Saturday Night Radio Drama - Noni Stapleton - Charolais

 Charolais  

 

Charolais a surreal comedy about love, longing and one woman’s intense rivalry with a Charolais heifer. This is a muddy place of simmering desire minced with a loneliness that cuts to the bone.  Noni Stapleton who wrote the piece, plays both the protagonist Siobhan and her love rival the cow.

Siobhan is a woman who is very alone in the world. She wants to change that but the way she goes about doing so is off beat to say the least! She is looking for love and very determined but there are obstacles to her achieving that sense of belonging she craves. One of which happens to be a terribly beautiful Charolais Heifer, who appears to be vying for the affections of Siobhan’s fella.

There are bumps in the road including a pass remarkable mother in law played by Bairbre Ní Chaoimh and a less than committed lover in the form of Jimmy, a farmer played by Enda Oates.
Siobhan's method of getting rid of any perceived threat to her idea of happy families is very unusual. There is plenty of room for dark humour, and a little gothic horror here.

Sound Supervision was by Damien Chennells

Directed by Gorretti Slavin

Series Producer of Drama on One is Kevin Reynolds

Charolais is a 'Show in a Bag' and won the Bewley's Cafe Theatre 'Little Gem' award at Tiger Dublin Fringe 2014
Show in a Bag is an artist development initiative of Tiger Dublin Fringe, Fishamble: The New Play Company and Irish Theatre Institute to resource theatre makers and actors. Written by Noni Stapleton. Originally  Directed and developed for theatre  by Bairbre Ni Chaoimh. Dramaturg Gavin Costick. Sound Design Jack Cawley, lighting design Colm maher, costume design Miriam Duffy. Original photography Sally Anne Kelly.Theatrical producer was Michelle Cahill. Developed with thanks to The Arts Council of Ireland.

Didn't think I was going to like this one but I did.  Maybe listening to the freak-show Giuliani produced in Michigan this week made this nutcase seem more normal.

 

For The Second Sunday in Advent - Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11 - Comfort, give comfort to my People

Comfort, give comfort to my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her
that her service is at an end,
her guilt is expiated;
indeed, she has received from the hand of the LORD
double for all her sins.

A voice cries out:
In the desert prepare the way of the LORD!
Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God!
Every valley shall be filled in,
every mountain and hill shall be made low;
the rugged land shall be made a plain,
the rough country, a broad valley.
Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together;
for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

Go up on to a high mountain,
Zion, herald of glad tidings;
cry out at the top of your voice,
Jerusalem, herald of good news!
Fear not to cry out
and say to the cities of Judah:
Here is your God!
Here comes with power
the Lord GOD,
who rules by his strong arm;
here is his reward with him,
his recompense before him.
Like a shepherd he feeds his flock;
in his arms he gathers the lambs,
carrying them in his bosom,
and leading the ewes with care.

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The God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are very different.

For many philosophers, God is passionless, remote, unmoved and unchanging. The Scriptures paint a very different portrait of God. Anger and wrath are present, to be sure, but so is disappointment, sorrow, affection and tenderness. The latter — tenderness — is the dominant theme in Isaiah’s famous comfort or consolation prophecy.

The prophecy was given in Babylon, towards the end of Israel’s long captivity and exile in the mid-sixth cen tury B.C. Isaiah ecstatically proclaimed the good news: God was going to lead them back to Judah to begin life anew. Their captivity was over; the debt had been paid in full.

God was going to do what God does best: comfort and console the people and speak tenderly to them. The image of the shepherd carrying the lambs in his arms and gently leading the mother sheep completes the picture.

Much remained to be done — the people had to be prepared and things set in motion. Preparing the way for God in the wilderness, filling in valleys and levelling mountains, meant removing all obstacles and hindrances. Some might have become too comfortable and settled in Babylon, finding it hard to leave behind all that they had known. Others might have needed to put aside grievances, resentments and factionalism.

They had to be very clear about why they were going home and what was expected of them. It would not be just picking up their old way of life where it had been interrupted 50 years before, for that life had led to their collective disaster. Their ideals and intentions had to be clear and pure for their restoration to be complete and successful.

The voice proclaiming “Here is your God!” made it very clear that this was God’s show, not theirs. Remaining resolutely focused on God and God’s ways is the antidote for fear, hopelessness and loss of meaning.

In our own day, more voices need to proclaim God’s faithful love and sovereignty over the world, but they need to speak from inner conviction and personal experience rather than ideology and desire for power. God is alive and present for those willing to see.

People are impatient and find waiting on God very difficult. We all have our own timetables for when events are supposed to unfold — and it is usually “the sooner the better.” The author of 2 Peter reminded his impatient community that God’s timetable and concept of time is totally different from our own.

A day and a thousand years are interchangeable, for God is eternal. Things will happen when God decides and not before. Some scary end-time imagery is thrown in for the sake of motivation, but this is not necessary for the point he is trying to make: Use your time on Earth wisely. Live in godliness and holiness and be at peace with God. It does not matter when the new heavens and new Earth will be created, for we can create these realities in ourselves and our communities by the lives we lead.

Isaiah’s prophecy had multiple lives. It was used by the community of the Dead Sea Scrolls to describe their preparatory mission and by the evangelists to define that of John the Baptist. His job was to level the mountains and fill in the valleys to prepare the way for Jesus the Messiah.

Fr. Scott Lewis, SJ

This passage from Isaiah is matched with the beginning of the Gospel according to Mark that starts with a brief passage about John the Baptist in preparation for the story of the baptism of Jesus - there is no birth or infancy narrative in Mark or John.  

The insight of Scott Lewis is interesting to me because through writing about the ideology of materialism it has reached a point where I think it is founded in an unnoticed and unconsidered truth of how we think instead of being a revelation of an unmitigated view of the universe we live in or, in fact, an accurate view of our own selves.  We don't have an unmitigated knowledge of any of it, everything we can articulate, everything we can think is mitigated by the conditions of the apparatus of our thinking.  We have no direct and complete knowledge of anything.  

 

I think the philosopher's view of God or, the possibility of there being a god is thoroughly a product of such mitigation, of making God into something that can fit into our imaginations just as certainly as physics and chemistry are unadmitted attempts to encompass a smaller but still overwhelming reality as if we could understand the whole thing. That act of mitigation is turning what we can't hope to encompass into something we can deal with without the constant focus on the inadequacy of our view of things. 

In philosophy as in all of academic and, even more so, all human culture, from highest to lowest brow, we are constantly trying to wrap our heads around things. In pop culture that attempt is made EZ by focusing on the unimportant (fashion) the stupidly attractive (show biz) and the excitingly and gratifyingly unimportant and stupid. Modernism, the pretense that the very specialized methods that work, to a useful extent, in physics and chemistry are infinitely extendable to everything has just about reached the limit of that pretense. 

The fact is outside of some very useful applications in the hard sciences and, with some very important instances, in the life sciences, the scientific method is not only inapt, it is bound to fail. To the extent that theoretical physics or science believes it's ability to come up with such a hard, direct knowledge of things is the extent to which it is a delusion. And with that failure will, tragically, come the discrediting of genuine science that can help us to understand the world for the purposes for which science is best put.**

The Babylonian captivity was the removal of the elite of Jerusalem to put them under the control of the scientific powerhouse of its time. We in the West largely bought the Greek propaganda that what it took from other people, much of it from Babylon, was a product of the Greeks but a lot of it was knowledge developed in what is now Iraq and Iran as well as Egypt. Much of that maligned culture, we now know, was the development of mathematics and science which the Greeks either documented or developed further. 

I wonder if there isn't an implication in the thirst of the returning population that Isaiah addresses to leave that powerhouse of intellectual life that they found that to be inadequate as compared to the far different tradition of radical justice as found in the Exodus tradition.  If the Scriptural abuse of Babylon meant anything, it wasn't the knowledge developed there that was found inadequate by the Hebrews, it was the absence of the kind of radical justice that led, in the telling of Isaiah, to their displacement from Jerusalem in the first place.

* 

Definition of mitigate

transitive verb

1 : to cause to become less harsh or hostile : mollify aggressiveness may be mitigated or … channeled— Ashley Montagu

2a : to make less severe or painful : alleviate mitigate a patient's suffering

b : extenuate attempted to mitigate the offense

Merriam Webster 

** Richard Lewontin warned his fellow scientists about the consequences of scientists overselling science a quarter of a century ago.  I think the ease with which the Republican-fascists have discredited the scientific knowledge and advice around Covid-19 is a result of that ideological overreach by scientists and the sci-rangers of the popular media. 

If It Was Something Else I Might Say She's More To Be Pitied Than Censured

My first impulse is to pity Melissa Carone, the woman who matches skanky, whacked out dishonesty with monumental obnoxiousness in order to ratfuck American democracy on behalf of the Trump cult. And it's not working for her like it worked for Rudy.  If she'd just had style problems and even a monumentally obnoxious personality I might go on with that but she is actually lying to destroy democracy on behalf of the troll-doll pelted, 70s color-themed Naugahyde Mussolini and his party of sycophantic cowards.  I have an issue with that one.  The chances are good the dumb dolly will have lots of trouble from here on in, she'll have the same kind of notoriety that the hapless and dumb Rosie Ruiz got for a far, far less serious wrong.  The Republican fascists will  dump her for the TV-movie crime of being unattractive, not for why they should have, the lies and anti-democratic motivations. They're OK with that, especially if the liar and ratfucker is male.

Hey, if she'd asked me before she did it I'd have advised her against it but she made her choice. She's supposedly an adult.  We let even stupid ones run their own lives.

I will say if she's someone who a major elections machine manufacturer had as a contractor, it's all the more reason to get industry out of the elections process. It's clear if they'd hire someone like her they're not hiring the top talent.  I'd like to know if it's true she was contracting with them or if that was a lie, too. 

She is a type that regularly recurs on the political right and often on the left, especially among Marxists and others who migrate from the secular left to fascism.  Lyndon Larouche used to be such a figure of fun, now we've had one as president* for four years and it's no fun at all.  There are scores and hundreds of people as bad as she is in right-wing academia and in think tanks, some of them about as articulate.  You see them a lot on FOX and on CNN, Frank Gaffney? Matt Drudge?,  Lou Dobbs? Naw, she's no worse than them.  You see them on C-Span in the morning quite often.

A Footnote On The Morning Post

Thinking more on the pardon's talk floating around (the Covid news is something I can't take just now) and the idiotic permission by the Court of blanket pardons, even for crimes uncharged and of yet unknown, why wouldn't that keep President Biden from issuing such preemptive pardons to every member of his family, himself, every member of his administration in carrying out his policies? If you can issue pardons for crimes undiscovered, why not for those uncommitted? It makes about as much sense.

A pardon is an exemption from the legal system over actions taken, if the idiot Court is going to allow them for crimes against The People, against democracy, against equality, for the most corrupt of purposes (what we know by way of Trump crime family crime is less than the tip of a giant heap of crime). The "originalist" dodge would have to find language prohibiting that kind of preemptive pardon being granted at the beginning of a presidency in the language of the pardon section, just one of the very badly written passages in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Of course, they could just choose to do so on the partisan basis that the Alito-Kavanaugh-Barrett wing of the court will make ever clearer is the basis of their decisions. Who's to stop them? You're never going to impeach them unless Democrats get a super-majority on the Senate and that's not likely. Though it's more likely than the Republican-fascist party returning even to the corruption that it embodied in the Nixon years.

The corruption on the Court is a product of the corruption through the anti-democratic Senate. Just one of the corruptions put into the Constitution at the start of it.

I've found out that the brand of Linux I use has the unfortunate glitch that, once in a while, the touch-pad function goes so I'm relearning to use a mouse.  Funny, I remember when I started using laptops with touch-pads I whined and complained just like I am now.  

It's what accounts for any rougher than usual content here

.

If The Supremes Gave The Fascist, Criminal, Traitor Trump The Kind of Pardon Power The Idiot Founders Stupidly Implied In The Text, Biden Should Take Full Advantage Of It For Democracy

If the Supreme Court ever ruled that a president can pardon himself, that his pardon power is that absolute then it would have invited a Democratic President and anyone in their administration they could pardon the power to ignore any Supreme Court ruling they chose to, the whole range of those rulings, everything back to and including Marbury v Madison, in which the Court granted itself the power to overrule the Congress and the President when they adopted legislation in line with the Constitutional powers that are enumerated to them. The self-granted power of review in that way appears nowhere in the Constitution.

If they do that then I say the Biden administration should reinstate the laws passed to get money out of our politics, which were passed on a bipartisan basis before the Supreme Court and the "civil liberties" industry overturned them by judicial fiat, opening up our politics to the corruption of money, bribes paid to politicians to do what the billionaires want.

Biden should also reinstate the ability of public figures to sue media companies that generate AND CARRY lies. They should also enforce the Fairness Doctrine, PUBLIC SERVICE REQUIREMENTS, diversity in in the media. That purpose should always be in the service of equality an democracy and reality and public health. Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and all the rest would either clean out the lies or be abolished, comment threads online and the hosting companies that are used to spread lies that produced a Trump would not be allowed to serve that purpose.

What would the Robert's court do if he did those things and pardoned everyone who carried out the policies and laws?  Overturn their ruling allowing Trump to do that while a Putin puppet traitor and destroyer of electoral democracy and equality?  I'm sure five of them would do it in a heartbeat if they thought they could get away with another Bush v Gore level partisan action

The malignity in our politics was largely a product of the Supreme Court, it has played that role back to when the slave-owners on the court were enhancing their wealth through their use of the language of the Constitution to enhance and expand slavery and to allow the slave industry to impose its will in states in which the majority didn't approve of slavery. That court, using the ever more apparently inadequate language of the Constitution and the "Bill of Rights" has been the enemy of equality and democracy far, far more often than it has issued those PR cover up rulings that seemed to be a step away from their typical character. That it is the branch totally unanswerable to The People is certainly a part of that as is the idiotic decision by the "founders" to make it a life-time appointment, saddling us with ever so many long-term horrors and idiots and churls than Ruth Bader Ginsburgs. Even those who were, in their times, peddled as great figures of American liberalism such as William O. Douglas turned into a caricature of what they were sold as being. I've slammed Oliver Wendell Holmes enough so anyone who is curious as to what I think of his ill granted repute as a liberal hero can look him up in my archive.  Term limits, ten years.  While a RBG may be great for longer than that, there aren't many of her like appointed.  She's the exception, goons and creeps and oligarchic toadies are the rule on that court.

The Unlearned Lessons of The Trump Experience In Context

 

Among the biggest dreams that the Trump experience should shatter are

a. the idiotic idea popular in show biz, especially in Hollywood, that what the country really needed was a businessman to run the country like a business. Trump has run the country as our lax and corrupt laws allow a businessman to operate in, that it took one from the criminal gang dominated construction and real estate businesses of New York City to demonstrate to us the folly of thinking the commonwealth, the common-good could benefit from what human beings insult a nobler speices with the description "dog-eat-dog" is one of the stupidest ideas that people who have been to college have made the common currency.

But it's far from the only stupid idea including the idiotic ideas surrounding

b. the popularization and mainstreaming of University of Chicago, Stanford, Harvard, etc. nurtured ideas romanticizing markets and capitalism, as brought to the fore by Milton Friedman as anything but a benefit to the oligarchs who sponsored the academics and media figures who propagandized us into that last fifty year war against the rising of the middle class.

c. the even stupider idea that the mass media, freed of any restraint, even those against lying and slandering individuals such as that being practiced against Republicans following the law, much to their outrage and shock, would produce anything but a gulled and suckered Electorate who would vote for people who were actively killing even them and their families. The stories being told by nurses that FOX, Sinclair, the online fascist media being so effective in peddling the most transparent lies that even the experience of contracting and the process of dying from Covid-19 can't shake the belief of their patients in the lies peddled to them by the freest of all free presses in American history should be the end of that stupid, libertarian-"liberal" fantasy made law first by the Warren Court but preceded in the thinking of the vicious Oliver Wendell Holmes and his side kick who, I must admit, falls ever more in my esteem, Louis Brandise.

The list of things we should have learned, which this near brush with fascism should have made the common currency of anyone with an ability to learn from hard experience is longer than this but those are some of the most important ones.

However, the extent to which slogans such as "what this country needs is a businessman as president," "the market," "free enterprise," "freedom of the press". . . controls even, perhaps especially those with college credentials and others is a deeper, unheeded lesson from the hard school of experience.

The historical books of the Bible, the tales of the turn of the Children of Israel from the Mosaic ideal of egalitarian commonwealth in which even slaves and foreigners had more benefits than under the alternative, the turn to having a conventional king against the warning given to them by God, the serial disasters and the terrible corruption that comes with having rule by the gangster regime that all non-democratic, non-egalitarian rule is, and the near impossibility to return to the Mosaic ideal is a confession by the Children of Israel to their own weakness and folly even having The Law which is the start of what developed into egalitarian-democracy in the modern period. I think that record is one of the most impressive and honest things ever made Scripture by any People anywhere.  It is certainly more honest than American history as commonly understood or written, it is infinitely better than the ersatz history most people get from movies and TV and Broadway rap and boogie extravaganzas.   As Verna Holyhead pointed out, even as the Gospel of Jesus was fresh and strong, another essential component in the creation of modern egalitarian-democracy, it was no guarantee that the believers would overcome divisions that threatened the establshment of an alternative society, as well.

But it can't even get started with people believing lies, falling for sales pitches and slogans and buzz-words and fashion and misplaced standards of what is estimable.  Lies and seductive slogans destroy it.

The deviation of American democracy from egalitarian common-good, including all of us was a planned one, the elements of it were embedded into the Constitution and the structure of the country by the slave-owners and their Northern financier allies and we have lived with it because the structure they set up to amend the anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian elements out of it was always going to be next to impossible, the strength they gave to small population states, the quick start they gave to white-male-property owners that still stands now was always going to make that impossible. The only way I think we'll get rid of the Electoral College is by larger states and those which favor democracy banding together and starving the smaller states into accepting the democratic election of presidents and vice-presidents, maybe the democratization of the Senate, as well. Not that there aren't dangers that come with those, the fact of the geographic distribution of population not being anything like evil is a fact that cannot be abolished by those democratic reforms that might save those of us living in small population states from anti-democratic, fascist domination as well as those who live in more diverse and much larger states. But either you accept the risks inherent in egalitarian democracy or you give up and live with the greater risks under gangster governance.

One thing that has to be done is that the self-given power of a majority of those on the Supreme Court to ratfuck democracy on behalf of inequality and oligarchy has to be removed. Amy Coney Barrett may have put above question the self-given, non-Constitutional power of judicial review of laws adopted by Congress and made law either by it being signed by the president or which becomes law by override of their veto but there is nothing in the Constitution or in reason that forces the Congress or The People to accept that self-given right by the totally non-democratic Court to itself. For the most part that self-given power has been used malignantly in exactly that way by the Court, increasingly, after the very rare use of it in the 19th century, it has become the go-to method of fascists to overturn even the honest-government laws adopted on a bi-partisan basis after the warning of the Nixon crimes were made public.

The Supreme Court's role in the corruption of American democracy doesn't require Constitutional amendment, it just takes the guts of those who favor egalitarian democracy and such benefits as universal health care and even keeping the American People alive and safe during a pandemic to say, no more. That's not something the benighted population of the Dakotas and Wyoming or Vermont or Maine, for that matter, need to approve of by a majority as expressed by their legislatures. It is something that may seem radical but it is essential to avoiding disasters of the kind the Roberts Court is going to bring with increasing frequency. We won't survive that assault on democracy, the ones they have brought through the slogans of "free speech" and "free press" have brought us to Trump as it is. That the "freedom" of words and the artificial entities of "the press" can destroy the equal rights of The People under that regime of thoughtless thought is one of the most astonishing features of modern life there is.

More on 1 Corinthians 1:3-9 From The First Sunday in Advent

 Again, from Verna Holyhead's book:

It may sound from the reading of the beginning of Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians that everything was going well in their church,  but to read the Letter in its entirety makes it clear that the Corinthians were also experiencing crises.  Disturbed by internal rival factions, deviant sexual practices, marital difficulties, disputes about liturgy and community roles, they too needed to be encouraged to use the gifts of the Spirit that they had received in baptism, and so recognize the revelation of Christ and endure in fidelity to him.  Paul encourages them to put their lives under the loving reign of God until this is definitively established on earth "on the day of the Lord Jesus Christ,"  that second coming of Jesus.  Like the Corinthians, we are still waiting for that day, are still in the "in-between-time" that stretches from Pentecost to parousia.   Waiting can sap our energies unless it is pregnant with hope, compassionate for those who have no hope, vigilant for justice and faithful to the promises of God spoken to us by Jesus. 

In one of his talks Walter Brueggemann mentions how people love to dwell on what's coming to those whose preferences and likings and doings we find obnoxious or disgusting as a trait of human moral systems.  In the United States right now it's going from the allegedly "last taboo" dealing with sexual practices back to reverting to what was all too briefly made taboo in terms of racism, ethnic and religious hatred.   That's not to say that there aren't things wrong with sexual practices, those that violate the well being and autonomy and dignity of one or both parties are not made OK by someone getting convinced or wanting to give consent, not those in which someone in a position of more power can impose their will on someone in a position of less power.  That is an objective evil of the kind that the traditional prohibitions, but only at their best, attempt to legislate.  In the case of those contained in the legal code of the Old Testament, they are problematically bound up in the exercise of power by males over women, over children, over slaves, over those with lesser power, just as they always have been and are, even under democracy which has not achieved anything like equality.  

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Thinking about eternity is bigger than I can do much, other than hoping that all things will be well, that the "omega" will get us back to the "alpha" of Creation in a state of unmitigated goodness or, rather bring the goodness that was always coming out of it.  Other than that it's a topic that saps my energy,  I don't find the superficial reading of Revelations as stimulating as fundamentalists who like to get scared for thrills and to use it for other reasons than the book was probably written for.  And in that misunderstanding there has been little good.  Clearly Paul's time line was off, he was only human, after all.  In the mean time we have to get on with things. 

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Having long since given up the sterility and futility of the ebbing fashion and the increasingly annoying buzz-wording of "mindfulness," of dwelling on every fleeting thing that presents itself to my notice, for the past several months I've been concentrating on the "Our Father" phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, how those fit together and am finding it quite productive.   Even the first two words of it,  "Our father" or our parent, has a lot in it to think about.   The use of the plural pronoun for us instead of the singular is a good place to start.  There is no "I" in the prayer, not in any of its petitions and desires and the "us" isn't limited, it's a universal prayer on behalf of everyone.  

And calling God "our Father" is fraught with implications.  Not so much in modern America or, perhaps, Europe, but the relationship of a child to a father at the time was far, far more encompassing and extensive, a network of obligations and duties and expectations and, yes, family honor, than you get from just a rote recitation of the two words.   One of those implications, I think, would have been the expectation that a child would take up the imitation of the father as a life vocation. That we're supposed to act in imitation to our father, a father who has the same obligations to the other members of the family and who expects us to treat them with respect.  It's like what the father in the prodigal son parable says to the dutiful son when he welcomes his annoying, irresponsible, profligate brother back into the family.   The themes of the Gospel are a lot more intertwining and comprehensive than I remember anyone ever telling us in catechism class.  Both in obligations, which we can never hope to achieve in our lifetimes and in blessings that we are told to expect - forgive us as we forgive - give us our daily bread - maybe that's what we find at the end, how to do that perfectly when we die into God.   In the meantime, it's hard to put the "our" above the "my" and even harder to try to live up to God who allows rain to fall on the wicked as well as the virtuous, who just might understand the wicked better than we understand them or they understand themselves.   And in our misunderstanding of ourselves, we might not be as virtuous as we think.

Continuing With Advent - The Epistle for the First Sunday in Advent with O Radix Jesse

1 Corinthians 1:3-9

Brothers and sisters:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father
and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I give thanks to my God always on your account
for the grace of God bestowed on you in Christ Jesus,
that in him you were enriched in every way,
with all discourse and all knowledge,
as the testimony to Christ was confirmed among you,
so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift
as you wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
He will keep you firm to the end,
irreproachable on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
God is faithful,
and by him you were called to fellowship with his Son,
Jesus Christ our Lord.

When we fail to sense the presence of God, it is because our minds and hearts have become clouded with negative human attitudes, emotions and actions. Isaiah affirmed that God is not only our Father, but the master potter carefully and lovingly forming us into the desired image.

He called out to God plaintively, begging God to rekindle the relationship that existed with the nation in the past. Isaiah had the answer to his problem: He recognized that God always meets those who not only do right but do it gladly, and those who always keep God in their minds and hearts. Individually and collectively, we are responsible for our relationship with God and the world in which we dwell.

Paul rejoiced that God had been so generous with the Corinthian community, endowing them with grace and diverse spiritual riches. God had blessed them with inspired speech, knowledge and spiritual gifts. But there is a hint of sarcasm in Paul’s words, for these are precisely the gifts that were causing the disruption and division of the community.

Some in the community misused the gifts, using them to inflate their egos and grab power and influence over others. Throughout the letter, Paul chastised them for their abuse of God’s generosity, but he ends on a note of hope. God is faithful and would continue to bless them to the end, enabling them to be pure and blameless on the day of the Lord’s return. On that day, excuses and evasions will not suffice.

God did tear open the heavens and come down. Jesus was the visible presence of God during His ministry and the Spirit is active in the world and in our lives. But there will be another encounter for humanity when Jesus returns.

Unfortunately, the passage of time and the changing of attitudes have deadened the spiritual awareness of humanity. Many do not sense the presence or even the existence of God. We are in danger of going the way of the people in Isaiah’s reading.

Fr. Scott Lewis, SJ  

And today's Catholic liturgy contains the passage of Isaiah from which the first of the "O" readings from Isaiah is derived, From The Stump of Jesse,  so a setting by a composer I'm entirely unfamiliar with, Rihards Dubra.

San Antonio Chamber Choir

Richard Bjella, director 

O Radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorum, super quem continebunt reges os suum, quem Gentes deprecabuntur: veni ad liberandum nos, jam noli tardare.

O Root of Jesse, who stands as a sign for the People before whom kings will be silent and who the People will make supplication to, come and free us, please come quickly. 

My quick and dirty translation. 

 

The Death Threat As A Trump Tactic

 

There is a real difference between American conservatives in 2020 and liberals, violence and life damaging threats to life are encouraged in Republicanism and the fascist media that empowers them, among liberals it's far from the daily routine.  

And this all does come from the media, hate-talk radio, 24-hour OCD watch cabloid "news" the even more primitive stuff online.  It will only get worse as they are allowed to push the vulnerable, the susceptible over the edge, those who are OK with it close to the edge, and there are about 73 million of those.

More On The Reading From Isaiah Posted Yesterday

 The Advent liturgy is full of shouting - and nees to be, as the Word of God competes with the eternal noise of Musak jingles or blasts of pre-Christmas bargain advertising, as well as the internal noise of our own worries about what has to be planned in family, at work, for holidays, in these weeks before Christmas.  "O that thou would tear open the heavens and come down!"  shout the returning Babylonian exiles of the sixth century B.C.E. They were a community in crisis, a ragged group of exiles who had returned from Babylon (in present day Iraq)  to the devastation of their Jerusalem Temple and the ir land.  They are facing opposition from the "locals" those who had not been exiled and did not welcome the return of people who might upset their settled life.  Bold and audacious in their hope, familiar and abrasive in their speech, the remnant people still recognize God as their go'el, "redeemer" or nearest kin, charged in the Jewish tradition with the protection of the weak and needy.  The returned exiles implore God to make their present sorrow and disillusionment the birth pangs of something new.   Isaiah's wonderful imagry can speak to us,  no matter what our present climatctic season, for we recognize that we often walk in the winter of personal sinfulness;  that we can be withered people blown about aimlessly like a heap of dead leaves;  that although exiled by sin we can beg our redeeming God to help us return home and live.  We may look back on the past year and realize that there have been times when our lack of integrity and our lethargy have piled up like dirty laundry on those  frenetic days when we had neither the time nor energy to do any washing.  The days of Advent call us to some vigorous "laundering" to the repentance that enables us to continue our journey of faith clothed in the fresh grace of our baptism.  The responsorial Psalm 80 is insistent about the need for the Advent repentance that we pray:  "Lord make us turn to you,  let us see your face and we shall be saved,"  even though it is a gentler repentance then that of Lent.  

Sr. Verna A. Holyhead Welcoming The Word In Year B

I have tried to make it a practice to read as much commentary from people other than white male commentators because without that you don't get anything like a full meaning of things.  That's a true outside of Scripture as when reading Scripture commentary.  With the differences of different lives comes differences in understanding and what you notice requires emphasis.  Sometimes the differences in emphasis is subtle, sometimes it's as loud as what Verna Holyhead said the liturgy for Advent has to be. 

I'm probably going to be leaning most heavily on her commentary because it has that subtly different emphasis that not only shines a different light on the readings, it also makes the newly engaging, for me at least.  

Through the words of Isaiah,  God assures the people that he is always their go'el, their redeemer and nearest kin., has never been absent from them, is always ready and willing to be found, even by those ho have given up seeking their God.  "Here I am, here I am."  God also calls to us this Advent.   Meister Eckardt, a fourteenth-century mystic, described spirituality as "waking up" to the presence of God in our live, especially in our sisters and brothers -those elbowing, jostling, lonely, unloved, and (we might consider) unlovable people around us or distant from us to whom we are called to reach out in practical compassion, justice, and prayer.

Which makes me think of nothing so much as something Marilynne Robinson once said, that even those of us who are really rotten people are unaccountably loved by God, even ourselves when we don't deserve love, when we fall far short, she said that we should consider that God could be expected to know ourselves better than we could, I don't think she added that we should consider that God knows those who are unloveable better than we could know them.  I put that together with Emily Dickinson's hope that in heaven "Somehow it will be even, A new equation given" before she relapsed into the fashionable Transcendentalist era's habit of giving up before making a choice.  I think the choice to believe is ours to make but I don't think you'll get anywhere without having the courage or audacity to make the choice.  I think Robinson has more of both than poor Emily mustered in that poem, at least. 

First Reading For The First Sunday of Advent in the Catholic Lectionary

First Sunday of Advent

Reading 1 IS 63:16B-17, 19B; 64:2-7

You, LORD, are our father,

our redeemer you are named forever.

Why do you let us wander, O LORD, from your ways,

and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?

Return for the sake of your servants,

the tribes of your heritage.

Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,

with the mountains quaking before you,

while you wrought awesome deeds we could not hope for,

such as they had not heard of from of old.

No ear has ever heard, no eye ever seen, any God but you

doing such deeds for those who wait for him.

Would that you might meet us doing right,

that we were mindful of you in our ways!

Behold, you are angry, and we are sinful;

all of us have become like unclean people,

all our good deeds are like polluted rags;

we have all withered like leaves,

and our guilt carries us away like the wind.

There is none who calls upon your name,

who rouses himself to cling to you;

for you have hidden your face from us

and have delivered us up to our guilt.

Yet, O LORD, you are our father;

we are the clay and you the potter:

we are all the work of your hands.

 

--------------------------

Who has not wished at one time or another that God would make an appearance? This would solve definitively so many problems: whether God exists; what God is like; why there is injustice and suffering in the world; and who is “right.” God could also remake the world and put everything the way it should be.

This feeling is especially poignant when the world seems to fall apart or spin out of control. Isaiah expressed the fervent wish that God would tear open the heavens and come down. It would be awesome; the mountains would quake at God’s presence.

Isaiah recalled all the mighty and marvellous deeds of God in the past and wondered where they had all gone. This was written after the return from exile in Babylon. Hopes for a rebirth of the nation and a return to former glory had not been realized. He recognized that this perceived absence of God was because of the sins of the nation and the people’s failure to walk in God’s path.

But there was a bit of self-justification and dodging of responsibility: Isaiah insinuated that God had caused Israel to stray, hardening its collective heart. He accused God of hiding the divine face from the people, causing them to forget and wander off. But God does not play games of hide and seek.

When we fail to sense the presence of God, it is because our minds and hearts have become clouded with negative human attitudes, emotions and actions. Isaiah affirmed that God is not only our Father, but the master potter carefully and lovingly forming us into the desired image.

He called out to God plaintively, begging God to rekindle the relationship that existed with the nation in the past. Isaiah had the answer to his problem: He recognized that God always meets those who not only do right but do it gladly, and those who always keep God in their minds and hearts. Individually and collectively, we are responsible for our relationship with God and the world in which we dwell.

Fr. Scott Lewis, SJ 

That's so good I don't think I'm going to comment on it further, Scott Lewis's commentary on the other readings for today are found at the link. I'm very impressed with his commentary.  I will be posting more on today's readings during the week. 

Hate Mail - I'll Stop Pointing This Out When I'm Dead Or When It Takes In The Public Mind

IT is an inescapable fact that Leonard Darwin was Charles Darwin's son who, unlike anyone who never knew Charles Darwin, talked with and heard Charles Darwin, was familiar with his thinking and actions in ways that no one who never knew the man, personally, never mind being raised by him has absolutely no authority to speak on his behalf.  

When he, repeatedly, over decades, said that his work in eugenics, promoting eugenic policies, opposing universal vaccination, etc. was him continuing his father's work with full confidence that Charles Darwin would approve of it, he speaks with an authority that the entire post-WWII regime of lies that Charles Darwin was not guilty of inspiring and approving eugenics cannot match in any way.

That Leonard Darwin was only one of four sons of Charles Darwin, not to mention others of his generation who knew Charles Darwin who were active in promoting eugenics and that not one of them ever objected to Leonard Darwin's claims about their father in that regard is as solid proof that is available in that matter is insurmountable except by ignoring it or lying about it.  That that post-WWII lie has become ubiquitous is not surprising considering the whole of natural selection is based in the construction of stories made for the purpose of being persuasive instead of a rigorous examination of dispassionately amassed and considered evidence. It has always been more a matter of salesmanship than honest appraisal, so the construction of the phony, dishonest, pantomime version or Charles Darwin was a natural for that ideological campaign.

I've been pointing this out for almost a decade, at this point and it becomes no less true the more I look at the issue, none of Darwin's defenders has been able to answer it.

The theory of natural selection is one of  if not the most dangerous of all ideological framings ever adopted by something alleged to be science.  It may be the most dangerous of all of the materialist ideologies ever devised.  It is responsible for the disastrous, irresponsible, inept and incompetent government policies in regard to this current pandemic, it is, again, getting people in large numbers killed in the United States, in Sweden and elsewhere where some of its central concepts, such as those promoted by Charles Darwin and his sons, have sway.  That total is merely added to the millions of deaths already motivated by it. I won't ever stop pointing that out. As with the anti-democratic ideological myth of "The Founders" and its malignancy in the United States under Republican-fascism, people have to face the truth of it if it's ever to be set aside.  I figure now is the time to tell the truth about it.

Before Advent

IN the introduction to her book of commentary, sermons, on the readings at Sunday masses for the liturgical cycle, the late Sr. Verna Holyhead noted that even then, in 2007, there were not enough ordained Roman Catholic priests to staff the churches and that if Catholics were going to hear the readings and hear sermons on them it would be from "nonordained" persons they were going to hear it from. Of course a lot of them would have to be the ones reading them and thinking about them.

That was in 2007 when the regrettable not only non-pastoral but anti-pastoral papacy of John Paul II had ended but his was taken up by the, if anything, even less pastoral papacy of Benedict XVI who had explicitly endorsed the idea of a shrinking Catholic church, one in which those kinds of Catholics he didn't like would leave or be pushed out for those he found to be more to his liking. Considering the abysmal record of the bishops and Cardinals he elevated within his conception of a soon-to-be purified Catholic church the quality of his kind of Catholic isn't particlarly Christian.

I am more convinced than I was when I first read the term that Karl Rahner's idea that the Christian religion of the present and future will be comparable to nature during winter, stripped to its essentials, not having the florid cultural and social trappings that are a remnant of what grew in the medieval period or other such times when Christianity was the default framing of thought. Or so it was supposed to be. Much that was dreadful about that form of medieval and later Christianity was hardly Christian to start with, the "most Christian" monarchs and other gangsters who held power, not a few of them bishops, cardinals and popes, honored the Gospel of Jesus entirely more as a cover story than in actual fact. That led, of course, to the reformation which, in turn, was corrupted in a similar way to the corrupt medieval, renaissance, baroque and later papacies with political power were.  There is little by way of historical Papal corruption that isn't on full display in American Protestantism in the age of Trump.   Though the right-wing of the Catholic hierarchy would love to bring all of that back to Catholicism, too.  It has long struck me as ironic that even with all of that corruption internally and the falling away from Christianity outside of it that within Christianity, even in Catholicism, there seems to be more of a sincere attempt to live up to the Gospel than any time I'm aware of.

I think Rahner's idea that a genuine Christianity would be without all of the clap-trap that was and is what most peoples' conception of Christianity was always the case. It was always winter, that is something that should have never come as a surprise to anyone, Jesus said he would not have a kingdom of this world, it should always have been a given that the kingdoms of this world, whether it be an empire or a local parish would not be where you could not expect to find the Gospel in its most unmitigated form, in its most reliable expression. Even in the letters of Paul we can see the machinations of politics in local house churches in settled locations creating problems and divisions.

The enforced de-churching of Christianity whether by parish closings or congregations being unable to sustain a church building or the paying of a pastor or though a pandemic will, of course, lead many people who might have been in the habit of going to church on Sundays not taking it up again. But it also is an opportunity to take responsibility to do it yourself. 

 

While I'm more than a little skeptical about the Christian nature of a huge amount of official Christianity (and have become even more skeptical about the "non-liturgical" form of Protestantism of late) a lot of the structure of things like the liturgy and the liturgical year can be useful if you use them as a motivation to encounter the Scriptures and think about what they say, learning about what we know and can reasonably discern about the contexts in which they were written and how they tie in with the tradition that inspired them and, most relevant to leading a life in line with the core of the Mosaic and Christian traditions, how we are to lead our lives to do to others as we would have them do unto us, the most exigent and sincere and literal worship of God. That is the point of trying to lead a Christian life, not adherence to some medieval or modern form or adhering to the Vatican's dictates on the liturgy or a voyeuristic precision meddling into our adult consenting sex lives, the kind of thing that led to the adoption and retaining of the celibate priesthood that, if the likes of that political hack Timothy Dolan have their way, may well more than decimate the ordained population of Catholics and a good many of those who choose to go to non-socially distanced masses as super-spreader events.

So, this is a big messy and too hastily written beginning to Advent here. I think it's likely to be a bumpy ride but, I hope, one that will keep us all thinking.