The Weighty Collection

A key lime pie for a quilt
And a cotton tuft for breakfast
On the kitchen tile, we awake late
To find our loopy stomach
And a just hang-over clinging; . . .

[And so now my thumb is split at the joint,
What, for writing all this parlour-room poetry?
Parloir, parloir,- 'nous parlons de rien']

. . . Sing our new morning psalm, a still
Reserve, no ripples, a rationale for getting the words
Until the mottled and drippy day
Simply puts pressure lines on our backs, on the back of our neck
And frets, simply sighing a just defeat.

-For this time, write no more of this poetry for women,
No more of these simple parlour tricks in play:
Beat the poemed ploughshares into swords
For all these ugly days of reckoning;
For slithering horrors brood just beyond the women
Just outside the parlour,
Pooling on these doors.

-r

Se Lever

Souvent elle habite en le jour par la mare,
Eclaboussant ses jambes dans la mousse du midi
Et les permettent de refroidit
Dans l'endormi
Ondule de crépuscule;
Le sel dans son pleurer, le souffle du rire,
Dans tout, un mystère.

Je pleure, pour
La Vérité est trouvé
Dans le moment
Dans la mousse,
Dans la saumure, dans le rire coulant, coulant, coulant,
Dans le calme.

M. Hegel, s'il vous plaît: lisez un livre;
Arrêtez avec les chansons de tuba gais à nos funérailles.
Vous réduisez le Processus et la Fin,
N'importe quelles bougies, la saumure, la bouffée,
Dans les boyaux cireux
Et la violence hypothétique pathétique.
Le sens n'arrive pas en soulevant
La phrase de chaque livre sur la phrase
Mais dans permettre
Les phrases et les livres pour embrasser
Quand ils se traversent dans l'allée.

('. . .Mr. Hegel, please: read a book;
Stop with the jolly tuba songs at our funerals.
You reduce the Process and End,
Any candles, the brine, the puff,
Into waxy guts and pathetic hypothetical violence.
The meaning doesn't come in lifting phrase from each book upon phrase
But in allowing the phrases and books to kiss
When they cross each other in the aisle.')

r

Four Months A Catholic. . .

I've recounted here, in various ways and times and instances, the utter blood loss - how I basically came to understand that Protestant faith was quickly killing me. After years of playing the occasional, detached lawyer for the Catholic Church against the occasional and unfair Catholic-bashings of my college peers, finally, one day in the counsel chambres, the historic Church finally began getting through to me: 'Thanks for your help and everything, but I'll be okay. In case you didn't know, I've been around the block a few times. However - and I've been trying to tell you this for some time now - you're missing some vital organs, and you're bleeding all over your nice suit and leather briefcase.' And I was. Long before finally deciding to participate in Confirmation, I knew something had to give. If Someone didn't heal me soon, it would be curtains.

Life before being Catholic, life now as a Catholic- there is no way to even begin describing the two different lives, the surprisingly utter transformation. It is indescribably different and utterly natural to be a Catholic Christian. I'm finally home, finally at peace, feasting with our Lord and brothers and sisters at the Table where (in one sense) I'd always grown up but never actually lived. This always seems to cause confusion in conversation with my Protestant friends - this idea of 'coming home,' like it's some sort of a death/end to the 'Christian journey.' No: it's not that the journey ends, but now it's that you suddenly know (in all your journeying) where Father and Mom literally are. All the truths I had clung to as a Protestant were suddenly made complete and allowed to find harmony in such a way that my 'personal experience' is now actually fulfilling and not timidly skeptical, now wrapped up in something much more expansive than my own little definitions. It's like having lived your entire life in a car on an endless vacation and then, late one night when you're despairing and drifting somewhere near another restless dream, pulling up to a strangely familiar house, crashing on a bed that is as you might have remembered it. There will be tomorrow morning to explore the yard, but for now, as it is, it is sensory overload to discover the mystery of a pillow that holds strangely familiar smells.

The incense pours forth at the Vigil; the chant reminds you of a Christianity you never knew but always knew; terms like 'offertory' finally begin presenting themselves to you as the embodied, meaningful realities that they are. The Catholic doesn't need to bring a Bible to the Mass because the Mass is the embodiment of the Holy Word and His Scriptures, a living-out of the Holy Scriptures. After all, Catholicism embodies the reality of the Incarnation, and heaven and earth come together again. When the Psalmist writes 'I will enter His gates with thanksgiving in my heart,' as a Catholic, I am now literally caught up in this reality on at least a weekly basis (daily when possible); the doors of the church open, the Mass begins, the Gate of Heaven offers Himself to us, and we literally kneel before Him praying, 'Lord, I am not worthy to receive Thee, but only say the word and I shall be healed.'

-r

Orthodox Economics, Part 1

'One of the great difficulties of all-knowing modernity (including postmodernism and the other reactionary '-isms' into which it tends to fragment itself) is its blindness to its own blindnesses.'
-John Montag, SJ ('Revelation - The false legacy of Suarez')

How do 'economics' and 'Christianity' work together? Where do the two meet, if at all? How do the two communicate with each other?

I won't retrace the history here, although the narrative painting is important. The Eucharist was denied Himself, and so (in the turn of time) the newly birthed secular concluded, 'What do you, the Church, have to offer anymore?' and established an incarnation to replace the Incarnation (which had been debunked). Thankfully, the times have changed across the board; this age feels the absence of the Incarnation, and so there is the possibility of rediscovering the Presence, since in the first place it really hasn't left. In our peculiar social situation - what is being called the 'post-Christian West' - now more than ever it's important for Catholic Christians to embody the kind of truly Christian, truly theological worldview that narrates every facet of life; the days have come and gone when Christians can simply take cues from secular narratives. Catholic literally refers to that which is wholistic - complete, universal - and this is the kind of theology we need reclaiming all areas of discussion.

In what I've observed of our culture's overly defencive political conversations, a statement like 'I'm against our manifestation of capitalism' inevitably translates itself into something like 'I'm a socialist' or 'I love communism.' And we immediately find ourselves dancing the same predictable steps toward some little triumph or another; or else we begin having some emasculated discussion that emulsifies the different systemmes into a 'no one knows' cream. Capitalism versus socialism/communism - this is how I've always seen the dilemma phrased, with one side or the other being 'the safest/most correct/best systemme' or else being shrugged off together in a relativistic manner.

What I would like to suggest, first and foremost, is that we put the long-sanctioned horse before the long-omnipotent cart . . . and then (with the horse and cart in a healthy and loving relationship) work hard from there onward. Capitalism is not in itself a complete portrait of reality; nor is socialism, nor is communism. And most of us seem to understand this, begrudgingly, when we note the abuses of our consumerist/materialistic systemme. The blunder Christians have made in our various conversations is to accept the criteria we have been handed by modernity's secular conviction: that the secular is the 'truly human' that describes central human reality - a reality deeper than the 'extra, ornamental fluff' of the sacred 'realm' (private religious experience). Thus it is that our discussions of economics never truly touch our discussions of orthodox Christianity, and we timidly juxtapose capitalism with other secular financial systemmes. What is absolutely never done - it amounts to secular blasphemy - is for our current consumerist/materialist systemme to be measured by (and birthed out of) theological concerns. The two realms - the secular and the sacred - must remain dual aspects, at the least, for the secular myth to continue.

A disclaimer: I do understand that there isn't one economic systemme that is 'the Christian' economic systemme; that sort of talk plays into the superficiality of secular economics by attempting to reduce shades of beauty into a monochromatic science. Instead of allowing many harmonious, Incarnational realities - an Ireland and a Greece - to coexist in Incarnational unity, all is crushed into an abstract/disembodied test tube. However, I would say that, historically, we have made the exact mistake in the opposite direction by telling Catholic theology to take its toys home; if the Catholic Faith truly does believe in a Saviour who embraced, embodied, and was (and represented, and enacted) the perfection of the human race, it is essentially heresy for us to make any claims - economic or otherwise - that do not begin with that unfolding, theological Revelation as a starting place.

-rick