You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December 2008.
I’d be posting a lot more if this computer wasn’t rancid with suck.
The night after my last post, I grabbed the V-train to 53rd street, right across the street. providentially, from the Museum of Modern Art where the rest of my fellow-travelers were seeing an exhibit I could barely afford, the apparently-stunning Van Gogh exhibition. The subway ride was both nerve-wracking, as I’d never before taken the subway by myself, and if there’s one thing that worries me, it’s the prospect of getting lost. With futility I tried to read the Catechism on my way to the city, but kept checking the subway map to make sure I was on the right way. I was.
Anyways. Meeting up with them at MoMA, we hung out in the gift shop for maybe an hour while Riccard tried to find the right prints for his mom and then waited on the Holy Crap line. Maria, Carl and I huddled together and played with magnet toys, which, it seems, have become almost iconic of this trip. Magnets thrill and amaze me, the feeling of an invisible force that reminds me of grace, and Ian’s apartment has a whole set of recreational magnets. Awesome.
So after leaving MoMA, we began the long trek down to Little Italy, a trip of about fifty or so blocks, to find a restaurant called Paesano’s. The walk, hard as it was for a fat guy like me, was still fun, even if it did take us about two and a half hours. I expected, though, to hear more Italian in Little Italy. The food was great, and conversation excellent, and afterwards, I took the V-train back to Astoria while Carl and the Passions went to meet with his friend Joey and have some drinks; I have Ian’s key and needed to make sure his apartment was unlocked.
Yesterday, we stayed in Astoria and went up and down Steinway with no particular goal. It was very col, and today it’s only colder.
Writing from Astoria, sitting at a six-year-old computer with a broken mouse, struggling to load webpages this PC simply ain’t built for, I’m taking a lighter day today.
We drove up on the 27th, my friend Maria and I hitching a ride with another friend named Riccard, who was coming up to see his family in Valley Stream. Our journey passed through some of the thickest fog I’ve ever seen, but we made it up safely and crashed at his grandparents’ house the first night, meeting up with Maria’s boyfriend Carl late in the evening, resting deeply and waking the next day to hoof it around Manhattan for ten hours. My pleas to hit mass fell on unreceptive ears, which hurt; I very, very, very rarely miss mass. It was the first time in probably two year, but my company very much had the attitude of “We were just at mass on Christmas.” Efforts to pull something off in the city were equally unsuccessful.
Yesterday was generally exhausting, as I’m not in great shape, so wandering up and down Fifth Avenue for ten hours in fairly heavy humidity (for December) was draining. Today, while Carl, Maria and Riccard go to MoMA for the Van Gogh exhibit, I’m crashing back at my friend Ian’s apartment; I couldn’t afford to go, and anyway, I needed a solid nothing day to sort of recharge spiritually and, in the case of my cell phone, electrically. I also wanted to send you fine people a message that I’m quite alive and dedicated to this little blog of mine. I’m gonna let it shine. This little blog of mine.
Let it shine.
But I digress. I’m going to hit mass tomorrow morning with Ian’s roommate Mario at 9 AM, which will mean I’ll be getting, max, maybe six hours of sleep. Do pray for me and my compatriots; I’m struggling to understand and identify how it is, exactly, we’re supposed to let Christ infiltrate our tourism when Jesus is the last thing on anybody’s mind.
I hear a Frank Sinatra record playing outside the window.
Hey there, my friends and fellow-schemers. I hope everyone had a good Christmas. Mine was pretty solid. My day-after not so much.
Anyway, I want to let you guys know, right off the bat, that I’m going to out of town from the 27th until after the New Year, so expect light blogging. I’ll be in NYC, and I hope, sure as hell, to be able to post at least once a day with pictures from my travels. But if not, so be it. Peace to all!
Hoping you all had a Merry Christmas, and that your day was especially blessed.
I had a busy week, so look forward to another comic next week.
This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about.
When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph,
but before they lived together,
she was found with child through the Holy Spirit.
Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man,
yet unwilling to expose her to shame,
decided to divorce her quietly.
Such was his intention when, behold,
the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said,
“Joseph, son of David,
do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home.
For it is through the Holy Spirit
that this child has been conceived in her.
She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus,
because he will save his people from their sins.”
All this took place to fulfill
what the Lord had said through the prophet:
Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel,
which means “God is with us.”
When Joseph awoke,
he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him
and took his wife into his home.
He had no relations with her until she bore a son,
and he named him Jesus.
H/t to Mark Shea for posting this video, although I’m going to take it in a different direction. Watch the video first, and then read the post.
Penn Jillette raises an interesting point which I believe all Christians wrestle with to an extent: if we really do believe all of this is true, shouldn’t we be telling everybody all the time? How much, he asks, would you have to hate someone to not tell them about eternal life, about communion with God, about the whole point of human existence? But I think this question makes us profoundly uncomfortable, and that that discomfort is a social phenomenon.
We have a very insular notion of humanity in this country. I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but here, yes, a very insular notion and perspective; man is of himself, and should make his own decisions without unsought advice, without constraint, without external judgment — the wholly independent moral agent, without community. We do not nod to each other on the street; we avert our eyes and shuffle past. Our shoulders tight, our gaze lowered, we do not even see each other as we pass. How, then, can we imagine stopping that person on the street, and telling them all about Jesus? After all, they have places to be.
Less likely still is standing on the corner, passionately describing what Christ has come to do, the Holy Eucharist, the God-With-Us of it all. Aren’t we amazed? Don’t we wonder? How is it we fail to do these things?
American Catholicism in particular was formed in a minority context; we tend to live either as intense minorities or in large, gracious clumps, and have little popular sense of being a part of any marketplace of ideas. Catholicism in this country tends to be something inherited, as much a part of the immigrant culture and one of the ways we identify as Italian or Polish or Moravian or whatever. Evangelization simply isn’t something we generally often think about, or, if we do, we think it, perhaps, the role of the Pope or the clergy in general. Perhaps we’re all just still clericalists at heart, and haven’t internalized the message that the Church is more than that. As a Cardinal (I forget who — Willebrands maybe?) once said when asked what he thought about the role of the laity, “Well, we’d look pretty ridiculous without them.” The clergy exists for the laity and not the laity for the clergy, and the evangelization commanded by Christ and restated by JP2 remains our mission.
I guess what I wonder is whether we’re using the honest advice of St. Francis (or whoever said it) to “preach the gospel at all times, and when necessary, use words” simply as an excuse not to preach it at all.
There’s a blog called Theology of the Body, which, as much as I like it, is generally very dry. The author tends to get caught up in thick religious prose that often fails to convey the clear passion she feels for her topic, using language less as a tool than as a big, blunt instrument. Note such awkward sentences as “And thus the Catholic construal does not posit an idea of grace as a kind force that is foreign to us…”
For all that, it’s a great blog. Check out this jazz they wrote about Christmas and the incarnation.
If God is to be God with us, it is no unreasonable leap to rejoice that He is God with us, abiding in all the tabernacles of the world, from which comes the grace that flows through the waters of baptism, through the laying on of hands, through the bodies of man and wife, through the oils of unction. As the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoffer once put it in The Cost of Discipleship, the body of Christ which was born in Bethlehem and laid in a manger takes up space on earth.As God with us, His presence and His grace remain with us in real ways, open in love to our sight, our taste, our touch. It is not the case that the Lord of the dusty Judean roads, the Gallilean Sea, and the Last Supper is now only amenable to the spoken word, the written text, and the pious memory. The Incarnation has consequences; He is with us.
Probably the best fan-anything I’ve seen.
Hannukah started yesterday. Yes, I assure, I’m past my whole Will-I-Or-Won’t-I Judaism thing.
The interreligious blog Children of God has a fan-frickin-tabulous post up about Hannukah and its situation in American culture as Christmas’ wimpy little brother. This, he maintains, is a bad thing.
One interesting quirk of Hanukkah is that while the story appears to be a celebration of the struggle against assimilation, the observance of Hanukkah, since it comes out very close to Christmas, has probably been influenced by Christian culture more than any other Jewish holiday. Just as an example of this Christmas influence, gift-giving, for the most part, isn’t really a Hanukkah tradition and was only adopted by American Jews so their kids wouldn’t feel left out at Christmas-time.
