Does the Lord Regret?

In 1 Samuel 15, as the eponymous prophet is apprising king Saul of the Lord’s rejection of his house, Samuel says the following in response to Saul’s pleas: “The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this day and has given it to a neighbor of yours, who is better than you. And also the Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret (1 Samuel 15:28-29 ESV).”

After Samuel “hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord” and separated from Saul, we are told that he “grieved over Saul”, which is to be expected. However, we are also told something unexpected: “And the Lord regretted that he had made Saul king over Israel (1 Samuel 15:35 ESV).”

Still Fighting the Cold War

Many of these old “cold warriors” – along with the post-Cold War world they inhabit – no doubt make the mistake (we are being charitable) of reading into the mutual opposition to Soviet expansionism and atheism of both the Church and the modern, materialist West the unconditional support by the former of the social and philosophical system of the latter. From such a viewpoint, any “third way” beyond capitalism and communism would seem a futile, if not dangerous, compromise between the forces of evil and the forces of evident good.

- John Sharpe “Introduction,” Beyond Capitalism and Socialism (Norfolk, Virginia: LTD Publications, 2008) xviii.

Freedom

…[H]e only is a free man who owns and administers his own land, craft, trade, art or profession and is able, at necessity, to maintain himself and his family therefrom.

- Ralph Adams Cram, “What Is a Free Man?,” Catholic Rural Life Objectives (St. Paul, Minn: National Catholic Rural Life Conference, 1937) 36-7.

“[T]he individual [gets] his sustenance from property which bears his imprint and assimilation…” Indeed, it was not security he was after with such a scheme, which would only mean “being taken care of, or freedom from want and fear – which would reduce man to an invertebrate – [but rather] stability, which gives nothing for nothing but which maintains a constant between effort and reward.”

- John Sharpe, “Introduction,” Beyond Capitalism and Socialism (Norfolk, Virginia: LTD Publications, 2008) xv.

Christ Resurrected

Christ, rising again from the dead
dies now no more:
death shall no more have dominion over him;
for in that he died, he died once:
but in that he lives, he lives unto God,
alleluia, alleluia.

Let the Jews now tell us
how the soldiers,
who guarded the sepulchre,
lost the King,
though they had placed a rock over him.
Why kept they not the Rock of Justice?
Either let them restore the buried One,
or adore with us the risen One, saying:

In that he lives,
he lives unto God,
alleluia, alleluia.

Easter Even Prayer

Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish, saying,

“I called out to the LORD, out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice.
For you cast me into the deep,
into the heart of the seas,
and the flood surrounded me;
all your waves and your billows
passed over me.
Then I said, ‘I am driven away
from your sight;
yet I shall again look
upon your holy temple.’
The waters closed in over me to take my life;
the deep surrounded me;
weeds were wrapped about my head
at the roots of the mountains.
I went down to the land
whose bars closed upon me forever;
yet you brought up my life from the pit,
O LORD my God.
When my life was fainting away,
I remembered the LORD,
and my prayer came to you,
into your holy temple.
Those who pay regard to vain idols
forsake their hope of steadfast love.
But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Salvation belongs to the LORD!”

And the LORD spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.

Isolation Equals Death

Friends are not a luxury but a necessity…God, in His mercy does not save us in isolation from other people but rather in community with other people…

“If one falls he has someone to lift him up, but woe to the man who is alone when he falls” (Eccl. 4:10)…

“A man who isolates himself seeks his own desire, and rages against all wise judement” (Prov. 18:1)…

Thus the ultimate fruition of sin – which is that ultimate expression of our selfishness, going our own way, and isolating ourselves – is the isolation of hell.

– Steve Wilkins, Face to Face p. 11-18

For HS: Judging by Appearances

Contrary to popular opinion, appearances do not generally deceive. Instead, they are an indispensable feature of the way things are and serve as our first contact with the world. The world reveals itself first through the way it can be sensed and felt, by means of our eyes or ears or by touch or taste. Art helps us see, sense and feel the world in novel ways by revealing new angles and fresh perspectives.

- Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin

More Cardus coming at you. Q & A with Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin, aesthetic philosopher extrodinaire.

The Overshadowed: Edvard Munch’s Madonna

I find Munch’s “Madonna” fascinating and frightening, the way I would expect the “overshadowing” of the Holy Spirit to affect a person. Beatified sexuality (note the red halo). Sadly his stylistically innovative print of this image, employing both woodcut and lithograph (a self taught printmaker, Munch made numerous varied prints of this and many of his other images), cheapens the power of the image with a puerile, Hot Topic kind of scatology, reminiscent of some of Serrano’s less compelling work, grasping for “disturbing”, but laying hold on nothing but the laghable blasphemes of a twelve-year-old.

Both are quite a bit different from this image I captured several years ago at St. Mary’s around the corner from my house in Idaho which, to me anyway, seemed to capture both the attraction and un-thankful barrenness of the ideal of Our Lady’s perpetual virginity.

Touching for the King’s Evil

At the Healing:

Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings with thy most gracious favour, and further us with thy continual help, that in all our works begun, continued, and ended in thee, we may glorify thy holy name, and finally by thy mercy obtain everlasting life: through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Gospel (for Ascension-day)S. Mark xvi. 14-20.

Let us pray.
Lord have mercy upon us.Christ have mercy upon us.Lord have mercy upon us.Our Father, which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, As it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. Amen.

Then shall the infirm persons, one by one, be presented to the Queen upon their knees; and as every one is presented and while the Queen is laying her hands upon them, and putting the gold about their necks, the Chaplain that officiates, turning himself to her Majesty, shall say these words following:

God give a blessing to this work; and grant that these sick persons on whom the Queen lays her hands may recover, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

After all have been presented, the Chaplain shall say,

O Lord, save thy servants.
Answer. That put their trust in thee.
Minister. Send unto them help from above.
Answer. And evermore mightily defend them.
Minister. Help us, O God our Saviour.
Answer. And for the glory of thy Name deliver us; be merciful to us sinners, for thy Name’s sake.
Minister. O Lord, hear our prayer.
Answer. And let our cry come unto thee.

Let us pray. O Almighty God, who art the Giver of all health, and the aid of them that seek to thee for succour, we call upon thee for thy help and goodness mercifully to be showed upon these thy servants, that they being healed of their infirmities may give thanks unto thee in thy holy Church, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Then the Chaplain, standing with his face towards them that come to be healed, shall say,

The Almighty Lord, who is a most strong tower to all them that put their trust in him, to whom all things in heaven, in earth, and under the earth, do bow and obey, be now and evermore thy defense; and make thee know and feel, that there is none other Name under heaven given to man, in whom, and through whom, thou mayest receive health and salvation, but only the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

For Guido

In introducing some of the basic doctrinal trends of the Reformation to my 9th graders, I accidentally wrote Sola Scriptura as “Sala Scriptura” on the board. In speedily correcting my error, I created a visual analogy which I thought my Roman Catholic friends would appreciate. Providence is a funny thing.

Water runs downhill because it is Bewitched

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none. A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen them together. A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, because, by dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boyhood. So the materialist professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by dark association of his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country…

Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales…Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales, because they find them romantic…

Nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 58-59.

The Ardent Flight of Apples

I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened – dawn and death and so on – as if they were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as necessary as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not…You cannot imagine two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail. These men in spectacles spoke much of a man named Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law. But they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling. If the apple hit Newton’s nose, Newton’s nose hit the apple. That is a true necessity: because we cannot conceive the one occurring without the other. But we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose, of which it had a more definite dislike.

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 56.

Joan of Arc’s Startling Sanity

As I turn and tumble over the clever, wonderful, tiresome, and useless modern books, the title of one of them rivets my eye. It is called “Jeanne d’Arc,” by Anatole France.* I have only glanced at it, but a glance was enough to remind me of Renan’s “Vie de Jesus.”** It has the same strange method of the reverent sceptic. It discredits supernatural stories that have some foundation, simply by telling natural stories that have no foundation…

I do not mention either book in order to criticise it, but because the accidental combination of the names called up two startling images of sanity which blasted all the books before me. Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt.

Yet Joan, when I come to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them. I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition, that she endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret.

And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this differences, that she did not praise fighting, but fought…

She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing.

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 49-50.