From the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 65

The parable of the Good Samaritan continued...the enlightenment project, when rejecting its Christian moral basis, emulates the priest and Levite by moving away from the centrality of the victim.

From the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 64

The parable of the Good Samaritan continued...the aversion to the corpse. The power of the sacrificial system is based on death.

From the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 63

The parable of the Good Samaritan continued...'beaten and stripped' of cultural markers...a priest and Levite pass by.

From the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 62

The parable of the Good Samaritan continued..."trying to justify himself" - a symptom of the lack of ontological moorings/ontological density

From the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 61

A lawyer asks, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" - The parable of the Good Samaritan...

From the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 60

 A short detour back to St. John's Gospel chapter 9 and the story of the man born blind...Christian agnosticism: "I do not know. All I know is once I was blind and now I can see."

From the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 59

Thank you Father because you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent ones and revealed them to infants…

From the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 58

Do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven...

From the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 57

The disciples rejoice that even the demons "submit to us in your name"...where is the emphasis, on 'us' or 'in your name'?
 Jesus sees Satan fall like lightening...

From the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 56

"At the judgment it will be more tolerable with Tyre and Sidon than with you..."
If a culture, after having been exposed to the Gospel, turns its back on it, it then runs a great risk. The old sacrificial system for averting culture destroying violence has been compromised by the Gospel leaving it exposed to falling into the chaos of 'hades'.

From the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 55

The sending of the 70...an advance team going in pairs...like lambs among wolves. Will they go 'native'? The instablility of the autonomous self.

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 54

The "impossible possibility" of the Church - to create an enculturating force whose effects are to free us from the forces of enculturation...showing the world a universal being where only ethnic/tribal members existed.

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 53

"Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?"

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 52

Gil's reference to "today's" NY Times is from the summer on 1995. An example of the 'constituting other'...

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 51

The longstanding problem of ethnicity...

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 50

From Luke's perspective Jesus is on a journey. The disciples are following him but only vaguely aware of the destination (at least as Jesus sees it). At this point in the story Jesus turns towards Jerusalem...

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 49

A digression into John's Gospel and the story of the man born blind...an image of redemptive suffering and the lucidity born of the victim's epistemological advantage.

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 48

Redemptive suffering...and the epistemological handicap of the disciples

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 47

The mimetic socio-drama unfolds...whoever is not against you is for you

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 46

The Generative Mimetic Scapegoating Mechanism...the obfuscating ink of an octopus...and the Gospel's epistemological emancipation

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 45

Coming down from the Mount of Transfiguration into the demon possessed valley...Jesus tells his disciples "the Son of Man is going to be betrayed into human hands"...but they could not understand this saying.

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 44

Transfiguration pt 3...Peter's incomprehension and the appeal to tradition.

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 43

The Transfiguration Pt 2...Jesus, Moses and Elijah speaking of the 'exodus' which is to take place in Jerusalem.

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 42

The Transfiguration Part 1

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 41

"There are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God"....Jesus' big mistake?

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 40

"The son of man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders chief priests and scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised..."

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 39

"Who do you say that I am?" The birth of real individuality.

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 38

Feeding of the 5,000 continued....when all were fed the disciples gathered together twelve baskets of broken pieces.

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 37

Following the return of the apostles after having been sent out to preach the Gospel (and having shaken some of the dust from their feet when they were, at times, rejected...) Luke begins the story of the feeding of the 5,000 - Luke's eucharistic image

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 36

the apostles as scapegoats of the world...collective masochism or a homeopathic dose of social scorn




Note: Gil in this excerpt refers to a 'martyr spirit' mentioned in the Mark Twain essay entitled "The United States of Lyncherdom"

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 35

More on the effects of the experience of rejection...

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 34

Forging the remnant...continued.

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 33

"If they do not welcome you - go out into the street and shake the dust from your feet..." Jesus sends the disciples out to preach the Gospel and so the post-crucifixion remnant begins to be formed in the crucible of rejection - inoculated against the mystifications of the sacrificial vortex awaiting them.

Year End Note from Gil & Randy

Thank you for making our work possible...

A Rene Girard Christmas card...

courtesy of National Review Online - Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson...

A Cornerstone Forum Christmas Card...

David Walsh

‎"Liberalism in our own time has finally revealed its loss of spiritual direction and, as a consequence, its responsibility for the progressive destruction of human nature. In light of the bankruptcy now exposed at its core, it is difficult to claim that liberalism stands for any higher idea of the dignity and worth of the person. We recognize that the uneasy compromise at its inception, which has indeed been a source of stability for three centuries, is now on the verge of falling apart. Possessive individualism, the rights of an acquisitive self-interested liberty, and the pull of our true self, fidelity to the obligations of the natural moral order, could only be held together for so long." - David Walsh 

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from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 32

Preparing the disciples for the Lukan long haul...sending of the 12

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 31

Herod 'sets eyes on' Jesus. but the ruler's epistemological handicap prevents him from seeing him.



Jesus before Herod continued...

George Marlin: Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger actually stated that: “Birth control does not mean abortion.” Here are her exact words:

“The real alternative to birth control is abortion,” wrote Dean Inge, [Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London]. It is an alternative that I cannot too strongly condemn. Although abortion may be resorted to in order to save the life of the mother, the practice of it merely for limitation of offspring is dangerous and vicious. [Emphasis added] I bring up the subject here only because some ill-informed persons have the notion that when we speak of birth control we include abortion as a method. We certainly do not. Abortion destroys the already fertilized ovum or the embryo; contraception, as I have carefully explained, prevents the fertilizing of the ovum by keeping the male cells away. Thus it prevents the beginning of life.

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Michael Knox Beran

"The primitive man famishes; the civilized man despairs," thus writes Michael Knox Beran here. It's well worth reading.

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from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 30

Herod's desire to see Jesus...

G. K. Chesterton

"... the very fitness of the new creeds [whether they are religious, political or "life-style" creeds] makes them unfit; their very acceptability make them inacceptable. Thus they all profess to be progressive because the peculiar boast of their peculiar period was progress; they claim to be democratic because our political system still rather pathetically claims to be democratic. ... These people merely take the modern mood, with much in it that is amiable and much that is anarchical and must that is merely dull and obvious, and then require any creed to be cut down to fit that mood." 

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Blessed John Henry Newman

"Never do men come together in considerable numbers, but the passion, self-will, pride, and unbelief, which may be more or less dormant in them one by one, bursts into flame, and becomes a constituent of their union. Even when faith exists in the whole people, even when religious men combine for religious purposes, still, when they form into a body, they evidence in no long time the innate debility of human nature, and in their spirit and conduct, in their avowals and proceedings, they are in grave contrast to Christian simplicity and straightforwardness. This is what the sacred writers mean by 'the world,' and why they warn us against it; and their description of it applies in its degree to all collections and parties of men, high and low, national and professional, lay and ecclesiastical."

Please join us on Facebook, where I daily share quotations I have found helpful and interesting.  - Gil Bailie

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 29

Gil Bailie begins the 5th cassette tape from the Poetry of Truth series with this quote from Henri de Lubac:

“There is the hacknedely moralizing interpretation of those who have not studied the subject historically, and there is the narrowly historical interpretation of those who have not gone deeply into it spiritually. These are the alternating forms of mediocrity.”

With this he starts a prolonged excursus on the story of Herod, John the Baptist and Jesus. This will continue over the next few posted excerpts.

From Henri de Lubac

"Do the unbelievers who jostle us at every turn observe on our brows the radiance of that gladness which, twenty centuries ago, captivated the fine flower of the pagan world? Are our hearts the hearts of men risen with Christ? Do we, in our time, bear witness to the Beatitudes? In a word, while we are fully alive to the blasphemy in Nietzsche's terrible phrase and in its whole context, are we not also forced to see in ourselves something of what drove him to such blaspheme?"
 

Mimetic Influence . . .

"Example is the sole eternal work by which one can influence souls whose attitude to Christ is one of complete rejection," wrote Charles de Foucauld. Likewise the faithful are inspired by example, but, as Hans Urs von Balthasar observed: "In this connection it may be affirmed, not as a daring conjecture but as a simple fact, that even the numerous canonizations make comparatively little impression on the faithful, as does everything, in fact, that can be effected by by organizational machinery. The faithful are impressed not by canonization but by sanctity ..."

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 28

The Gerasene demoniac story continued...the cure for possession is possession

Today's Anthropological Offering

"Modern civilization, especially as manifested in its most uncompromising form in the ideological mass movements, is not to be considered as either a purely secular phenomenon, a reversion to pre-Christian paganism, or a quest for wholly novel religious forms of its own. It is primarily a deformation of the Christian experience that redirects the eschatological transfiguration toward an innerworldly fulfillment within time." – David Walsh

From Facebook . . .

The one and only thing that my work and that of the Cornerstone Forum has in common with the gigantic theological contribution of Hans Urs von Balthasar is that what he said of his work in the following passage is true as well of our efforts:

"If there were nothing original in my work there would remain only the passion with which it hands on what it has received, because it is unknown to so many, and the assignment to do this for the missions one is given, more than one's talents, are what individuate the Christian."

Consider this post an "anthropological" one - according to the plan outlined in the immediately prior post - inasmuch the mission of "passing on what one has received" (1 Cor 11:23) fosters a form of individuation that conventional "individuality" cannot possibly achieve but which nonetheless satisfies the hunger of the human heart that "individuality" promises but never delivers.

Linking Facebook and Our Blog

Bestirring myself from assorted preoccupations, I plan to post more regularly to Facebook and to copy the posts here on our Blog.  

 

I apologize for being AWOL on Facebook in the last while. Other matters required my attention. Since my writing project involves a great deal of research and reviewing books which merit careful attention, the pace of the project is terribly slow, and I daily berate myself for that. By way of partial expiation of my sins in this area, I plan to better organize my Facebook postings in conformity with the brief description of the Cornerstone Forum that appears on our webpage:

According to then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, the coincidence of theology and anthropology constitutes "the truly most exciting part of Christian faith." The Cornerstone Forum is a product of that excitement and an effort to communicate it to others.

With this theme in mind, I hope to post items - daily if possible - under the headings of theology and anthropology. In the interest of time, these posts will often be quotations taken from the books I am now reviewing, though interspersed with them will be miscellaneous items and links to matters of interest.

Thank you for your patience and for checking in on our efforts to understand the depth of the anthropological crisis that we now face while accounting for a hope (1 Peter 3:15) that no historical calamity can extinguish.

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 27

The story of the Gerasene demoniac

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 26

The parable of the sower and the seed explained...bearing fruit with patience

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 25

The parable of the Sower and the Seed

Thoughts on Time & Rage

The following essay by Geoff Wood is offered for your Advent reflection.

There is no element more conspicuously absent from contemporary poetry than nobility. Wallace Stevens 1942

In the days before television the trends of current events were presented to the public at the movie theater in a 20 to 30 minute documentary called The March of Time. The title must have been taken from that old saying, “Time marches on.” And so it does until whatever events were shown in that documentary have long since been swallowed up by time – indeed, even Time Magazine is getting slimmer and slimmer and may one day disappear like the people and events narrated in its contents.

You will hear Time’s relentless pace tolled out every day on our obituary pages – as in John Donne’s famous line: Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. And this relentlessness, this seeming inevitability of change, nothing holding firm, tends to get people down – so much so that in his Sonnet 65 Shakespeare can speak of Time as a kind of raging force which neither brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor . . . sea can withstand. And if that be the case, he asks, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower? / . . . how shall summer’s honey breath hold out / against the wrackful siege of battering days, / When rocks impregnable are not so stout / Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?

And yet thanks to our Christian heritage, we defy Time’s rage even as St. Paul defies it in today’s second reading (1Cor 15:20-28)* where he says of the risen Christ: For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet and the last enemy to be destroyed is death. As Christians we believe that time need no longer be synonymous with death but experienced as a crescendo, as an overture to our living forever – somehow! And as such, each day becomes – no longer a roadblock – but a gateway to wider horizons. Time is redeemed. Indeed, if we are true Christins, really moved from the depths of our Scripture, we should confront the so-called rage of Time with a rage of our own. Or as the poet Wallace Stevens has written, we must confront the violence of meaningless Time with our own violence from within – which he defines as “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality”. Translate “imagination” as creative faith, hope and love.

And so to Shakespeare’s complaint how with this rage of time can beauty hold a plea Stevens looks to art, poetry, and I might add the beauty of today’s Psalm “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Specifically Stevens refers us to the rage evident in the watercolors of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, whose flowers “make no pretence to fragility. They shout, explode all over the picture space and generally oppose the rage of the world with such a rage of form and color as no flower in nature or pigment has done since Van Gogh.” (Look up Epstein’s flower images on Google.com.)

As Christians we are often encouraged to be gentle, sweet, calm, pious amid the storms of life. But maybe rage should be the better expression of what we believe (as it was in subtle ways in the writings of Flannery O’Connor). Like Christ (whom we honor as so much more noble than monarchs of old, whose noble rage was shown when he chased the money changers from the Temple) we ourselves should live nobly, defiantly in the face of all that would reduce us to timid souls, cringing within an ominous universe. We should affirm life and beauty, stand up to all that has made of Time a dead end against which beauty cannot hold a plea, being so fragile. But what was Christ raised upon the cross but someone fragile – and yet he rose again as someone of whom the Book of Revelation says: His eyes flamed like fire; his feet gleamed like burnished brass refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. Like an Epstein dahlia?

*reading for the last Sunday of the Liturgical Year - Christ the King Sunday

Geoff Wood lives in Sonoma. He holds a doctorate in theology and a licentiate in scripture from the Catholic University of America and the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. And his soul holds a third indelible mark.

Books by Geoff Wood:

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 24

– blessed are those who are not scandalized by me

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 23

The blind leading the blind...a world in which transcendence is lost

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 22

The story of King Seigbert of Norway who was killed by his subjects for wanting to show mercy to his enemies...

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 21

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you...

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 20

Love your enemies – do good to those who hate & abuse you... and watch what happens

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 19

Blessed are you when they persecute you!

From Notre Dame

I'm at Notre Dame tonight, here to participate in a Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology panel at the "Radical Emancipation" conference which begins tomorrow. On the plane today, I read this is Emery de Gall's "The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI"

"Dogma is not merely a learned formula, but must be personally acquired, prayed for, and affirmed as the existential leitmotiv of one's life. Whoever practices faith on a daily basis and realizes the spirit of Christ gains freedom."

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 18

Sermon on the plain continued...weeping and laughing

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 17

The Gospel of Luke's "sermon on the plain"...a diptych of 4 blessings and 4 woes

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 16

Now during those days he went out to the mountain to pray...

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 15

With this excerpt the 3rd audio tape of the series begins. Gil again mentions that Luke tells Jesus' story by telling stories...in the manner of a 'florilegium' which is an anthology or collection of brief extracts or writings - something Gil believed aptly described his own style. (note - the Cornerstone Forum's previous moniker was The Florilegia Institute.) We pick up the narrative with Chapter 6 of the Gospel of Luke...

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 14

The pharisees ask Jesus why he and his disciples eat and drink while John the Baptist and his disciples fasted...

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 13

Jesus heals the paralytic...

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 12

The Sufi poet Rumi gives the advice: "Be like one who, when he enters the room, luck shifts to the one who needs it."

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 11

Jesus in Capernaum healing a leper...on Lake Gennesaret in Galilee and two boats



In this excerpt Gil makes reference to the work of Jean-Michel Oughourlian, one of Rene Girard's collaborators in his book "Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World". The work Gil was referring to in this piece is entitled "The Puppet of Desire" which is now out of print. Oughourlian's most recent book in English is "The Genesis of Desire" - a link to the Amazon offering is below (if you follow this link and order the book the Cornerstone Forum receives a bit of the revenue...thank you)

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 10

Jesus in the synagogue of Nazareth...all eyes are fixed on him

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 9

Led by the Spirit into the wilderness, Jesus faces the test...

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 8

The baptism of Jesus...and the earliest creed in a voice from heaven

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 7

John the Baptist and the urgent need for forgiveness...because

the valleys will be filled and the mountains leveled

...the hierarchies of the old sacred system are being undermined.

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 6

Nunc dimittis...Simeon's prophecy: Jesus as a sign of contradiction. The evolution of consciousness...our thoughts will be revealed because He is rejected...this is an epistemological revolution.

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 5

Swaddling clothes as acculturation so, like Mary, Jesus's thoughts, words and deeds will proceed from the depths of the Jewish tradition. Mary pondered these things in her heart...not her head - an emancipation from superstition, even enlightenment rationalist superstition.

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 4

Mary's "fiat"; where did this 'yes' come from? Luke's juxtaposition of Augustus Caesar - the divine emperor/god - with the infant Jesus...the shepherds, the outsiders of their society, are all part of Luke's story.

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 3

Luke's first stories...the annunciations of the births of John the Baptist and Jesus, and the visitation of Mary & Elizabeth.

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 2

The Ba'al Shem Tov and story telling....

from the Archives: Poetry of Truth Part 1

With this excerpt we begin another series of presentations by Gil Bailie made in the summer of 1995. The original tape set began with a talk that was supposed to give a condensed overview of Rene Girard's anthropological perspective in which Gil used Mark Twain's 1901 essay, The United States of Lyncherdom. Gil was not satisfied with that introduction to the Gospel of Luke and so we start with the second tape in the series.

Like all of the evangelists, Luke is a re-teller of stories...

from the Archives: Famished Craving - Part 100

Augustine of Hippo

I turned from unity in You to be lost in multiplicity. However You gathered me together from the state of disintegration in which I had be fruitlessly divided. We are restless until we rest in Thee.

This is the final excerpt from the Famished Craving series. This entire audio presentation will be available as a 13 CD set, a 13 part MP3 downloadable audio file series or a single data CD containing all 13 MP3 audio files. All of these will soon be posted on our webstore.
The next series to be excerpted here will be The Poetry of Truth: Reflections on the Gospel of Luke

from the Archives: Famished Craving - Part 99

This is the next to last excerpt from the Famished Craving series. Gil continues to examine the life and times of Anais Nin.

from the Archives: Famished Craving - Part 98

"...here is a birth that is of greater interest to me!" Henry Miller to Anais Nin about his soon to be published book

from the Archives: Famished Craving - Part 97

Continuing with Anais Nin...who one reviewer described as someone who came to "embody in an extreme form some of the more unfortunate distinguishing characteristics of our age (late 20th Century) – an obsession with fame, a zeal for self advertisement, a tendency to confuse art and self expression, a rejection of intellect in favor of feeling, and a romantic glorification of neurosis, selfishness and irresponsibility."

from the Archives: Famished Craving - Part 96

From Suetonius' "History of the 12 Caesars" to the Diaries of Anais Nin...