whatever is connected with 'genuine emotion', whatever must be recognized as 'authentic' in its emotional content, is good. Hence the temptation to reduce love to nothing more than subjective emotional states. If we do this, love finds its whole content and sole criterion in emotion. The affirmation of the value of the person, the aspiration to the person's true good, to union in a common true good -- none of these things exist for a will subjectivistically fixed upon emotion as such. In these circumstances sin arises from the fact that a human being does not wish to subordinate emotion to the person and to love, but on the contrary to subordinate the person and love to emotion.

[Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, Willetts, tr. Ignatius Press (San Francisco: 1993) p. 163.]

Where Is My Hoverboard?

A milestone is reached today at 4:29 pm!



2015 was so much cooler in the 80s. It's probably fortunate that we avoided the punk rock hair, though.

Interior Teacher

Here now, brothers, see a great mystery. The sound of our words strikes your ears; the Master is within. Do not think that anyone learns anything from a man. We can suggest through the sound of the voice; if there were not One within who teaches, our sound is empty. Do you even so want to know it, brothers? Have not all of you heard the discourse? How many will leave here untaught! For my part, I have spoken to all. But those to whom that anointing does not speak within, whom the Holy Spirit does not teach within, go back untaught. Instructions from outside are kinds of aids and suggestions. He who teaches hearts has his chair in heaven. For this reason he also himself says in the Gospel, "Call no one your teacher on earth. One is your Teacher, Christ." Let him, therefore, speak to you within since no one of men is there, for even if someone is at your side, no one is in your heart. Let Christ be in your heart; let his anointing be in your heart, so that your heart may not be thirsting in a desert and having no springs by which it may be watered. There is, therefore, an Interior Master who teaches. Christ teaches, his inspiration teaches. Where his inspiration and his anointing are not, words from outside make useless sounds.

Augustine, Tractate on First John 3.13, in St. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 112-24; Tractates on the First Epistle of John, tr. by John W. Rettig, The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, D.C.: 1995), pp. 171-172.

At the Pallid Polar Midnight

The Were-Wolves
by William Wilfrid Campbell

They hasten, still they hasten,
From the even to the dawn;
And their tired eyes gleam and glis’en
Under north skies white and wan.
Each panter in the darkness
Is a demon-haunted soul,
The shadowy, phantom were-wolves,
Who circle round the Pole.

Their tongues are crimson flaming,
Their haunted blue eyes gleam,
And they strain them to the utmost
O’er frozen lake and stream;
Their cry one note of agony,
That is neither yelp nor bark,
These panters of the northern waste,
Who hound them to the dark.

You may hear their hurried breathing,
You may see their fleeting forms,
At the pallid polar midnight,
When the north is gathering storms;
When the arctic frosts are flaming,
And the ice-field thunders roll;
These demon-haunted were-wolves,
Who circle round the Pole.

They hasten, still they hasten,
Across the northern night,
Filled with a frighted madness,
A horror of the light;
Forever and forever,
Like leaves before the wind,
They leave the wan, white gleaming
Of the dawning far behind.

Their only peace is darkness,
Their rest to hasten on
Into the heart of midnight,
Forever from the dawn.
Across far phantom ice-floes
The eye of night may mark
These horror-haunted were-wolves
Who hound them to the dark.

All through this hideous journey,
They are the souls of men
Who in the far dark-ages
Made Europe one black fen.
They fled from courts and convents,
And bound their mortal dust
With demon wolfish girdles
Of human hate and lust.

These who could have been god-like,
Chose, each a loathsome beast,
Amid the heart’s foul graveyards,
On putrid thoughts to feast;
But the great God who made them
Gave each a human soul,
And so ’mid night forever
They circle round the Pole.

A praying for the blackness,
A longing for the night,
For each is doomed forever
By a horror of the light;
And far in the heart of midnight,
Where their shadowy flight is hurled,
They feel with pain the dawning
That creeps in round the world.

Under the northern midnight,
The white, glint ice upon,
They hasten, still they hasten,
With their horror of the dawn;
Forever and forever,
Into the night away
They hasten, still they hasten
Unto the judgment day.

Some Links of Note

I've been snowed under with grading and allergies, but posting should pick up a bit later this week.

* David Mumford talks about mathematics and beauty

* A man shooting puppies was shot by a puppy.

* The wood s lot blog recently reached its fifteenth anniversary.

* An interesting interview with Nancy Fraser on feminism, at "The Stone"

* Sydney Penner on Schmid on final causation in Suarez: Part I, Part II

* Rosemary Counter on surviving the Twitter mob.

* Robert Wagoner on Seneca at the IEP

* The recent Synod has made quite a few Eastern Catholic voices more easily heard.

An interview with Berhaneyesus Demerew Souraphiel, the primate of the Ethiopian Catholic Church.

Some comments by Sviatoslav Shevchuk, Major Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.

The intervention of Fülöp Kocsis, primate of the Hungarian Greek Catholic Church.

* A feed for a large number of Catholic blogs

* I've linked to it before, but I keep forgetting about it and having to rediscover it:
Documenta Catholica Omnia

Ignatios ho Theophoros, Antiokheias

Today was the feast of the St. Ignatius of Antioch, the third bishop of Antioch and according to tradition appointed by St. Peter himself. From his letter to the Ephesians (10:1-3):

And pray ye also without ceasing for the rest of mankind (for there is in them a hope of repentance), that they may find God. Therefore permit them to take lessons at least from your works. Against their outbursts of wrath be ye meek; against their proud words be ye humble; against their railings set ye your prayers; against their errors be ye stedfast in the faith; against their fierceness be ye gentle. And be not zealous to imitate them by requital. Let us show ourselves their brothers by our forbearance; but let us be zealous to be imitators of the Lord, vying with each other who shall suffer the greater wrong, who shall be defrauded, who shall be set at nought; that no herb of the devil be found in you: but in all purity and temperance abide ye in Christ Jesus, with our flesh and with your spirit.