The Virtual Oratory

The deepest level of the human soul is where poesis happens---a creative energy which throws up for us dreams and images and is symbol-making and story-tellilng.  ("The symbol touches the depth long before it engenders thought and rationality.") What from the point of view of rationality we call rhetoric, or figures of speech, refers to the deepest activities of the human soul when we learn to read it, to know its transformations and to use it creatively, "under the Protection." That deep place of making gives rise to thought but it is wise for thought to keep its tap root in the creative matrix, where truths are invocatory, celebrate, proclamatory, rather than set out as rational propositions.

Wendy Robinson, "Mary: The Flower and Fruit of Worship: The Mother of God in the Orthodox Tradition" in Abba, The Tradition of Orthodoxy in the West, Ed. by John Behr, Andrew Louth, & Dimitri Conomos, St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2003. 

She quotes from The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bayard, Boston, 1940.

We start this section with this brilliant and deep formulation of the place of literature and poetry in religious experience. Because of the deep place in the soul that gives birth to symbols, there will be a lot of work done under WORDS.

___________

From G.K. Chesterton...that is, from a 100 years ago or so...

Eternity is the eve of something...

the man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place. The danger of it is that he himself whould not keep the appointment...

In modern times, this terror of one's self, has perilously increased and is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind...

They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the Devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves....

It is exactly this backdoor, this sense of having a retreat behind us, that is, to our minds, the sterilizing spirit in modern pleasure. Everywhere there is the persistent and insane attempt to obtain pleasure without paying for it.

...All around us is the City of small sins, abounding in backways and retreats, but surely, sooner or later, the towering flame will ris from the harbor announcing the reign of the cowards is over and a man is burning his ships.

***The above is from a 2005 notebook and the GKC quotations are probably from Orthodoxy...a book Chesterton wrote that sounds Catholic but was in fact written before his conversion to Catholicism. 

 
The Oratory provides workshops and bulletins about books. The following list is taken from these services and from Mary R. Reichardt (Exploring Catholic Literature, A Companion and Resource Guide, Sheed & Ward, 2003).

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory. This is the whiskey priest novel set in Mexico in the 1930s during the persecution of the Church. The movie was terrible, but the novel remains superb.

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited. Another English novelist setting his action in the 1920s and 1930s in Britain. The TV series now on DVD is great and faithful to the book. Charles Ryder is the convert and Sebastian Marchmain the spoiled priest.

Shusaku Endo, Deep River. Anything by this Japanese author is well worth the effort. This novel is the most accessible, but once hooked on Endo you will not drop him. 

Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge. American, Southern, and Catholic and some would say gothic. The struggle between gravity and grace is palpable. Her letters are published and are remarkable.

Sigrid Unsedt, Kristen Lavransdatter. Norwegian author of this fine trilogy set in the middle ages. Kristen is willful, sometimes for good reason, and comes to wisdom through a long life of getting and losing everything she wants. Oprah's club chose this book! There is a movie but it misses the point.

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Set in New Mexico in the early days, Cather, now an feminist icon in American literature, inhabits a priest as few men or women writers have been able to do.

J.F. Powers, Morte d'Urban. Ironic, comical, and spare, Powerss knew his clergy well. Their sin is not sex or power but mediocrity, boredom with God. This was a prize winner and is still in print. 

Gertrude von le Fort, Song of the Scaffold. Small book, set in the French Revolutionl. The opera Dialogues of the Carmelites is taken from the same story. The meekest  finds the grace to become the martyr that the strongest is denied.

Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede. The movie now on DVD and the book convey the real struggle of religious life. We presented this movie (16mm in those days...1970s) to students at a state women's college so they could see an alternative life style. It went over very well with Protestants and Catholics.

Isak Dineson, Babette's Feast. Again book and DVD are a marvel. A French cook on the run from yet another revolution shows Danish Protestants how to live like God made the world. 

 Some words are visual...

Feeling the Summer blues?

Read a lament psalm and look at this sculpture

from Notre Dame of Paris

+++

Contemplation and Poetry: The Big Stretch

 A PRAYER TO EVE by Kathleen Norris

from Little Girls in Church, Pittsburgh Press, pb., $10.95 (whole book is recommended...this is the opening)...

Mother of fictions

and of irony,

help us to laugh.

Mother of science

and the critical method,

keep us humble.

Muse of listeners,

hope of interpreters,

inspire us to act.

Bless our metaphors, 

that we might eat them.

Help us to know, Eve,

the one thing we must do.

Come with us, muse of exile,

mother of the road. 

+++

Presences by Zoe Karelli

(translated by Kimon Friar)

You must remain very much alone,

---quietness of the fragile movement,

anxiety of perception---

that the presences might come.

Do not be afraid,

the dead never die;

even the most humble and forgotten

exist, and when you are very much alone

they come near you

invested with the mystic silence

of the ineradicable,

the incomparable human presence.

^^^^

In Memoriam by Edward Thomas

(Easter, 1915)

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

This Eastertide call into mind the men,

Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should

Have gathered them and will do never again.

 ===

The following are not poems but possible things to do written up by HW

EASTER

Try Easter as a verb...

eastering...

I easter,

you easter,

she easters,

he easters,

it easters,

we easter,

they easter

passing over

from

to

death to life

slavery to freedom

blindness to sight

isolation to empathy

ignorance to knowledge

fear to courage

...

Not alone

but with Jesus

In Jesus

unlovely

unsafe

really

new

life

eternal

from love

in love

forever love

...

Now somewhere else

some other time

with someone else

but

in the Spirit

now

here

...

where else???

.